The Importance of Being Ernest


Ernest Cline - 2006
    This companion book to his CD, The Geek Wants Out, contains many of the same poems, notably: The Geek Wants Out, Dance Monkeys Dance, and Nerd Porn Auteur among others. It also contains three bonus poems not found on the CD. Cline's work is simultaneously clever, witty, intelligent and 100% Airwolf! Some strong language and subject matter in some poems.

Song of the Departed: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl


Georg Trakl - 2011
    His reader is gifted with visions of a darker world, an autumnal place of surreal beauty and a dying splendor. It is not a world friendly to people—it is full of death, desolation, and decay, strange creatures and arcane gods. But it is beautiful nonetheless. Hauntingly beautiful."—Chris Faatz, Powells.com"I do not understand them; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius."—Ludwig WittgensteinSong of the Departed brings back into print poems written at the height of Georg Trakl's career. Trakl boldly confronted the conflicts created by the pursuit of truth amidst the fallenness of the human condition, writing of the unspeakable that lies beyond language, creating poetry that is intensely personal and eerily beautiful. Included in this revised edition are several new translations and an introduction by the translator.All roads disgorge to black decay.Beneath the golden boughs of night and starsThe sister's shadow flutters through the silent groveTo greet the spirits of the heroes, bleeding heads.And softly in the reeds drone the dark flutes of autumn.O prouder grief! you brazen altars;Tonight a mighty anguish feeds the hot flame of spirit:Unborn grandchildren.Georg Trakl was born in Austria in 1887. He served as a medical officer during World War I. As a lyric poet, he set a dark, introspective tone that deeply influenced the course of German expressionism. He died in 1914 after an overdose of cocaine.

World of Made and Unmade: A Poem


Jane Mead - 2016
    We know much of poetry ever was and ever shall be elegiac. Jane Mead’s poem could be neither more literal nor nearer the verge of appearing a little too perfect for this world. As the laundry room floods and the grape harvest gets done; as Michoacan waits for another time, her beautiful, practical mother is dying. Ashes are scattered in the pecan groves of her own Rincon, her own corner of the world, and the poet, in elementary script, draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle, and she cannot, will not, does not fuck it up." — C.D. WrightJane Mead's fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We're drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.…This year I have disappearedfrom the harvest routine—the pickers throwing their traysunder the vines, grape hooksflying, the heavy bunches flying—pickers running to the running tractorswith trays held high above their headsand the arc of dark fruit falling heavily into the half-ton bins.The hornets swarming in the diesel-filled air.Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Money Money Money | Water Water Water (2014). Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she's the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and farms in Northern California.

Looking for the Gulf Motel


Richard Blanco - 2012
    His third book of poetry, Looking for The Gulf Motel, is a genealogy of the heart, exploring how his family’s emotion legacy has shaped—and continues shaping—his perspectives. The collection is presented in three movements, each one chronicling his understanding of a particular facet of life from childhood into adulthood. As a child born into the milieu of his Cuban exiled familia, the first movement delves into early questions of cultural identity and their evolution into his unrelenting sense of displacement and quest for the elusive meaning of home. The second, begins with poems peering back into family again, examining the blurred lines of gender, the frailty of his father-son relationship, and the intersection of his cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man living in rural Maine. In the last movement, poems focused on his mother’s life shaped by exile, his father’s death, and the passing of a generation of relatives, all provide lessons about his own impermanence in the world and the permanence of loss. Looking for the Gulf Motel is looking for the beauty of that which we cannot hold onto, be it country, family, or love.

The Irrationalist


Suzanne Buffam - 2010
    In acclaimed poet Suzanne Buffam's second collection, her unusual range, formal rigor, and imaginative force are on full display as we are introduced to the wry meditations of a literary "irrationalist" who pursues her own poetic logic beyond the bounds of reason. Throughout the collection, in resolutely modern, rueful and eccentric lyrics, Buffam investigates the shifting grounds of knowledge while refusing to take any philosophical authority too seriously. Together, these poems compose a swift, durable, protean argument for the necessity of interior maps in a world that may be on the eve of extinction, but whose darkness is continually illuminated by a pyrotechnics of curiosity, candor, and wit.