Book picks similar to
A Certain Slant of Sunlight by Ted Berrigan


poetry
century-20th
on-our-shelf
teaching-pedagogy

Invisible Bride


Tony Tost - 2004
    Like a fantastic film, a feverish delirium, or a dream state, these prose poems use an experimental lexicon of imagery that goes beyond anything typically poetic. Tost's point of departure is the loss of the Other that makes the I: Agnes, And in a sort of coming-of-age soliloquy song, he meditates on a range of topics: fatherhood, childhood, identity, poetry. Together his poems express the unburdening of consciousness, a consciousness that contains the likes of Blake, Italo Calvino, Allen Grossman, and Frank Stanford, among others (including Tost himself), Surreal and surprising, Invisible Bride showcases the prose artistry of a new American talent.

I Will Destroy You: Poems


Nick Flynn - 2019
    But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.

Heavenly Questions: Poems


Gjertrud Schnackenberg - 2010
    In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

The New Sentence


Ron Silliman - 1987
    Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order -Bruce Boone.

The Back Chamber


Donald Hall - 2011
    While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted but rather is lively, irreverent, sexy, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.

A Ragdoll Kitten Care Guide: Bringing Your Ragdoll Kitten Home


Jenny Dean - 2010
     A Ragdoll Kitten Care Guide: Bringing Your Ragdoll Kitten Home is a comprehensive guide that covers every aspect of kitten care a new owner needs to know written in a warm, friendly tone. What if you knew what to expect and prepare for before you even picked your Ragdoll kitten up? Wouldn't it be nice to know how to kitten proof your home? Or what about what to buy in anticipation for your little one's arrival? Looking for recommended products for a new Ragdoll kitten? Looking for suggestions on everything from water fountains to scratching posts, pet carriers, cat litter, litter boxes, cat bowls, etc....products that a Ragdoll cat owner just can't live without? How about vet visits and cat health insurance? There's a lot to consider and prepare for. A Ragdoll Kitten Care Guide includes links to videos and products, and the information presented is from real life experiences, not repeated from other cat books. There are many quick, simple tips that can be used with Ragdoll kittens. The author also has a corresponding website Floppycats.com, where you can easily connect with other Ragdoll cat owners. Here's a peek inside of A Ragdoll Kitten Care Guide: Chapter 1 - Getting Your Kitten Safe-Room Ready, Kitten-Proofing, and Other Things Chapter 2 - First Days with Your Kitten and Things to Watch Out For Chapter 3 - Diet, Food and Water Bowls, Treats Chapter 4 - Scratchers, Trees, Toys and Beds Chapter 5 - Vets, Carriers, Vaccinations and Cat Health Insurance Chapter 6 - Nail Trimming, Declawing and Grooming Chapter 7 - Litter Boxes, Automatic Litter Boxes and Litter Scoops Chapter 8 - Dental Care, Teething and Teeth Brushing BONUS: How to Introduce Your New Ragdoll Kitten to a Resident Cat BONUS: Bringing Your Ragdoll Kitten Home Checklist BONUS: Questions to ask Ragdoll Breeders Carefully researched, this guide is a fast and enjoyable read with lots of photos and recommendations for the Ragdoll Kitten owner. Everything is broken down into easy chapters, and Jenny writes as if she is there with you to take you there through the various steps.

The Fatalist


Lyn Hejinian - 2003
    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

Between The Lines: Volumes of Words Unspoken


Céline Zabad - 2018
     Written with incredible honesty and self-knowledge, Between the Lines is a stunning collection of poems from Céline Zabad. Ranging in length from a single line to full pages, her poems mimic at once the brevity and vastness of feeling. Her verse is at times as free as a cloud, other times as solid as stone. Her words are philosophies and feelings in their own rights, on love, loss, loyalty, betrayal, hope, and disappointment—on life. Zabad encapsulates the thrill of love’s first blush and the freezing burn of heartbreak. Her feelings flow freely throughout the collection, lending her poetry uncommon authenticity and power. Nature thrives between the lines of her verse, reminding the reader that tears are as natural as raindrops. Whether you’re looking for new ways to think about your own feelings or are simply passionate about poetry, you’ll find plenty to love in this collection. To better understand the complexities of emotion in yourself and others, you must read Between the Lines.

Learning To Speak


Kat Savage - 2015
    It's real, relatable, and totally raw.

The Pajamaist


Matthew Zapruder - 2006
    In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle “Twenty Poems for Noelle” is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.Noelle, somewhere in an apartmentsymphony number twolistens to you breathing.Broken glass in the street.What was once unglowing glows. . . The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder’s poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.

Voyager


Srikanth Reddy - 2011
    Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim—Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht—who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.

Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1: Modern and Postmodern Poetry from Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude


Jerome Rothenberg - 1995
    Poems for the Millennium captures the essence of that change, and unlike any anthology available today, it reveals the revolutionary concepts at the very heart of twentieth-century poetry. International in its coverage, these volumes depart from the established poetic modes that grew out of the nineteenth century and instead bring together the movements that radically altered the ways that art and language express the human condition.The first volume offers three "galleries" of individual poets—figures such as Mallarmé, Stein, Rilke, Tzara, Mayakovsky, Pound, H.D., Vallejo, Artaud, Césaire, and Tsvetayeva. Included, too, are sections dedicated to some of the most significant pre-World War II movements in poetry and the other arts: Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Objectivism, and Negritude. The second volume will extend the gathering to the present, forming a synthesizing, global anthology that surpasses other collections in its international scope and experimental range.Poet-editors Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris provide informative and irreverent commentaries throughout. They challenge old truths and propose alternative directions, in the tradition of the revolutionary manifestos that have marked the art and poetry of the twentieth century. The result is both an essential source book for experiencing the full range of this century's poetic possibilities and a powerful statement on the future of poetry in the millennium ahead.

Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays


Anne Waldman - 1975
    Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional form, making their particular demands on my voice and body. I am the ‘energumen.’ The poem is the experience." Also included in this book are three essays on the oral tradition in poetry. One essay discusses the history and occasion of the title poem. The others treat such topics as performance art and poetic tradition, ethnopoetics, intoxication and transformation, Tibetan Buddhism, and the renewed ascendency of feminine energy in writing. Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry. She is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado."Anne Waldman is one of the fastest, wisest women to run with the wolves in some time." — The New York Times Book ReviewAnne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born, and Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets).

Touch: Poems


Henri Cole - 2011
    In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.   Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

Riding the Earthboy 40


James Welch - 1976
    The title of the book refers to the forty acres of Montana land Welch?s father once leased from a Blackfeet family called Earthboy. This land and its surroundings shaped the writer?s worldview as a youth, its rawness resonates in the vitality of his elegant poetry, and his verse shows a great awareness of a moment in time, of a place in nature, and of the human being in context. Deeply evoking the specific Native American experience in Montana, Welch?s poems nonetheless speak profoundly to all readers. With its new introduction, this vital work that has influenced so many American writers is certain to capture a new generation of readers.