Modern and contemporary poetry
Two Rivers Press The Blue Armchair
Book SynopsisIn The Blue Armchair, his third collection, John Froy seeks to rediscover his mother after her death in poems widely and wildly various. But which mother? The inspiring painter he hardly saw, a reckless mother he saw too much of? Or an ill, unhappy woman? These complications provide the background, but others too often take centre stage. We meet father, siblings, step-parents, a grandmother and a tragic grandfather, lovers and friends. In poems written over twenty years that don't flinch from pain, loss, and mental health issues, we also find much family love, art, colour, scented flowers, food and wine. We travel across the world, encounter the earth mother, Gaia, get up to hear the dawn chorus. An artist stepfather shines through, as we end with the joys in being a grandfather.Trade Review‘A complicated mother provides the impetus for these beautifully crafted poems. The poet moves from a fractured childhood to maturity with honesty and intelligence. A first-rate volume of poetry. Do read it!’ — Myra Cottingham; ‘This mosaic of poems, a loving attempt to gather the shards of life of a tantalising woman. The writer uses a very delicate touch in evoking amusing, disturbing and richly rewarding moments in the life of a diasporic family’ — Elke Asmus
£10.79
Granta Publications Ltd Brother Poem
Book SynopsisA speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG. At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others. From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can't be seen. Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.Trade ReviewAfter the triumph of RENDANG, Will Harris takes us in this captivating new collection to a place altogether stranger, where the self is polished to a blur and memory a series of forking paths: 'Each time / you forget & remember the experience / becomes truer.' With uncommon brilliance and linguistic originality, this is a book that unpicks the myths we weave around ourselves as individuals or as nations. Harris is a poet I turn to for the solace of an idea perfectly caught. These are poems to dwell in; they challenge and restore. -- Sarah Howe, author of Loop of JadeIn Brother Poem, Will Harris questions the real in everyday life and words, through crumbs of the past, crumbs of experience, through absence and loss, through media harm, 'cloudless dream,' and 'river mind,' migrating in the lines-what to say and how or to whom to address it? When the spirit moves as they do in these poems to you, carried forth in 'I-not-I' and others, bound by Harris's scopic reach and cortical hum, crackling like lightning in a jar, released into our cells of shared feelings, we jubilate. -- Jeffrey Yang
£10.44
Granta Publications Ltd We Play Here
Book SynopsisFour female friends navigate the political turbulence of North Belfast in the late 80s in this extraordinary, evocative verse novel We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class childhood, and a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships,in the years before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known.Trade ReviewAn extraordinary, enviably great debut. Watson has that rare ability to capture the ever-present strangeness of childhood and to use that to let us into a specific history with intellectual and imaginative generosity. There is taut, lyrical focus on every page, but overall, a game-changing narrative long poem you'll want to keep close. -- Luke KennardA unique new voice in poetry who reminds us that what some people call history, others might call memory; and what some might deem a city, others might insist is actually the individual topography of their childhood -- Andrew McMillanDawn Watson gives us a closely-mapped, child's-eye-view of a North Belfast community in the mid-1980s. Watson's sequences, in the voices of four 12-year-old girls, record this broken world innocently, movingly and often humorously - but, more than this, through their attention to beauty and wonder, they map these girls' inner lives, where imagination and poetry itself survive. -- Leontia Flynn
£11.69
Crumps Barn Studio A Chair at the Cafe: a journey in verse filled
Book Synopsis"I see the hut, its weathered state a focus for an artist's eye; worn and brown amid white-gold sand, a shape to break blue sea and sky ..." Cumbria, Spain, Devon and France - a beautiful poetry collection written on location. Hilda Cochrane sets out on a journey filled with humour and a magical sense of place.
