Book picks similar to
Landscape at the End of the Century by Stephen Dunn
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No Object
Natalie Shapero - 2013
With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.
The World I Made for Her
Thomas Moran - 1998
Nuala is the Irish immigrant nurse who coaxes him toward survival. The odd synergy of their relationship is both his link to reality and his inspiration to fantasy. This is the hypnotic story of the world that grows in the silence between them.In Thomas Moran's first novel, the New York Times Book Review saw evidence of his "incontestable conceptual gifts". In his "elegant writing", the Los Angeles Times found the promise of a serious new career. The New Yorker compared The Man in the Box to The Diary of Anne Frank, and the Los Angeles Times compared Thomas Moran to Eli Wiesel. And on the heels of this critical success comes The World I Made for Her.Nuala means "white shoulders" in Gaelic. Nuala's wild red hair falls in disarray over hers. James watches her moving deftly around him; changing his IV, attaching a fresh respirator tube. Nuala's movements are like dance to him through his morphine-clouded vision. His senses are numbed, his mind is dulled, but he hears her Irish spirit sing against the metronome of the life-support machines. He is drawn to the warmth of her. He carries Nuala in and out of consciousness with him, writing a secret love story in which she is, unknowingly, the heroine.In prose that moves seamlessly between fantasy and reality, The World I Made for Her is a novel of obsession and redemption that unfolds like a dream -- a story that will break your heart.
Trout Fishing in America
Richard Brautigan - 1967
He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called the last of the Beats.” His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise. This new edition includes an introduction by the poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan’s work as a student in California.
You Good Thing
Dara Wier - 2013
. . Assigned toAdventure said the motto on our buttons. The last thing we knewBefore we left with our satchels concerned how love withdrawsMoving backward taking with it everything, our names, this way.Dara Wier directs the MFA program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This is her ninth book, and first new collection of poetry since 2006.
Actual Air
David Berman - 1999
His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise. This debut collection has received extraordinary acclaim from readers and reviewers alike and is quickly becoming a cult classic. As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate said, "These poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. . . . It's a book for everyone."
Tap Out: Poems
Edgar Kunz - 2019
Tap Out, Edgar Kunz’s debut collection, reckons with his working‑poor heritage. Within are poignant, troubling portraits of blue‑collar lives, mental health in contemporary America, and what is conveyed and passed on through touch and words―violent, or simply absent. Yet Kunz’s verses are unsentimental, visceral, sprawling between oxys and Bitcoin, crossing the country restlessly. They grapple with the shame and guilt of choosing to leave the culture Kunz was born and raised in, the identity crises caused by class mobility. They pull the reader close, alternating fierce whispers and proud shouts about what working hands are capable of and the different ways a mind and body can leave a life they can no longer endure. This hungry new voice asks: after you make the choice to leave, what is left behind, what can you make of it, and at what cost?
Selected Poems
Kenneth Rexroth - 1984
The late Kenneth Rexroth ( 1905-1982) is surely one of the most readable of this century's great American poets. He is also one of the most sophisticated.
Source
Mark Doty - 2001
They offer a complex, boldly colored self-portrait; their muscular lines argue fiercely with the fact of limit; they pulse with the drama of perception and the quest to forge meaning.
Pamela: A Novel (Atelos (Series), 4.)
Pamela Lu - 1999
"While the new sentence--the prose wing of Language writing--strips narrative down to pointed sets of shifting referents, Lu, in her debut, knowingly resuscitates it, creating a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions. This quasi-bildungsroman charts the emergence of an 'I' (not 'P' and not 'Pamela, ' though the three characters do appear together) into a 20-something Bay Area, with memories of a suburban childhood close on her heels.... This is a book of extraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages to tell a beautiful story in spite of itself"--Publishers Weekly.
Two Girls, Fat and Thin
Mary Gaitskill - 1991
They are superficially a study in contrasts yet share equally haunting sexual burdens carried since youth. With common secrets, they are drawn into a remarkable friendship.
The Babies
Sabrina Orah Mark - 2004
Of The Babies, poet Claudia Rankine writes, “Rarely do we encounter poems that are so precisely framed, though on their surface seemingly whimsical and erratic. These poems are gorgeous, intelligent, and disturbing.”
The Orange Fish
Carol Shields - 1989
In the title story, an unhappily married couple find their print of an orange fish brings them newfound harmony as they join other owner of the print who gather to extol the miraculous powers of “fishness.” “Chemistry” describes a group of young musicians drawn briefly into an impenetrable circle of love. And in “Hazel,” a middle-aged woman finally comes into her own as a sales rep for a line of kitchen products. The Orange Fish is a collection full of wit and compassion, a series of stories to be read and reread and savored.The orange fish --Chemistry --Hazel --Today is the day --Hinterland --Block out --Collision --Good manners --Times of sickness and health --Family secrets --Fuel for the fire --Milk bread beer ice