Book picks similar to
DOWN by Sarah Dowling


poetry
canadian
confusing-but-good
modern

Scattered at Sea


Amy Gerstler - 2015
    The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

The Emperor of Water Clocks


Yusef Komunyakaa - 2015
    But Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the beguiling guises Komunyakaa dons over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here he is with Napoleon, as the emperor "tells the doctor to cut out his heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise"; here he is at the circus, observing as "The strong man presses six hundred pounds, / his muscles flexed for the woman / whose T-shirt says, these guns are loaded"; and here is just a man, placing "a few red anemones / & a sheaf of wheat" on Mahmoud Darwish's grave, reflecting on why "I'd rather die a poet / than a warrior." Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected rhythms; his effortlessly surreal images; his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only of, say, king against jester but of man against his own desire and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past. Another brilliant collection from the man David Wojahn has called one of our "most significant and individual voices," The Emperor of Water Clocks delights, challenges, and satisfies.

The Romance of Happy Workers


Anne Boyer - 2008
    Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern “Home on the Range” read:Mix a drink of stock lot:vermouth and the water table.And the bar will smell of IBP.And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed.Nothing, too, is a subject:dusk regulating the blankery.Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,fill in the metaphorical smell.A poet and visual artist, Anne Boyer lives in Kansas, where she co-edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln and teaches at Kansas City Art Institute.

I Become a Delight to My Enemies


Sara Peters - 2019
    Sara Peters combines poetry and short prose vignettes to create a singular, unflinching portrait of a Town in which the lives of girls and women are shaped by the brutality meted upon them and by their acts of defiance and yearning towards places of safety and belonging. Through lucid detail, sparkling imagery and illumination, Peters' individual characters and the collective of The Town leap vividly, fully formed off the page. A hybrid in form, I Become a Delight to My Enemies is an awe-inspiring example of the exquisite force of words to shock and to move, from a writer of exceptional talent and potential.

I am a home to butterflies


J. Alchem - 2018
    It will then be about them only. It will be all about the one they loved like thunder, about the one they struggled hard to keep, about the one who had left them in the middle of their 'forever', about their world shattering into pieces, about them gluing together every piece, and about them falling in love one more time.And if you still think it is about you and me, you haven't loved someone like thunder, yet.

They Feed They Lion & The Names of the Lost: Two Books of Poems


Philip Levine - 1999
    In an essay on his career, Edward Hirsch describes They Feed They Lion as his "most eloquent book of industrial Detroit . . . The magisterial title poem--with its fierce diction and driving rhythms--is Levine's hymn to communal rage, to acting in unison." Of The Names of the Lost: "In these poems Levine explicitly links the people of his childhood whom 'no one remembers' with his doomed heroes from the Spanish Civil War."

Kensington Heights


Leslie Thomas - 1996
    Until the other bizarre and eccentric inhabitants of the building start arriving on his doorstep.And the Savage gets a visit from a homeless waif he meets in the local launderette called Korky.Korky's intrusion on Savage's private world alters his whole existence. High above the London rooftops this strange and contradictory relationship blooms like an improbable flower and Savage begins to realise that the world can creep under even the most firmly closed doors.'As ever in a Thomas novel, we constantly shift from tears to laughter and back again' Daily Express' A moving and jolly book ... with hardly a dull moment and difficult not to be cheered by' Times

Jimmy & Rita


Kim Addonizio - 1996
    Haunted by their childhoods of material and emotional poverty, Jimmy and Rita float through days in urban San Francisco.

The Sisters, Texas, Box Set I (Books 1-3): Welcome to The Sisters!


Becki Willis - 2020
    FREE in Kindle Unlimited.Each book features a challenging whodunit mystery with a successful conclusion and keeps you guessing until the end. The underlying backstory weaves throughout the series and brings the characters and their small community to life.The series has won numerous awards, regularly appears on multiple bestsellers lists, and has an option for a television movie series, but the ultimate compliment comes from readers. They say ‘it’s like visiting with old friends.’These true-to-life characters will warm your heart, challenge your sleuthing skills, bring a smile to your face and sometimes a tear to your eye, and will draw you into their own little world known as The Sisters, Texas, Population 2000. (Give or take a dead body or two.)The Sisters, Texas, Box Set One: Welcome to The Sisters consists of:Chicken ScratchWhen the Stars FallStipulations and ComplicationsBehind-the-scenes insights and researchNotable QuotablesAlso available in audio format. Each sold separately.Word of Caution: Readers claim this series is addictive!

One NRI Girl


Rupi Kaur - 2019
    She is working as a software engineer in an investment bank in USA. She has money ($$$$), she can afford sex outside marriage. She also has opinion on everything. She is dating various marriage prospects, will she get her dream guy?

Earth & Heaven


Sue Gee - 2001
    has dared to take on a difficult, grief-stricken period of English history, and done so with sensitivity and understanding; EARTH AND HEAVEN is the clever, compelling result' The Times

A Heart Full of Love


Javan - 1990
    0-935906-02-9$5.00 / Javan Press

The Outernationale


Peter Gizzi - 2007
    The Outernationale locates us "just off the grid," in an emotional and spiritual frontier, where reverie, outrage, history, and vision merge. Thinking and feeling become one in the urgent music of Gizzi's poems. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom. This is both a poetry of conscience and the embodiment of a genuinely poetic consciousness. Objects, images, and their histories are caught here in their half-life, their profoundly human after-life. Gizzi has written a brilliant follow-up to Some Values of Landscape and Weather, a book hailed by Robert Creeley as "a breakthrough book in every way: for reader, for writer, and for the art."

Work and Days


Tess Taylor - 2016
    Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor—outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child—found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, “methamphetamine and global economic crisis,” these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets—Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare—Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century. In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.

Witchy Trouble


Nic Saint - 2016
    If you like cozy witch mysteries, you’ll love Edelie, Estrella and Ernestine and all of their witchy shenanigans! Triplets Edelie, Estrella and Ernestine Flummox are three New York City working girls, living with their grandmother and aspiring to become, respectively, top chef, top singer and top lawyer. There’s something very peculiar about the Flummox sisters, however. They’re witches, and not just any witches but just about the worst witches in the world, their every spell an unmitigated disaster. Which is why Granny has forbidden them to ever use magic outside of the house. But then Granny suddenly disappears, and when she returns isn’t the same granny they know and love. Something very strange is going on, and it just might have something to do with the serial killer who’s terrorizing New York, or the fact that very soon now the three sisters are coming of witching age, or that on the same day they used magic at work and made a terrible mess, a sinister warlock shows up, warning them that their lives are in terrible danger.