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Selected Poems by William Bronk


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this is how i knew


Kiana Azizian - 2018
    Everything you need to hear, but already know.

Case Sensitive


Kate Greenstreet - 2006
    Greenstreet's highly original CASE SENSITIVE posits a female central character who writes chapbooks that become the sections in this book. What happens in the book I want to read? Greenstreet asked herself. And how would it sound? Everything the character is reading, remembering, and dreaming turns up in what she writes, duly referenced with notes. Using natural language charged with concision and precise syntax, Greenstreet has created a memorable and lasting first collection. A poem intrigue of the highest order. Greenstreet has made a brilliant beginning with this first book--Kathleen Fraser. A beautiful dwelling of ideas. CASE SENSITIVE suggests that there need be no divide between the associative connections of poetry and the extended thinking of the essay. This is a book full of luminous footnotes, details, and attentive readings. CASE SENSITIVE strings together a series of moments to create something resonate, large, and inclusive--Juliana Spahr.

Loosestrife


Stephen Dunn - 1996
    Not content merely to observe the world, Dunn's stance is always dual, complicit. And as he navigates through each paradox of his moral and aesthetic and erotic selves, this poet, described by Sydney Lea as one "who remains open to contradictions," travels to a place of exact and complicated vision.

Quick Question: New Poems


John Ashbery - 2012
    A beloved and gifted artist, Ashbery takes his place beside Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane in the canon of great American poets. With Quick Question, a new collection of poems published in time for his 85th birthday, John Ashbery proves that his creative power has only grown stronger with age.

The Captain Lands in Paradise


Sarah Manguso - 2002
    The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

Dead Man's Float


Jim Harrison - 2015
    Harrison's novels and poems over the last two decades have been increasingly preoccupied with mortality, never so much as in Dead Man's Float, his very good new book of verse. Here he details the shocks of shingles and back surgery, as well as the comprehensive low wheeze of a fraying body... The joys in Mr. Harrison's world have remained consistent. If sex is less frequently an option, his appetites for food and the outdoors are undiminished. In one poem, he goes out into a rainstorm at night and sits naked at a picnic table. In another, he writes: 'I envied the dog lying in the yard/so I did it.'... The title of this volume, Dead Man's Float, refers to a way to stay alive in the water when one has grown tired while far from shore. As a poet, however, Mr. Harrison is not passively drifting. He remains committed to language, and to what pleasures he can catch."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times"Few enough are the books I decide to keep beyond a culling or two. Barring fire or flood, Dead Man's Float will be in my library for the rest of my life. If it's the last poetry collection we get from Harrison--and I hope it isn't--it is as fine an example of his efforts as any."--Missoula Independent"Harrison's poems succeed on the basis of an open heart and a still-ravenous appetite for life."--The Texas Observer"Forthright and unaffected, even brash, Harrison always scoops us straight into the world whether writing fiction or nonfiction [and] goes in deep, acknowledging our frailness even as he seamlessly connects with a world that moves from water to air to the sky beyond."--Library Journal"Harrison pours himself into everything he writes... in poems, you do meet Harrison head-on. As he navigates his seventies, he continues to marvel with succinct awe and earthy lyricism over the wonders of birds, dogs, and stars as he pays haunting homage to his dead and contends with age's assaults. The sagely mischievous poet of the North Woods and the Arizona desert laughs at himself as he tries to relax by imagining that he's doing the dead man's float only to sink into troubling memories...Bracingly candid, gracefully elegiac, tough, and passionate, Harrison travels the deep river of the spirit, from the wailing precincts of a hospital to a "green glade of soft marsh grass near a pool in a creek" to the moon-bright sea."--Donna Seaman, Booklist"Jim Harrison has been a remarkably productive writer across a multitude of genres... His poetry is earthy, witty, keenly observed and tied closely to the natural world [and] mortality looms large in Dead Man's Float, his 14th collection of poems... [F]orceful, lucid, fearlessly honest, Harrison knows that the nearness of death intensifies life."--Arlice Davenport, Wichita Daily EagleWarblerThis year we have two gorgeousyellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.The other day I stuck my head in the bush.The nestlings weigh one twentieth of an ounce, about the size of a honeybee. We stared ateach other, startled by our existence.In a month or so, when they reach the sizeof bumblebees they'll fly to Costa Rica without a map.Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was one of America's most versatile and celebrated writers.

Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979


Susan Howe - 1996
    In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems


Larry Levis - 2016
    The two other acrobats were thieves. --from "Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It"The Darkening Trapeze collects the last poems by Larry Levis, written during the extraordinary blaze of his final years when his poetry expanded into the ambitious operatic masterpieces he is known for. Edited and with an afterword by David St. John and published twenty years after Levis's death, this collection contains major unpublished works, including final elegies, brief lyrics, and a coda believed to be the last poem Levis wrote, a heart-wrenching poem about his son. The Darkening Trapeze is an astonishing collection by a poet many consider to be among the greatest of late-twentieth-century American poetry.

Blowout


Denise Duhamel - 2013
    From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love through music, film, and history—Michelle and Barak Obama's inauguration and Cleopatra's ancient sex toy. Duhamel chronicles the perilous cruelties of love gone awry, but also reminds us of the compassion and transcendence in the aftermath. In "Having a Diet Coke with You," she asserts that "love poems are the most difficult poems to write / because each poem contains its opposite its loss / and that no matter how fierce the love of a couple / one of them will leave the other / if not through betrayal / then through death." Yet, in Blowout, Duhamel fiercely and foolishly embraces the poetry of love.

Mule


Shane McCrae - 2010
    African American Studies. MULE is highly lyrical, obsessively incantatory, audaciously formal, and actually a very personal, very autobiographical book. In it, the author addresses his at the time failing second marriage (which he is no longer in), his son's autism, his own racial identity, and some of his beliefs about God. "Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. MULE is such a book. Never shying away from sudden confusions of pain and beauty, Shane McCrae's questions are not why so much pain? why so much beauty? but, instead, how can they remake us? McCrae's is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song"--Katie Ford.

Petit à Petit


Ambica Uppal - 2020
    It assures you that tomorrow will be a better day and encourages you to realise your potential and achieve your aspirations. Petit à Petit is centred on themes like self-love, self-confidence and taking life into your own hands.No matter how far-away and impossible your dreams seem, don't be afraid to reach for them.

Theories of Falling


Sandra Beasley - 2008
    THEORIES OF FALLING is the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Judge Marie Howe said of THEORIES OF FALLING, "I kept coming back to these poems--the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground." "Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting 'Allergy Girl' series will set off such an itch, I doubt you'll ever fully recover...This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where 'even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.'"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Nigh-No-Place


Jen Hadfield - 2008
    Her first book, Almanacs, was a travellers's litany, featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland. Nigh-No-Place is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the natural world." Nigh-No-Place reflects the breadth of ground she's covered. 'Ten-minute Break Haiku' is her response to working in a fish factory. 'Paternoster' is the Lord's Prayer uttered by a draught-horse. 'Prenatal Polar Bear' takes place in Churchill, Manitoba, surrounded by tundra.

X: Poems


James Galvin - 2003
    In his sixth book of poems, James Galvin writes from a deep, philosophical engagement with the landscape and faces a "vertigo of solitude" with his marriage dissolved, his only daughter grown and gone, and the log house he built by hand abandoned. "What did I love that made me believe it would last?" he asks.Something has to be true enough to beTaken for granted.In the hospital I sawAn old manCaressing the face of an old woman.This same man, young, caressed her faceIn just that way.That’s the stillnessAt the center of change—A sadness worth dying for, I swear—There is no other.—from "Dying into What I’ve Done""James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."—The Nation"In James Galvin we have a superior poet."—American Book Review"Galvin’s poems have the virtues of precise observation and original language, yes, but what he also brings to the table is a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make the slightest of his poems an architectural pleasure."—Harvard ReviewJames Galvin has published five collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975–1997, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadow and a novel, Fencing the Sky. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he works as a rancher part of each year, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Vantage


Taneum Bambrick - 2019
    Bambrick began writing poems in order to document the forms of violence she witnessed towards the people and the environment of the Columbia River. While working there she found that reservoirs foster a uniquely complex community--from fish biologists to the owners of luxury summer homes--and became interested in the issues and tensions between the people of that place. The idea of power, literal and metaphorical, was present in every action and encounter with bosses and the people using the river. The presence of a young woman on the crew irritated her older, male co-workers who'd logged, built houses, and had to suffer various forms of class discrimination their entire lives. She found throughout this experience that their issues, while not the same, were inherently connected to the suffering of the lands they worked. Introduction by Sharon Olds.