£7.59
Eyewear Publishing Death And Exes
Book SynopsisDeath and Exes explores the complexity of grief and the author''s struggle to process loss through consumption; of food, drugs, alcohol, pop culture, sex, and fashion. Buying and imbibing things are often looked at as superficial distractions that keep us from dealing with difficult emotions. In Death and Exes, they are touchstones that help remind us of who we are during the times we feel most untethered and alone. These are poems of mourning, but they are also a celebration of the life affirming power of, among other things, burlesque, RuPaul, Dolly Parton, Hellraiser, and Columbo.
£10.79
Eyewear Publishing The Art of Coming Undone
Book SynopsisThe Art of Coming Undone is American poet Christie Collins''s first full-length collection of poems, which includes artwork by Dutch artist Erna Kuik. At its core, this collection is a celebration of the self, of imagination, and of reinvention. Based largely on autobiographical events that trace a life-changing move from Louisiana to Wales, Collins''s poems also weave a narrative about the different kinds of love that shaped her story: love that is lost, unrequited love, the possibility of new love after heartbreak, and perhaps most importantly, learning to love and value the self. This collection reminds readers that while loss, setbacks, and struggles are an inevitable part of life, they are not defining. We each have the power to reshape ? and retell ? our stories and to start again.
£11.69
Eyewear Publishing Winter, Glossolalia
Book SynopsisIn poems as tautly constructed as they are trenchantly observed, Winter, Glossolalia probes the natureof language to depict the world from which it springs. Paired with humorous, often satirical images,this collection explores human ingenuity and creativity against the material resources of the givenworld, highlighting the possibilities and the limits of artistic making. In that sense, it is both a timelyand enduring book, one that recalls Virgil?s Georgics as readily as it evokes the crisis of anthropogenicclimate change.
£8.54
Eyewear Publishing Before the Cameras Leave Ukraine:: An Anthology
Book SynopsisIn February 2022, the world watched in horror as news outlets began reporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then tens of thousands of people have died, been wounded, and millions displaced. Poets worldwide rose tothe occasion, to create anthologies and compose poems to bear witness to this historic outrage. The 45 poems in this collection, ranging from polemic to artfully crafted verse (and sometimes both) have been curated by editor RebeccaGraham to express solidarity with the victims of war. This is a collection of poems about war, atrocity, trauma, survival, and being a refugee and consequently a book also about friendship, humanity, love, and the best of us. It is not a primer on hate, or a propaganda tool. Instead, it showcases how poetry can rise to historical moments, and formally engage chaos with authenticity, compassion and intelligence and above all, creativity. One hundred percent of the sales profits will go to the Sanctuary Foundation, a charity that helps to relocate Ukrainian people to safety and homes in the UK.
£11.69
Eyewear Publishing All These Things Aren't Really Lost
Book SynopsisEge Dundar is a young poet and activist from Turkey, forced to relocate to London and Berlin unable to return home for over seven years. His debut poetry collection, written in English, dives into the pain and longing that loss brings, contrasted by the beauty of all that has been found. Relating his experience with the struggle for human rights and a wider exodus of self-discovery, Dundar holds on to poetry when a titanic darkness descends and lights shine through minuscule cracks.''Space unveiled ahead, a quietude akin to death, a blue cocoon behind, vacuumed, like the shelter that is a breath.'
£10.79
Eyewear Publishing NAKED: The Honest Musings of 2 Brown Women
Book SynopsisThis impressive and enjoyable debut poetry collection by American-Tamil poet Selvi M. Bunce and Ugandan poet Mimi Mutesa is enriched with unique illustrations by Mimi. It is a fiery challenge to preconceptions of race and relationships through poems of autobiography and self-empowerment.These poems are bold, humorous, and uninhibited, charting revelatory journeys through the complexities of identity, family, love, and independence. Dedicated to all of us who are bad, brown and brazen.'
£10.79
Eyewear Publishing Technelegy
Book SynopsisAn essential handbook for our time of astonishing technological transformation by the world''s leading AI poet.In 2018, Sasha Stiles found herself wondering what the rise of large language models might mean for writers - and for creativity at large. To probe the possibilities, she began translating over a decade of analog poems and research into a personalized AI model, augmenting human voice with next-gen imagination.Crafted jointly by Stiles and her poetic alter ego, and first published in hardcover in 2021, Technelegy is a prescient artifact of the pre-ChatGPT era - a collection of generative poems nestled in their own training data - and an unprecedented experiment fusing past and future, woman and machine, verse and code, elegy and wordplay, in search of answers to the urgent question: what does it mean to be human in a nearly posthuman world?
