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Hemming the Water
Yona Harvey - 2013
Here the spiritual and the secular comingle in a "Fierce fragmentation, lonely tune." Harvey inhabits, challenges, and explores the many facets of the female self--as daughter, mother, sister, wife, and artist. Every page is rich with Harvey's rapturous music.
Too Black Too Strong
Benjamin Zephaniah - 2001
This work includes poems written, while the author was working with Michael Mansfield QC on the Stephen Lawrence case and other high profile political trails. It is hard hitting and blackly funny.
Mosquito
Alex Lemon - 2006
Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him to see life in a wholly new way. Mosquito is a resilient meditation that is as much Zen as it is explosive, as clinical as it is philosophical and lyrical.
Columbarium
Susan Stewart - 2003
Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics. Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book's center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible.Stewart's Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.
Violet Energy Ingots
Hoa Nguyen - 2016
Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen’s writing as “a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways.” As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment.A Brief History of WarAnd what if Jupiteris your faitha balloonbut I call youby the impropernames I'm stainedby the world hereTo be brave and endurethe losing To be braveand be the losingLuck BrutalBorn in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home for fourteen years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long as Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.
A Sleepwalk on the Severn
Alice Oswald - 2009
This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead, all based on real people from the Severn catchment, talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. The poem, which was written for the 2009 festival of the Severn, aims to record what happens when the moon moves over us – its effect on water and its effect on voices.’ Alice Oswald A Sleepwalk on the Severn is a poem for several voices, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead - all based on real people from the Severn catchment - talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. Commissioned for the 2009 festival of the Severn, Alice Oswald's breathtakingly original new work aims to record what happens when the moon moves over the sublunary world: its effect on water and its effect on language.
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.
Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
Joanna Klink - 2015
Of her most recent book, Raptus, Carolyn Forché has written that she is “a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement.” The poems in Klink’s new collection offer a closely keyed meditation on being alone—on a self fighting its way out of isolation, toward connection with other people and a vanishing world.
Temper
Beth Bachmann - 2009
The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.
Medicine
Amy Gerstler - 2000
In her new collection, Medicine, she deploys a variety of dramatic voices, spoken by such disparate characters as Cinderella's wicked sisters, the wife of a nineteenth-century naturalist, a homicide detective, and a woman who is happily married to a bear. Their elusive collectivity suggests, but never quite defines, the floating authorial presence that haunts them. Gerstler's abiding interests--in love and mourning, in science and pseudo-science, in the idea of an afterlife--are strongly evident in these new poems, which are full of strong emotion, language play, surprising twists, and a wicked sense of black humor.
Viral Poems
Lily Myers - 2013
This anthology of poems and essays is a forceful argument for the continuing cultural relevance of poetry.
The War Works Hard
Dunya Mikhail - 2005
Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. "Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur'anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail's poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.
The Little Girl in the Window: A Psychological Thriller
C.G. TwilesC.G. Twiles - 2021
There, she starts a relationship with the last man she should—and who has no idea Romy is behind the drowning of his high school girlfriend and their unborn child.
Bad lady. Horrible woman!
When a pale little blonde girl with eerily blue eyes starts hurling insults through Romy’s window before vanishing into the woods, Romy fears her past has returned with a vengeance.She’s never told anyone about the worst mistake of her life. So how does the little girl seem to know about it? Who is she?And how to stop her before she reveals Romy’s darkest secret?A new twisty, suspenseful psychological thriller from C.G. Twiles, author of the top 800 Amazon Kindle bestseller The Neighbors in Apartment 3D, as well as The Last Star Standing, and Brooklyn Gothic.For fans of Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, Shari Lapena.
The Government Lake: Last Poems
James Tate - 2019
A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him and eventually rues his captor’s death. A baby is born transparent.James Tate’s work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, “fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent,” (New York Times) has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection before his death in 2015, Tate’s dark yet whimsical humor, his emotional acuity, and his keen ear for the absurd are on full display in prose poems that finely constructed and lyrical, surrealistic and provocative.With The Government Lake, James Tate reminds us why he is one of the great poets of our age and one of the true masters of the form.
The Pocketknife Bible: The Poems and Art of Anis Mojgani
Anis Mojgani - 2015
For the first time, Mojgani has given us a collection which combines his poems with his illustrations, at times using them to infuse and inform one another. The poems and pictures of The Pocketknife Bible climb through the child-like heart of its author to bring stories from the well that are enhanced by the imagery. This book is a celebration of childhood and family, or rather the mythology of what that entails, exploring the intersection of how we may have once seen the world and how we remember how we saw it. This is an almost-children s book for those who might no longer be young, but could use a map to find their way back to that world."