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Hat on a Pond by Dara Wier


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First Fig and Other Poems


Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1921
    Vincent Millay (1892–1950) sounded a clarion call for the impassioned youth of her generation. Her rare mixture of clever cynicism and wistful tenderness captivated readers, who reveled in the jubilant defiance of such poems as the title piece of this collection, "First Fig": "My candle burns at both ends;/It will not last the night;/But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — /it gives a lovely light!"Their brilliance undimmed by the passage of time, these gemlike verses continue to dazzle poetry lovers. This new anthology represents the quintessential Edna St. Vincent Millay, comprising 67 poems from two of her most popular works, A Few Figs from Thistles and Second April. Its contents include such well-known and much-studied poems as "Recuerdo" and "The Philosopher," along with an abundance of sonnets, a genre in which the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet excelled.The perfect introduction for those as yet unacquainted with one of the most distinctive voices of 20th-century poetry, this volume also offers a high-quality, inexpensive treasury of favorite Millay works for devotees of her verse.

The Long Take


Robin Robertson - 2018
    Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and unable to face a return to his family home in rural Nova Scotia, he goes in search of freedom, change, anonymity and repair. We follow Walker through a sequence of poems as he moves through post-war American cities of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Smörgåsbord of Musings


Rathnakumar Raghunath - 2020
    People living happy lives, some not-so-happy lives, people in love, hopeless romantics, people dealing with heartbreak, the ones who believe life is better with a bit of whimsy, this book, hopefully, has a little something that resonates with everybody, lets the reader find the silver lining when needed and discover the joie de vivre even when times are hard.

The Clerk's Tale: Poems


Spencer Reece - 2004
    The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm. Gluck describes them as having "an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play . . . We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence . . . Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft."

Mrs. Pickles' Perilous Parting (A Mystery Theater Presents Cozy Mystery)


K.P. Stafford - 2018
     At least for theater owner Jessica James and her crew in the small town of Peculiar. Things get shaky when they’re thrown into the crazy world of murder investigation. This new cozy mystery series is a step back in time for those that love old fashioned ghosts who like to stir up mayhem, amateur sleuths, and a few animals keep things lively and interesting. Jessica needs to pull off the biggest production of her life to save her small community theater. Murder in the theater threatens to bring her efforts to a screeching halt as she scrambles to figure out who the killer is and who can fill the lead role before opening night. If she can’t pull this off and the show is a flop, she will lose everything she’s been working so hard to hold onto. The resident ghost, Farley, keeps things stirred up with his antics and sarcastic remarks about everything, which leads to more trouble. Every time she turns around, the new deputy overhears her talking to thin air. How can she convince him that ghosts are real and she’s not some crazy lady who talks to herself?

Hot Springs


Geoffrey Becker - 2010
    She convinces her boyfriend, Landis, to help carry out her plan, but once the abduction is accomplished, Bernice—whose own mother was given to manic episodes and strange behavior—is plagued with doubts. Will Landis stay with her, given her volatile personality and his own drifter past? Will she and Landis both end up in jail for this crime? And, perhaps most importantly, will she fail at being a mother? Dovetailed with this is the story of the conservative Christian adoptive parents, Tessa and David, and the effect the kidnapping has on their troubled marriage. As Bernice and Landis journey across America, from Colorado Springs to Tucson to Baltimore, Bernice must confront her past and the secrets she has kept.

The Poet in Exile


Ray Manzarek - 2001
    There, to his amazement, he is re-united with the man once known as "the snake man," and hears the remarkable story of his faked death--and the rebirth it made possible. A happily married man, the father of two children, he has discovered the secret to life and is finally free of the demons that had driven him headlong through the American night. Now an enticing question arises: Would destiny smile upon the re-launch of one of the most influential rock and roll bands in history? ". . . a narrative that ends with a moment of authentic surprise and heart-tugging poignancy."--Los Angeles Times

Render / An Apocalypse


Rebecca Gayle Howell - 2013
    To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transform, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively we enter inside of that which we devour.--Nick FlynnThis is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.--Marie HoweIn every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading RENDER how deeply I was handing everything over.--Nikky Finney

Fox


Adrienne Rich - 2001
    Here Rich continues taking the temperature of mind and body in her time in an intimate and yet commanding voice that resonates long after an initial reading. Fox is formidable and moving, fierce and passionate, and one of Rich's most powerful works to date. "Justly celebrated....Rich has long wanted to set her readers' minds blazing...she succeeds."—Publishers Weekly starred review "Intimate, explorative, these are poems with a millennial feel, at once retrospective and forward-looking."—Washington Post Book World

Good Poems for Hard Times


Garrison KeillorE.E. Cummings - 2005
    Here, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and courageous, organized into such resonant headings as "Such As It Is More or Less" and "Let It Spill." From William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman to R. S. Gwynn and Jennifer Michael Hecht, the voices gathered in this collection will be more than welcome to those who've been struck by bad news, who are burdened by stress, or who simply appreciate the power of good poetry.

Emergency Brake


Ruth Madievsky - 2016
    This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."- Matthew Dickman"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."- David St. John"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"- ZYZZYVA"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."- Columbia Journal"Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, 'Do it again! Do it again!'”- Harpur Palate

(R)evolution: The Autobiography


Gary Numan - 2020
    He has been lauded by everyone from Prince ('His album Replicas never left my turntable . . . There are people still trying to work out what a genius he was') through the Foo Fighters and Nine Inch Nails to Lady Gaga ('[He] proves music has always been really inventive for the masses'). (R)evolution is Numan's long-awaited memoir; one that charts his two lives. The first: from growing up in west London, where he was expelled from school and beaten up daily for looking different, before discovering his first synthesiser and conquering the music world in rapid time; to the extravagance, the undiagnosed Asperger's and the slow decline of a career that faded into near obscurity. The second: a twenty-plus year renaissance, catalysed by the date with a super-fan, which has allowed Gary to rediscover his creativity, produce some of his best music and become the true Godfather of electro-pop. This will be the story of one man, several dozen synthesisers, multiple issues and two desperately different lives.

The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille


Georges Bataille - 1971
    Bataille's poetry is definitely the poetry of a philosopher, but it is also a poetry with an obsessively erotic, often scatological edge to it, frequently pushing the boundary of what is or isn't obscene. Bataille believed that everything relates to the workings of desire and death in sexuality, but he also believed that poetry was the product of ""hate"" (and other extreme emotions), just as much as erotic pleasure accedes to self-annihilation. But Bataille was interested in actual action, not just disengaged hypothesis concerning the sexual act. Dufour Editions is pleased to bring Bataille's poetry to print in English. ""This is the audacious, frightful side of surrealism.""-Library Journal "Bataille produced some of the most transcendent, pointedly filthy literature of the century, and these poems, together in English for the first time, are no exception." - Publishers Weekly

The History of Anonymity: Poems


Jennifer Chang - 2008
    Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.

What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire


Charles Bukowski - 1999
    This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 70s to the 1990s.