Book picks similar to
A Field Guide to the Heavens by Frank X. Gaspar
poetry
non-fiction
poetry-read
professor_author
Tunsiya-Amrikiya
Leila Chatti - 2018
From vantage points on both sides of the Atlantic, Chatti investigates the perpetual exile that comes from always being separated from some essential part of oneself.“Tunsiya is Arabic for Tunisian/female, and Amrikiya is Arabic for American/female. This naming makes a cross of empowerment even as it is it requires great effort to bear it. Muslim female power is real and undeniable in thesecoming of age poems. In this collection, arcs spark between Tunisian and American citizenship, male and female duality, sky and earth, and yes and no. This is one of the punchiest and powerful chapbooks to appear in recent years. Leila Chatti is someone to watch.” —JOY HARJO“I marvel at Leila Chatti’s poems, their deceptive ease, their ‘calligraphy of smoke,’ their luminous concern with identity and self, love and family, her aesthetic command. ‘I orbited the town of my origin.’ She writes an America that belongs to the world, not the other way around. ‘What kind of world will we leave/ for our mothers?’ In poems filled with vision, desire, tenderness, she disarms our most guarded partialities, those we hide in our slumber, or deep under our tongues: ‘a Muslim girl who loved her father’; ‘ghost of a word mixed up with our bodies.’ Leila Chatti is a remarkable poet. Take notice.” —FADY JOUDAH“Leila Chatti is a major star. She writes exquisite, indelible, necessary poems, from two worlds mixing, rich as the threads of finest tapestries— glistening, warm. I’m struck by her vibrant sense of detail and perfect pacing. We need her honest, compassionate voice so much, at this moment, and everywhere.”—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
Rhythm of Remembrance
Samir Satam - 2020
– Shubhangi Swarup (Latitudes of Longing)
The Hounds of No
Lara Glenum - 2005
Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Virgina, and now teaches at the University of Georgia. In this entirely unheimlich debut, she enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model. Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project. The extraordinary precision of these poems is so stunning, we can't help but feel blinded by their visions: sock-monkeys, dollhouses, and a circus made of meat vibrate between the playful and the brutal so deftly, each line is a perfect shard of some fantastic planet, gloriously and sadly like our own. As in Blake's apocalyptic images, the sky rolls itself up like a scroll--brilliant in its colors and infinite in its scope. Glorious!--D.A. Powell.
(w)holehearted: a collection of poetry and prose
Sara Bawany - 2018
it is the facade that many of us peruse our lives carrying, often neglecting our pain, our mental health, and most importantly, the way we are more prone to hurting others when we lack this self-awareness. (w)holehearted seeks to encompass as many stories as possible, touching on several topics, namely, spirituality, feminism, colorism, domestic violence, intersectionality, mental health and more. it aims to depict that anyone with the darkest past and pitfalls can still save themselves from drowning in the difficulties that not only plague our world, but also plague our hearts.
Happiness
Jack Underwood - 2015
With the sort of smart, persuasive voice associated with Simon Armitage and Michael Donaghy, these poems worry at the world in search of consolation, or else meet life's absurdity and strangeness half-way; whether sitting proudly atop an unexploded bomb, or injecting blood under the skin of a banana, playfulness and imagination are vehicles for confronting 'the fearful and forgotten things I've lied to myself about'. Here are poems which address anxiety about fatherhood, remorse for lost lovers and friends, or mourn for a miscarried sibling. Happiness is a collection preoccupied with the ephemerality of happiness itself, at the ever-present possibility of its departure, and the ways we try to grasp and keep hold of it. 'Every single thought I'm having is about LOVE', here meaning both the pleasure and panic of love, its peculiarity; love as a feeling of risk, love for one's own body, familiar yet estranged, of 'cack-handed LOVE at his console', love like 'pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain'.
Love Story
Megan Benjamin - 2017
Some poems read as conversations, some as internal monologues, others as observations, but they all work together to tell one couple's love story.
I Wrote This for You: Just the Words
Iain S. Thomas - 2018
While focusing on the words from the project, new photography launches each section which speaks to the reader's journey through the world: Love Found, Being In Love, Love Lost, Hope, Despair, Living and Dying.
Yellowrocket: Poems
Todd Boss - 2008
His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.
Rumi's Little Book of Love: 150 Poems That Speak to the Heart
Rumi - 2009
His language, that of love in its purest form, speaks to us today as it did seven hundred years ago, surpassing time and bridging cultures.These poems, most of them translated into English for the first time from the original Persian, were carefully selected from two thousand of Rumi's quatrains. Arranged thematically, they take us on a journey of the soul. Persian calligraphy enhances the beauty of the poems.Discover the depths of a mystic's soul. Fly with him on his beloved's wings. Fall with him into the despair and fear of losing his beloved forever. Discover the beauty and love contained in this wonderful little book of poetry.
