Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014


Ursula K. Le Guin - 2015
    Le Guin's.”  —Grace Paley  Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin’s new collection of poems (2010–2014) seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver’s poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin’s latest give voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological. As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. The poems are bookended with two short essays, “Deep in Admiration” and “Some Thoughts on Form, Free Form, Free Verse.”

Invisible Strings


Jim Moore - 2011
                Two empty suitcases sit in the corner, if that’s any kind of clue.                                —from “Almost Sixty” Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.

I Am The Architect of My Own Destruction


Juansen Dizon - 2018
    A collection of poetry about depression, survival, and healing: featuring "Self-Love Manifesto" an inspirational poem that became viral on Tumblr which explores what it truly means to fall in love with your being.

10 Things I Hate about You


Frederic P. Miller - 2010
    10 Things I Hate About You is a 1999 American romantic comedy film. It is directed by Gil Junger and stars Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, David Krumholtz, and Larry Miller. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew set in a modern American high school, the screenplay was written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith. The film's title is a reference to a poem written by the film's female lead to describe her bittersweet romance with the male lead. The film was released March 31, 1999, and it was a breakout success for stars Stiles and Ledger. The film marks the directing debut of Junger.

There's a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery


Portia Nelson - 1988
    Designed to inspire self discovery, There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk includes stirring poems that gently lead readers to embrace a more authentic self.Individuals, therapy groups, the self-help community, and twelve-step programs around the world have embraced this classic book. There’s a Hole My Sidewalk is the perfect motivational gift for yourself, your friends, or your family.

Never


Jorie Graham - 2002
    One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

Eugene Onegin


Alexander Pushkin - 1833
    Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.

soul like thunder


Sophia Elaine Hanson - 2018
    Sophia Elaine Hanson is the author of the critically acclaimed chapbook hummingbird as well as the #1 bestselling young adult series the Vinyl Trilogy. She resides in New York City and loves pigeons and Star Wars.

The Song of Hiawatha


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1855
    Once there, they've stayed to hear about the young brave with the magic moccasins, who talks with animals and uses his supernatural gifts to bring peace and enlightenment to his people. This 1855 masterpiece combines romance and idealism in an idyllic natural setting.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book


J.R.R. Tolkien - 1962
    A delightful volume of 16 songs, rhymes and poems from the acclaimed The Hobbit. Illustrated.

Berrymans Sonnets


John Berryman - 1967
    It was an unusual choice—even an unpopular one—for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a colleague.     “Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally, passion utterly thwarted”: this is how the poet April Bernard, in her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle, and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of tender, obsessive, impossible love in his “characteristic tonal mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness.” Here is the poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard’s words, as nutcase.     In Berryman’s Sonnets, the poet draws on the models of Petrarch and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence. Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe for rediscovery by contemporary readers.

Boris by the Sea


Matvei Yankelevich - 2009
    The world was 'somewhere inside his skull. And it hurt.' These poems and dramatic sketches, however, delight even when they hurt" -- ROSMARIE WALDROP"BORIS BY THE SEA was born when Aesop was reading Chekhov, and Chekhov was reading Nietzsche, and Nietzsche was watching The Brother From Another Planet. Actually Matvei Yankelevich wrote this book, but 'wrote' is incomplete... he seems more to inhabit this stateless, beautiful being who uses language to move his body or erase the sea: 'Boris looked over himself and realized there were many parts of him that he could not see. And only a small part of these parts was on the surface.' BORIS BY THE SEA could be a children's fable if it weren't so freakin' real, unreal, hyper-real: 'But people need each other to open each other up and see what is inside.' This is Boris--and he, like Pinnochio--has a clever master." -- ROBERT FITTERMANMatvei Yankelevich's first full-length book, BORIS BY THE SEA, is a work of existential theater that destroys the distance between puppeteer and puppet, between ego and id, between what is real and what is absurd. Consisting of prose, poems, and plays, the book creates its own world and then confronts the loneliness of having to exist within one's own creation. Like Daniil Kharms, Yankelevich has written a children's book for only the bravest of adults.

Redhead and the Slaughter King


Megan Falley - 2014
    More than a collection of poems, this book serves as a survival guide for anyone who has ever been a daughter. Knotted with gritty tales of addiction, mental illness, and girlhood, Redhead and the Slaughter King is the prequel to every time someone asked the question, “how the hell did I end up here?”

The Book of Words


Abay Qunanbayuli - 1918
    Abay's major work is The Book of Words (Kazakh: Қара Сөздер), a philosophic treatise and collection of poems where he encourages his fellow Kazakhs to embrace education, literacy, and good moral character in order to escape poverty, enslavement and corruption.

Madonna Anno Domini: Poems


Joshua Clover - 1997
    Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page.The eerie cyberglow of Clover's lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene.Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with "God in abeyance" where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here. in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.