Book picks similar to
Mapmaking: poems by Megan Harlan


poetry
issue-17-nonfiction
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contemporary-poetry

Fireflies at 3 am


Danni Thomas - 2020
    It’s a book with the flow of poetry but the ebb of short stories – rightfully called “Shoetry”. This creation takes you to the roots of humanity - stripping back the veneers of life, society and interaction to see people and their ways in an entirely new light.

the moon will shine for us too


Jennae Cecelia - 2021
    

Shapeshift


Sherwin Bitsui - 2003
    . . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing."Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

Maggot: Poems


Paul Muldoon - 2010
    If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."

Taken By The Thief


Flora Ferrari - 2020
    I’ve tried hard to go straight, and this time I thought I’d got it, thought things would work out for a change. I didn’t reckon on Tony Rossi and his gang…. Why did I have to get myself involved with such low-life again? And then I saw her, and my life would never be the same again. I knew I wanted her there and then, even though I knew I was committing a crime against her. That’s the moment I knew it all had to change, that I had to change if I was ever going to deserve a woman like Janine. Her dad, on the other hand, has different plans for his daughter’s future, plans that don’t involve me. Times running out to save her, but I have no job, no money… no hope. Even if I did, what happens when the past catches up to me and she finds out all about me? It’s bound to happen… I can’t build a relationship on a web of lies. Can she ever love a man like me? Janine I’m scared, scared as hell of a future that dad has already planned for me, but what can I do? When I meet Ed, I wish things could be different, he’s everything I want in a man… even if he is older than me. He’s strong and handsome, and someone to protect me from men like Tony Rossi… but it all seems so hopeless. I hate Tony Rossi with a passion, I hate any form of violence, and could never love a man like him… a bully and a small-time gangster. I felt a strong attachment to Ed from our first meeting… maybe it’s love at first sight, I don’t know… but I know nothing about him. With my dad forever watching me, how will I ever meet up with Ed to find out? They say that love will find a way, but I don’t see how. Can Ed save me? Is he the one? *Taken By The Thief is a short, standalone romance with an HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

The Beneath Duet - Hugo's Story (The Collectables Book 2)


Shandi Boyes - 2020
     Book One: Beneath the Secrets. What happens when the only girl you’ve ever lusted comes crashing back into the picture? Nothing. Don’t construe my lack of interest the wrong way. The last time I saw Ava, she was no doubt attractive. Although she’s always been a little nerdy, and her head never left the inside of a book during her entire schooling experience, she could garner the attention of any hot-blooded male she feigned an interest in – myself included. Just one flash of her killer smile and I wanted to drop to my knees and kiss her f*cking feet. But a lot has changed since Ava left town six years ago with a flood of tears streaming down her face. Circumstances change. People change. I’ve changed. I’m no longer a teenage boy who can’t control his cock around a beautiful girl. I am a grown man. A man that has done two tours in Afghanistan. A man that has no troubles controlling his cock. A man that can still remember the sweet taste of her lips. What the f*ck? I'm screwed. From the Author that brought you the 'Enigma' series comes the next installment. An emotional story about being reacquainted with your high school crush. Does time really alter your interests? Or is using your age just an excuse to downplay real love? Let's find out - it's time to dive beneath the sheets Book Two: Beneath the Sheets. One Small Decision: One Epic Result. Five years ago, I made a mistake. If I’d known my hasty decision was going to have the consequences it did, I would have evaluated it with more diligence. I would have taken the time to properly assess the repercussions of my actions. But when my sister and unborn nephew were killed in an horrific accident, any chances of my grief-riddled brain forming a rational decision was lost. I was hurting too much. Losing Jorgie and Malcolm gutted me. Losing Ava the same week, utterly destroyed me. For the past five years, I’ve been a ghost, missing, presumed dead, hidden from the people who are seeking my demise. I knew eventually my past would catch up with me. I just never fathomed once it did, it would unravel even more secrets than the ones I've been hiding. But I'm tired of running and fighting fate. It's time to dive beneath the sheets, where all the best-kept secrets are exposed. Author Warning: This book is for people over the age of eighteen. It has swear words, sexual activities, and adult situations.

