Book picks similar to
Anchors & Vacancies by Kat Savage


poetry
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Oceanic


Aimee Nezhukumatathil - 2018
    Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash of painted fingernails. With unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the natural world—the extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. This is a poet ecstatically, emphatically, naming what it means to love a world in peril.

The Dogs I Have Kissed


Trista Mateer - 2015
    Known for her eponymous blog and her confessional style of writing, this is Trista Mateer's second collection of poetry.

Spooks for Sale


Carolyn Ridder Aspenson - 2020
    Just without the extra pay.Now I’m showing old homes, and every single one of them is haunted. As a witch, I’m not supposed to be able to see ghosts. But I do. And they know I do. And I know they know I do. And, oh boy.Worse yet, an apparition that looks an awful lot like my boss’s dead partner has come knocking, and demanding I solve her murder. I’ve been given an ultimatum: help or die. It looks like I can’t really trust anyone any more. Will my cat, mouse familiar, and a new shapeshifter friend be enough to help me get the job done in what little time I have left?

Salt Is For Curing


Sonya Vatomsky - 2015
    It's also too smart for bullshit and too graceful to be mean about the bullshit: a marvelous debut. I love it."Juliet Escoria, author of Black Cloud, says: "Imagine bodies within bodies eating a feast, spilling over with their own secrets and hopes and dreams and fears and brutality and witchery. That is the party you will find in this book — a modern-day, literary equivalent of a Bosch painting.Mike Young, author of Sprezzatura, says: "These poems list the real shit. These poems melt the hard fat of life into tallow candles, then reach up and light themselves.Salt Is For Curing is the lush and haunting full-length debut by Sonya Vatomsky. These poems, structured as an elaborate meal, conjure up a vapor of earthly pains and magical desires; like the most enduring rituals, Vatomsky’s poems both intoxicate and ward. A new blood moon in American poetry, Salt Is For Curing is surprising, disturbing, and spookily illuminating.

Three Impossible Wishes


Anmol Malik - 2020
    Her jugaad and privilege puts her directly in the path of a hardworking scholarship student– Vladimir Petrov, the vodka to her hot chocolate. Their tumultuous friendship is affected by global events, the landscape around them ever changing. And slowly, the Russian winter begins to melt for the Indian summer.Funny and endearing, Three Impossible Wishes is a heart-warming book about finding love and learning to love yourself.

We Were Young


Fortesa Latifi - 2015
    We Were Young explores the heartbreaks, hangovers, and hang ups associated with growing up.

The Glimmering Room


Cynthia Cruz - 2012
    Peopled with "ambassadors from the Netherworld"--the orphaned and abused, the lost and addicted--Cruz leads us through this "traveling minstrel show / Called girlhood--" which is at once tragic and magical.

Smoke Signals (burn this)


Ashley Dun - 2016
    But they’re real, they’re honest, and hopefully they’ll make you feel a little less alone." -Ashley Dun

Second Chances


Rachel Cullen - 2017
     Second Chances follows a single mother deserted by her adulterous ex-husband, a socialite who abandoned her family and fled to the Caribbean, a high-powered executive with a disconcerting fear of commitment and a questionable sense of judgment, and a privileged teenager plagued with a lecherous father and absentee mother while bewildered by an unforeseen opportunity with the most sought after boy in school. Although the women are each dealt cards they never expected, they find friendship, family and love in the least likely of places, and with those, they find hope.

Ashes of Her Love


Pierre Jeanty - 2019
    Best-selling author Pierre Alex Jeanty helps to bring clarity and understanding to the countless women who are faced with the reality of heartbreak. Ashes of Her Love exposes the fire for what it truly was, and encourages women to drown out the embers that threaten to reignite. With this book, women are inspired to free themselves from the weight of dead relationships, find freedom in walking away, and are empowered to stay away and avoid the reoccurring cycle of heartache. If you’re in a dying relationship, walking away from a terrible love story, learning to put what is no longer good in the past, Ashes of Her love is the fire you need to turn the pages and start writing a new love story. The ending is just the beginning…

Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel I


R.H. Sin - 2015
    Sin's first book of poetry.

Count the Waves: Poems


Sandra Beasley - 2015
    A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer."Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.

The Country Between Us


Carolyn Forché - 1981
    This is a major new voice.” — Margaret AtwoodThe Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. Forché's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter


Aja Monet - 2017
    Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.Praise for Aja Monet:“[Monet] is the true definition of an artist.”—Harry Belafonte“In Paris, she walked out onto the stage, opened her mouth and spoke. At the first utterance I heard that rare something that said this is special and knew immediately that Aja Monet was one of the Ones who will mark the sound of the ages. She brings depth of voice to the voiceless, and through her we sing a powerful song.”—Carrie Mae WeemsOf Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate. Monet is also the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title.

The Whetting Stone


Taylor Mali - 2017
    She was a teacher, and it was morning on the first day of school. In this haunting new collection of poems, Taylor Mali, once a teacher himself, explores her life and their love as well as the shape and texture of his own guilt and resilience.