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Everything Awake was written during a dreamy, disorienting period of insomnia. In the middle of the night, I began studying Catullus, imagining that his hendecasyllabic rhythms might shush me to sleep. Instead, they prompted a series of eleven-line poems with eleven syllables per line. I was drawn to the number, via Catullus, because it felt both excessive and insufficient, just like the space of an insomniac's day. Eleven opened up onto an expanse in which I could think about dwelling, in a day, at the foot of a wind-swept mountain, in a family of humans, animals and plants, all of whom needed my care. Like Catullus's neoteric poems, these poems attempt to bring the private, domestic space ...
A portrait in poems of the back-to-the-land movement of the '70s: the hippies and hicks, addictions and attempts at recovery.
The Method is a manuscript of theorems and proofs written and diagrammed by the mathematician Archimedes in Syracuse around 250 bc. The Method is a book of poems by Sasha Steensen. The former is a text that has survived, at least in parts, through a series of processes that includes palimpsesting, thievery, obscurantism, acquisition, and conservation. The latter text takes the former and its history, which has been invisible, overwritten, and requisitioned for use value, as a jumping-off place for her own meditation on the relationships that develop between a person and her historical truth, a person and her writings. Steensen's The Method treads carefully in the terrain of fact that foregrounds her investigations, and emerges centuries and centuries on in the only moment that remains to us. "I thought:// The Method, so happily recovered./ I am the one who called us all together./ I driven time./ I wars and waves./ I was./ I go over sea-lanes rife with fish./ I did not.// I saw a shadow on the water./ I know this situation makes a perfect poem,/ but I will not."
"Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both, are the themes of [Chelsey] Minnis's second collection."--Publishers Weekly "Decadent! Childish! . . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."--Arielle Greenberg "Her poems take some getting used to."--Robert Strong "Many won't find her . . . acceptable at all...--Cole Swensen
Recent years have seen the arrival of new approaches to writing about landscape. Partly to do with new eco-sensibilities, this is however also due to a realisation that landscape writing need not be confined to literary tourism, and to the injection of radical poetic styles. This is the first volume to engage with this new wave of writing.
"Here is an astonishingly generous gathering of poetic energies and imaginations aimed toward turning more and more classrooms into scenes of transformative engagement with the prime instrument of our humanity, language. The essential work of exploratory play with words is presented in heartening variety in its necessary wildness, surprising pleasures, gravitas, illumination. This book is a catalogue of invention: visionary, pragmatic, surprising, fun---useful because it's inspiring and vice versa. The poets' essays are themselves an affirmation of the vital presence of poetry in our culture, proof and promise, Q.E.D."---Joan Retallock, coeditor, Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, and author, The Poethical Wager --Book Jacket.
The Poet's Novel provides a unique entrance to the prose and poetry of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including: Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting and action. The contributors, all poets in their own right like, Brian Blanchfield, Brandon Brown, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C.D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprising results.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin', the warmhearted and hilarious story of how his life was transformed by his love for a poorly behaved, half-blind stray dog. Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber and screen door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the Fed Ex man, picking fights with thousand-pound livestock, and rolling in donkey manure, and his nights howling at the moon. He has been that way since the moment he appeared on the ridgeline behind Rick Bragg's house, a starved and half-dead creature, seventy-six pounds of wet hair and poor decisions. Speck arrived in Rick's life at a moment of looming uncertainty. A cancer diagnosis, chemo, kidney failure, and recurring pneumonia had left Rick lethargic and melancholy. Speck helped, and he is helping, still, when he is not peeing on the rose of Sharon. Written with Bragg's inimitable blend of tenderness and sorrow, humor and grit, The Speckled Beauty captures the extraordinary, sustaining devotion between two damaged creatures who need each other to heal.
"Wave Says is an invitation to tune in. With taut lyrics and pressurized white space, K.M. English's debut listens into the gaps, sensing into an experience of time, self, and world as perpetually shifting interactions 'circuitries hot to touch... where the depths are believable'. Through an intensely felt, impressionistic poetics in conversation with Dickinson, Celan, Woolf and Olson, as well as a more contemporary lineage of U.S. women experimental poets, Wave Says enacts a theory of energies-in-presence by collapsing perceived borders between interior/exterior, past/present, and the living/dead and rendering a relational, distinctly feminist matrix of language, history, feeling, body, and...
In The Melancholy of Anatomy, his ninth collection of poetry, Martin Corless-Smith turns his attention towards ageing and mortality, and in particular to the death of his father. Shifting between formal verse and prose, from the metaphysical to the whimsical, from surreal to anecdotal, the book moves between poetic articulations as a mind might through memories, sifting to find anything to hold on to as everything flows and falls away. At times melancholic at times nihilistic at times luminous and dark, this collection asks questions about poetry, memory and what it is to have loved and lived. Praise for The Fool and The Bee: "Corless-Smith has an extraordinary eye for detail and this meticu...