£11.69
The Conrad Press fearsmallLOVEBIG
Book Synopsis‘fear small LOVE BIG’ is a pocket guide to the human condition, ideal for keeping by the bedside and dipping into when you need inspiration, reassurance, and gentle advice. A perfect antidote to the chaos and confusion of our times, this collection of clear, direct, and radiantly honest poems encourages the reader to look within for solutions. They are like gems gathered by an awakening soul, one who has gained plenty of experience along his own spiritual path from fear to love, from head to heart; and one who now accompanies others on their ‘voyages in time’. The text is sprinkled throughout with notes which honour some of the author’s sources of inspiration as well as offering suggestions for further reading.Table of ContentsDedication 9 Prologue 10 Introduction 11 1 Unalome 12 2 Winter Sun 16 3 Out of Reach 18 4 Eat Drink Work Sleep 21 5 Carousel 23 6 Arrogance 26 7 Breaking the Spell 30 8 Success 33 9 Another Tune 36 10 Chasing Me 40 11 The Screen 45 12 Fractured Narrative 47 13 Identity 51 14 Gravity 57 15 Cosmic Seed 61 16 Beyond Belief 64 17 Qualia 68 18 The Shadow 70 19 Claim Your Peace 80 20 Clarion Call 82 21 Sovereign 85 22 Mountain of Light 88 23 The Diamond Soul 98 24 Vitality 101 25 Merkablah 105 26 Contentment 107 27 The Door 109 28 Crossing the Rubicon 113 29 Out of the Blue 115 30 Pathway 117 31 All by Yourself 119 32 Mindless Meditation 121 33 Alignment 124 34 Superman 127 35 Sacred Lover 130 36 Paradox 132 37 Chocolate 133 38 Welcome 135 39 Wonder 137 40 Gratitude 139 41 Courage 143 42 Abandon 146 43 Faith 149 44 Terminus 150 45 Rise 152 Epilogue 154 Afterword 155
£9.49
The Emma Press Accessioning: 2023
Book SynopsisAstute, precise, and unsettlingly calm, Accessioning is an index of lives encased in museum glass, and then brought to life. Through poems about ‘fossilised fruit seeds’ and the sofa where Emily Bronte died, Wetton questions how we curate the lives of those living and dead, in a pamphlet about looking, processing, and memorialising. Whether considering preserved wedding-cakes, a non-existent art exhibition or a human scream, these poems speak to the impossibility of containment and question our ability to map and categorise. This is a pamphlet of poems about the stories that we tell ourselves, the memories that we construct, and the ways that we value and devalue people, animals and objects alike.
