How to Wash a Heart


Bhanu Kapil - 2020
    over the last two decades to create what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a 'Literature that is not made from literature.' During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers, whose books often defy categorisation, as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told.How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the U.K., depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.

Women Like Us


Jason Pomerance - 2016
    But after her marriage to Andrew fell apart, she ceded most of the raising of the baby to her mother-in-law, the very opinionated Edith Vale, a woman as formidable and steely as her stiff blond bouffant, the veritable helmet that helps her soldier through life. Now, after letting Henry drift away, Susan is determined to make things right, but just as mother and son seem to make headway after embarking on a cross-country road-trip, things take a darker turn. When the family reconvenes in California, everybody must fight to find humor and courage in the face of a situation that threatens to change them all forever.

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far


Adrienne Rich - 1981
    “We are in the presence here of a major American poet whose voice at mid-century in her own life is increasingly marked by moral passion.”—New York Times Book Review

Circle Mirror Transformation


Annie Baker - 2010
    I think this was a really, really great start.Five lost people come together at a community centre class to try and find some meaning in their lives. Counting to ten can be harder than you think. Over six tangled weeks their lives become knotted together in this tender and funny play.

Second Chances


Rachel Cullen - 2017
     Second Chances follows a single mother deserted by her adulterous ex-husband, a socialite who abandoned her family and fled to the Caribbean, a high-powered executive with a disconcerting fear of commitment and a questionable sense of judgment, and a privileged teenager plagued with a lecherous father and absentee mother while bewildered by an unforeseen opportunity with the most sought after boy in school. Although the women are each dealt cards they never expected, they find friendship, family and love in the least likely of places, and with those, they find hope.

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love


Keith S. Wilson - 2019
    There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

Ordinary Sun


Matthew Henriksen - 2011
    Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate."

Walks Away Woman


Ki Longfellow - 2013
    Overwhelmed, overwrought, and overweight, an everyday housewife walks into the Sonoran Desert to die.But there's more to a desert than sand or death. There's thorns, venom, claws, heat, thirst, other people—and unexpected adventure.As she says, "It's because your gums are receding and your hair is thinning and your neckline is sagging. It's because all you ever had was your youth, and you spent that so long ago now it's hard to remember what you bought with it. Mrs. Warner shuddered in her loosening skin, was almost running now. It's because you're scared. Lately you're so scared and so aimless and so useless you sleep half the day and panic half the night. In between, you watch TV to ward off the evil of watching yourself. So—if not death, then what?"When she tripped over a rock—and in tripping, plunged over the edge of a cliff—Mrs. Warner had forgotten the desert, the cacti, the heat, the hunger, the thirst. All that was left was an ever increasing panic and an ever deepening desperation. And then there was the shock of falling and the screaming inside: Here we go, here we go—but don't hurt, don't hurt. Oh god, please! Don't hurt!After that, there was nothing."Until she woke up at the bottom of an arroyo with a lot of surviving to do. And all she had was her purse. It wasn't much to face a desert with, but Mrs. Warner, born Molly Brock, was in a fight for her life, the life she didn't want until she was just about to lose it.What's an everyday housewife to do? In Molly's case, a lot. And every bit of it changing her from ordinary to extraordinary.

The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy


Mina Loy - 1923
    In America she has been posthumously launched as the electric-age Blake, she has been translated into French and Italian to great acclaim, and in the Times Literary Supplement Thom Gunn compared her to the great Augustan satirists. Her reclamation as an English poet is long overdue.Pound, Moore and Williams valued her work, while British critics openly scorned it. Not only were her futurist techniques unlike anything they had encountered before, but her subjects -- procreation, parturition, prostitution, suicide, addiction, retardation -- were considered shocking even by some modernists.She vanished from the literary scene just as dramatically as she had arrived on it, and for much of the century her bold experiments remained a well-kept secret. Carcanet first introduced her work to British readers in 1985 in Roger Conover's The Last Lunar Baedeker, a collected writings. This new edition updates our earlier volume and presents more reliable texts of the essential Loy poems. It includes more extensive notes and apparatus, and features a number of previously unknown works rescued from Dada archives and obscure avant-garde little magazines. All of Loy's canonical Futurist and feminist satires are included, as are the celebrated poems from her Paris and New York periods, the complete cycle of `Love Songs', and her famous portraits-in-verse which define the trajectory of her favoured company and geography -- from fellow modernists Joyce and Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s to fellow destitutes in New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s.

Water & Salt


Lena Khalaf Tuffaha - 2017
    These poems alternately rage, laugh, celebrate and grieve, singing in the voices of people ravaged by cycles of war and news coverage and inviting the reader to see the human lives lived beyond the headlines.

Sonnets


Bernadette Mayer - 1989
    Edited by Lee Ann Brown. SONNETS, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground- breaking works of writing consciousness.

Daughters of Copper Woman


Anne Cameron - 1984
    Now comes a new edition that includes many pieces cut from the original as well as fresh material added by the author. Here finally, after twenty-two years of gathering dust, is the complete version of the groundbreaking bestseller.In this, her best-loved work, Anne Cameron has created a timeless retelling of northwest coast Native myths that together create a sublime image of the social and spiritual power of woman. Cameron weaves together the lives of legendary and imaginary characters, creating a work of fiction with an intensity of style matched by the power of its subject.

William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Clueless


Ian Doescher - 2020
    Cher, the fairest maiden of Beverly Hills, takes center stage in this comedy of errors in which matchmaking, makeovers, and mall-hopping lead to plenty of merry-making—until Cher realizes her good intentions are creating mischief for her friends and family, including her new best friend Tai and her cute stepbrother Josh. The only solution? Admit that she knoweth nothing and beginneth anew. Just in time for the movie’s 25th anniversary, best-selling author Ian Doescher rolleth with the homies as he brings his signature Shakespearean wordsmithing to this beloved tale.

Begin Again: Collected Poems


Grace Paley - 1997
    Combining her two previous collections with unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of a direct, attentive, and always unpredictable poet. Whether describing the vicissitudes of life in New York City or the hard beauty of rural Vermont, whether celebrating the blessings of friendship or protesting against social injustice, her poems brim with compassion and tough good humor.

In Full Velvet


Jenny Johnson - 2017
    Characterized by formal poise, vulnerability, and compassion, Johnson's debut collection is one of resounding generosity and grace.Jenny Johnson is a recipient of the 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, and the 2016 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.