Book picks similar to
Common Place by Rob Halpern


poetry
poetry-please
poetry-poetics
queer-lit

If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?


Matthea Harvey - 2014
    On days when there’s no sprinkler to comb through her curls, no rain pouring in glorious torrents from the gutters, no dew in the grass for her to nuzzle with her nose, not even a mud puddle in the kiddie pool, she wonders how much longer she can bear this life. The front yard thud of the newspaper every morning. Singing songs to the unresponsive push mower in the garage. Wriggling under fence after fence to reach the house four down which has an aquarium in the back window. She wants to get lost in that sad glowing square of blue. Don’t you?            —from “The Backyard Mermaid”Prose poems introduce deeply untraditional mermaids alongside mer-tool silhouettes. A text by Ray Bradbury is erased into a melancholy meeting with a Martian. The Michelin Man is possessed by William Shakespeare. Antonio Meucci’s invention of the telephone is chronicled next to embroidered images of his real and imagined patents. If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? combines Matthea Harvey’s award-winning poetry with her fascinating visual artwork into a true hybrid book, an amazing and beautiful work by one of our most ingenious creative artists.

The Book of Jon


Eleni Sikelianos - 2004
    Jon, a multitalented, eccentric visionary, emerges as a brilliant, charming, irresponsible, frustrating, and ultimately tragic hero.This is a saga of the rise and fall of family lines—a tale marked by bohemia, Greek poets, intellectuals, drugs and homelessness. It is the story of eccentrics and survivors, the strength of personal vision and the nature of addiction, and what it does to families. An exquisitely rendered exploration of the harrowing and motivating forces of family, history, and individual choices.Eleni Sikelianos’ previous books include Earliest Worlds and the National Poetry Series winner The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls. She lives in Boulder, CO.

Yellowrocket: Poems


Todd Boss - 2008
    His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

The Verging Cities


Natalie Scenters-Zapico - 2015
    Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas. The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers’ spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that “ooze only silt.” This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.

The To Sound


Eric Baus - 2004
    Cassiopeia. A sister. A Marco Polo. A somnambulist. A documentary on the voyages of Columbus. A cartographer. Star charts. Young intellectuals in black robes. Jean-Michel Basquiat. More birds and still more birds. A mathematician. All these things appear in The To Sound’s beautifully warped cosmology. This is a stunning book that builds its own world, a world of ambiguous relations and loaded words; a lyrical world that explores the unstated connections between things. . . ."

Petit à Petit


Ambica Uppal - 2020
    It assures you that tomorrow will be a better day and encourages you to realise your potential and achieve your aspirations. Petit à Petit is centred on themes like self-love, self-confidence and taking life into your own hands.No matter how far-away and impossible your dreams seem, don't be afraid to reach for them.

I Found You


Praneeth Chandra - 2021
    Divided into seven chapters, from love to the family. It's all about falling in love madly, getting hurt deeply, bearing all the pain in darkness. Still finding hope and waiting for a miracle to heal the broken heart, waiting for the love, makes me feel like home. It is all about love and trusting the universe

Knots


Deblina Bhattacharya - 2019
     Knots is a collection of poetry and prose about love and heartbreak, tragedy and grief, survival and loss. It's a journey through the numerous knots that we tie in life, and the ones we tangle and untangle with. It explores the realities of mental illness & suicide, social taboos & violence against women, pain & darkness, self love & healing in all its naked glory. The rhythm of Knots resonates directly with the poet's heart, conveying to the readers that there is a way to untangle every knot in life, but sometimes, some of these knots are what we are made of. Foreword by Dr. Santosh Bakaya

Advantages of Being Evergreen


Oliver Baez Bendorf - 2019
    Poetry. Latinx. From the author of award-winning debut collection The Spectral Wilderness, this is Oliver Baez Bendorf's second book, Advantages of Being Evergreen, winner of the Open Book Poetry Competition from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. "Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time. With rigorous compassion and great formal dexterity Bendorf imagines a new world for all of our animal selves in which we are truly seen and truly safe. At the same time these are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of this world. I don’t know when I’ve read a book that is so gentle and ferocious at the same time. Over and over again people come together to make their individual and communal body whole, knowing all the while that so much of the world seeks to wreck even the simplest kinds of safety. Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate. And I’m so happy to be held by them in the times that keep coming on this endless road to safety. This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom." - Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Soft Targets


Deborah Landau - 2019
    In this ambitious lyric sequence, the speaker’s fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which all inhabitants are “soft targets.” Her melancholic examinations recall life’s uncanny ability to transform ordinary places―subways, cafes, street corners―into sites of intense significance that weigh heavily on the modern mind.“O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon/enough what’s the rush,” Landau writes, contemplating a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks, and climate change. Still there are the ordinary and abundant pleasures of day-to-day living, though the tender exchanges of friendship and love play out against a backdrop of 21st century threats with historical echoes, as neo-Nazis marching in the United States recall her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany.

Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers


George Oppen - 2007
    Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's "Daybooks," composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958. iSelected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.

Horse Latitudes


Paul Muldoon - 2006
    From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. "Horse Latitudes "is a triumphant new collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.

A Little White Shadow


Mary Ruefle - 2006
    What remains visible is delicate poetry: artfully rendered, haunted by its former self, yet completely new. A high-quality replica of the original aged, delicate book in which Ruefle “erased” the text, this book will appeal to fans of poetry as well as visual art.Mary Ruefle is the author of Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism (Wave Books, 2012), and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and include the publication of A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

Bone Map: Poems


Sara Eliza Johnson - 2014
    “All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun.” With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echo—a regenerative force—that comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will establish the already decorated young author as an important and vital new voice in American poetry.

The Last Cigarette on Earth


Benjamin Alire Sáenz - 2017
    He loved heroin, ecstasy, the sad musicof the bars. He said he loved you too. You arethinking of the night you met him. Late October night, the breeze as soft as his black eyes. He wasso hungry for trouble. You were so hungryfor anything that resembled love. Your fingertracing the tattoos on his chest, you dreamedof living in the prison of his arms. But you refusedto live in the prison of his deadly nights. Youcan’t survive without the morninglight. You repeat this again and again:He’s a man, not an illness. Tattoos and prison.Novels and poems. A bird can love a fish but they can’tlive in your apartment. He called again last nightand left a message that was meant to wound.He said: I want to know what you meant whenyou said I love you. You said: I love you. I meant I love you.He said: I want to know what you meant whenyou said goodbye. You said: Goodbye. I meant goodbye.You whispered his name in the dark.Benjamin Alire Sáenz in 2013 won the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Lambda Award for his book Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. His young adult novel Dante and Aristotle in Paradise was a 2013 Printz Honoree. He lives in El Paso, Texas.