It’s Fine, It’s Fine, It’s Fine: It’s Not
Taz Alam - 2021
A raw, honest and heartfelt poetry collection from Taz Alam – for the tough times, the great times, and everything in between.Depressed, but it’s fine.Anxious, but it’s fine.Heartbroken, but it’s fine.When you’re ready to embrace how you really feel,I hope this book helps you connect, reflect, and be seen.What matters is that you’re here.Maybe we can be fine, together.
Beautiful in the Mouth
Keetje Kuipers - 2010
Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.From Devils Lake Journal:“Keetje Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker’s own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as “Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer” alongside “Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage,” “Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar,” and “Barn Elegy” with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets.”From ForeWord Reviews:“The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, “a wave as well as a particle.””
We Don't Know We Don't Know
Nick Lantz - 2010
The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t
Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems
Tom Hennen - 2013
But despite his lack of recognition, Mr. Hennen...has simply gone about his calling with humility and gratitude in a culture whose primary crop has become fame. He just watches, waits and then strikes, delivering heart-buckling lines.” —Dana Jennings, The New York Times"As with Ted Kooser, Tom Hennen is a genius of the common touch. . . . They are amazingly modest men who early accepted poetry as a calling in ancient terms and never let up despite being ignored early on. They return to the readers a thousandfold for their attentions."—Jim Harrison, from the introduction"Many readers will appreciate this evocation of a life not as commonly portrayed in contemporary verse."—Library Journal"There is something of the ancient Chinese poets in Hennen, of Clare and Thoreau, although he is very much a contemporary poet."—Willow Springs"One of the most charming things about Tom Hennen's poems is his strange ability to bring immense amounts of space, often uninhabited space, into his mind and so into the whole poem."—Robert Bly"America is a country that loves its advertising. That loves its boxes we can put people and places into. We love 'Heartland' as opposed to 'Dustbowl.' We also love to be surprised. Rural Minnesota, as written by Tom Hennen in Darkness Sticks to Everything, is a world of realistic loneliness and lessons. It’s a collection of sincere poems about man and the land."—The Rumpus"Hennen is a master of the prose poem [who] can take little details, tiny details and make them universal."—River Falls Journal"What separates Hennen from many of his contemporaries is his willingness to identify with the natural world in a way that feels neither possessive nor self-serving, but simply (once again) sincere."—Basalt Magazine"There is something strong in all Tom Hennen's poems, an awareness and a clear, sure voice... I don't usually want to end by saying 'Buy this book,' but I'm going to say it this time: 'You should buy this book.'"—Fleda Brown, Interlochen Public Radio, "Michigan Writers on the Air"Tom Hennen gives voice to the prairie and to rural communities, celebrating—with sadness, praise, and astute observations—the land, weather, and inhabitants. In short lyrics and prose poems, he reveals the detailed strangeness of ordinary things. Gathered from six chapbooks that were regionally distributed, this volume is Hennen's long-overdue introduction to a national audience. Includes an introduction by Jim Harrison and an afterword by Thomas R. Smith."In Falling Snow at a Farm Auction"Straight pine chairComfortableIn anyone's company,Older than grandmotherIt enters the presentIts arms wide openWanting to hold another young wife.Tom Hennen, author of six books of poetry, was born and raised in rural Minnesota. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer. He helped found the Minnesota Writer's Publishing House, then worked for the Department of Natural Resources wildlife section, and later at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in Minnesota.
Some Values of Landscape and Weather
Peter Gizzi - 2003
His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."
The War Poets: A Selection of World War I Poetry (a selection of poems from Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, all with an active Table of Contents)
Rupert Brooke - 2011
The collection includes:RUPERT BROOKEPEACESAFETYTHE DEADTHE DEADTHE SOLDIEREDWARD THOMASADLESTROPTEARSTHE OWLRAINTHE CHERRY TREESAS THE TEAM'S HEAD-BRASSSIEGFRIED SASSOON"THEY"THE REAR-GUARDI STOOD WITH THE DEADSUICIDE IN TRENCHESTHE GENERALHOW TO DIEGLORY OF WOMENTHEIR FRAILTYDOES IT MATTER?SURVIVORSEVERYONE SANGTO ANY DEAD OFFICERSICK LEAVEIVOR GURNEYTO HIS LOVETHE SILENT ONEISAAC ROSENBERGBREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHESLOUSE HUNTINGON RECEIVING NEWS OF THE WARDEAD MAN'S DUMPRETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKSWILFRED OWENANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTHAPOLOGIA PRO POEMATE MEODULCE ET DECORUM ESTSTRANGE MEETINGFUTILITYDISABLEDMINERSS.I.W.