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This second collection by Nikki Wallschlaeger contains sonnets and sonnet sequences, incorporating allusions to foremothers Wanda Coleman, Lucille Clifton & Bernadette Mayer, among others. Whereas her first volume of poetry, Houses, explored lived-in space, Crawlspace goes deeper, under, beyond.
The fourth book by Peter Davis, author of TINA, Hilter's Mustache, and Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!
One of a series of titles first published by Faber between 1930 and 1990, and in a style and format planned with a view to the appearance of the volumes on the bookshelf. This was the Poet Laureate's fourth book of poems for adults, and represented a significant moment in his writing career.
Did somebody say Jen Knox's poems "read like Richard Pryor with an MFA"? Yes, somebody did. (It was John Findura in Verse Magazine.) She's also been compared to comedian Sarah Silverman, artist Jeff Koons, a 10-year-old who can't keep her mouth shut, and cartoonist R. Crumb. None of these equations is quite right, however. Jennifer L. Knox's work is unmistakably her own: darkly hilarious, surprisingly empathetic, utterly original. DRUNK BY NOON is the eagerly awaited sequel to Knox's first book, A GRINGO LIKE ME, which is also available from Bloof in a new edition. Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to the Best American Poetry Series and her poems have also appeared in Great American Prose Poems and Great American Erotic Poems. For more information, see www.jenniferlknox.com.
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Ginger Ko's INHERIT is a multi-generational testament of the trauma of immigration, domesticity, flight, and intergenerational wounds. Writing as a woman first, Ko lays bare a collective "I" in this raw, measured record of inheritance that writes into the gap between generations of women rendered alien by their experience. In the book's two sequences, Ko takes great care to disclose how past personal afflictions can act as a catalyst for finding future lines of escape. INHERIT is not a push for resolution. Instead, impelled by "a constant fear of furthering the sequence," Ko pushes to be heard as something more than a "woman and not white." The result is a powerful collection of poems relentlessly questing for an answer: how do you come to accept and own your whole self?
"'It feels good, ' says Danielle Pafunda, 'to conduct the world's violence on the page. It's my response to violence without doing or incurring much violence. It's how I navigate through it.' The fifth poetry collection by Danielle Pafunda, Natural History Rape Museum centers around an unnamed speaker and her intimate/adversary, the fuckwad, in pieces interrupted (or violated) by their boxed-in titles. Further interrupting this narrative are a prose sequence and a menagerie of objects/animals/elements borne as totems by the speaker--a lump of coal, a stingray, a cord of wood, a wolf spider, an earthworm, the fly. The volume culminates in four linked essays on the subject of pain: The Bid for Pain, The Manner in Which Pain Becomes Me, Pain Beak-Pecks a Figurine, and Extraterrestrial Painsake. Exploring the more grotesque corners of the Gurlesque aesthetic, in Natural History Rape Museum Pafunda ventriloquizes through the unstable identities of her characters to create creepy tableaux that resemble--despite their vivid, violent excesses--the world we know." -- Publisher's description.
SHARE THE WEALTH trains a wry and closely-observing eye on chance, exploring a world in which we collectively stand always on the brink of change--for good or ill. Sometimes the roll of the die delights: Cherry leaves turn into tortillas, snowbanks wear makeup, and hotdog-sized caterpillars wander the night, munching pecan leaves. But death and hazard are present here, lurking beneath world's abundance--its overflow of bookstores, turkeys, paintings, freeways, and flowers. Still, these poems attune the reader to the strange riotous-ness of the universe, its wealth of natural abundance, sensory detail, and time. Balanced between gain and loss, these poems allow room for bliss as much as decay. Poetry.
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It's hard to resist using a game show announcer's voice when discussing Jennifer Knox's latest collection, Days of Shame & Failure. Knox knows how to draw human complexity out of absurdity and kitsch (and vice versa) without positioning herself above it. She is one of us, sharing our fear and wonder, and we feel this sense of community as if there were five million other viewers-a spin on Whitman's "multitudes"-watching along with us to see how she makes it out of each lyrically harrowing poem. Is that camp? Is it satire? Who cares! "Whatever it is," as one poem reports, it gives me "a real, really felt feeling," and that's what I'm a sucker for every time. -Gregory Pardlo, winner of the Pul...
Finalist for the National Book Award: “A family saga in the manner of Gabriel García Márquez,” set in Puerto Rico, from an extraordinary storyteller (The New York Times Book Review). This riveting, multigenerational epic tells the story of two families and the history of Puerto Rico through the eyes of Isabel Monfort and her husband, Quintín Mendizabal. Isabel attempts to immortalize their now-united families—and, by extension, their homeland—in a book. The tale that unfolds in her writing has layers upon layers, exploring the nature of love, marriage, family, and Puerto Rico itself. Weaving the intimate with the expansive on a teeming stage, Ferré crafts a revealing self-portrait of a man and a woman, two fiercely independent people searching for meaning and identity. As Isabel declares: “Nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is the color of the glass you’re looking through.” A book about freeing oneself from societal and cultural constraints, The House on the Lagoon also grapples with bigger issues of life, death, poverty, and racism. Mythological in its breadth and scope, this is a masterwork from an extraordinary storyteller.