Book picks similar to
Tweaky Village by Kevin Killian
poetry
poetry-poetics
glbt
indexed
The Book of Craw: A Hobo's Testament (Companion Volume to "The Dirty Parts of the Bible")
Sam Torode - 2013
The Book of Craw -- comprised of poems and proverbs from Craw's own notebook -- is the companion volume to The Dirty Parts of the Bible: A Novel.
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Salámán and Absál Together With A Life Of Edward Fitzgerald And An Essay On Persian Poetry By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Omar Khayyám - 2010
You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
Our Poison Horse
Derrick Brown - 2014
Brown. Brown is the winner of the Texas Book of The Year Prize, 2013. The New York Times calls his work a rekindling of the faith in the shocking, weird and beautiful power of words. Brown finally sold the ship, The Sea Section, upon which he lived for years in the Long Beach harbor, after which he took to hunting for a city that was affordable and had a bustling writer s community. He landed in Austin, Texas and when the progress of that town got to be intense, he moved to the nearby countryside in Elgin, Texas, and from that pastoral setting came unfurling this new collection of his most personal work to date. Brown has been known as one of the most touring, well travelled living poets in America. He has based his whole writing career on changing peoples minds about poetry and he feels a quality, unforgettable live experience can achieve that. Brown told himself he needed a 10-year hiatus from writing poetry when he felt the well of creativity had dried up. 2 years ago, he wrote a one-hour long poetic play called Strange Light, commissioned by The Noord Nederlands Dans Group in Holland. The piece was performed by 14 dancers and accompanied by a live orchestra using music composed by fellow Americans, Emily Wells and Timmy Straw. While he was working on a new libretto for Wayne State University in Detroit, he was set up in a seemingly pastoral country setting, where, as Brown says, an incredible war broke out inside and out, such bright, massive storms, snakes, guns, howling wind, hard sun: all kinds of poems gushed forth. I gave in to the process and my best work to date was born, this will be my 5th book. Our Poison Horse touches on more autobiography than the romantic and fantastical that was so present in his past work. In Derrick Brown s words: I found a poetry in the real events that shaped or broke me. Every morning, I would quiet down, stare out into the field where we were watching our neighbors horse, a horse that was poisoned with pesticide by some local boys, a horse with massive scars all down its body from it s skin peeling from the poison sprayed upon it maliciously by some bastard kids. I watched the horse heal and finally come to me, and trust me and eat carrots. Something about that horse, Lacey, about it not trusting me and then warming up pulled something out of me that I didn t know I was ready for. There is a theme that in beautiful places, you will"
MxT
Sina Queyras - 2014
These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.'Like the central conceptual apparatus, Queyras is smart and insightful in her work to expand and challenge the nature of language and poetry . . . Lend Queyras your ears, your minds, your hearts, your Time. She will reward you, repeatedly.' – The Rumpus'A collection of gorgeous and cantankerous poems that ask testy questions of all contemporary poets, and for this, the book is a must-read.' – The Globe and Mail'This year's most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection.' – Telegraph-Journal
Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One; Poems
Yusef Komunyakaa - 2004
In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.
The Lifting Dress
Lauren Berry - 2011
Lauren Berry's bracing and emotionally charged first collection of poetry delivers visions of a gothic South that Flannery O'Connor would recognize. Set in a feverish swamp town in Florida, The Lifting Dress enters the life of a teenage girl the day after she has been raped. She refuses to tell anyone what has happened, and moves silently toward adulthood in a community that offers beauty but denies apology. Through lyric narratives, readers watch her shift between mirroring and rejecting the anxious swelter of her world, until she ultimately embraces it with the same violent affection once tendered to her.
The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures
Jack Spicer - 1998
These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This thorough documentation of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.
Ark
Ronald Johnson - 1996
It takes its legitimate place with the great works of the century of like kind, Ezra Pound's "Cantos," Louis Zukofsky's "A," Charles Olson's "Maximus," and Robert Duncan's "Passages." Its own specific character is, however, brilliantly singular."Robert Creeley"A late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible, and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."Guy Davenport
Kindertotenwald: Prose Poems
Franz Wright - 2011
Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet. In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. “Take everything,” Wright suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.” With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.
Bright Existence
Brenda Hillman - 1993
Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.
I Dreamed You
Justine Avery - 2020
I Dreamed You gives a voice to the feelings so difficult to express and so important to share.Award-winning and beloved children's author Justine Avery thoughtfully, reverently expresses the sentiments behind welcoming a child into our lives, whether we're a grandparent, adopting parent, step-parent, sibling, or anyone else blessed with a cherished young one.
The Waste Land And Other Poems
John Beer - 2010
Winner of the 2011 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. John Beer's first collection, THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS, employs the wit of a philosopher and the ear of a poet to stage ways of reading that are political, personal, and theoretical. The speaker of these poems also brings humor to the dissecting table, to prod the legacies of great works of the imagination while balancing irony and affection.
One Big Self: An Investigation
C.D. Wright - 2003
D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature. One Big Self does to the contemporary prison-industrial complex what James Agee did to poverty — it reacts passionately and lyrically (and idiosyncratically) to a sociopolitical abomination. This book, while angry and sorrowful and bewildered, has humor, constant levity and candor, and countless moments of incredible beauty." —Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review“Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence.”—The New YorkerInspired by numerous visits inside Louisiana state prisons—where MacArthur Fellow C.D. Wright served as a “factotum” for a portrait photographer—One Big Self bears witness to incarcerated men and women and speaks to the psychic toll of protracted time passed in constricted space. It is a riveting mosaic of distinct voices, epistolary pieces, elements from a moralistic board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and “counts” of things—from baby’s teeth to chigger bites:Count your folding moneyCount the times you said you wouldn’t go backCount your debtsCount the roaches when the light comes onCount your kids after the housefireOne Big Self—originally published as a large-format limited edition that featured photographs and text—was selected by The New York Times and The Village Voice as a notable book of the year. This edition features the poem exclusively.C.D. Wright is the author of ten books of poetry, including several collaborations with photographer Deborah Luster. She is a professor at Brown University.
Tender Data
Monica McClure - 2015
Nobody comes out looking good. The slippery self, surveilled yet ready with her mask, performs a peep show—booth opens wide, yet somehow the dancer isn't there. She's in character. She's "cut off the head to let the humors hose through.