Book picks similar to
Far from Algiers by Djelloul Marbrook


poetry
shelfari-favorites
4-stars
contemporary

Open House


Beth Ann Fennelly - 2002
    We at Zoo are eminently pleased to have such a fine book of verse for our inaugural Kenyon Review Prize volume. Fennelly's poems are well poised in their witty and sometime sassy ruminations, often "maximalist" in their scope (see "From L' HUtel Terminus Notebooks") and the pleasure one takes within them is of the rarest breed: it is the pleasure of unexpected revelation. Open House comes introduced by series judge and Kenyon Review poetry editor, David Baker.

Lovestruck


Stephanie Bond - 2003
    . .They never knew what hit them . . .IRRESISTIBLE?Starving artist Ellie Sutherland is taking drastic measures to correct her nonexistent love life -- including offering herself as a guinea pig in a sex study! And something's definitely working . . . because suddenly, Ellie has men falling all over her, including lawyer Mark Blackwell. But once the study is over, will he still find her irresistible?KIDS IS A 4-LETTER WORDJo Montgomery is an interior decorator, not a baby-sitter. Still, when she discovers her new client's baby-sitter tied to the stake, what can she do but untie the poor woman and watch her run for the hills? And after ten minutes with the little darlings, she's ready to do the same -- until she meets the kids' gorgeous father . . .WIFE IS A 4-LETTER WORDAlan Parish thinks things can't get any worse, when he finds himself dumped on his wedding day. But when Pamela Kaminski decides to join him on his honeymoon, Alan's really in a fix. Because Pam is beautiful, desirable . . . and his former fiancée's maid of honor. And the more time Alan spends with her, the less honorable his intentions become . . .

Wait


C.K. Williams - 2010
    K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candor and style.

Nineteen


Makenzie Campbell - 2020
    Nineteen is a collection of poetry that broaches heartbreak, love, loss, war, peace, and healing.For every place we go, there is a feeling or memory that’s been painted on the walls. You can paint over it, but it will always be there. Even if you can’t see it, you know. You can feel the heartbreak inside the bedroom where you lost a love.You can feel the hope at the coffee shop where a beginning happened. You can feel the healing as you sit in the driver’s seat, in charge of your own life.

Misfortune's Daughters


Joan Collins - 2005
    Beginning in the Golden Era of Hollywood, the beautiful and talented actress Laura Marlowe meets the young, dashing, and rich shipping magnate Nicholas Stephanopolis. After a whirlwind courtship, the two marry and move to the private Stephanopolis Island in the south of Greece. Yet heartache and tragedy soon find them and extend into the lives of their two very different but willful and ambitious daughters, Venetia and Atlanta. One is a beautiful and favored daughter who's bent on self-destruction; the other is a wallflower who buries herself in books and shies away from her privileged world. But both must confront the legacy and tragedy of the lives of their parents.Sweeping across almost 60 years and jetting from New York to Paris, Los Angeles, and Greece, Misfortune's Daughters is an irresistible, page-turning tale that reveals the glittering life of show business and the grittiness of the journalistic profession. Drawing on her own knowledge and experience, Collins takes the reader deep inside the exclusive gates of wealth and luxury, exposing dark secrets and forbidden desires as two young women vie to break free from their family's shadow and become independent women in their own right.

Goest


Cole Swensen - 2004
    Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing—and reading—offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down.From “The Invention of Streetlights”Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own.There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin.and light entire rooms. .Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man.on any corner with a torch to light you home. were lamps made of horn.and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched.Notre Dame seem small. .Now the streets stand still. .By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium.to photograph a midnight ball.“Goest, sonorous with a hovering ‘ghost’ which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the ‘whites’ of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman

Honest


Mohamed Ghazi - 2015
    It is just a very small square in the enormous circle that connects us all.I am the story.I am the poems.And you are my muse.

Leftover Dreams


Charlotte Vale Allen - 1992
    The author takes readers on an emotional roller-coaster ride no one will wnat to stop before its emotionally-draining, thoroughly satisfying conclusion.

One Bride for Three Firemen


Jess Bentley - 2020
    Not only was I fired, but also evicted, with only five days to fix things.Little did I know that these firemen could save me in the steamiest of ways.Each one is a smoke show.The best part is, they're willing to share.A flash fire has ignited between us.Stefan, young and red-hot...Trigger, a beast of a man in every way.Daddy Pete dominates me, and orders me to give him exactly what I want.I hope I can handle them all.But if, or when, my ex finds out, will this whole thing burn out of control?One Bride for Three Firemen is a steamy standalone 45,000 word novel with a HEA, and no cheating!

The Diary of V: The Affair


Debra Kent - 2001
    But payback - in the shape of a man - will be hers.

Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone


Bo Burnham - 2013
    100 million people viewed those videos, turning Bo into an online sensation with a huge and dedicated following. Bo taped his first of two Comedy Central specials four days after his 18th birthday, making him the youngest to do so in the channel's history. Now Bo is a rising star in the comedy world, revered for his utterly original and intelligent voice. And, he can SIIIIIIIIING!In EGGHEAD, Bo brings his brand of brainy, emotional comedy to the page in the form of off-kilter poems, thoughts, and more. Teaming up with his longtime friend, artist, and illustrator Chance Bone, Bo takes on everything from death to farts in this weird book that will make you think, laugh and think, "why did I just laugh?"

High Heels and Big Deals: A Christmas Fake Fiancé Romcom Novel (Good Girls Don't Come Last)


Jennifer Youngblood - 2021
    

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967­-1987


Eavan Boland - 1996
    Included in this volume is the work from Eavan Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.The poems from Boland's first book, New Territory, show her to be, at twenty-two, a master of formal verse reflecting Irish history and myth. This collection charts the ways in which Boland's work breaks from poetic tradition, honors it, and reinvents it. Poems like "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," and "Witching" have an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In later poems, her subjects become more personal, sequencing Boland's life as a woman, poet, and mother. Boland writes, "I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile with it," becoming, in effect, "a displaced person / in a pastoral chaos."This collection demonstrates how Boland's mature voice developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

Mars and Her Children: Poems


Marge Piercy - 1992
    These poems celebrate the beauties of nature and the eternal cycle of love, death and birth that is being interrupted by the assault on the environment.

The Continuous Life


Mark Strand - 1990
    It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking", but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit.