Book picks similar to
Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel by Evan S. Connell
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Beautiful in the Mouth
Keetje Kuipers - 2010
Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.From Devils Lake Journal:“Keetje Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker’s own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as “Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer” alongside “Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage,” “Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar,” and “Barn Elegy” with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets.”From ForeWord Reviews:“The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, “a wave as well as a particle.””
Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
David Shields - 1996
It is a remoteness that both perplexes and enthralls him. Through dazzling sleight of hand in which the public becomes private and the private becomes public, the entire book—clicking from confession to family-album photograph to family chronicle to sexual fantasy to pseudo-scholarly footnote to reportage to personal essay to stand-up comedy to cultural criticism to literary criticism to film criticism to prose-poem to litany to outtake —becomes both an anatomy of American culture and a searing self-portrait. David Shields reads his own life—reads our life—as if it were an allegory about remoteness and finds persuasive, hilarious, heartbreaking evidence wherever he goes.Winner of the PEN / Revson Award?
Tape for the Turn of the Year
A.R. Ammons - 1965
R. Ammons’s long, thin poem was written on a roll of adding-machine tape, then transferred foot by foot to manuscript. He chose this method as a serious experiment in making a poem adapt to something outside itself. The tape determined both the length of the poem’s lines and when it ends. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a poem of infinite variety, blessed by the rich resources of one of this century’s greatest poets. By turns witty, serious, lyrical, and meditative, it is at once a superbly entertaining book and a significant literary achievement.
Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems
Stephanie Burt - 2019
Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems.A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.
Animals Strike Curious Poses
Elena Passarello - 2017
Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.
The Common Years
Jilly Cooper - 1994
For most of the time she lived there she kept a diary, noting the effects of the changing seasons and writing about her encounters with dogs and humans. The book is a distillation of those diaries: an affectionate and enthralling portrait - warts and all - of life on Putney Common. Never has Jilly Cooper written more lyrically about flowers, trees, birds and the natural world; more tellingly about the sorrows - as well as the joys - of caring for dogs and children; or more outrageously about the gossip, illicit romances and jealousies of life in a small community.
Lunch Poems
Frank O'Hara - 1964
Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.Often O'Hara, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.
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."
How to Be Perfect
Ron Padgett - 2007
He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have always imparted a contagious sense of joy.In these new poems, Padgett hasn’t forsaken his beloved Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the alarm. Here, he asks, “What makes us so mean?” And he really wants to know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving. “Humanity,” Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still “has to take it one step at a time.”Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, teacher, and, as Peter Gizzi says, “a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist.” His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Visit his website at www.ronpadgett.com.
Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology
Robert Pinsky - 2002
Poems to Read is a welcoming avenue into poetry for readers new to poetry, including high school and college students. It is also meant to be a fresh, valuable collection for readers already devoted to the art. This anthology concentrates on the actual pleasures of reading poems: hearing the poem in your voice, bringing it to other people, musing about it, taking excitement or comfort from it, wandering with it or—as in the Keats letter quoted in the Introduction—having it as a starting post. Many of these 200 poems are accompanied by comments from readers of various ages, regions, and backgrounds who participated in the Favorite Poem Project. Included are poems by John Donne, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, and Louise Glück, to name a few. The editors offer their own comments on some of the poems, which are arranged in thematic chapters.
The Bedbug and Selected Poetry
Vladimir Mayakovsky - 1929
Splendid translations of the poems, with the Russian on a facing page, and a fresh, colloquial version of Mayakovsky's dramatic masterpiece, The Bedbug.
Tales of a Wayside Inn
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1863
Longfellow's Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, originally known as Howe's Tavern, was the inspiration for Longfellow's widely read book of poems, Tales of a Wayside Inn. He based his works on a group of fictitious characters that regularly gathered at the old Sudbury tavern. Lyman Howe was the character featured in "The Landlord's Tale," and where Longfellow penned the immortal phrase, "Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere."
The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling
Peter Ackroyd - 2009
A retelling of The Canterbury Tales
The Common Reader
Virginia Woolf - 1925
This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as "Modern Fiction" and "The Modern Essay."
Nature Poem
Tommy Pico - 2017
For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.