Book picks similar to
Say Something Back by Denise Riley
poetry
fiction
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contemporary
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass
Lana Del Rey - 2020
Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.” (Lana Del Rey) Lana Del Rey brings her breathtaking poetry to life in an unprecedented audiobook. In this stunning spoken word performance, Lana Del Rey reads 14 poems from her debut book Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass accompanied by music from Grammy Award-winning musician Jack Antonoff. Lana’s debut book solidifies her further as “the essential writer of her times” (The Atlantic). This audiobook features Lana reading select poems from the book, including "LA Who Am I to Love You?", "The Land of 1,000 Fires", "Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving", "Never to Heaven", "Tessa DiPietro", "Happy", and several others. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator.
Birthday Letters
Ted Hughes - 1998
And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right.
Love & Misadventure
Lang Leav - 2013
Awarded a coveted Churchill Fellowship, her work expresses the intricacies of love and loss. Beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully conceived, Love and Misadventure will take you on a rollercoaster ride through an ill-fated love affair- from the initial butterflies to the soaring heights- through to the devastating plunge. Lang Leav has an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers. Her talent for translating complex emotions with astonishing simplicity has won her a cult following of devoted fans from all over the world.
To Make Monsters Out of Girls
Amanda Lovelace - 2018
She poses the eternal question: Can you heal once you’ve been marked by a monster, or will the sun always sting?
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky - 2019
When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky's long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.Finalist for the T. S. Eliot PrizeFinalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection
The Chaos of Longing
K.Y. Robinson - 2016
This revised and expanded edition contains over 50 pages of all-new material.Organized in four sections – Inception, Longing, Chaos, and Epiphany – K.Y. Robinson's debut poetry collection explores what it is to want in spite of trauma, shame, injustice, and mental illness. It is one survivor's powerful testimony, and a love letter "to those who lie awake burning."
Home
Clementine von Radics - 2014
Part narrative poetry, part memoir, and wholly unusual, it is an honest, messy, beautiful, at times brutal account of navigating collective living, sex, love, fear, and self-discovery as a young artist.
Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel I
R.H. Sin - 2015
Sin's first book of poetry.
The Wild Iris
Louise Glück - 1992
Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureFrom Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realmsBound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.
Dearly
Margaret Atwood - 2020
Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry. This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.
Love Her Wild
Atticus Poetry - 2017
With honesty, poignancy, and romantic flair, Atticus distills the most exhilarating highs and the heartbreaking lows of life and love into a few perfectly evocative lines, ensuring that his words will become etched in your mind—and will awaken your sense of adventure.
Alone with Other People
Gabby Bess - 2013
In this collection, she evokes what it means to be young, to be a woman, to have both feet firmly planted both in this world & the virtual. She asks fascinating questions like, 'Is anyone moved by the plainness of raw skin anymore?' She makes you trust she's the necessary answers with intelligence & confidence. In this book, she builds an identity for herself, tears it down & builds herself anew. It's breathtaking to behold."--Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State & Bad Feminist“The poems & prose pieces in this smart & complex collection illuminate the shape of a new, 21st century webcam feminism—one that questions its own ambitions, knows the shape of pornstar mouths & doubts the sanctity of individuality when pitted against the existential. Gabby writes with radical uncertainty about illusions of control, the limits of identity & what it means to still want to kiss another human amidst the screenshots. This is a book that invents its own female gaze & then, like a bad bitch, breaks the lens.”--Melissa Broder, author of Meat Heart“Gabby Bess’s Alone with Other People orchestrates an impressive catalog of young human want with a uncompromising style. In the span between its 1st phrase The sex can be rough & its last sentence, Panic, the reader forward thru a virtual rolodex of self-inquisition shaped by boredom, horror, aspiration, fear for future, wonder, lust. There’s a lot of intense light coming off this book full of screens & suns & large black dots.”--Blake Butler, author of Sky Saw“Don’t take me for crazy when I say that the verse “Hahaha, am I alone here?” is the one that best sums up Gabby’s incredible debut book, because it’s true. Thru each & every page that makes up Alone with Other People, the author manages to head out into the world with a sane, witty & protesting laugh. A laugh about the strength of woman, of youth, of poetry. When Gabby says hahaha, it also starts to unravel before our very eyes a series of texts that first & foremost find beauty in the mundane, followed by the universality of intimacy, & lastly (& most importantly): the sensation that with this book, we will never, ever feel lonely again.”--Luna Miguel, author of Bluebird & Other Tattoos“Of-the-moment, brilliant & triumphantly sad, Illuminati Girl Gang leader Gabby Bess’s debut Alone with Other People is a post-feminist, hyper selfconscious teen swansong of the Internet age. The line between girl body & Macbook is collapsed in these vignettes that riff from blog posts, text messages & tumblr memes, & what emerges is a “modern tragic figure who would sacrifice herself for whatever.”--Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment“Alone with Other People deftly deals with relationships in a highly mediated age–one that twists our perceptions of self & others. Gabby shows us how we can be simultaneously complicit in this culture but still have the desire to fight against it.”--Ann Hirsch, performance artist