Breakup Poems: Vol 1


J.R. Rogue - 2018
    Rogue returns with her newest collection of poetry, Breakup Poems. In six sections – five devoted to the stages of grief and a final one for her dedicated group of online fans – the author examines the various emotions women go through as they mourn the loss of lovers, ranging from almost-relationships to marriage.

Thrown in the Throat


Benjamin Garcia - 2020
    In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone


Eduardo Galeano - 2008
    Isabelle Allende said his works “invade the reader’s mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing and power of his idealism.”Mirrors, Galeano’s most ambitious project since Memory of Fire, is an unofficial history of the world seen through history’s unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano notes: “Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind??”Recalling the lives of artists, writers, gods, and visionaries, from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York, of the black slaves who built the White House and the women erased by men’s fears, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes, Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.

Call Me Cassandra


Marcial Gala - 2022
    His older brother is violent; his philandering father doesn’t understand him; his intelligence and sensitivity do not endear him to the other children at school. He loves to read, especially Greek myths, but in Cuba in the 1970s, novels and gods can be dangerous. Despite the signs that warn Rauli to repress and fear what he is, he knows three things to be true: First, that he was born in the wrong body. Second, that he will die, aged eighteen, as a soldier in the Cuban intervention in Angola. And third, that he is the reincarnation of the Trojan princess Cassandra.Moving between Rauli’s childhood and adolescence, between the Angolan battlefield, the Cuban city of Cienfuegos, and the shores of ancient Troy, Marcial Gala’s Call Me Cassandra tells of the search for identity amid the collapse of Cuba’s utopian dreams. Burdened with knowledge of tragedies yet to come, Rauli nonetheless strives to know himself. Lyrical and gritty, heartbreaking and luminous, Rauli’s is the story of the inexorable pull of destiny.

Smörgåsbord of Musings


Rathnakumar Raghunath - 2020
    People living happy lives, some not-so-happy lives, people in love, hopeless romantics, people dealing with heartbreak, the ones who believe life is better with a bit of whimsy, this book, hopefully, has a little something that resonates with everybody, lets the reader find the silver lining when needed and discover the joie de vivre even when times are hard.

The Concrete River: Poems


Luis J. Rodríguez - 1991
    They illuminate the gritty idiosyncrasies of immigrant life in urban barrios spanning Los Angeles to Chicago to Harlem. Rodríguez lends powerful voices to those struggling to keep the gas on, to find work, and to keep love.  Populated by a vibrant cast of characters, ranging from the drugged, to the eccentric, to the heartbroken, Rodríguez’s poems protest capitalism, violence, and exploitation while reveling in the potential of compassion.

The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory


Jorge Luis Borges - 1975
    The Book of Sand was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes...combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales as "The Congress", "Undr" and "The Mirror and the Mask". Also included are the handful of stories written right at the end of Borges' life - "August 25, 1983", "Blue Tigers", "The Rose of Paracelsus" and "Shakespeare's Memory".

Love and Ghost Letters


Chantel Acevedo - 2005
    But for the young socialite in pre-Castro Cuba, her life in Havana with her Sergeant of police father is idyllic. That is, until she falls in love with Lorenzo, a penniless man who takes her away to the impoverished town of El Cotorro, and her father disowns her. Josefina comes to wish her father dead but regrets it after the Sergeant is assumed killed in a student-led riot. One day, mysterious letters from the Sergeant begin to arrive, telling her the truth about his past. The ghostly letters become her link to love.Set in Miami and Cuba and covering nearly fifty years of that island's history, Love and Ghost Letters unfolds the lives of the members of the Navarro-Concepción families in the patterns and permutations of memory, and conjures a Cuban setting that evokes mysticism and magic.

Água Viva


Clarice Lispector - 1973
    In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World


Miguel León-Portilla
    Biographies of fifteen composers of Nahuatl verse and analyses of their work are followed by their extant poems in Nahuatl and in English.The poets - fourteen men and one woman - lived in the central highlands of Mexico and spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, Texcocans, Tlaxcalans, and several other chiefdoms. These authors of "flower and song" (a Nahuatl metaphor for poetry, art, and symbolism) lived during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Sources for the poems included indigenous "codices," books of songs" now unfortunately lost, and renditions of them preserved by the Nahuatl oral tradition, which survived the Spanish Conquest and were recorded by several young natives in two manuscripts.

With My Dog Eyes


Hilda Hilst - 1986
    Most difficult of all are his struggles to express what has happened to him, for a man more accustomed to numbers than words. He calls it "the clearcut unhoped-for," and it's a vision that will drive him to madness and, eventually, death. Written in a fragmented style that echoes the character's increasingly fragile hold on reality, With My Dog-Eyes is intensely vivid, summoning up Amos's childhood and young adulthood—when, like Richard Feynman, he used to bring his math books to brothels to study—and his life at the university, with its "meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, meglomanias." Hilst, whose father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has created a lacerating, and yet oddly hopeful, portrayal of a descent into hell--Amos never makes sense of the new way he sees things, but he does find an avenue of escape, retreating to his mother's house and, farther, towards the animal world. A deeply metaphysical, formally radical one-of-a-kind book from a great Brazilian writer.

Save Twilight: Selected Poems


Julio Cortázar - 1980
    Informed by his immersion in world literature, music, art, and history, and most of his own emotional geography, Cortázar’s poetry traces his paradoxical evolution from provincial Argentinean sophisticate to cosmopolitan Parisian Romantic, always maintaining the sense of astonishment of an artist surprised by life.

Martín Fierro


José Hernández - 1872
    An adaptation of the ballad singing culture of the gaucho minority that saw its way of life threatened by social and political changes of the 19th century.

Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972


Alejandra Pizarnik - 1968
    Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to "the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”

Scars Set In Stone


Shenaia Lucas - 2018
    Each chapter serves a different purpose. The chapters are For The Scarred, For the Loving, For the Oppressed, and For the Healing. This book teaches you to love yourself and others. It teaches the difficulty of dealing with past traumas and the journey towards healing, despite when it feels as if your scars are set in stone. It's better experienced than described, so sit down with some coffee and allow yourself to feel-- and heal.