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Our Deathbeds Will Be Thirsty by Shane L. Koyczan
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Teach Your Class Off: The Real Rap Guide to Teaching
Cj Reynolds - 2020
Face
Sherman Alexie - 2009
Fiction. Native American Studies. In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time."
Poetry in (e) Motion: The Illustrated Words of Scroobius Pip
Scroobius Pip - 2010
One of the UK’s most exciting up-and-coming hip-hop artists, Scroobius Pip, is a master of the spoken word lyric.From his childhood musings in the school playground to his feelings on the rat race, Pip has selected from his online fan collective artistic collaborations that bring the power of his lyrics to the printed page, creating an innovative multimedia collection of modern poetry.
Bestiary: Poems
Donika Kelly - 2016
Donika Kelly's Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures--from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from "Out West" to "Back East." Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.
Revolutionary Petunias
Alice Walker - 1973
They are also about (and for) those few embattled souls who remain painfully committed to beauty and to love even while facing the firing squad. “Quick, direct, witty, pungent” (DeWitt Beall, Chicago Daily News).
playtime
Andrew McMillan - 2018
Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood.McMillan’s award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those that explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.
When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices: Selected Poems from Single to Mid-Life
Judith Viorst - 1987
Bringing together all of Viorst's best-loved poetry, this collection includes many of the poet's previously out-of-print favorites.
Useless Magic
Florence Welch - 2018
Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic."
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush. An anthology of Poems and Conversations (From Outside).
Tim Key - 2021
This new book takes place in Lockdown Three. This time Key can make Government-sanctioned expeditions out onto the streets of London (remember?). And it is there that the inaction takes place. Phone calls to his mother, promenades with his loyal friend, bubble-negotiations, sitting his fat arse down on benches, drinking mocha. Another three months of mind-freezing inertia. This time on the move. Conversations interspersed with poetry.
Hoarders
Kate Durbin - 2021
Each poem is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snow globes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects our cultural moment back to the reader in ways that are surreal and tender. In the absurdist tradition of Kafka and Beckett, Hoarders ultimately embraces with sympathy the difficulty and complexity of the human condition.“Hoarders amounts to a series of fifteen character sketches, each based on a different person (and one couple) featured in the popular A&E-originated documentary series of the same name that entered its thirteenth season in October 2021. Like the show, the book is characterized by a distinctly American lowbrow display of misery and an equally American interest in lives of abject excess. However, unlike the show’s implicit point-and-gawk approach, Durbin’s sympathetic treatment of the figures invites readers to consider how consumption shapes identity, and to entertain as reasonable the longing to hang on to every trivial item we acquire over the course of a lifetime, rather than joyfully KonMari-ing it all away….The book’s power, after all, is in the way it depicts a diversity of rituals and motives around consumption, and how it centers the pain of human relation in all of them.” - Amanda Montei, The Believer"From what I presume is an abundance of hoarded material on the reality TV show, [Durbin] isolates these stunning and evocative tableaux that feel very moving, memento mori, and in a way treat the hoarded material with the care and dignity that many of the hoarders espouse.” ―JoAnna Novak, Los Angeles Review of Books"It’s Durbin’s exquisitely fine-tuned attention that is thrown into new relief in Hoarders, a book that chronicles the lived experiences of people who cannot let go of things, and the things that “glow” under the attention of being witnessed and inventoried by Durbin’s vivid and heartbreaking renderings." Emily Skillings, The Believer"Durbin’s curations and re-imaginings [of the reality TV show] allow this material to transcend its form, and the result is a fascinating collection about connection, desire, and what it means to be American." -Chelsea Hodson, Lit Hub
Build Yourself a Boat
Camonghne Felix - 2019
This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.Build Yourself a Boat, an innovative debut by award-winning poet Camonghne Felix, interrogates generational trauma, the possibility of healing, and the messiness of survival.Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.
A Brilliant Madness
Robert M. Drake - 2015
Drake written during 2004-2014. A Brilliant Madness is a reflection of the social collapses in the 21st century. The social programming, the daily routine and the economic struggles we all go through blindly. What has happen to us? Where did all the love go? We have all gone beautifully mad in a beautifully mad world.
In The Event This Doesn't Fall Apart
Shannon Lee Barry - 2020
Follow in real time as the author grapples with the excitement, hesitation, and fear of asking yourself… did I just find the one? Raw and honest and written without thoughts of publication, this collection is perfect for romantics and skeptics alike."I thought the reckoning was shifting everyone’s lives and bringing a change so great it was rewriting the fabric of the universe. Turns out I was just falling in love. The two can feel very similar, I think."
Some Things I Still Can't Tell You: Poems
Misha Collins - 2021
Trademark wit and subtle vulnerability converge in each poem; this book is both a celebration of and aspiration for a life well lived.This book is a compilation of small observations and musings. It's filled with moments of reflection and a love letter to simple joys: passing a simple blade of grass on the sidewalk, the freedom of peeing outdoors late at night, or the way a hand-built ceramic mug feels when it's full of warm tea on a chilly morning. It's a catalog and a compendium that examines the complicated experience of being all too human and interacting with a complex, confounding, breathtaking world … and a reminder to stop and be awake and alive in yourself.
Running Upon the Wires: Poems
Kate Tempest - 2018
Her raw and exhilarating new collection of poems throbs with love’s extremes: the end of one relationship, the budding of another, and what happens when the heart is pulled both ways at once.Calling in its title upon the classical poet’s harp, the technological wires of communication, and the neural wires of feeling, Tempest’s electrifying new verse weaves interpersonal struggle into a cathartic and memorable work of art about joy and despair, confusion and clarity, self-destruction and revival. Explosively lyrical and pulsing with feeling, Running Upon the Wires is frayed yet powerful in its pain, determined to speak and find love in a human community of “terrifying beauty.”