The Black Automaton


Douglas Kearney - 2009
    . . These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before."—Terrance Hayes

Look: Poems


Solmaz Sharif - 2016
    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto


David Shields - 2010
    YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality” precisely because we experience hardly any.Most artistic movements are attempts to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo, from Horace’s Ars Poetica to Lars von Trier’s “Vow of Chastity.” Shields has written the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a variety of forms and media who, living in an unbearably manufactured and artificial world, are striving to stay open to the possibility of randomness, accident, serendipity, spontaneity; actively courting reader/listener/viewer participation, artistic risk, emotional urgency; breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work; and, above all, seeking to erase any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.The questions Reality Hunger explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly all around us. Think of the now endless controversy surrounding the provenance and authenticity of the “real”: A Million Little Pieces, the Obama “Hope” poster, the sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” photograph, the boy who wasn’t in the balloon. Reality Hunger is a rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about “truthiness,” literary license, quotation, appropriation.Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. People will either love or hate this book. Its converts will see it as a rallying cry; its detractors will view it as an occasion for defending the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked-about books of the year.

Unexpressed Feelings


Khadija Rupa - 2016
    Priceless lessons, that only mistakes and sorrow can teach, leap out from the middle part of the book with the forethought to heal an inner wound that is still raw, still painful. This book of yearning, heartache and realisations gradually comes to a beautiful end in part three by unveiling how love is supposed to look like when it truly enters one’s life. By expressing some of the sweet feelings of falling in love and being consumed by it in this last section, with the right person this time, the aim of the book is one: to give hope to souls that propels them to the continuous search for Love. True Love. Throughout this book, loss, lessons and love have been portrayed in a brief, whimsical, poetic manner with meanings that are intensely deep.

Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos


Robert Desnos - 2007
    He wrote, and collaboratively wrote, many influential and celebrated books. Besides poetry, Desnos also wrote on a wide range of subjects from film texts and criticism to novels. During WWII he became a poet of the resistance, but was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to several notorious concentration camps for the duration of the war. He died as a result of his internment. This is the most comprehensive anthology of the writings of Robert Desnos ever assembled and translated into the English language. The extensive poetry section is bilingual. The English translations are by the most renowned translators of Robert Desnos.

Selected Poems


William Carlos Williams - 1963
    In addition to including many more pieces, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order.It isn't what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art," Williams maintained, "it's what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

Women in Public


Elaine Kahn - 2015
    By turns seductive and self-deprecating, Women in Public navigates a world where the erotics of the body and mind do battle against the constructs that would demean and define them, using lyric, fragment, humor, and repetition to create a space flexible enough to hold the many contradictions of reality. Where expectations and desires can be piled too easily upon the body, Kahn digs in her heels, writing in attempt to liberate physical form from society's confines.Praise for Women in Public:"'Do you think that you are greater than a mom?' This is an intensely honest, honestly intense poetry. Humorous, carnal, accusatory, celebratory––Women in Public tells me to get lost so I do. When I find myself later, I'm re-reading Women in Public."––Rod Smith"In these exhilarating poems, Elaine Kahn shoots from the groin, championing a ferociousness that rages against asperity while playfully seducing the reader to misbehave. Hers is a realm where oceans beat against genitals, and Hannah Wilke warms the earth. I don’t want to let go of Women in Public for I want its boldness all to myself."––Dodie BellamyAbout the Author:Musician, poet, artist, Elaine Kahn was born in Evanston, Illinois and is currently based in Oakland, California. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA from California College of the Arts. Kahn is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Voluptuous Dream During an Eclipse (2012), Customer (2010), and Radiant Bottle Caps (2008), and is a contributor to Art Papers. Her music project, Horsebladder, has toured widely throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is also co-founder of the feminist puppet troop P. Splash Collective and managing editor of the small press Flowers & Cream.

The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1848
    It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from the publisher's website (GeneralBooksClub.com). You can also preview excerpts of the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Publisher: J. R. Osgood

Bone Map: Poems


Sara Eliza Johnson - 2014
    “All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun.” With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echo—a regenerative force—that comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will establish the already decorated young author as an important and vital new voice in American poetry.

Slab


Selah Saterstrom - 2015
    She was a stripper, but is she now a performance artist and best-selling author, and it is really Barbara Walters she's narrating this tale to? We're too dazzled to know more than that this is about how a girl ends up in the backwash of decadence and sin and how out of the flotsam and jetsam she might construct a story of herself and the South to carry her to salvation.Serial killers, preachers, and prison flower-arranging classes. Bikers, bad boyfriends, and a stripper who performed as a Trans Am. Tiger has seen it all and as she sits on her slab, identifying anecdotes as they go by, we witness Selah Saterstrom at her greatest—funny, bawdy, and steeped in the landscape and all the devastation it has created and absorbed.Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and Slab, all published by Coffee House Press. She is also the author of Tiger Goes to the Dogs, a limited edition letterpress project published by Nor By Press. Her prose, poetry, and interviews can be found in publications such as The Black Warrior Review, Postroad, Tarpaulin Sky, Fourteen Hills, and other places. She is the director of the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver and teaches and lectures throughout the United States.

Field Guide


Robert Hass - 1973
    Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the book is a core of love poems, mainly domestic, which muse on the natural order that the affections try to establish even within the wilderness of history and political violence. Stanley Kunitz, the judge of the competition, calls this year’s selection “a big, strong-hearted, earthy book, in the America epic tradition of Whitman and Neruda. Hass is a wonderfully informed young man, a waking history, with abounding affection for the natural universe, including some humans, and with an imagination that spans the whole continent, from Buffalo to the Pacific.”

On Being Blue


William H. Gass - 1975
    In a philosophical approach to color, William Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

Cunt-Ups


Dodie Bellamy - 2001
    Prose. "CUNT-UPS is an explosion of textual sexuality that resists principles of formal ordering, is polyvalent in its voice and range, and as perverse in its sentence construction as its content. Its 'setting' is the mediated exchange itself, the fractured articulation of 'a female body who has sex writing about sex.' While the title might imply a gendered site of production, it also suggests a sexual/textual violence that is more than a mere 'disorganization of the senses' but a dismemberment of the gendered body as well. The text becomes a (feminist) desiring machine, its writing a prosthetic device mediating the traces of physicality, imagination, abjection, and pleasure."Throw on the switch, plug into the mediating machine, the flesh-object writes back, becomes subject, suspect, the gaze cut-up and fed back into vibrating loops of unobtainable desire."--David Buuck

Not Here


Hieu Minh Nguyen - 2018
    Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

Indictus


Natalie Eilbert - 2018
    Women's Studies. INDICTUS re-imagines various creation myths to bear the invisible and unsaid assaults of women. In doing so, it subverts notions of patriarchal power into a genre that can be demolished and set again. INDICTUS is a Latin word, from which other words like "indict" and "indicate" are born. It translates literally as "to write the unsaid." There is an effort in this book to create the supernatural through the utterance of violence, because jurisdiction fails in real time. That sexual assault can so easily become a science fiction when power is rearranged to serve the victim speaks to the abject lack of control within victims to ever be redeemed. Crimes resolve to misdemeanors. In a world without my abusers, how can I soon become myself? Combining the mythological and autobiographical, this book attempts to indict us, so that the wounded might one day be free.