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Bastards of the Reagan Era


Reginald Dwayne Betts - 2015
    Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear "the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.

The Book of Jon


Eleni Sikelianos - 2004
    Jon, a multitalented, eccentric visionary, emerges as a brilliant, charming, irresponsible, frustrating, and ultimately tragic hero.This is a saga of the rise and fall of family lines—a tale marked by bohemia, Greek poets, intellectuals, drugs and homelessness. It is the story of eccentrics and survivors, the strength of personal vision and the nature of addiction, and what it does to families. An exquisitely rendered exploration of the harrowing and motivating forces of family, history, and individual choices.Eleni Sikelianos’ previous books include Earliest Worlds and the National Poetry Series winner The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls. She lives in Boulder, CO.

Cruel Fiction


Wendy Trevino - 2018
    This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle though the insurgencies, context, and kinesis of our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.Copies for purchase now available: https://communeeditions.com/cruel-fic...

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.””

Half Pleasure Half Pain


Mohamed Ghazi - 2016
    This book is about the girls whose lives were ruined by me. I want to write about my story, for it’s the only way to be immortal. I want you to feel the pleasure of falling in love. The lust, the passion, the desire, and the craving that turns into an unhealthy addiction. And I want you also to feel the pain of losing someone, the ache, the agony, the bitterness, and the grief that cripples your soul forever. This is for everyone. The forgotten souls buried under the melancholy of the past. Yes, I will show you how much you hurt me, I will write. This is what my heart holds for you; half pleasure, half pain.

Migritude


Shailja Patel - 2010
    debut of internationally acclaimed poet and performance artist Shailja Patel, Migritude is a tour-de-force hybrid text that confounds categories and conventions. Part poetic memoir, part political history, Migritude weaves together family history, reportage and monologues to create an achingly beautiful portrait of women's lives and migrant journeys undertaken under the boot print of Empire. Patel, who was born in Kenya and educated in England and the U.S., honed her poetic skills in performances of this work that have received standing ovations throughout Europe, Africa and North America. She has been described by the Gulf Times as -the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy- and by CNN as -the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange.- Migritude includes interviews with the author, as well as performance notes and essays.

House of Lords and Commons: Poems


Ishion Hutchinson - 2016
    Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

Texture Notes


Sawako Nakayasu - 2010
    Asian American Studies. Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu's TEXTURE NOTES presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu's writing explodes with genre-bending fury and fine-tuned improvisation, leaving in its wake a largess of feeling for the things of the world.

Our Songs, Our Places, Without You


Trevor Capiro - 2018
    each poem is incredibly impactful and beautifully written. stories of love, heartbreak, suffering, and healing come alive on the page in an incredible way. let this book of poetry touch your soul and help you feel free. join trevor capiro on this journey towards healing.

I Am Magic: How To Create Your Best Life (I Am, #1)


Maria Robins - 2017
    I AM Magic shows you exactly how to create magic in your own life.In this book, you’ll discover: •A better way of thinking about what you’re thinking!•How to focus on the good things and bring more of these your way•How to find delight in the everyday stuff•An easy to remember way of staying on the happiness trackYou no longer have to leave your life to chance. This book shows you how to take control of your own happiness and create a better life.If you don’t want to spend hours reading a book but you want the feel good factor , then you’ll love I AM Magic’s easy to remember rhymes, which set you up quickly and easily for a happy day, every day.

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest


Barbara Guest - 2008
    And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest's poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest's remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.

Cunt-Ups


Dodie Bellamy - 2001
    Prose. "CUNT-UPS is an explosion of textual sexuality that resists principles of formal ordering, is polyvalent in its voice and range, and as perverse in its sentence construction as its content. Its 'setting' is the mediated exchange itself, the fractured articulation of 'a female body who has sex writing about sex.' While the title might imply a gendered site of production, it also suggests a sexual/textual violence that is more than a mere 'disorganization of the senses' but a dismemberment of the gendered body as well. The text becomes a (feminist) desiring machine, its writing a prosthetic device mediating the traces of physicality, imagination, abjection, and pleasure."Throw on the switch, plug into the mediating machine, the flesh-object writes back, becomes subject, suspect, the gaze cut-up and fed back into vibrating loops of unobtainable desire."--David Buuck

Pamela: A Novel (Atelos (Series), 4.)


Pamela Lu - 1999
    "While the new sentence--the prose wing of Language writing--strips narrative down to pointed sets of shifting referents, Lu, in her debut, knowingly resuscitates it, creating a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions. This quasi-bildungsroman charts the emergence of an 'I' (not 'P' and not 'Pamela, ' though the three characters do appear together) into a 20-something Bay Area, with memories of a suburban childhood close on her heels.... This is a book of extraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages to tell a beautiful story in spite of itself"--Publishers Weekly.

Blue Yodel


Ansel Elkins - 2015
    Ansel Elkins’s poetry collection, Blue Yodel, is the 109th volume to be so honored. Esteemed poet and competition judge Carl Phillips praises Elkins for her “arresting use of persona,” calling her poems “razor-edged in their intelligence, Southern Gothic in their sensibility.”   In her imaginative and haunting debut collection, Elkins introduces readers to a multitude of characters whose “otherness” has condemned them to live on the margins of society. She weaves blues, ballads, folklore, and storytelling into an intricate tapestry that depicts the violence, poverty, and loneliness of the Deep South, as well as the compassion, generosity, and hope that brings light to people in their darkest times. The blue yodel heard throughout this diverse compilation is a raw, primal, deeply felt expression of the human experience, calling on us to reach out to the isolated and disenfranchised and to find the humanity in every person.

Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic


Mario Santiago Papasquiaro - 2013
    Fierce and visceral, Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic is canonical to Infrarealism, a poem that renders poetry inseparable from politics. It was published originally as part of the posthumous collection Jeta de Santo: Antología Poética, 1974–1997. This is the first widely available English translation of Santiago Papasquiaro's work.the thesis & antithesis of the world meetlike 1 white-hot meteor & 1 UFO in distress& inexplicably they greet each other:I'm the 1 who embossed on the back of his denim jacketthe sentence: The nucleus of my solar system is AdventureMario Santiago Papasquiaro founded the radical Infrarealist poetry movement with Roberto Bolaño. During his lifetime, Santiago published two books of poetry, Beso eterno (1995) and Aullido de Cisne (1996). He died in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1998.Cole Heinowitz is an associate professor of literature at Bard College.Alexis Graman is a painter and translator living in New York.