Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs


Ellen Kennedy - 2009
    Ellen Kennedy's debut full-length poetry collection. When I finished reading SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS I had to go to lunch with people in a restaurant with enormous beverages and misnamed sandwiches. I kept tapping my hand on the table and I didn't listen to anything anybody said. All I wanted to do was go home to read and write the kind of poetry Ellen Kennedy writes, declarative and nervous and wild and free. This is the sort of thing you want. This is the sort of book you should buy and you should buy it now instead of having lunch with those `friends'--Daniel Handler. Ellen Kennedy was born in 1989 and lives in Boston.

The Failure Six


Shane Jones - 2010
    A young woman named Foe has lost her memory and six messengers who attempt to recite her past back to her inevitably - and creatively - fail. Parts Kafka, Lewis Carroll, and Aesop, the imagistic allegory warns that in a culture of texting, email, and Twitter, we can't forsake real conversation - or we could lose its art forever. - Interview Magazine, Dec/Jan 2010.An exquisite memento of wildly imagined scenes, odd characters, and nightmares confused with waking life, a slipstream loop where bureaucracy and hallucination are so intertwined that you’re often confused which is the most absurd. - The Brooklyn Rail, April 2010.

The Age of Huts


Ron Silliman - 1986
    This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ "the new sentence," to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The Age of Huts questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.

Together and By Ourselves


Alex Dimitrov - 2017
    Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal, professional, or family lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.from "Water"What is aging exactly?There are new jobs and peopleand someone dies before noon every day.I am swimming and swimming…in May or an ocean,I don’t see the reason. “But that’s unimportant,” you said.“Just keep doing it over again until one day you can’t.”Spring excites us and we know what it is every time.The minutes in meetings are life’s most undistinguished;that’s obvious. And what’s obvious makes us all foolsthen fast friends.Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.

Notes on Thought and Vision


H.D. - 1982
    (Hilda Doolittle) is an aphoristic meditation on how one works toward an ideal body-mind synthesis; a contemplation of the sources of imagination and the creative process; and a study of gender differences H.D. believed to be inherent in women's and men's consciousness. Here, too, is The Wise Sappho, a lyrical tribute to the great poet of Lesbos, for whom H.D. felt deep personal kinship.""Notes" is filled with dualisms that seem to split experience at all levels: body and spirit, womb and head, feeling and thought, the unconscious and ego consciousness, female and male, nature and divinity, classical and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, Sphinx and Centaur, Pan and Helios, Naiads and Athene, thistle and serpent. But the impulse behind "Notes" is to account for those mysterious moments in which the polarities seemed to fall away, or—more accurately—to find their contradictions lifted and subsumed into a gestalt that illuminated the cross-patch of the past and released her to the chances of the future." —Albert Gelpi, Introduction"H. D.'s Notes on Thought and Vision [is] such a unique, inspiring, exploration of her notion of the creative process, orchestrated through an array of fully female, not feminine, not feminist, female figures." —Paul Kameen, University of Pittsburgh, English DepartmentHilda "H.D." Doolittle (1886-1961) was a poet, novelist, and memoirist well-known for her role with the avant-gard Imagist group. Though born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, her publications took off in London and earned her a spot within the emerging Imagist movement. She is also known for being unapologetic about her sexuality and is an icon for LGBT rights and feminist movements.

Doll Palace


Sara Lippmann - 2014
    She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, the isolated characters in Doll Palace are united by conflicting desires, quiet rebellions, and the private struggles of the heart.

Money for Something: Sex Work. Drugs. Life. Need.


Mia Walsch - 2020
    Look where we are. What else do we have to hide?'When nineteen-year-old Mia is fired from her job at an insurance company, she answers an ad in the newspaper. The ad says: 'Erotic Massage. Good Money. No Sex.'Mia takes to her new job with recklessness, aplomb and good humour. Over the next few years, as she works her way through Sydney's many parlours, she meets exquisite and complex women from every walk of life who choose sex work for myriad reasons. While juggling the demands of her new job, she battles her problematic drug use, and the mental illness that has shaped her life.But rather than needing saving from sex work, it is the work that sometimes helps to save Mia from herself.A raw and honest memoir about surviving, sex work, friendships, drugs and mental illness.

Ode On A Grecian Urn And Other Poems


John Keats - 1996
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream


Kim Hyesoon - 2011
    East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women"--Pam Brown

Poeta En San Francisco


Barbara Jane Reyes - 2005
    Asian American Studies. POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO is the winner of the highly prestigious James Laughlin Award for 2005, awarded annually from the Academy of American Poetry and the only prize for a second book of poetry in the United States. Although Reyes' first book was not as widely known as the first book of many of the other eligible poets, the judges nevertheless courageously chose this risky, radical, and deserving second book put out by an energetic but very small publisher. Reyes received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, where she also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Filipino American literary publication Maganda. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Gravities of Center, was published by Arkipelago Books (SF) in 2003.

The Portable Henry Rollins


Henry Rollins - 1997
    punk rocker into a universal soldier.  His enemies: slackers and hypocrites.  His mission: to steel your soul and rock your world."Rollins was frontman for the seminal punk band Black Flag, and since 1987 has led the Rollins Band, whose ninth album, Come In and Burn, was just released by DreamWorks.As a spoken-word artist, he regularly performs at colleges and theaters worldwide and has released eight spoken-word audiotapes.  His album Get in the Van won the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for 1995.  As an actor, he has appeared in The Chase, Johnny Mnemonic, Heat, and David Lynch's forthcoming film, Lost Highway.  From his days as front man for the band Black Flag and the current Rollins Band to his books and spoken-word audiotapes, Henry Rollins is the music, the attitude, and the voice that takes no prisoners.  In his twelve books, he has led us on a hallucinatory journey through the decades--and his mind--with poems, essays, short stories, diary entries, and rants that exist at "the frayed edges where reality ends and imagination begins" (Publishers Weekly).  For the first time, the best of his legendary, no-holds-barred writings are available.  This collection includes new photos and works from such seminal Rollins books as:High Adventure in the Great OutdoorsArt to Choke HeartsBang!Black Coffee BluesGet in the VanDo I Come Here Often?SolipsistPlus never before released stories and more...

Feast Your Eyes


Myla Goldberg - 2019
    When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition. Narrated by Samantha, Feast Your Eyes reads as a collection of Samantha’s memories, interviews with Lillian’s friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian’s journals and letters—a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity.ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories


Tim Burton - 1997
    Now he gives birth to a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children – misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel, cruel worlds. His lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and the tragedy of these dark yet simple beings – hopeful, hapless heroes who appeal to the ugly outsider in all of us, and let us laugh at a world we have long left behind (mostly anyway).

Landscape at the End of the Century


Stephen Dunn - 1991
    Dunn's landscape at the end of the century embraces the spectrum of urgencies and obsessions that we live with and for. It's a landscape that we share with citizens and spies, revelers and mourners, women who weep, men who keep secrets, and especially with the poet himself.

Slaves of New York


Tama Janowitz - 1986
    Instead they find high rents, faithless partners, and dead-end careers. Offbeat, funny and bitingly satirical, "Slaves of New York" sheds an incomparable light on the city's denizens and social mores.