Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
Attic boxes full of shards. Family stories full of secrets. A grandchild wondering what to save and what to throw away seeks to make sense of what it means to inherit anything at all. In The Forage House, the speaker unravels a rich and troubling history. Some of her ancestors were the Randolph Jeffersons, one of Virginia's most prominent slaveholding families. Some were New England missionaries. Some were dirt-poor Appalachians. And one was the brilliant,...
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English
Description
Leia Penina Wilson's "i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown)" is at once a love ballad and a warning. These poems are-at their simplest-about relationships, sex, love, creatures, different kinds (and degrees) of violence, and-at their most complex-about the limits of the imagination, of language, and about the power the imagination has over the body. These poems confront the shifty line between human and animal,...
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English
Description
Based on the true story of Sarah Ellen Gibson, the sixth woman to arrive in Fairbanks, Alaska, in the gold rush of 1903, this novel in poems incorporates a wide variety of style-persona, narrative, and lyric poems, as well as historical photographs and documents-to tell Gibson's story. Through these poems, the reader is offered the chance to try on the dusty, mining-town overcoat of Gibson's life.
4) Quiet Money
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Language
English
Description
The poet's first full-length collection, Quiet Money's New Edition consists almost exclusively of longer narrative poems, including the title poem about a bootlegger/pilot who flew the Atlantic solo before Charles Lindbergh. This piece is often cited as one of the most important poems of the 1980s and the movement to revive storytelling in verse.
Author
Language
English
Description
Prolific writer Gary Soto introduces the beauty of the much neglected literary form, the "proverb." His proverbs are quirky, fun, urban and enlightening for all ages. Some people might consider the literary genre of proverbs to be stodgy or out of date, perhaps pretentious and irrelevant in our techy world. Not so with Meatballs for the People: Proverbs to Chew On. These proverbs are all original, all beckoning for verbal debate and discussion, and...
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English
Description
Vanishing Point concerns memory, cognition, history, and morality, as experienced through the process of aging and as seen largely through a seriocomic lens. The range is wide, from arrestingly dark to downright hilarious sometimes both at once and all stages in-between. The poet Jim Daniels has said about this book, With profound wit and humility, with a purity and clarity of language that defines our best poetry, [Trowbridge] takes us on a wild...
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English
Description
In John Barr's poems, the ancient masters encounter the modern world. Dante on a beach in China beholds the Inferno: "Flaring well gas night and day, / towers rise as if to say, / Pollution can be beautiful." Bach's final fugue informs all of nature. Villon is admonished by an aging courtesan. Aristotle finds "Demagogues are the insects of politics. / Like water beetles they stay afloat / on surface tension, they taxi on iridescence." And his afterlife:...
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English
Description
In Alan Lightman's new book, a verse narrative, we meet a man who has lost his faith in all things following a mysterious personal tragedy. After decades of living "hung like a dried fly," emptied and haunted by his past, the narrator awakens one morning revitalized and begins a Dante-like journey to find something to believe in, first turning to the world of science and then to the world of philosophy, religion, and human life. As his personal story...
Author
Publisher
Red Hen Press
Language
English
Description
"Both daring and exacting, Torn from the Sun, journeys through the ensnarements of mortality. The poems' meditations, rendered in supple language and form, invite us to step along with the likes of Miyamoto Musashi, John Coltrane, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vincent Van Gogh, as they fly and fall through labyrinthine paths of life. Torn from the Sun weaves mosaic steps that stir the ashes of rebirth, recognizing that these bewildering,...
10) In the ice house
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English
Description
Genevieve Kaplan's In the ice house offers an innovative meditation on domestic life and the physical world that surrounds it, chronicling "at least the beginnings of some disaster" taking place in a landscape that "had no symmetry." Deftly channeling poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, as well as invoking Kaplan's own distinct poetic sensibility, these poems reveal an atmospheric and wondrous world filled with odd and compelling images....
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English
Description
A collection of poetry with "resilience throughout and an awareness of the common world that both comforts and devastates" (Dorianne Laux, award-winning author of Only As the Day Is Long).
From Tina Schumann, recipient of the American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal and a Pushcart Prize nominee, comes a full collection of fifty-six poems reflecting on the concept of self, loss, fragility, and the constructs we must create in order to...
Author
Language
English
Description
Run Away to the Yard is a unique collection of poems that addresses personal identity within the contemporary culture. In parable-like vignettes and metaphor-dense portraits, Krueger's poems challenge old notions of self, asking readers to reconsider what brings meaning to daily life. Through the lens of close observation―much like a photographer―Krueger examines the complexity of our responses to a convoluted world. Poems ask us to consider who...
13) Hold Me Tight
Author
Language
English
Description
In five poetic sequences, Jason Schneiderman's Hold Me Tight considers life in a new age of anxiety as technology and violence inform new forms of selfhood and apocalypse seems always around the corner. Starting with a long poem about his own struggle to find peace, the collection is searingly grounded in the personal, anchored to Schneiderman's own life. The collection moves to a sequence of parables about wolves, which obliquely consider intractable...
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English
Description
Percival Everett's The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document-a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training...
15) Sex Augury
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Language
English
Description
• A STRONG VOICE IN THE QUEER COMMUNITY C Bain is a Gender Liminal poet who pushes the envelope of normal expectation
• LAMBDA LITERARY FELLOW C Bain challenges stereotypes of gender and sex, and puts forth a realistic portrait of the world in his second poetry collection
• ESTABLISHED LITERARY COMMUNITY MEMBER C Bain is a poet, performer, playwright, and artist.
16) Bone Willows
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Language
English
Description
In the Alaska-based poems of Bone Willows, the wheel of the year spins faster than in the Lower Forty-Eight: "Arctic spring bicycles down a bookcase." And the frantic course of time affects everything from non-human nature to the ways a couple with a small child make their way in the world. Here, animals "glow with no light," friends remind each other that "it will break again, the push will come and it will all break again," and home is "a secret...
Author
Language
English
Description
In The Sound acclaimed poet David Mason collects his best shorter work of the past forty years, including lyrics like "Song of the Powers" and darkly brilliant narratives "The Collector's Tale" and "The Country I Remember," which Anthony Hecht called "a welcome addition to the best that is now being written by American poets." A poet of love and history and nature, Mason forges a language that can reconnect us to the world.
18) Call Me Fool
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Language
English
Description
Written by the former Poet Laureate of Missouri!
ACCESSIBLE, HUMOROUS POETRY: Trowbridge writes of the comedic escapades of "The Fool", a character that blunders through history, inadvertently creating everything from caveman art to the first piano.
19) The Diviners
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Language
English
Description
A book-length poem that brilliantly reinvents narrative poetry, The Diviners is a single poem divided into five chapters, each a different decade. McDowell relates the most crucial developments in each decade spanning from the 1950s through 1990s, of the shared lives of Al, Eleanor, and their son, Tom. The Diviners records in blank verse the family's beginnings, their growth, their problems, their separation, and their ultimate reunion. The events...
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English
Description
From the award-winning author of Kettle Bottom, a sequence of fairytale-inspired narrative poems concerning the life of a troubled girl.
Once upon a time, there lived a girl whose story was not her own ...
So the story goes: Neglected and abused by her family, eclipsed by her elder and more beautiful sister, a young girl longs for happily-ever-after, for something, someone to rescue her. She is soon swept away into the next chapter of her life:...
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