The Blazing World


Siri Hustvedt - 2014
    Even after she steps forward to reveal herself as the force behind three solo shows, there are those who doubt she is responsible for the last exhibition, initially credited to the acclaimed artist Rune. No one doubts the two artists were involved with each other. According to Burden's journals, she and Rune found themselves locked in a charged and dangerous psychological game that ended with the man's bizarre death. From one of the most ambitious and internationally celebrated writers of her generation, Hustvedt's The Blazing World is a polyphonic tour de force. It is also an intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle that addresses the shaping influences of prejudice, money, fame, and desire on what we see in one another. Emotionally intense, intellectually rigorous, ironic, and playful, this is a book you won't be able to put down.

The Pillow Book


Sei Shōnagon
    Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthralls with its lively gossip, witty observations, and subtle impressions. Lady Shonagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose novel, "The Tale of Genji," fictionalized the elite world Lady Shonagon so eloquently relates. Featuring reflections on royal and religious ceremonies, nature, conversation, poetry, and many other subjects, "The Pillow Book" is an intimate look at the experiences and outlook of the Heian upper class, further enriched by Ivan Morris's extensive notes and critical contextualization.

Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone


Bo Burnham - 2013
    100 million people viewed those videos, turning Bo into an online sensation with a huge and dedicated following. Bo taped his first of two Comedy Central specials four days after his 18th birthday, making him the youngest to do so in the channel's history. Now Bo is a rising star in the comedy world, revered for his utterly original and intelligent voice. And, he can SIIIIIIIIING!In EGGHEAD, Bo brings his brand of brainy, emotional comedy to the page in the form of off-kilter poems, thoughts, and more. Teaming up with his longtime friend, artist, and illustrator Chance Bone, Bo takes on everything from death to farts in this weird book that will make you think, laugh and think, "why did I just laugh?"

E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 (Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition)


E.E. Cummings - 1991
    E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."

Swimming Lessons: Poems


Lili Reinhart - 2020
     Swimming Lessons explores the euphoric beginnings of young love, battling anxiety and depression in the face of fame, and the inevitable heartbreak that stems from passion. Relatable yet deeply intimate, provocative yet comforting, bite-sized yet profound, Lili's poems reflect her trademark honesty and unique perspective. Accompanied by striking and evocative illustrations, Swimming Lessons reveals the depths of female experience, and is the work of a storyteller who is coming into her own.

Schizophrene


Bhanu Kapil - 2011
    Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.

Broetry Poetry for Dudes


Brian McGackin - 2011
    Who can speak for Everyman? Who will articulate his love for Xbox 360, for Mama Celeste's frozen pizza, for the cinematic oeuvre of Bruce Willis? Enter Broetry--a stunning debut from a dazzling new literary voice. "Broet Laureate" Brian McGackin goes where no poet has gone before--to Star Wars conventions, to frat parties, to video game tournaments, and beyond. With poems like "Ode to That Girl I Dated for, Like, a Month Sophomore Year" and "My Friends Who Don't Have Student Loans," we follow the Bro from his high school graduation and college experience through a "quarter-life crisis" and beyond.

Diving Into the Wreck


Adrienne Rich - 1973
    / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail." These provocative poems move with the power of Rich's distinctive voice.

Margaret the First


Danielle Dutton - 2016
    The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when “being a writer” was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen’s attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was “Mad Madge,” an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London—a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution—and the last for another two hundred years.Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past, rather than “historical fiction.” Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new narrative approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

Goblin Market and Other Poems


Christina Rossetti - 1862
    Like Emily Dickinson, she lived in self-imposed isolation, writing of God and lost love with a sensuality and passion that seemed to emanate from the soul.This edition of 53 works combines a number of her best-known sonnets, ballads, and shorter lyrics with her long masterpiece, the narrative fable Goblin Market. A haunting fairy tale in verse, Goblin Market was once labeled a children's poem, yet its intricate symbolism and themes of temptation, sin, and redemption mark it for an adult audience. Among other works included in this choice collection are "The Convent Threshold," "Up-hill," "Cousin Kate," "Winter: My Secret," "Maude Clare," "No, Thank You, John," and "After Death."

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish


Katya Apekina - 2018
    Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother’s dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success.The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart—Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession.

Electric Arches


Eve L. Ewing - 2017
    Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances, and identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons.Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant: a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.

I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make Us Beautiful Together


Mira González - 2013
    It is messed up and feels honest, open, like lying naked on the floor with your arms chopped off. --Blake Butler, author of There Is No YearI like Mira Gonzalez's 1st poetry collection. It was poignant, intellectually stimulating, funny, interesting to me. The carefulness and precision and control with which Mira describes intense, uncommon, painful, mysterious experiences in her life made me feel very close to another human being (Mira, I think) in a way that is rare for me and that caused me to feel calmer and less desperate/despairing about my life and, I think, to some degree, more inclined to consider and be affected by the perspectives/lives of other people. The words I keep thinking when I think of Mira's book are wise and compassionate. --Tao Lin, author of Shoplifting From American ApparelMira Gonzalez is doing her thing. I f*ck with these poems. I felt bad for her when she talked about how that dude said I'm gonna come on your stomach like 15-20 times and then didn't. --Victor 'Kool A.D.' Vazquez

And Her Soul Out Of Nothing


Olena Kalytiak Davis - 1997
    Both contemporary and other-worldly, Davis's lyrical poetry is a fearless expression of the spirit which defines the very essence of our beings.

shades of lovers


Catarine Hancock - 2019
    it is not only something to enjoy, but something to learn from. here are the things i did right, and the many things i did wrong. i give them to you, so that when love comes knocking, you will have a sense of what to do when you open the door.