The Twenty-Ninth Year


Hala Alyan - 2019
    For Hala Alyan, this is a year in which the past—memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith—winds itself around the present. Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies. A vivid catalog of trauma, heartache, loneliness, and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.

Intimations


Zadie Smith - 2020
    This is not any of those—the year isn’t half-way done. What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.”Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love—an essential book in extraordinary times.

The Name at the End of the Ladder


Elena de Roo - 2014
    Soon she discovers she has no choice, unless she can win an ancient and mysterious board game. And every roll of the dice leads her further into danger. The Name at the End of the Ladder is a fantasy adventure for younger readers by award-winning New Zealand poet Elena de Roo. This junior fiction novel about the power of language and friendship is ideal for fans of Jumanji, Zathura and The Phantom Tollbooth. For more about the author and her books, please visit www.elenaderoo.com

The Arab Apocalypse


Etel Adnan - 1980
    Middle Eastern studies. Translated from the French by the author. Reprinted with a new foreward by Jalal Toufic. This book, a masterwork of the dislocations and radiant outcries of the Arab world, reaffirms Etel Adnan, who authored the great poem, Jebu, as among the foremost poets of the French Language. THE ARAB APOCALYPSE is an immersion into a rapture of chaos clawing towards destiny, and nullified hope refusing its zero. Is is also the journey of soul through the cartography of a global immediacy rarely registered by maps, replete with signposts like hieroglyphs in a storm of shrapnel and broken glass. And above all it is a book that, though capable of being read in its orderly sequence, has so surrendered to 'being there, ' it can rivet the sensibility to the Middle Eastern condition at any point in the text--so rapid are its mutations, so becoming its becomingness--like a wisdom book or a book of Changes--Jack Hirschman.It has a power and intensity that few poets today can muster--only Allen Ginsberg's Howl comes to mind.--Alice MolloyThe power of Adnan's language and imagery reminds us that she is indeed one of the most significant post-modern poets in contemporary Arab culture.--Kamal BoullattaTHE ARAB APOCALYPSE is, to date, Adnan's most triumphant battle with the exactness of words.--Douglas PowellThe poem invokes a mythic past of Gilgamesh, Tammouz, and Ishtar to presage a present that resists narration, THE ARAB APOCALYPSE contests an uncritical reflection on the immediate historical past.--Barbara Harlow

I Am Not Your Final Girl


Claire C. Holland - 2018
    Holland, a timely collection of poetry that follows the final girl of slasher cinema - the girl who survives until the end - on a journey of retribution and reclamation. From the white picket fences of 1970s Haddonfield to the apocalyptic end of the world, Holland confronts the role of women in relation to subjects including feminism, violence, motherhood, sexuality, and assault in the world of Trump and the MeToo movement. Each poem centers on a fictional character from horror cinema, and explores the many ways in which women find empowerment through their own perceived monstrousness.

Date & Time


Phil Kaye - 2018
    Kaye takes the reader on a journey from a complex but iridescent childhood, drawing them into adolescence, and finally on to adulthood. There are first kisses, lost friendships, hair blowing in the wind while driving the vastness of an empty road, and the author positioned in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. Readers will find joy and vulnerability, in equal measure. Date & Time is a welcoming story, which freezes the calendar and allows us all to live in our best moments.

The Late Parade: Poems


Adam Fitzgerald - 2013
    Channeling "the primal vision of Hart Crane" (Harold Bloom), Adam Fitzgerald helped welcome the modernist aethetic into the twenty-first century. Part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide, Fitzgerald's chimerical poems confront "a surging ocean of sound and language" (Maureen McLane). In these forty-eight poems, he conducts a madcap symphony of language, memory, and fantasy with the "exhilarating assurance of nonstop invention" (Timothy Donnelly).

The Bluest Eye


Toni Morrison - 1970
    Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change- in painful, devastating ways.What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.

Red Sugar


Jan Beatty - 2008
    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

Meteoric Flowers


Elizabeth Willis - 2006
    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

Her


Pierre Alex Jeanty - 2017
    Every woman should know the feelings of being loved and radiating those feelings back to her mate. This is a beautiful expression of heartfelt emotion using short, gratifying sentiments. If there is a lover in you, you will not get enough of "Her."

Cane


Jean Toomer - 1923
    The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.

The Immortal Soul Salvage Yard


Beth May - 2021
    The topics may vary widely, from love to mental illness to the most recent "Florida Man" headline, but it's all in the same handwriting. Welcome to The Immortal Soul Salvage Yard.

Ring of Fire


Lisa Jarnot - 2001
    This full-length collection includes individual lyric poems as well as a previously published chapbook Sea Lyrics and a new collaborative piece "Dumb Duke Death" with illustrations by Jennifer Jarnot.

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning


Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 1988
    This probing of the changes in the American psyche through the 1970s is carried forward in the second part, Landscapes of Living Dying (1979)—a work originally hailed by Library Journal as "Ferlinghetti's strongest work since his 1957 A Coney Island of the Mind. . . . [He] pursues his disheveled muse with the innocent passion of a young beatnik, hiding his authentic erudition behind a comfortable guise of spontaneous composition."