Book picks similar to
Ambrosia and Fire by Helen Armstrong
poetry
independants
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The Most of It
Mary Ruefle - 2008
. . brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.”—Charles SimicFans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.From “The Dart and the Drill”:I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.
Resurrection Update: Collected Poems, 1975-1997
James Galvin - 1997
The complete works of an extraordinary poet who consistently refines the notion of what constitutes an American sound.
I Hate and I Love
Catullus
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Catullus (c.84-54 BCE).Catullus's The Poems is available in Penguin Classics.
Kissed by a Fat Waitress
Dan Fante - 2008
In the not-so-gentle hands of Dan Fante, this book of new poetry is more akin to surgery or the body shop than to the techniques of music and painting. Fante excises whole slices of life and lays them bare for us in inspect. Pain and self-mocking humor are the writer's tools here. He pries open and exposes his heart with the kindness of a hammer or crowbar. Indeed, what could be more ego-sizing than to have all pretense flattened, laying bare the raw self underneath? "Dan Fante allows us a glimpse of the Southern California demimonde that surely escaped his father's attention"--Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Questions to Our Answers
Timothy Joshua - 2017
It contains three main chapters, centred around answers to three main questions one would ask during different stages of a relationship. The questions are:What are we?Where are we going?How are we getting there?The poems, juxtaposed together with short stories take readers on a deeply reflective journey within themselves as they contemplate the deepest thoughts, doubts and hopes they carry for their past and present relationships.
Many-Storied House
George Ella Lyon - 2013
She has since published many more books in multiple genres and for readers of all ages, but poetry remains at the heart of her work. Many-Storied House is her fifth collection. While teaching aspiring writers, Lyon asked her students to write a poem based on memories rooted in a house where they had lived. Working on the assignment herself, Lyon began a personal
The Glass Age
Cole Swensen - 2007
Starting there, this extended poem—part art criticism, part history—considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.
Some Values of Landscape and Weather
Peter Gizzi - 2003
His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."
A Little Book of Love and Companionship
Ruskin Bond
The Story of Our Lives: with The Monument and The Late Hour
Mark Strand - 1973
He was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990, and currently teaches at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicago.
The Flowering Woman: Becoming and Being
Q. Gibson - 2016
Gibson. The pages explore hurt, healing, love, forgiveness, self-discovery and the journey towards becoming a woman. Written in four chapters each piece encourages healing and the journeying of self.
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.
Venus and Adonis
William Shakespeare
The poem recounts Venus' attempts to woo Adonis, their passionate coupling, and Adonis' rejection of the goddess, to which she responds with jealousy, with tragic results.
The Lost Arabs
Omar Sakr - 2019
Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a fierce, urgent collection from a distinct new voice.