Book picks similar to
Survival Is a Style: Poems by Christian Wiman
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Of Yesteryear
Lauren Eden - 2016
In her debut, Lauren Eden’s succinct and beautiful observations of human nature and its gains and losses will lead readers to understand their own journey in love and self discovery - now, and of yesteryear.
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems
Joy Harjo - 2015
Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a "magician and a master" (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
Chen Chen - 2017
Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one’s own path in identity, life, and love.In the HospitalMy mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, shortskeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday.My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend.Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonablepigeons. No one had the time & our solution to itwas to buy shinier watches. We were enamored withwhat our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital& I didn’t want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale,bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital& she didn’t want to be her friend. She wanted to be the familygrocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn’t trust my fatherto be it. You always forget something, she said, even whenI do the list for you. Even then.
I Am Her Tribe
Danielle Doby - 2018
Focusing on inspiration, Doby's poetry invites its reader to "Come as you are. Your tribe has arrived. Your breath can rest here."both softand fiercecan coexist and still be powerful
Interrogations at Noon: Poems
Dana Gioia - 2001
But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.
Don't Call Us Dead
Danez Smith - 2017
Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
2am Thoughts
Makenzie Campbell - 2017
My emotions have bled out on each and every page with the ink of my pen. Your eyes will discover my soul. Your fingers casually flipping through my mind. I hope you find each delicate word as captivating as the stars. And I hope a piece of you feels the things I felt when creating this art. - 2:00 am This modern poetry book is an exploration of love, heartache, relationships, loss, finding one's self, and learning to love the life you've been given. 2am Thoughts is a poetry book similar to some titles such as milk and honey by Rupi Kaur and Buried Light by Beau Taplin.
Graffiti (and Other Poems)
Savannah Brown - 2016
Written between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, with examinations of anxiety, death, first loves, and first lusts, Graffiti extends a hand to those undergoing the trials and uncertainty of teenagehood, and assures them they're not alone.
Blizzard: Poems
Henri Cole - 2020
Whether he is wrestling with the mundane, history and its disasters, or sexual love, he can sound both classical and contemporary, with the modern austerity of Cavafy and Bishop. Often exploring the darker places of the heart, his sonnets do not lie down obediently, but spark with an honest self-awareness.Cole's lucid, empathetic poems--with lyrical beauty and ethical depth--seem to transmute the anxious perplexities of our time.
Jane: A Murder
Maggie Nelson - 2005
Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson was born a few years after Jane’s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related "true crime" books, and fragments from Jane’s own diaries written. Each piece in Jane has its own form that serves as an important fissure, disrupting the tabloid, "page-turner" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another’s life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane’s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do—what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.
Words for Empty and Words for Full
Bob Hicok - 2010
I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.” —Corduroy Books “Bob Hicok's poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.” —Los Angeles Times on This Clumsy Living “The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there's almost no problem that can't be solved by this poet's gentle humor.” —New York Times Book Review on Insomnia Diary
Please Love Me at My Worst
Michaela Angemeer - 2021
Written during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine, the book is a reflection of what it means to yearn for people who are unavailable and how important it is to focus on self-love and healing.
New Shoes On A Dead Horse
Sierra DeMulder - 2012
In her second book, Sierra DeMulder examines her childhood in a small town, heartache, loss, and the possibility of transcending suffering, aided by the voice of her own genius. His character appears throughout the book, providing charming commentary and biting insight on the young author's creative process and emotional path.