Book picks similar to
Small Hours by Ilyse Kusnetz
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Slanky: Poems
Mike Doughty - 2002
Doughty’s poems are at once absurdist and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he reimagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted,” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.
Broken World
Joseph Lease - 2007
In a country where “money has won everywhere,” but the essential promise of democracy still beckons, these poems uncover our troubled psyches and show us what it might mean to be “Free Again.”
Black Dog Songs
Lisa Jarnot - 2003
Simply one of the most admired and imitated poets of her generation, Lisa Jarnot's third volume of poetry does what only Jarnot can do. Decidedly lyrical, always reliant on repetition and rhythm, what emergies in this book is a catalog of loves and laments: "Just the eldergrass and him, the fog, unpoliced and safe inside the train, the thoughts of rain, Apollo, and the sun..." As Stan Brackage has said of Jarnot, " H]er words are never severed from the means that engendered them; and the consequent meanings are never detached from the meditative drama of each whole poem."
His Fire Inside
Fiona Murphy - 2018
The arrogant billionaire manwhore is to blame for turning my beloved Austin from quirky, cool college town to hipster paradise. It's a good thing I don't have to deal with him while I help his mother recover from a stroke. Her, I love. Him, all right I might have this insane desire to lick the dimple in his chin. Then there's the way from the outside he's calm, cool, collected and in control as if nothing fazes him. It makes me want to press his buttons, to make him lose control, to see the fire he hides inside. The fire I felt all too briefly. The fire I can't forget even as I tell myself I'm crazy because no way could a man as gorgeous as Rourke want a plus size like me. If my plus size doesn't put him off my family situation will. Both of our lives are too complicated to add romance to it. Besides, he's made it clear for the six months I'm his employee I'm off limits. Except he's still staring at me with the heat of a volcano ready to explode. Like a fool, I'm drawn to the fire even when I know it means one of us will get burned, but who? **Trigger warning** The h's sister is experiencing domestic violence. **This is a standalone however Sam King from A Favor appears briefly. You need not have read A Favor to read His Fire Inside.**
Cole for Christmas
Brooke St. James - 2021
The Love Poems of Lord Byron: A Romantic's Passion
Lord Byron - 1970
The man whose name is synonymous with romance gave his life in the noble cause of Greek liberty at the young age of thirty-six.Byron's love lyrics-like his epic works, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan-cast light on his legendary amorous exploits. The poems range from his schoolboy imitation of Catullus, to the poems praising such early loves as Mary Chaworth and Theresa Macri, to the tender lyrics for his half sister, Augusta Leigh, and poignant reflections on a failed marriage in "Fare Thee Well." Byron's poetry reveals a complex mix of self-revelation and breadth of knowledge plus an artistically modern sensibility.This selection of forty-four poems includes an introduction to Byron's life and notes on individual poems. Portraits of the various women in Byron's life contribute to this handsome collector's edition.The Love Poems of Lord Byron: A Romantic's Passion is the seventh volume in a poetry series that already includes The Sonnets: Poems of Love by William Shakespeare, The Love Poems of John Donne, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Poems of W.B. Yeats, Sonnets from the Portuguese: A Celebration of Love by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and The Love Poems of John Keats: In Praise of Beauty.
Inferno
Dante Alighieri
In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem’s line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante’s most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.
A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World
Christine Gerhardt - 2014
Yet for all their metaphorical suggestiveness, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poems about the natural world neither preclude nor erase nature’s relevance as an actual living environment. In their respective poetic projects, the earth matters both figuratively, as a realm of the imagination, and also as the physical ground that is profoundly affected by human action. This double perspective, and the ways in which it intersects with their formal innovations, points beyond their traditional status as curiously disparate icons of American nature poetry. That both of them not only approach nature as an important subject in its own right, but also address human-nature relationships in ethical terms, invests their work with important environmental overtones. Dickinson and Whitman developed their environmentally suggestive poetics at roughly the same historical moment, at a time when a major shift was occurring in American culture’s view and understanding of the natural world. Just as they were achieving poetic maturity, the dominant view of wilderness was beginning to shift from obstacle or exploitable resource to an endangered treasure in need of conservation and preservation.A Place for Humility examines Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry in conjunction with this important change in American environmental perception, exploring the links between their poetic projects within the context of developing nineteenth-century environmental thought. Christine Gerhardt argues that each author's poetry participates in this shift in different but related ways, and that their involvement with their culture’s growing environmental sensibilities constitutes an important connection between their disparate poetic projects. There may be few direct links between Dickinson’s “letter to the World” and Whitman’s “language experiment,” but via a web of environmentally-oriented discourses, their poetry engages in a cultural conversation about the natural world and the possibilities and limitations of writing about it—a conversation in which their thematic and formal choices meet on a surprising number of levels.
Uptalk
Kimmy Walters - 2015
By turns sassy and serious, the poems can seem to sprint in two directions at once, managing to make the reader laugh at the same time they are struck by the emotional strength of the work. "Charming, inviting, beguiling and delightful poems in the language of someone who seems alive speaking refreshing riddles to herself." SHEILA HETI"Uptalk is a book of transcribed whale songs. Some scientists gave a whale a microphone and she took it home and stayed up all night under the covers talking to herself about faces and word-parts. I am delighted that Kimmy took it upon herself to transcribe this unique document of marine biology, and my heart goes out to the brilliant, charming whale author, wherever she may be." SARA WOODS
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin - 1833
Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.
Aurora Leigh
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 1856
It is and based on Elizabeth's own experiences.Excerpt from Aurora Leigh: A Poem in Nine Books Aurora Leigh. First Book. Of writing many books there is no end;And I, who have written much in prose and verseFor others' uses, will write now for mine, -Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer, and looks at itLong after he has ceased to love you, justTo hold together what he was and is. I, writing thus, am still what men call youngI have not so far left the coasts of lifeTo travel inland, that I cannot hearThat murmur of the outer InfiniteWhich unweaned babies smile at in their sleepWhen wondered at for smiling; not so far, But still I catch my mother at her postBeside the nursery-door, with finger up, "Hush, hush, here's too much noise!" while her sweet eyesLeap forward, taking part against her wordIn the child's riot. Still I sit, and feelMy father's slow hand, when she has left us both, Stroke out my childish curls across his knee, And hear Assunta's daily jest (she knewHe liked it better than a better jest)Inquire how many golden scudi wentTo make such ringlets. O my father's hand, Stroke heavily, heavily, the poor hair down, Draw, press the child's head closer to thy knee!I'm still too young, too young, to sit alone.
Rise of the Trust Fall
Mindy Nettifee - 2010
This beautiful collection of poems will make you rise, rise up." - PANK Magazine "Mindy Nettifee poems inspire and fulfill. Rise of the Trust Fall has become a necessary book for me." -Beau Sia, Def Poetry Jam On Broadway "Mindy Nettifee is destined to be the next Dorothy Parker." -Poetic Diversity
The Flight
Caleb Cleek - 2015
Time is short as they fear he will settle his grudge by adding their families to the mounting number of bodies left in the wake of his destruction.Meanwhile, Connor’s brother, Zeke, faces his own obstacles as he attempts to escape Atlanta before the virus unleashed in the Chinese bio-attack infects the entire population, turning people into ravenous, infected monsters.The brothers face overwhelming odds as they fight to protect the people they care for and do the right thing in the face of crumbling humanity. Will Connor and Matt find their families and will Zeke make it across the country to reunite with his brother? Or will they be added to the mounting casualties piling up at the feet of ruthless outlaws and the infected?