Book picks similar to
Crosslight for Youngbird by Asiya Wadud


poetry
readsoullit
mfa-preparation-list
black

Gardening in the Dark


Laura Kasischke - 2004
    Her poems take us to the flip side of human consciousness, where anything can happen at any time. Tinged with surrealism, her work makes visionary leaps from the quotidian to sudden, surprising epiphanies.

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.

It Is Daylight


Arda Collins - 2009
    Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

Collected Poems


Lynda Hull - 2006
    . .--from "The Window"Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections--long unavailable--with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume--chosen by series editor Mark Doty--is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

In My Head


J.M. Storm - 2017
    Who feel everything and everything has feeling."In My Head, the debut release of one of Instagram's most popular poets whose writing has been liked by millions, dives below the surface of love, loss, and life.J.M. Storm has crafted a haunting yet hopeful poetry collection that is meant to be felt as much as it is read.

Dismantling the Hills


Michael McGriff - 2008
    In a world of machinists, loggers, mill workers, and hairdressers, the poems collected here bear witness to a landscape, an industry, and a people teetering on the edge of ruin. From tightly constructed narratives to expansive and surreal meditations, the various styles in this book not only reflect the poet's range, but his willingness to delve into his obsessions from countless angles Full of despair yet never self-loathing, full of praise yet never nostalgic, Dismantling the Hills is both ode and elegy. McGriff's vision of blue-collar life is one of complication and contradiction, and the poems he makes are authentic, unwavering, and unapologetically American.

The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems


David K. Kirby - 2007
    were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry. Long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything--the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing."

Boss Cupid: Poems


Thom Gunn - 2000
    As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

Selected Poems


Richard Hugo - 1979
    The result easily demonstrated, then as now, the massive achievement of the writer whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living."

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast


Hannah Gamble - 2012
    They are truly delightful and robustly original—a poetic joy."—Tony HoaglandSelected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, these poems engage the structures of family and intimacy, exposing the viscera of the everyday, all its frailties and familiarity rendered absurd and remade through language.Outside there's a world where every love-scenebegins with a man in a doorway;he walks over to the woman and says "Open your mouth."Hannah Gamble has received fellowships from Rice University, The University of Houston, and The Edward F. Albee Foundation. She teaches literature and writing at Prairie State College and is the poet-in-residence at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

Seven Notebooks: Poems


Campbell McGrath - 2008
    Written in forms that range from haiku to prose, and in a voice that veers from incanta­tory to deadpan, these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas. Taken collectively, Seven Notebooks composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator, from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle, this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry, a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath, one of the most honored, accessible, and humanistically engaged writers of our time.

A Hunger


Lucie Brock-Broido - 1988
    . . A violently skewed portrait of the female poet and her Muse, a hyped-up version of Stevens and his interior paramour, locked in a soliloquy 'in which being there together is enough' . . . Something in Brock-Broido likes stealth, toxicity, wildness, neon--'perfect mean lines' . . . The poems lead off the page." --Helen Vendler, The New Yorker"These poems are out of Stevens in the abundance, glitter, and seductiveness of their language, out of Browning in the authority of their inhabiting, and out of Plath in the ferocity and passion of their holding on--to feeling, to life, and to us . . . An astonishing first book." --Cynthia Macdonald"Brock-Broido's brilliant nervosity and taste for the fantastic impel her to explore the obscure corners of the psyche and the fringes of ordinary human experience . . . The poems in A Hunger are original, strange, often unsettling, and mostly beautiful." --Stanley Kunitz

In the Pines


Alice Notley - 2007
    Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

Sight Map


Brian Teare - 2009
    Teare provides us with poems that insist on the simultaneous physical embodiment of tactile pleasure—that which is found in the textures of thought and language—as well as the action of syntax. Partly informed by an ecological imagination that leads him back to Emerson and Thoreau, Teare's method and fragmented style are nevertheless up to the moment. Remarkable in its range, Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.

Natural History


Dan Chiasson - 2005
    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.