£7.00
The Emma Press Makeover: Poems: 2024
Book SynopsisMakeover is a book dripping with nostalgia, cigarette ash and sour cream dip. Lit by too-close TV screens and too-bright calorie counters, Bolger's poems explore growing up, differing bodies and societal expectations. Writing in praise of mums, nans and sisterhood, this is a work bursting with strength, anger, love and, ultimately, hope. In a celebration of girls shaped by swimming baths and Working Men's Clubs, friendship and family, Makeover contends with what we inherit and what we ought to pass on.Trade Review"Laurie Bolger's writing is a best friend, a memory, a picnic, a hug and a punch. "I want to live without weighing things" is maybe my favourite line of poetry this year, and definitely my new life motto. Stunning." - Hollie McNish
£7.00
Flapjack Press Jumping into a Waterfall
Book SynopsisFrom the seclusion of the Scottish isles to the urban vigour of Manchester to the lowlands of East Anglia, Anna Percy observes an ever-changing world wherein change is sometimes imperceptible. This passionate and enticing meditation of ecopoetry also explores modern feminism and its societal perception, whilst thematically embracing sensuality, mental health and wellbeing, love and loss. Contains adult themes and strong language.Trade Review"A vivid evocation of place and a celebration of life and the body. Her work suggests the oneness of self and environment; that separation is an illusion." - Steve O'Connor, poet & educator; "Raw as a fresh cut, yet finely crafted as a Grecian sculpture, this collection fills the void unfilled by every pithy self-help book and half-baked love song. Anna's finest work to date." - Genevieve L. Walsh, spoken word artist; "A signature understanding of imagination and skill. I feel invited into a quiet place of crowds and their secrets, knowingly held and softly told." - Gerry Potter, poet & playwright; "Anna is a fabulous, feminist fighter whose new collection takes you on a journey into self-exploration and change. A wonderful addition to her poetry legacy." - Shirley May, poet & founding director of Young Identity
£8.00
Poems and Pictures Ltd The Virus Poems
Book SynopsisThe Covid-19 virus outbreak of 2020 will forever be a pivotal part of human history. The impact was global and affected everyone on the planet. Here, in the UK, we managed the coronavirus in similar ways to other countries but also with a degree of Britishness that has defined us for centuries. Not that it was all good and it raised many issues about our culture and values. Hundreds of thousands caught the virus and many thousands died. The impact on the nation, on families and our very own NHS was palpable and at times, almost too much to bear. A Facebook group in Marlow was set up to help people, to communicate and provide support to anyone that might need it. It became incredibly important for many and it was here that Mike started writing 'The Virus Poems'. The journey began and ended sixty seven days later on the 31st May 2020. When you read just one poem it might touch you or amuse you. It is when you consider every subject that, without knowing, this has become a walk through our time in 'Lockdown' as this period will be forever known. We have also included alongside every poem an extract of the news headlines of the day to help you put the poems into some context.
£11.69
FUM D'ESTAMPA PRESS The Silent Letter
Book SynopsisAward-winning poet, translator, and academic, Jaume Subirana is one of Catalonia’s most treasured poets, winning some of its most prestigious prizes for his poetry and essays. In an eloquent translation from accomplished poet and translator Christopher Whyte, The Silent Letter showcases Subirana’s sharp observations, delicate eye for detail, stunningly beautiful images, and poignant suspension of the moment.Trade ReviewSasha Dugdale, award-winning poet and translator "I think Jaume’s work is astounding, I was grasping for ways to describe it: delicate and profound. The Silent Letter translated by Christopher Whyte who has reproduced the wonderfully taut lyric of Jaume’s Catalonian work. My Best Poetry of 2020 list would be alarming and capacious like a great aunt’s handbag – but it would definitely include this (The Silent Letter) on this morning’s reading...” Robert Pisani. Full review here If one is unsure about poetry or is wants to explore poetry in translation then The Silent Letter is a perfect primer and once again Fum d’Estampa Press have shown that they are a publisher with a high quality rate and are slowly becoming an indie powerhouse with each release (spoiler, there will be another review from this press in the near future). Bookmunch Literary Blog. Full review here In achieving balance and perspective – cultural resonance drawn from life, nature and simple observation – the author provides inspiration to pay quiet attention and live well. From Jackie Law’s blog review. Full review here. The poems bring to life the beauty of nature and its ability to calm inner turbulence. Time is given over to watching raindrops catching light on a windowpane. Snow blankets the ground, bringing with it a feeling of peace … Such visual pleasures are presented succinctly, avoiding the garish, leaving a contrail of enchantment in what many will fail to notice