Book picks similar to
The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin by Kathleen Hellen
authors-of-color
poetry
za-o-lit-asian-diaspora
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The Eye Like a Strange Balloon
Mary Jo Bang - 2004
Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backwards in time to 1 BC, where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art’s strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating—a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang’s sly and elegant commentary on poetry’s enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.
Stars of the Night Commute
Ana Bozicevic - 2009
"STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams"Annie Finch. "Bozicevic's poetry has everythinga mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound"Noelle Kocot. "How does she do it?"Eileen Myles. "Absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect.... She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial.... She is able to perceive with the eyes of languagethen render with lyrical immediacythe experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream"Franz Wright.
The Romance of Happy Workers
Anne Boyer - 2008
Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern “Home on the Range” read:Mix a drink of stock lot:vermouth and the water table.And the bar will smell of IBP.And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed.Nothing, too, is a subject:dusk regulating the blankery.Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,fill in the metaphorical smell.A poet and visual artist, Anne Boyer lives in Kansas, where she co-edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln and teaches at Kansas City Art Institute.
Minuscules : when less is more…
Priyanka Bhatt - 2018
Since then, my words have been oozing pain. Today’s instant make-up, instant break-up generation have no time to spare time at all. They prefer enjoying eternity in moments to waiting eternally for that moment. Hence, these micro tales have become the latest fad. Minuscule is a collection of unique micro tales and short stories that are spread over various themes. From horror to social issues to romance, these tales leave no topic unwritten about, no emotion unexplored. Though told with brevity, the impact of these stories can be more lingering than that of novels. To-the-point, poignant, relatable - this micro fiction book can be read by anyone in today’s time - a teenager and an adult alike. Its varied range of themes is the cherry on the cake. Minuscule is a book that is sure to bring a smile to your face and tears to your eyes – and stay with you for a very long time. May the stories make a home in your heart! Don’t leave me the way you leave others. Some things are permanent indeed. Like love, like regret. And trust me honey, I’ll be your both.
From One Mom to a Mother: Poetry & Momisms (Jessica Urlichs: Early Motherhood Poetry & Prose Collection Book 1)
Jessica Urlichs - 2020
Love Cake
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2011
LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of color resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, LOVE CAKE also documents the persistence of survival and beauty--especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of color loving and desiring. LOVE CAKE maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.
The Fatalist
Lyn Hejinian - 2003
It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.
Instant Winner
Carrie Fountain - 2014
Fountain’s voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the “pure holiness in motherhood” with the “thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they’re tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck.” In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that’s wary of prepackaged wisdom—a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Siste Viator
Sarah Manguso - 2006
Her writing is gorgeous and cerebral (imagine Anne Carson) but she doesn't skimp on the wit (imagine Anne Carson's ne'er-do-well niece). Poetry-fearers, don't back away from this beautiful book; these might be the pages that bring you back into the form.” --Dave Eggers
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.
The Crisis of Infinite Worlds
Dana Ward - 2013
I love how thick this writing is, sublimely claustrophobic yet expansive, like a child's nightmare of scale."—Dodie Bellamy"Autodidact and knight-errant, Ward often betrays the procedural forms he tries to impose on his labyrinthine ruminations in order to remain faithfully engaged to the traditional task of the post-Romantic poet, an 'ecstatic commingling' of okay-you know and 'starry anaphor.'"—Tyrone Williams"I should write a real blurb with real blurb-like things in it, but TCOIW, a kind of lullaby arranging the psychic terrain of my future prosodically, is saving my stupid ass."—Anselm Berrigan
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.
A Brief History of Time
Shaindel Beers - 2008
These poems, many of them award-winning, span a wide range of styles-from plainsong free verse to sestinas to nearly epic works. The characters/speakers in Beers' poems range from the rural working class to mythological characters. These poems look at the world with an honest, unflinching eye. She is one of the up-and-coming poets from Generation X we will be hearing a great deal from in the future.