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Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann


Ingeborg Bachmann - 1978
    Bachmann is considered one of the most important poets to emerge in postwar German letters, and this volume represents the largest collection available in English translation. Influencing numerous writers from Thomas Bernhard to Christa Wolf to Elfriede Jelinek (winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature), Bachmann’s poetic investigation into the nature and limits of language in the face of historical violence remains unmatched in its ability to combine philosophical insight with haunting lyricism.Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. In 1953 she received the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit). Her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großen Bären), appeared in 1956. Her various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for Literature. Writing and publishing essays, opera libretti, short stories, and novels as well, she divided her time between Munich, Zurich, Berlin, and Rome, where she died from a fire in her apartment in 1973.Peter Filkins has published two volumes of poetry, What She Knew (1998) and After Homer (2002), and has translated Bachmann’s The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Hopscotch


Julio Cortázar - 1963
    Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the "riffing" aesthetic of jazz and New Wave Cinema.In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortázar was so pleased with Rabassa's translation of Hopscotch that he recommended the translator to Gabriel García Márquez when García Márquez was looking for someone to translate his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude into English. "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original," according to García Márquez.

The Dogs and the Wolves


Irène Némirovsky - 1940
    The dogs are the comfortable, assimilated rich Jews up on the hill, while the wolves, their distant cousins, struggle below in the ghetto. Ada grows up motherless, looked after first by her father, then by an indomitable, social-climbing aunt, and eventually moves to Paris with her aunt's family, all of them looking for a brighter future. Ada makes a living in Paris as an artist, painting scenes from the world she has left behind. Her cousin Ben, intense and ferociously intelligent, has loved her for years; they share memories - together they survived the terrible pogroms of their childhood - and he presses her to marry him. But Harry Sinner is also in Paris, moving in exclusive circles, and infatuated with the daughter of a wealthy gentile banker. One day he buys two paintings which remind him of his past... and the course of Ada's life changes once more.But as recession and revolutions shake previously rich regimes, even a solid international bank can find itself over-extended and vulnerable to greed. Ben, now working for the Sinner family bank in Paris, is well-placed to take the kind of risks he could only dream of in the past. And as summer draws to a close, Ada's world is disintegrating and she is faced with a fateful decision.The Dogs and the Wolves, painted on a broad, vibrant canvas, with Némirovsky's acute eye for small cruelties and everyday sacrifice, is an achingly poignant novel about blood and belonging, dreams and desire.

Transformations


Anne Sexton - 1971
    The fairy tale-based works of the tortured confessional poet, whose raw honesty and wit in the face of psychological pain have touched thousands of readers.

Lighthead


Terrance Hayes - 2010
    With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Classic Love Poems


Richard ArmitageLord Byron - 2015
    Vincent Millay • "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe • "I carry your heart" by e. e. cummings • "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron • "Give All to Love" by Ralph Waldo EmersonLength: 22 mins / Public Domain (P)2015 Audible Inc.

In His Own Write


John Lennon - 1964
    Anyway they didn't get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn't pass—much to my Aunties supplies. As a member of the most publified Beatles my and (P, G, and R's) records might seem funnier to some of you than this book, but as far as I'm conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I've ever ready. God help and breed you all.

Isabella, or The Pot of Basil


John Keats - 1898
    This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Something Bright, Then Holes


Maggie Nelson - 2003
    Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight -- of feeling lost, then found, then lost again. The book's three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niedecker-esque meditations written at the shore of a polluted urban canal, a harrowing long poem written at a friend's hospital bedside, and a series of unsparing, crystalline lyrics honoring the conjoined forces of love and sorrow. Whatever the style, the poems are linked by Nelson's singular poetic voice, as sly and exacting as it is raw. The collection is a testament to Nelson's steadfast commitment to chart the facts of feeling, whatever they are, and at whatever the cost.

Every Word You Cannot Say


Iain S. Thomas - 2019
    May they find every word they were looking for.***I know you don’t want to talk sometimes. Sometimes because it hurts and sometimes because you’re just not supposed to talk about what you want to talk about. Sometimes it can be hard to say, “this is beautiful,” when no one else can see what you see. Or, “Here, this is where the pain is.” But some part of you knows, the truth about the words you cannot say is that they only hurt until you say them. They only hurt until the person who needs to hear them, hears them.  Because we are human, and the closest we’ve ever come to showing each other who we really are, and how we love, is with words.So I’m going to try to say to you here, what I wish you’d say to me too. Please.Listen. We can change things. Here.

Selected Poetry


Percy Bysshe Shelley - 1913
    His life as well as his poetry embraced the passions, ideals and causes of Romanticism, whose emergence and early influences coincided with the dates of his own brief life (1792-1822). This selection of many of his best-known and most representative poems will give readers an exciting encounter with one of the most original and stimulating figures in English poetry.

The Crown Ain't Worth Much


Hanif Abdurraqib - 2016
    A regular columnist for MTV.com, Willis-Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Willis-Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.