Coma Therapy


Eric Victorino - 2007
    Important, so inspiring... Please read this book" -Sonny Moore, Recording Artist "There are very few ways to get inside the mind of a lyricist. One way is through reading their diaries, the other through sleeping with them. Eric's book is the more entertaining of the options. It's a raw look inside the heart and mind of a rock 'n' roll spiritualist whose struggles with love (Chaplin) and versus the world (Keaton) are laid out bare like an exhibitionist on a double-dare." -Mike Shea, Founder, AP Magazine "Coma Therapy" is the sound of a powerful new voice in contemporary American literature. Victorino's brand of punchy prose often draws comparisons to the likes of Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson. This debut collection of poems and short stories draws a dangerously thin line between the heartwarming and the horrifying... Eric Victorino then mischievously walks that line all the way to the last page. Defiant, triumphant, hopeful and wise.

Pandemonium


Armando Iannucci - 2021
    It tells the story of how Orbis Rex, Young Matt and his Circle of Friends, Queen Dido and the blind Dom'nic did battle with 'a wet and withered bat' from Wuhan.

The Scarlet Ibis: Poems


Susan Hahn - 2007
    The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.

The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems


Frank Stanford - 1991
    Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction, “Stanford was the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five.”The Light the Dead See collects the best work from those nine volumes and six previously unpublished poems. In the earlier poems, Stanford creates a world where he could keep childhood alive, deny time and mutability, and place a version of himself at the center of great myth and drama.Later, the denial of time and mutability gives way to an obsessive and familiar confrontation with death. Although Stanford paid an enormous price for his growing familiarity with Death as a presence, the direct address to that presence is a source of much of the striking originality and stunning power in the poetry.

overheard at waitrose: poetry of the public


Idiocratea - 2018
    104 pages of gossiping, loving and pestering of the British upper class, accompanied by illustrations, will definitely not disappoint.

The Dream of Reason


Jenny George - 2018
    Responding to the post-industrial landscape of rural life, Jenny George braids together regional plains poetry and the darkly fantastic imagery of medieval painting. Alluding to Goya’s grotesque bestiary, The Dream of Reason is similarly preoccupied with creatures of all kinds: tiny husks of insects, bats crawling across porches like goblins, purring moths, and pigs, in many forms. George names these creatures and documents the traumas of farm life, the role of the handlers involved, and the empathy and horror that comes with it. The collection lingers, transfixed by its strange imaginings, searching for sense in the dark.

Trouble in Mind: Poems


Lucie Brock-Broido - 2004
    There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,” Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experience–a quest that is as capricious as it is uncompromising. In the process, she reveals, unsparingly, things as they are. In “Pamphlet on Ravening” she recalls, “I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side.” The book is laced with sequences: haunted, odd self-portraits; a succession of poems provoked by discarded titles by Wallace Stevens; an intermittent series of fractured and beguiling lyrics that she variously refers to as fragments, leaflets, and apologues.Trouble in Mind is a book that astonishes us afresh at the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock-Broido is not afraid to follow where it may lead her: “That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing / (As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit / The quiet velvet cult of it, / Yet trouble came.” Even trouble, in Brock-Broido’s idiom, becomes something resplendent.From the Hardcover edition.

Poems


J.H. Prynne - 1982
    Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. This expanded edition includes four later collections only previously available in limited editions.

Go Giants: Poems


Nick Laird - 2012
    Laird boldly engages with topics ranging from fatherhood and marriage to mass destruction and the cosmos. Go Giants is a brash, brave, and wildly imaginative new collection.From Go Giants:Go in peace to love and serve the.Go and get help. Go directly to jail.Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.Go into detail. Go for the throat.