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In the Ghost-House Acquainted by Kevin Goodan


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Constance


Jane Kenyon - 1993
    Kenyon's fourth collection is built around two perfectly orchestrated poem sequences. In the first, the speaker contrasts memories of her baby carriage with other images from her childhood, such as her parents' toiling away at low-paying jobs. She also recalls the present-day life of her aging, increasingly dependent mother. Melancholia, the subject of the second sequence and several poems surrounding it, has been played to death in modern poetry, but still Kenyon offers new insights and gives even the most depressing poems an uplifting lilt in their final lines. In her hands a list of the latest medications becomes fit material for poetry: "The coated ones smell sweet or have / no smell; the powdery ones smell / like the chemistry lab at school / that made me hold my breath." She writes, in addition to illness, of sleep, insomnia and death. She interacts with the insects, birds and flowers in her New Hampshire landscape, relying on their fragility to teach her of her own. Kenyon describes afterlife, or "the Other Side," with the same precise, hard-edged imagery that fills her other poems." from Publisher's Weekly

A Green Light


Matthew Rohrer - 2004
    Over and over these poems leave us convinced that we’ve learned something very important and mysterious, yet we can’t say exactly what.

The Growing Season


Carol Lynn Pearson - 1976
    

Home Burial


Michael McGriff - 2012
    Whether tender or hard-hitting, McGriff juxtaposes natural images of deep forests, creeks, coyotes, and crows against the harsher oil-grease realities of blue-collar life, creating poems that read like folk tales about the people working in grain mills, forests, and factories."New Civilian"The new law says you can abandon your childin an emergency room,no questions asked. The young fathercarries the sleeping boythrough the hospital doors.Later, alone, parked at the boat basin,he takes a knife from his pocket,cuts an unfiltered cigarette in two,lights the longer half in his mouth.He was a medic in the war.In his basement are five bronze eaglesthat once adorned the wallsof a dictator's palace.Michael McGriff attended the University of Oregon; the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in creative writing; and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow. He is the co-founding editor and publisher of Tavern Books and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

My Haunted Apartment


Lisa Gellers - 2013
    Like most people Lisa Gellers never believed in ghosts or hauntings.  But all that changed when she moved into her first apartment.  It wasn’t long before strange things began to happen: objects moving on their own, things disappearing, disembodied voices, and a dark shadow that followed her wherever she went.Now a true believer in the paranormal, Lisa has decided to share her story.  For any who have suffered from a real haunting, hopefully this will provide you some confort and the knowledge that you are not alone.

Delights and Shadows


Ted Kooser - 2004
    Critics call him a "haiku-like imagist" and his poems have been compared to Chekov's short stories. In Delights and Shadows, Kooser draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed corn and a forgotten salesman's trophy help reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world."Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance."-PoetryTed Kooser is the author of eight collections of poems and a prose memoir. He lives on a small farm in rural Nebraska.

Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers


George Oppen - 2007
    Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's "Daybooks," composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958. iSelected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.

The Eye Like a Strange Balloon


Mary Jo Bang - 2004
    Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backwards in time to 1 BC, where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art’s strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating—a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang’s sly and elegant commentary on poetry’s enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.

Stars of the Night Commute


Ana Bozicevic - 2009
    "STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams"—Annie Finch. "Bozicevic's poetry has everything—a mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound"—Noelle Kocot. "How does she do it?"—Eileen Myles. "Absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect.... She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial.... She is able to perceive with the eyes of language—then render with lyrical immediacy—the experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream"—Franz Wright.

Ceremony for the Choking Ghost


Karen Finneyfrock - 2010
    Her voice came back, whispering at first, then screaming. Ceremony for the Choking Ghost contains the sound of that voice returning, bringing poems about grief and its effect on the body, the body politic, memory and, of course, poems about love. From the intensely personal, "How My Family Grieved," to the political, "What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn't a Pillar of Salt)," Finneyfrock engages the reader with the chiseled images of a precise storyteller.

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (City Lights Pocket Poets Number 17)


Malcolm Lowry - 1962
    First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The Ghost: How a California Golden Boy Became America's Most Unlikely-and Elusive- Fugitive


Paige Williams - 2012
    He's the prime suspect in the 2004 murder of Keith Palomares, a 25-year-old armored truck guard. Despite the FBI's active investigation, Brown remains at large living among us without a trace. And yet, a faint pulse of his identity surfaces from time to time, haunting the detectives tasked to find him. In the Kindle Single The Ghost, crime writer Paige Williams chronicles the case and draws a portrait of a killer who is as slippery and elusive as he is enigmatic. Jason Derek Brown was raised by a Mormon father who held a high position in the church despite being a known con man. Jason himself was a devout Mormon for years, and maintained his generosity and Southern California charm even as he slid into a life of excessive materialism fueled by theft. Aside from the murder, he has no history of violence. His case is downright perplexing, and Williams captures it from multiple viewpoints in pitch-perfect prose. --Paul Diamond

Earlier Poems


Franz Wright - 2007
    The haunting collection of poems that gathers the first four books (The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes , Entry In An Unknown Hand , The Night World and the Word Night and Rorschach Test) of Pulitzer winner Franz Wright under one cover, where “fans old and new will find a feast amid famine” (Publishers Weekly), and discover how large this poet’s gift was from the start.From the Trade Paperback edition.

First Course In Turbulence


Dean Young - 1999
    Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia


Kiki Petrosino - 2020
    From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello,' she writes: 'I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I’m a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino’s name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.