Book picks similar to
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My American Kundiman
Patrick Rosal - 2006
Here, though, the poet's electric narratives and portraits extend beyond the working class streets of urban New Jersey. Modeling poems on the kundiman, a song of unrequited love sung by Filipinos for their country in times of oppression, he professes his conflicted feelings for America, while celebrating and lamenting his various heritageswhether by chatting up St. Patrick, riffing on race relations, or channeling Lapu Lapu in a rejoinder to Magellan. Passionate, provocative, and irrepressible throughout, My American Kundiman further establishes Rosal as a poet to be reckoned with.
The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems
Adélia Prado - 1990
Incorporating poems published over the past fifteen years, The Alphabet in the Park is a book of passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. These are poems about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life. Prado also writes about ordinary matters; she insists that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. To Prado these are not contradictory: "It's the soul that's erotic," she writes.As Ellen Watson says in her introduction, "Adelia Prados poetry is a poetry of abundance. These poems overflow with the humble, grand, various stuff of daily life - necklaces, bicycles, fish; saints and prostitutes and presidents; innumerable chickens and musical instruments...And, seemingly at every turn, there is food." But also, an abundance of dark things, cancer, death, greed. These are poems of appetite, all kinds.
Simulacra
Airea D. Matthews - 2017
Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.
Awakening
K.M. Fortune - 2017
A woman awakens from the past. She is the key to restoring humanity, except not everyone believes humans are worth saving. Raven Winter lives a normal everyday life. Until one day, while on vacation, she is involved in an accident which freezes her in time. A century later, her body is found by a scientist on an expedition searching for the key to humanity’s survival. Hoping Raven’s body was frozen before the plague and the nuclear wars which followed it, he revives her. Now Raven, confused and suffering amnesia, is in a world completely alien to her own. All she knows is nothing is as it seems in the underground colony where she is a prisoner. Only one thing is clear. The residents have revived her for a single reason – to take her possibly fertile eggs.Matthew, a lead scientist in the colony, is shocked when his specimen awakens. Thinking she would remain in a coma forever, he finds himself enthralled by the beauty and intelligence of the woman from the ice. Before long he is faced with a horrible decision – to harvest her or give up all he has ever known to set her free.Awakening is the beginning of an epic post-apocalyptic story written in the serial novel format. If you like a quick read filled with intrigue and adventure, mixed with conflict and heroism, then you will love KM Fortune’s new page-turning book. Buy a copy now to explore the world of “The Forever Winter Chronicles” today and begin an unforgettable journey with book one Awakening.
Sanctificum
Chris Abani - 2010
With language of devastating beauty and complexity, he investigates conflicted personal history and political tragedy, and how the human body fares against both. A book-length sequence of linked poems, Sanctificum is Abani’s most intimate and ambitious book to date, a tour de force bringing together religious ritual, the Igbo language of his Nigerian homeland, and reggae rhythms in a complex, liturgical love song.
Mysteries of Small Houses
Alice Notley - 1998
In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present. In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed—child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow—are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.
Portrait of My Body as a Crime I'm Still Committing
Topaz Winters - 2019
Portrait is interested in the immediacy of language; in girlhood as wolfhood; in the cartography of illness; in fractures through the dark; in bodies, human & water alike. Luminous, tender, & unflinching, Portrait cuts straight to the marrow. To all those whose bodies have been more bruise than human—who feel so loudly the sky turns black in fear—this book is for you.Finalist, 2018 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book PrizeFinalist, 2018 Broken River Prize
Half-Hazard: Poems
Kristen Tracy - 2018
As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, "Dangers here. Perils there. It'll go how it goes." The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy's knack for noticing what's so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.
A Whiff of Pine, a Hint of Skunk: A Forest of Poems
Deborah Ruddell - 2009
Take a lighthearted romp through four seasons in the forest with these whimsical poems. Marvel at the overachieving beaver, applaud the race-winning snail and its perfect trail of slime, or head off to be pampered at a squirrel spa. Warning: Deborah Ruddell's quirky cast of animal characters and Joan Rankin's deliciously daffy pictures will cause giggles. The woods have never been so much fun!
Hard Candy Christmas
Hildred Billings - 2021
One shopkeeper.And the one wish that brings them together.Candy shop provisioner Emma has more than enough on her plate: her small-town business is struggling, the weather is cold and rainy, and her young daughter is a precocious handful.Yet when daughter Dani asks Santa for the impossible, Emma has another problem on her hands.Because Dani wants a stepmom. More specifically, she wants her mom Emma to get married!Enter city girl Tamryn, who is on assignment on behalf of her law firm. From the moment Emma sees her in a coffee shop, she’s infatuated – and from the moment Dani sees her mom’s eyes wander?Nothing will stop one little girl from bringing Emma and Tamryn together!The cozy tourist town of Cannon Beach is about to vibrate from the cosmic electricity of fate. Good thing Christmas is the season of everything sweet… with just a hint of spice.
River Hymns
Tyree Daye - 2017
River Hymns is the lyrical journey of a young black man’s spiritual reckoning with his family history.
Murder on Music Row
Stuart Dill - 2011
Meanwhile, Ripley’s label, Galaxy Records, is preparing a secret merger agreement that would create the largest record conglomerate in the world. Trouble arises when rumors spread that Ripley and Simon are withholding Ripley’s new album in hopes of renegotiating his contract.When Simon and Judd are shot on the famed Grand Ole Opry stage during the filming of Ripley’s new music video, no one is more upset than Ripley—especially as everyone assumes the shots were meant for him. While Simon’s life hangs in the balance, Judd seeks help from Megan Olsen, Simon’s right hand and Ripley’s day-to-day manager. The two set off on a high-powered chase to disclose the real motive behind the shootings and spare Ripley from a second murder attempt.Not unlike John Grisham’s legal thrillers and Michael Crichton’s science-based thrillers, Stuart Dill’s “music industry thriller” can now be added to the literary lexicon. Murder on Music Row leads readers through a maze of twists and turns that connect Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, and London in a behind-the-scenes look at an industry where there are no limits in the pursuit of money, power, and fame.
Burn Lake
Carrie Fountain - 2010
Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with the peculiar journey of Don Juan de Oñate, who was dispatched from Mexico City in the late sixteenth- century by Spanish royalty to settle the so-called New Mexico Province, of which little was known. A letter that was sent to Oñate by the Viceroy of New Spain, asking that should he come upon the North Sea in New Mexico, he should give a detailed report of "the configuration of the coast and the capacity of each harbor" becomes the inspiration for many of the poems in this artfully composed debut.
American Sublime: Poems
Elizabeth Alexander - 2005
. .-from "Notes From"In her fourth remarkable collection, Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the slave rebellion on the Amistad and to the artists' canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander's most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America's most lively and gifted writers."Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together." --Chicago Tribune