Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the POEMFONE Poets


Jordan Trachtenberg - 1997
    Not a telephone reciever, which is how most of the poems in this collection were first transmitted...There are plenty of examples of this spreading of one art form or another through popular mediums. There are all those wonderful Russian Constructivist posters, Dr. Alphabet's public poetry gatherings on football fields, Dada caberet antics, and various forms of street theatr...Essentially what all of these movements were trying to do was expand the playing field called "art". By making the field bigger they gave us all more room to frolic. They pushed art right out of the dusty museums and smack dab into your lives... Poetry should be everywhere, and slowly but surely it's infiltrating our lives. We are gla dto be the instruments of this infiltration." --from the IntroductionFeaturingPenny Arcade, Tish Benson, Nicole Blackman, David Cameron, Xavier Cavazos, Todd Colby, Matthew Courtney, M. Doughty, Kathy Ebel, Annie Elliot, Janice Erlbaum, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, John S. Hall, Bob Holman, Christian X. Hunter, Shannon Ketch, Bobby Miller, Wanda Phipps, Lee Ranaldo, Shut-Up Shelly, Hal Sirowitz, Sparrow, Spiro, Edwin Torres, Emily XYZWith unabashed fervor the Poemfone poets are redefining poetry as we know it. Archaic literary rules that have never been bent have suddenly been broken., and Versus That Hurt chronicles this poetic phenomenon. This is a revolutionary gathering of disparate and brash talent that is not to be missed.

Boom


Jean Tay - 2009
    Boom tells the story of an elderly woman and her property agent son in Singapore, who are struggling over the potential en bloc sale of their home. Their destinies become interwoven with that of an idealistic civil servant, Jeremiah, who is facing the greatest challenge of his career—persuading a reluctant corpse to yield its memories. Boom is a quirky yet poignant tale about the relocation of both dead and living, and how personal stories get left behind in the inexorable march of progress.Written by economist-turned-playwright Jean Tay, Boom was conceptualised at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2007, and developed and staged by the Singapore Repertory Theatre in September 2008. It was nominated for Best Original Script for The Straits Times’ Life! Theatre Awards in 2009 and is now an O- and N-Level Literature text in Singapore schools.“Jean Tay is one of the most gifted playwrights I have come across in years.” —Gaurav Kripalani, Artistic Director, Singapore Repertory Theatre

The Gift of Everything


Lang Leav - 2021
    In addition, this beautifully conceived clothbound anthology includes 35 new poems as well as original and arresting illustrations by the author.Lang’s evocative words of love, loss, and self-empowerment have inspired millions across the globe to seek their own voice through the healing power of poetry. A definite must-have collection for all lovers of poetry and prose.   The Gift of Everything will thrill and delight fans of Lang Leav as well as those yet to discover the enchanting world of one the most celebrated poets in modern history.

Rotten Perfect Mouth


Eva H.D. - 2015
    These poems are loose enough for the reader to flop down inside and stay awhile. They are plangent, personal, confessional, noisy, nostalgic, and maybe a little bit broken. They often contain boats and travel and Toronto (street names and railroad tracks, dives and parks and kitchens) because those are the sorts of things Eva H.D. is drawn to. In Rotten Perfect Mouth, readers will discover a writer with her heart on her sleeve and her hand on her pen, capturing the world around her with vibrant immediacy.

A Short Stay in Hell


Steven L. Peck - 2011
    Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life.In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.

Hours in the Garden and Other Poems


Hermann Hesse - 1979
    Written during the same period as The Glass Bead Game, these poems reflect the book's mysticism and help to illuminate Hesse's physical and metaphysical search for a "sublime alchemy" that would go beyond all images

Rabbit


Sophie Robinson - 2018
    These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism – and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? Rabbit was chosen for the PBS Wild Card Choice for Winter, 2018.

