Book picks similar to
Fieldglass by Catherine Pond
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The Lost Arabs
Omar Sakr - 2019
Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a fierce, urgent collection from a distinct new voice.
Thunderbird
Dorothea Lasky - 2012
Thunderbird's controlled rage plunges into the black interior armed with nothing but guts and Lasky's own fiery heart to light the way.Baby of airYou rose into the mysticalSide of thingsYou could no longer live with usWe put you in a little homeWhere they shut and locked the doorAnd at nightYou blew outAnd went wandering . . . Dorothea Lasky is also the author of Black Life and AWE, both from Wave Books. She lives in New York.
The Sidekicks
Will Kostakis - 2016
The Rebel. The Nerd.All Ryan, Harley and Miles had in common was Isaac. They lived different lives, had different interests and kept different secrets. But they shared the same best friend. They were sidekicks. And now that Isaac's gone, what does that make them?Will Kostakis, award-winning author of The First Third, perfectly depicts the pain and pleasure of this teenage world, piecing together three points of view with intricate splendour.
The Malevolent Volume
Justin Phillip Reed - 2020
In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.
Bury It
Sam Sax - 2018
What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. What’s at stake is survival itself and the archiving of a lived and lyric history. Laughlin Award judge Tyehimba Jess says “bury it is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously.” In this phenomenal second collection of poems, Sam Sax invites the reader to join him in his interrogation of the bridges we cross, the bridges we burn, and bridges we must leap from.
Forgiveness Parade
Jeffrey McDaniel - 1998
Both qualities are omnipresent whether he's tackling dysfunctional family memories in 'The Most Awful Lullaby', or broken-hearted romance in poems like 'Another Long Day in the Office of Dreams'.
Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982
Jack Gilbert - 1982
It was nominated for all three major American book awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the American Book Award.
The Totality for Kids
Joshua Clover - 2006
This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between “the brutal red dream/Of the collective” and “the parade/Of the ideal citizen.” The book’s action takes place in these gaps, “dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream.” The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern’s excess of signification—as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.
All the Flowers Kneeling
Paul Tran - 2022
imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran's poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.
No Real Light
Joe Wenderoth - 2007
I read his work with awe and admiration.”—Ben Marcus “Joe Wenderoth's brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the 'too much.' . . . But in Wenderoth's case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary—a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth's instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible.”—Cal Bedient This clear-eyed new work from a favorite young poet is searching and solemn, dissatisfied with artificial condolences and pat maxims. Joe Wenderoth’s determination in the face of harsh realities is what rescues us, and him, from hopelessness. “Luck” So a screaming woke you just in time An animal’s scream, or animals’. What kind of animal it was doesn’t matter, and cannot, in any case, be determined. The point is you are saved. Your mouth has been opened. Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore and is the author of five books of prose and poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Davis.
Stunt Water: Selected Poems of Buddy Wakefield, 1991-2011
Buddy Wakefield - 2015
It is a vulnerable cross section of his writing that moves from disarmingly human to sudden bursts of beast, able to seamlessly blend back into grounded stories of humor, heartache and identity using crisp, innovative and unforgettable metaphors. If you can only buy one Buddy Wakefield book, this collection is the most comprehensive of his most compelling works to date. His craft mimics the intrigue of propellers when they make themselves invisible. Buddy’s honest story is a one-man relay race to the light; that of a boy at gentleman practice who sometimes wants to blend in so badly he forgets his purpose has already arrived and there is no need to fight a war that’s long been over. The reader must be prepared for the recurring nightmares from which Buddy wakes up only to realize that whatever supposedly awful thing was stalking him was actually just trying to help.
The Easy Part of Impossible
Sarah Tomp - 2020
As someone who struggled in school, largely due to her ADHD, diving was the one place Ria could shine. But while her parents were focused on the trophies, no one noticed how Coach Benny’s strict rules and punishments controlled every aspect of Ria’s life. The harder he was on her, the sharper her focus. The bigger the bruise, the better the dive. Until a freak accident at a meet changes everything. Just like that, Ria is handed back her life, free of Benny.To fill her now-empty and aimless days, Ria rekindles a friendship with Cotton, a guy she used to know back in elementary school. With Cotton, she’s able to open up about what Benny would do to her, and through Cotton’s eyes, Ria is able to see it for what it was: abuse. Then Benny returns, offering Ria a second chance with a life-changing diving opportunity. But it’s not hers alone—Benny’s coaching comes with it. The thought of being back under his control seems impossible to bear, but so does walking away. How do you separate the impossible from the possible when the one thing you love is so tangled up in the thing you fear most?
Prelude to Bruise
Saeed Jones - 2014
How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.
Time Heals All things
Molly Hazelwood - 2017
even when our days are darker than ever we hold on to hope knowing that time will heal our wounds. -time heals all things
Butcher
Natasha T. Miller - 2021
Here, using the cuts of the cow as a metaphor Miller, explores addiction, family & tragedy.Butcher takes the body of a cow and cleaves it into 5 parts: envisioning the cuts as relationship with family members and social forces. Her Mother the rib, her Brother the brisket, her queerness as the tongue and cheek. Butcher is raw and tender. It’s a book that tells the story of a woman who redefined success after losing the most valuable thing to her.