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Death of Dreams


Shruti Agrawal
    It is deep dive into emotions, empathy, acceptance, healing and insights into a different perspective towards life. The book embraces you in silence and stillness of thoughts. The book is an attempt to connect to souls, to reflect upon them, unbiased and together embrace a new beginning and a beautiful journey called life.

Tsim Tsum


Sabrina Orah Mark - 2009
    and Beatrice, first introduced in The Babies. Unbeknownst to them they have come into being under the laws of Tsim Tsum, a Kabbalistic claim that a being cannot become, or come into existence, unless the creator of that being departs from that being. Along their journey they encounter many beguiling characters including The Healer, The Collector, Walter B.'s Extraordinary Cousin, and the Oldest Animal. These figures bewilder and dislodge what is at the heart of the immigrant experience: survival, testimony, and belonging.

A Lesser Love


E.J. Koh - 2017
    Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh describes her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. The spirit of jeong permeates this collection as each poem draws astonishing connections and illuminates the bonds that hold across time and place.With evocative lyricism, Koh mixes the languages of science and emotion to compose some poems like chemistry equations that convert light into "reasonable dioxide" and then further transmogrify the formula into a complex understanding of the parent-child relationship. Through this alchemy the poet allows readers to see through the eyes of mothers, fathers, daughters, aunts, friends, and lovers: we see the tragedy of a sinking ferry, the hypocrisies of government agencies, the aftermath of war, and a very wide view through the Hubble space telescope. Demonstrating an ability to elicit profound emotional intensity, Koh crafts a book of poems that challenge, delight, and enrich.

The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems


Gregory Orr - 2002
    Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review)"Love Poem"A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours.from "Gathering the Bones Together"A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming…"Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."—The New York Times Book ReviewGregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry.Also Available by Gregory Orr:Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence TP $12.00, 1-55659-151-9 • CUSA

Quarantine Love


Mel Dau - 2020
    After all, she prefers the peace of her solidarity. She’s a nerd and would much rather spend her quarantine time reading a great book or playing video games.Oren Breland is a jack of all trades and an entrepreneur at its finest; the one thing he knows how to do is make some money. You want to know what’s not on his skill list? Interacting with women! After one relationship that ended badly, he’s sworn off love entirely. But you know what they say.... when you make plans, God laughs.After a heated exchange over toilet paper, Oren and Knansie have left horrible tastes in each other’s mouths. Having to fight fire with fire, neither one of them expect their spark to turn into something romantic but it does and it’s all the way lit!After the quarantine is over and everyone goes back to their normal lives, will Oren and Knansie still feel that fire for each other? Or is their flame going to fizzle forever?

Shapeshift


Sherwin Bitsui - 2003
    . . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing."Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917


T.S. Eliot - 1996
    Alfred Prufrock” as well as ribald verse and other youthful curios. “Perhaps the most significant event in Eliot scholarship in the past twenty-five years” (New York Times Book Review). Edited by Christopher Ricks.

Twenty One Love Poems


Adrienne Rich - 1976
    

Tales of the Out and the Gone


Amiri Baraka - 1968
    The second section, “Tales of the Out & the Gone,” reveals Amiri Baraka’s increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration.Throughout, Baraka’s unique and constantly changing literary style will educate readers on the evolution of one of America’s most accomplished literary masters of the past four decades.

Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems


Cate Marvin - 2007
    The brokenness and loss of the fragmented queen—seeming to rise up through centuries—is their tutelary spirit.

The Clerk's Tale: Poems


Spencer Reece - 2004
    The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm. Gluck describes them as having "an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play . . . We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence . . . Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft."

It Is Daylight


Arda Collins - 2009
    Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

Point and Line


Thalia Field - 2000
    The wonderful writings in Thalia Field's long-awaited new book Point and Line deny categorization, they are "nicheless." Perhaps describable as "epic poetries," these riveting pieces represent a confluence of genres in which Thalia Field has been involved over the course of her career: fiction, theater, and poetry. Written from a constructivist, post-genre sensibility, they elude classification, and present the author's concern with clarity in a world that resists it. For instance, in "Hours" and "Setting, the Table," Field uses indeterminate performance techniques to emphasize the categorical/conceptual nature of thought. Other pieces use generative schemes, portraits of mental shapes, which create meaning out of noise. Visually, each chapter is captivating, showing the author's need for shapes and colors in her work, her fascination with the contours of speech.

Mind


Woo Myung - 2012
    Great Freedom, whereby you are not bound by the life you live in.The writings of Truth that guides you to the life of wisdom, cleanses your mind and leads you to the true and eternal world.

The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems


David K. Kirby - 2007
    were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry. Long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything--the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing."