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Poetry
Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Joy Harjo, Danusha Lameris, Ada Limon, Kevin Young, Arthur Sze, Ellen Bass, Li-Young Lee, Natasha Trethewey, and many more. The editor also includes an essay on appreciative attention and links to guided meditations for select poems, offering us a chance to have an even deeper experience of reflection.
A companion to On Writing and On Cats: A raw and tender poetry collection that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us.
Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a "passionate madman." In On Love, we see Bukowski reckoning with the complications and exaltations of love, lust, and desire. Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love--its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.
Bukowski is brilliant on love--often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. "My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough," he writes, "as the same cat crouches."
Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.
How does a love poet fall out of her marriage and back in love with the world? What happens when you grow up to be the "kind of person who..."? These fairytales are for the heartbreakers as much as the heartbroken, for those smitten with wanderlust, for those who believe in loving this world through art.
A singular flow of bewildered brilliance, Emily Carr's swiftly flowing sequence of love poems--divorce poems, really--engages the very real problem of falling out of love because (admit it!) you never think you will. No matter how many times it's happened before. Imagine it: not limiting love to the erotic but embracing endeavor, struggle, social change, and political action. Love as consciousness, inventiveness, and intention. In a world that hurts as much as it holds.
Carr's swell of gorgeous psychedelia is presented in a lavish book-object befitting the work's interconnected, page-defying sweep of line upon line:
between her thighs, the buffalo holding sky.
saucers of mountain sway. deities spill, shining & suffering ...
not forgetting we can't ever--whose fury sings like eagles--
skeletons unlean from fruit trees, falling
like white gunsmoke, we want/ to be here. listen.
the wind has blown all the birds from our hair.
A new collection of poetry inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, exploring topics of feminism, art, depression, and grief, by the author of the prizewinning collection Obit.
Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square. With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.
Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the Braille slate to sensuous prose poems to incisive erasures that find new narratives in nineteenth-century poetry. Calling out the limitations of the literary canon, Clark includes pathbreaking translations from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language built on touch.
How to Communicate embraces new linguistic possibilities that emanate from Clark's unique perspective and his connection to an expanding, inclusive activist community. Amid the astonishing task of constructing a new canon, the poet reveals a radically commonplace life. He explores grief and the vagaries of family, celebrates the small delights of knitting and visiting a museum, and, once, encounters a ghost in a gas station. Counteracting the assumptions of the sighted and hearing world with humor and grace, Clark finds beauty in the revelations of communicating through touch: "All things living and dead cry out to me / when I touch them."
A rare work of transformation and necessary discovery, How to Communicate is a brilliant debut that insists on the power of poetry.
"Coe is a poet's poet, a jazzy, postmodern Ben Johnson . . . understated, but shimmering with wit, compassion, integrity of purpose." -- The Phoenix