Essential Keats: Selected by Philip Levine


John Keats - 1987
    He remains a wellspring to which all of us might go to refresh our belief in the value of this art.

Amateur: An inexpert, inexperienced, unauthoritative, enamored view of life. (How To Be Ferociously Happy Book 2)


Dushka Zapata - 2016
     It's meant to be a very easy read; not a book you read systematically from beginning to end but rather a book to read during those times you find reading a book overwhelming. How we choose to look at something is essential to our happiness, and the author, Dushka Zapata, hopes to leave readers with a little of that.

Illumination: Poetry to Light Up the Darkness


Tyler Knott Gregson - 2021
    With loyal fans across the country and all over the Internet, he breathes new life into this ancient medium and delights fans with his openness and honesty alongside his beautiful photography.This new book will be his first poetry collection in four years, and he returns now with a message of hope. In his elegant and simple style, Gregson will lift your spirits, keep you going when times get tough, and remind you of the inherent inner strength you already have within you.

Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience


Shaun Usher - 2013
    Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Clementine Churchill, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and many more.

Dear Future Historians: Lyrics and Exegesis of Rou Reynolds for the Music of Enter Shikari


Enter Shikari - 2017
    They have become one of the most influential British rock bands of their generation, sharing with their fans a belief that music can inspire change. Dear Future Historians features front-man Rou Reynolds own song interpretations and social commentary alongside all of their lyrics to date.

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words


David Whyte - 2014
     Beginning with ALONE and closing with WORK, each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on the inevitable vicissitudes of life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling besieged and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness the appropriate confusion and helplessness that accompanies the first stage of revelation. CONSOLATIONS invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.

A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries


A.A. Gill - 2011
    His book includes essays on Sudan, India, Cuba, Germany and California. In each piece, there is a central image as the key to unlocking the personality of a place.

Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture


Seamus Heaney - 1996
    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos


John Berger - 1984
    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

Citizen: An American Lyric


Claudia Rankine - 2014
    Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

The Letters, Vol. 1: 1945-1959


William S. Burroughs - 1993
    Burroughs has had a range of influence rivalled by few living writers. This meticulously assembled volume of his correspondence vividly documents the personal and cultural history through which Burroughs developed, revealing clues to illuminate his life and keys to open up his texts. More than that, they also show how in the period 1945-1959, letter-writing was itself integral to his life and to his fiction-making. These letters reveal the extraordinary route that took Burroughs from narrative to anti-narrative, from Junky to Naked Lunch and the discovery of cut-ups, a turbulent journey crossing two decades and three continents. The letters track the great shifts in Burroughs' crucial relationship with Allen Ginsberg, from lecturing wise man ("Watch your semantics young man") to total dependence ("Your absence causes me, at times, acute pain.") to near-estrangement ("I sometimes feel you have mixed me up with someone else doesn't live here anymore."). They show Burroughs' initial despair at the obscenity of his own letters, some of which became parts of Naked Lunch, and his gradual recognition of the work's true nature ("It's beginning to look like a modern Inferno.") They reveal the harrowing lows and ecstatic highs of his emotions, and lay bare the pain of coming to terms with a childhood trauma ("Such horror in bringing it out I was afraid my heart would stop."). It is a story as revealing of his fellow Beats as it is of Burroughs: he writes of Kerouac and Cassady in the midst of the journey immortalized as On the Road ("Neal is, of course, the very soul of this voyage into pure, abstract, meaningless motion."), and to Ginsberg as he was writing Howl ("I sympathize with your feelings of depression, beatness: 'We have seen the best of our time.'"). And throughout runs the unmistakable Burroughs voice, the u

Redamancy: Poems


Kat Savage - 2016
    Well known for writing out the heartache and melancholia, this title explores the softer side of Savage, one not many are privileged to. She pours over the pages with a full love, one returned. You'll find no sadness or unrequited feelings in here. This is the real, heartfelt musings of a woman in love.

Decreation


Anne Carson - 2005
    In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. As she makes her way through these forms she slowly dismantles them, and in doing so seeks to move through the self, to its undoing.

No One Belongs Here More Than You


Miranda July - 2007
    Screenwriter, director, and star of the acclaimed film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection.

Scars Set In Stone


Shenaia Lucas - 2018
    Each chapter serves a different purpose. The chapters are For The Scarred, For the Loving, For the Oppressed, and For the Healing. This book teaches you to love yourself and others. It teaches the difficulty of dealing with past traumas and the journey towards healing, despite when it feels as if your scars are set in stone. It's better experienced than described, so sit down with some coffee and allow yourself to feel-- and heal.