Download or read book Viper Rum written by Mary Karr and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-09-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her third collection of poetry, Viper Rum, Mary Karr delves into autobiographical subject matter; various beloveds are birthed and buried in these touching lyrics, some of which, as the title suggests, deal with drink: I cast back to those last years I drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink, bathrobed, my head hatching snakes, while my baby slept in his upstairs cage and my marriage choked to death Precise and surprising, Karr's poems "take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own" (Poetry). Also included is Karr's controversial and prize-winning essay "Against Decoration," in which she took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days-the "new formalism" that elevates form to an end itself.
Download or read book Viper Rum Poetry written by Mary Karr and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her first book since "The Liar's Club", Karr delves into the autobiographical subject matter of her two early collections. Various beloveds are birthed and buried in these lyrics, some of which--as the title suggests--deal with drink. Exact and surprising, her poems "take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own" ("Poetry").
Download or read book The Devil s Tour written by Mary Karr and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her celebrated essay "Against Decoration," published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a "new formalism" that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are "humanist poems," written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil's Tour, her newest collection, she writes: "This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell ... I myself am hell."
Download or read book Trickster Feminism written by Anne Waldman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman - an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion and activism Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, Anthropocene blues, litany and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of months of protests with some texts penned in the streets. Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.
Download or read book The Middle Ages written by Roger Fanning and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection from a Whiting award and National Poetry Series winner. Thomas Lux has called Roger Fanning "an American original...[whose] poems are so pure, so piercing, so simple, so distilled that reading him is like taking a drunk-with-language dive into a moonlit lake on a night you believe you will live forever!" Fanning writes surprising and evocative poems that are filled with humor and ingenuity; Mary Karr says he "tunes us in to those minuscule instants of revelation that can keep life from being a long zombie convention." This new collection of poems, Fanning's first in more than ten years, in part chronicles a period of time when he suffered a break with reality, and continues his investigations into the drudgeries, the disappointments, and the joy of our daily lives.
Download or read book Night School written by Carl Dennis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful new collection of poetry from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize The poems in Carl Dennis’s thirteenth collection, Night School, are informed by an engagement with a world not fully accessible to the light of day, a world that can only be known with help from the imagination, whether we focus on ourselves, on people close at hand, or on the larger society. Only if we imagine alternatives to our present selves, Dennis suggests, can we begin to grasp who we are. Only if we imagine what is hidden from us about the lives of others can those lives begin to seem whole. Only if we can conceive of a social world different from the one we seem to inhabit can we begin to make sense of the country we call our own. To read these poems is to find ourselves invited into a dialogue between what is present and what is absent that proves surprising and enlarging.
Download or read book Certain Magical Acts written by Alice Notley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important new work of poetry from Alice Notley, winner of the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest work sets out to explore the world and its difficulties, from the recent economic crisis and climate change to the sorrow of violence and the disappointment of democracy or any other political system. Notley channels these themes in a mix of several longer poems - one is a kind of spy novella in which the author is discovered to be a secret agent of the dead, another an extended message found in a manuscript in a future defunct world - with some unique shorter pieces. Varying formally between long expansive lines, a mysteriously cohering sequence in meters reminiscent of ancient Latin, a narration with a postmodern broken surface, and the occasional sonnet, these are grand poems, inviting the reader to be grand enough to survive, spiritually, a planet's ruin.
Download or read book Madness written by Sam Sax and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the National Poetry Series Competition In this powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.
Download or read book Box written by Robert Wrigley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful new collection from an acclaimed, award-winning poet With nine previously published collections of poetry, Robert Wrigley has become one of his generation's most accomplished poets, renowned for his irony, power, and lucid style and for his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. Wrigley's tenth collection, Box, is a book of poems obsessed with human containment, with the way people are contained or confined—by time, mortality, technology, identity, culture, and history—in almost everything they are and everything they do. Even the body, even the poem itself, is in this regard a kind of self-containing crate, in which the human being, perhaps the human spirit, is shipped into the world at large. But Box is also a book obsessed with escape from containment, and escape comes from dreams, from deep awareness, from contemplation, from love, and above all, as Wallace Stevens insisted, from "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality." The poems in Box aim to do nothing less than "help people live their lives," as Stevens put it.
Download or read book Mixology written by Adrian Matejka and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series by Kevin Young The poems in Adrian Matejka's second collection, Mixology, shapeshift through the myriad meanings of "mixing" to explore and explode ideas of race, skin politics, appropriation, and cultural identity. Whether the focus of the individual poems is musical, digital, or historical, the otherness implicit in being of more than one racial background guides Matejka's work to the inevitable conclusion that all things-no matter how disparate-are parts of the whole.
Download or read book Rift of Light written by William Logan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New work from a poet who "seems to be getting stronger with each collection" (David Yezzi, The New Criterion) William Logan is widely admired as one of our foremost masters of free verse as well as formal poetry; his classical verve conjures up the past within the present and the foreshadowings of the present within the past. In their sculptural turns, their pleasure in the glimmerings of the sublime while rummaging around in the particular, the poems in Rift of Light, Logan's eleventh collection, are a master class of powerful feeling embedded in language. Ranging from Martin Luther to an abandoned crow, from a midwife toad to a small-town janitor, from actress Louise Brooks to Dürer's stag beetle, Logan shows an encyclopedic attention to the passing world. Dry, witty, skeptical, these dark and acidic poems prove a constant and informing delight.
Download or read book Blue Rose written by Carol Muske-Dukes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of emotionally rich, issue-oriented poems from an award-winning poet whose work “has long been essential reading” (Jorie Graham) Carol Muske-Dukes has won acclaim for poetry that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and lyrical intensity. The poems in her new collection, Blue Rose, navigate around the idea of the unattainable – the elusive nature of poetry, of knowledge, of the fact that we know so little of the lives of others, of the world in which we live. Some poems respond to matters of women, birth, and the struggle for reproductive rights, or to issues like gun control and climate change, while others draw inspiration from the lives of women who persisted outside of convention, in poetry, art, science: the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the scientist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, and the Californian poet and writer Ina Coolbrith, the first poet laureate ever appointed in America.
Download or read book Spell written by Ann Lauterbach and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of provocative work from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous, and intellectually charged work. In her tenth collection, Spell, Lauterbach activates the many meanings of "spell": her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life's difficulties and wonders, and how sin-gle words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition. In short poems, poem sequences, and a series of "Conversations with Evening," Lauterbach calls upon all her imaginative resources to locate a new hybrid poetics of reality, with wit, urgency, and candor.
Download or read book Plenty written by Corinne Lee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a springboard, Corinne Lee’s second book of poetry is an eco-epic that investigates and embodies the deterioration of America’s environment due to industrial agriculture, fossil fuels, war, racism, and technology. Lee’s book-length work draws upon a variety of poetic forms and histories—especially events in 1892, which included a surge in lynching in America and the beginning of our coup d’état of Hawaii—to examine how modern technology facilitated the Holocaust, sustains America’s racist prison industrial complex, fuels climate change, and ultimately underlies what has been called the Sixth Extinction. A daring and dazzling narrative of great originality, Plenty advocates a feminist ecobuddhist perspective: only by dismantling false hierarchies, especially those of patriarchal capitalism, are we able to recognize that all agents of environmental collapse are one with us.
Download or read book A Woman of Property written by Robyn Schiff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham) Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?
Download or read book Map to the Stars written by Adrian Matejka and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A resonant new collection of poetry from Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Map to the Stars, the fourth poetry collection from National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka, navigates the tensions between race, geography, and poverty in America during the Reagan Era. In the time of space shuttles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, outer space is the only place equality seems possible, even as the stars serve to both guide and obscure the earthly complexities of masculinity and migration. In Matejka's poems, hope is the link between the convoluted realities of being poor and the inspiring possibilities of transcendence and escape—whether it comes from Star Trek, the dream of being one of the first black astronauts, or Sun Ra's cosmic jazz.
Download or read book The Crazy Bunch written by Willie Perdomo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a prize-winning poet, a new collection that chronicles a weekend in the life of a group of friends coming of age in East Harlem at the dawn of the hip-hop era Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixes "city life with a sense of the transcendent" (NPR.org). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a "crew" coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s. In poems written in couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo recreates a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events: "That was the summer we all tried to fly. All but one of us succeeded."
