I Am Not Your Final Girl


Claire C. Holland - 2018
    Holland, a timely collection of poetry that follows the final girl of slasher cinema - the girl who survives until the end - on a journey of retribution and reclamation. From the white picket fences of 1970s Haddonfield to the apocalyptic end of the world, Holland confronts the role of women in relation to subjects including feminism, violence, motherhood, sexuality, and assault in the world of Trump and the MeToo movement. Each poem centers on a fictional character from horror cinema, and explores the many ways in which women find empowerment through their own perceived monstrousness.

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. . . ."

Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, the Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas


Marguerite Duras - 1965
    Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels are unparalleled exhibitions of a poetic beauty that is uniquely Duras.

The First Four Books of Poems


W.S. Merwin - 1975
    I make no prayer. Save us the green In the weed of time.Now is November; In night uneasy Nothing I say. I make no prayer. Save us from the water That washes us away.What do I ponder? All smiled disguise, Lights in cold places, I make no prayer. Save us from air That wears us loosely.The leaf of summer To cold has come In little time. I make no prayer. From earth deliver And the dark therein.Now is no whisper Through all the living. I speak to nothing. I make no prayer. Save us from fire Consuming up and down.Evening with Lee Shore and CliffsSea-shimmer, faint haze, and far out a bird Dipping for flies or fish. Then, when over That wide silk suddenly the shadow Spread skating, who turned with a shiver High in the rocks? And knew, then only, the waves' Layering patience: how they would follow after, After, dogged as sleep, to his inland Dreams, oh beyond the one lamb that cried In the olives, past the pines' derision. And heard Behind him not the sea's gaiety but its laughter.The FishermenWhen you think how big their feet are in black rubber And it slippery underfoot always, it is clever How they thread and manage among the sprawled nets, lines, Hooks, spidery cages with small entrances. But they are used to it. We do not know their names. They know our needs, and live by them, lending them wiles And beguilements we could never have fashioned for them; They carry the ends of our hungers out to drop them To wait swaying in a dark place we could never have chosen. By motions we have never learned they feed us. We lay wreaths on the sea when it has drowned them.

School of the Arts


Mark Doty - 2005
    At once witty and disconsolate -- formally inventive, acutely attentive, insistently alive -- this is a book of fierce vulnerability that explores the ways in which we are educated by the implacable powers of time and desire in a world that constantly renews itself.

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996


Seamus Heaney - 1997
    With these metaphors in place, he makes clear his difficult poetic task: to delve into the past, both personal and historic, while remaining ever mindful of the potentially fatal power of language.Born and raised in Northern Ireland, where any hint of Gaelic tradition in one's speech was considered a political act, Heaney is all too aware of the dire consequences of speaking one's mind. Indeed, during times of crisis, he has been expected to appear on television and dispense political wisdom. Most often, however, he stays out of the fray and opts for a supreme sense of empathy to guide his words. As excavator--of earth, of his beloved Gaelic, of his own life--Heaney is unmatched. In "Bone Dreams", the archaeologist's task is synonymous with reaching for a cultural past: I push back through dictions, Elizabethan canopies, Norman devices, the erotic mayflowers of Provence and the ivied Latins of churchmen to the scop's twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line.And in early poems like "Blackberry Picking", Heaney's images--deftly, delightfully--carry us back to childhood fields: At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full... Opened Ground is a pleasure and a triumph. These three decades of work confirm Heaney as one of the most important poets of his time. --Martha Silano

the Chaos inside Me


Elisabet Salas - 2018
    It is a story about owning the emotions that live inside the heart and the head. It is the cathartic experience of pain and loss but also the bittersweet feelings of joy and the complexity of beauty. Elisabet expresses the unraveling of herself and the complexity of emotions that stemmed from heartache, her own mental health and the struggles of growing up and into a world with no precedence for a first generation child. This is the accumulation of three years of tears and long nights figuring out that chaos isn't always a bad thing.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems


Mahmoud Darwish - 2002
    He is a living legend whose lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world's oldest literary traditions at the same time that he has struggled to open new possibilities for poetry. This collection spans Darwish's entire career, nearly four decades, revealing an impressive range of expression and form. A splendid team of translators has collaborated with the poet on these new translations, which capture Darwish's distinctive voice and spirit.

The Selected Poems


Osip Mandelstam - 1972
    A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan and Robert Lowell, Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Mandelstam's last poems, written in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the Gulag, are an extraordinary testament to the endurance of art in the presence of terror.This book represents a collaboration between the scholar Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, one of contemporary America's finest poets and translators. It also includes Mandelstam's "Conversation on Dante," an uncategorizable work of genius containing the poet's deepest reflections on the nature of the poetic process.

Strange Beasts of China


Yan Ge - 2006
    These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness—save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self. Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.

It's a Lonely Love


Hunter Summerall - 2018
    Styled as  entries from a journal, Hunter Summerall’s poetry takes the personal and constructs a universal story about unrequited love and anguish.

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.”

A Collection of Rumi: Quotes and Poetry


Alayna Miller - 2016
    Rumi is one of the greatest poetical geniuses and spiritual masters in human history. His name stands for Love and ecstatic flight into the infinite. Today, Rumi is one of the most widely read poets in the west and has been described to be on par with Beethoven, Shakespeare and Mozart. During a 25 year period, Rumi composed over 70,000 verses of poetry focusing on diverse and varied topics. Rumi’s influence goes beyond nationalities and ethnicities with his work having been translated in numerous languages around the world. His work is mystical and intensely philosophical, with poems of fiery soulful expression, to passionate love verses filled with yearning and desire. Rumi describes the life of mystics as a “gathering of lovers, where there is no high or low, smart or ignorant, no proper schooling required.” He believed in a life journey following a love-based principle free of guilt, fear and shame. The bringing together of a wealthy nobleman and a poor wanderer serve as a reminder to us all that inspiration can come from anywhere and anyone can aid us in advancing our growth.

This Life or the Next


Demian Vitanza - 2017
    An outsider in his own country—adrift between two worlds divided by class, race, and culture—he’s always been searching for home. Alongside a flock of other streetwise young men, each looking for direction and each easily susceptible, Tariq finds his cause in the Muslim revival.Idealistic, driven by faith, and empowered with purpose, he’s drawn to radical Islam—his last resort for achieving a sense of belonging, for embracing and being embraced. It’s only when he enlists in the war against Assad that Tariq’s eyes are truly opened. Dispirited with the violence, faced with the consequences of his choices, and increasingly distanced from the brutalities of jihad, Tariq’s spiritual struggle is now his alone. So are the stories he will tell to make sense of his life.In this daring and unprecedented work of literary fiction, Demian Vitanza explores the power of memory, the lure of rebellion, the search for meaning amid chaos—and the toll that such a journey can take before finally finding one’s way home.

Stick Out Your Tongue


Ma Jian - 1987
    Stick Out Your Tongue is a revelation: a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and violent, seductive and perverse.In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover on the wall of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between dream and reality becomes confused.When this book was published in Chinese in 1997, the government accused Ma Jian of "harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities," and a blanket ban was placed on his future work. With its publication in English, including a new afterword by the author that sets the book in its personal and political context, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes--and a window on the imagination of one of China's foremost writers.