City of Rivers


Zubair Ahmed - 2012
    "Zubair Ahmed’s first poetry collection City of Rivers captures the reader’s heart from its first line to its last. These poems are reminders of poetry’s power to leave us breathless after immersing us in truths, both wonderful and painful." - ZYZZYVA"...his poems are brief and beautiful, with final lines (“The light source is somewhere beyond / The years of my life.”) that should be scratched onto padlocks locked to the Pont des Arts over the Seine.... City of Rivers is a treasure you would do well to read." - Artvoice"While I imagine one of the reasons readers might find themselves interested in City of Rivers will be due to Ahmed’s relatively young age, such readers will invariably find themselves more interested in exploring the range of his vision and the confidence he seems to have hammered into every one of his sharp, stoic lines.... Ahmed possesses a profound understanding of the nature all poets, young and old, share—he recognizes that the words are a dream, that they haunt the body, and their constant buzzing, their inability to give us solace, keep us moving." - The Rumpus"Honestly, I’ve not yet read a contemporary poet of his equal." - Chico News Review"...a startling first collection of poems..." - Shelf-Awareness"This unusually compact and consistent debut from an unusually young poet might get noticed first for that poet’s unusual migratory life... Such work looks back productively to the American Deep Image style of the 1960s, to James Wright and the young Robert Bly." - Publisher's Weekly"Any poet would hope for the kind of praise that glows from the back cover of Zubair Ahmed’s debut poetry collection, City of Rivers. “Bracingly original…ushered into being by a prodigious new voice in America poetry.” Add to that the fact that Ahmed is only twenty-five, that his first book was published by McSweeney’s, and you have a rising star certainly worth keeping an eye on. Because—high as the book jacket praise might be—Ahmed lives up to it." - Late Night LibraryWe used to play soccer in the monsoon rains.Through my windows, I can see acres of fields,Lying in the ruins of the wind.The poems in City of Rivers—the first full-length collection from 23-year-old wunderkind Zubair Ahmed—are clear and cool as a glass of water. Grounded in his childhood in Bangladesh, Ahmed’s spare, evocative poems cast a knowing eye on the wider world, telling us what it’s like to be displaced and replaced, relocated and dislocated. His poems are suffused with a graceful, mysterious pathos—and also with joy, humor, and longing—with the full range of human emotions. City of Rivers is a remarkable and precocious debut.

Rhythm of Remembrance


Samir Satam - 2020
    – Shubhangi Swarup (Latitudes of Longing)

Notebooks of a Naked Youth


Billy Childish - 1997
    Over the course of the novel, he leads us through a series of encounters and adventures from industrial North Kent to the sleazy sex clubs of Hamburg's Reeperbahn. A powerful sequel to Childish's first novel My Fault

Cards as Weapons


Ricky Jay
    Photos.

Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania


Jerome Rothenberg - 1968
    Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful work book and an unequivocal delight," and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years, it appears here in a revised and expanded version several years in the making. Rothenberg's revision follows the structure and themes of the original version while reworking the contents to include a European section and a large number of newly gathered and translated poems that reflect the work set in motion since 1968.

The Moons At Your Door


David TibetElizabeth Gaskell - 2015
    The volume also includes extracts and translations by the author from Babylonian, Coptic and Biblical texts alongside poems and fairy tales.The book’s cover features artwork by David and design by Ania Goszczyńska; the frontispiece also reproduces a painting by David.

The Fox Woman


Kij Johnson - 2000
    A misstep at court forces him to retire to his long-deserted country estate, to rethink his plans and contemplate the next move that might return him to favor and guarantee his family's prosperity.Kitsune is a young fox who is fascinated by the large creatures that have suddenly invaded her world. She is drawn to them and to Yoshifuji. She comes to love him and will do anything to become a human woman to be with him.Shikujo is Yoshifuji's wife, ashamed of her husband, yet in love with him and uncertain of her role in his world. She is confused by his fascination with the creatures of the wood, and especially the foxes that she knows in her heart are harbingers of danger. She sees him slipping away and is determined to win him back from the wild ... for all that she has her own fox-related secret.Magic binds them all. And in the making (and breaking) of oaths and honors, the patterns of their lives will be changed forever.

LifeLines


Melissa Bernstein - 2021
    Now, more than ever, Melissa's message is needed by others, and her promise to all who journey with her is that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.Who would ever guess that Melissa Bernstein, happily-married mother of 6, creator of over 5,000 toys which have sold over a billion dollars, begins many days the same way far too many others do, wondering if she'll make it to tomorrow? Melissa shows us that when darkness descends, and it seems there's no escape, there actually is a way out, there actually is hope, and there actually is a path that can lead to meaning and purpose.Melissa takes us on her path through depression, revealing how her "lifelines" transformed despair into a beacon of hope. Filled with prose, gorgeous photography, and many of Melissa's verses that express her struggles and breakthroughs, LifeLines is committed to helping others who are "stuck" develop a plan for themselves to survive and thrive.A book of struggle and salvation, connection and community, LifeLines is a framework for people seeking to understand their emotional lives and to develop their own path to self-discovery and inner transformation.