Book picks similar to
Desdemona's Fire by Ruth Ellen Kocher
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Acolytes
Nikki Giovanni - 2007
In intimate and spare language, Giovanni offers insight into the powerful elements and forces in her life: family and friends, the deaths of heroes and companions, nature, libraries, and theater. In between, the deep and edgy conscience that has defined her for decades shines through when she writes movingly of Rosa Parks, Hurricane Katrina, and Emmett Till, leaving no doubt that this commanding presence has not traded one approach for another but simply made room for both.
The Poetry of Robert Frost
Robert Frost - 1969
Frost scholar Lathem, who was also a close friend of the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, scrupulously annotated the 350-plus poems in this collection, which has been the standard edition of Frost's work since it first appeared in 1969.
The Smell of Good Mud
Lauren Zúñiga - 2012
Lauren Zuniga has made a name for herself for fearlessly confronting legislators and being an ambassador for the Heartland. This collection is the underbelly. No emotion is spared. No image is lost. It is a field guide to blisters and curtsies. It is a chronicle of women/children/animals coming together in a house named Clementine.
Words You Will Never Read
Jessica Katoff - 2017
Written as a catharsis in the months following the loss of her father in late 2016, Jessica has taken pen to page to say things he and others will never read, either because they can't, or just won't. Containing entirely new works, this is a can't miss release.
Jimmy & Rita
Kim Addonizio - 1996
Haunted by their childhoods of material and emotional poverty, Jimmy and Rita float through days in urban San Francisco.
Selected Poems
William Carlos Williams - 1963
In addition to including many more pieces, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order.It isn't what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art," Williams maintained, "it's what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson - 2011
The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
Things Are Happening
Joshua Beckman - 1998
The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.
Meridian
Alice Walker - 1976
Set in the American South in the 1960s it follows Meridian Hill, a courageous young woman who dedicates herself heart and soul to her civil rights work, touching the lives of those around her even as her own health begins to deteriorate. Hers is a lonely battle, but it is one she will not abandon, whatever the costs. This is classic Alice Walker, beautifully written, intense and passionate.
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton - 2020
Clifton’s poems were widely celebrated during her lifetime, and she received wide acclaim for her work including the National Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems continue to inspire a new generation of readers and writers in the 21st century.In How to Carry Water, formidable younger poet Aracelis Girmay (winner of the Whiting Award, GLCA Award, and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) introduces a selection of Clifton’s work that is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous social and political moment.
Little Girls in Church
Kathleen Norris - 1995
Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.
A Coney Island of the Mind
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 1958
The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind—a kind of circus of the soul.
Lunch Poems
Frank O'Hara - 1964
Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.Often O'Hara, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.
Nest
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - 2003
Asian-American. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is one of the very few poets writing in the United States today whose voice and writing style are immediately recognizable. In her new collection, NEST, the medium of her poetry continues to be the sentence. To the formalities of syntax and grammar she adds the structures of domestic architecture, isolation, health, desire, play, and family life. Her writing offers a unique poetics of metaphysics and manners. As always the poetry is sensuous and stunning, and Richard Tuttle has once again designed an arresting cover.