as they chatter and look forward to their next experience. The poems offer a cessation in the rush and noise – the fear of missing some opportunity that blinds to what is here already. From John-Paul Davies’ review for Buzz Magazine. Full review here. Subirana’s collection is beautifully presented in the original Catalan, with the English translation on the opposite page. If, like me, you’re not so good at reading Catalan, it’s still a treat to turn the words over in your mouth, with the meaning, so well-rendered by Whyte on the opposite page, bringing clarity. Not that Subirana’s poetry is reading that feels like work. It’s best summed up in the entirety of Buson In Venice, “The gilded splendor of / the sun on stones / tired of being beautiful”. In a time when making new memories worth cherishing presents a challenge, Subirana reminds us such moments are all around us, every day. From Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Full review here. Subirana’s poetry is very immediate, something I love; and his works range in length from haiku length verses to longer works stretching over several pages. The poet discusses love, life, nature, loss – the usual subjects you’d expect. I suppose – and in beautiful, elegant and evocative lines. I marvelled, as I often do, as to how a poet can capture so much in so few words, convey so much that’s actually not spelled out in their verses. Manuel Castaño, El Pais “Subirana delights the reader because he is a poet capable of illuminating the importance of the moment, because he concentrates in but a few words the implied dimensions of often banal episodes or fleeting thoughts. The poem, 84th Street, for example, paints a scene in which someone, probably a couple, contemplates a nocturnal storm from their 21st floor flat, therefore underlining their elevation above other, daily preoccupations. It’s a moment of tranquillity, but also of worry: “how many more streets / before we meet / our destiny.” His poetry is a spark of joy in the face of the vertiginous passing of time.” Jordi Llavina, Diari Ara “In yet another glorious snapshot of poetry of the interior (Family Cinema), Subirana’s beautiful microscopic view of life associates “a popcorn explodes” with the following line: “like snow, laughter / reverberates.” … He continues to convince us of his own personal truth and his discreetly magnificent writing.” Enric Umbert-Rexach, El Nacional “Subirana’s singular poetry expresses both the enigma and the perplexity it can provoke within the patient observer of landscape. He is enchanted by the triviality of the self before the grandiosity of the surroundings, bringing form to this through an austere, timeless poetry.” Enric Umbert-Rexach, El Nacional Gerard E. Mur, El Nuvol “Subirana plays with surprise, a game he is particularly good at when working with maximum brevity in his poetry.” Jordi Galves, La Vanguardia “Subirana is ever faithful to his poetry, bringing it to lifetime and again. His work is serene, excellent, full of echoes of literary standing and precise creativity. His is a mature, important poetry. Bravo.” Jordi Carrera, Un dia en les carreras “Subirana demonstrates yet again that he is a strong, sensitive, minimalist poet who writes because he is in tune with tones and bursts of colour, of smells and aromas, and touch. He constructs his objects carefully, building them through his text, imagery and all of the efimer pleaures that, quite naturally, are impossible to otherwise communicate.” Francesc Parcerisas “Open any of Subirana’s books at random and you will feel yourself carried away by the natural current of his beautiful poetry.”
£11.39
University of Massachusetts Press Poems in Absentia & Poems from The Island and the
Book Synopsis
£20.08
CavanKerry Press The History Hotel
Book SynopsisFormally innovative poems that engage with history and the individual. In his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the wide range of subjects and imaginative approaches that his readers have come to expect. Touching on topics such as the Jewish resistance, Godard films, and the National Football League, The History Hotel opens the door to both political and personal histories. This collection also introduces us to unforgettable characters—we follow alongside speakers as they drive through Kansas, as they memorize Shakespeare sonnets, and as they rehearse a love affair that went south. As Wormser’s collection reminds us, the historical circumstances that touch, strengthen, or shatter a life are also key to understanding it. We all live in the History Hotel, where love, betrayal, hope, and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems—poems that are alive to tradition but consistently inventive along the way.Trade Review“The History Hotel carries a mixture of quiet humor and hard-nosed insight. There’s little decoration here, no fluff to deflect our attention from what we know that we know—just the energetic presence of Wormser’s consistently cool, keen sensibility that is both bewildered and wise. It’s easy to forget the good work words can do. Line by line, these poems resuscitate our weathered, better selves and the ability to see beyond the lurid surfaces that slowly but surely overwhelm our lives. If the current times offer us a steady stream of absurdities, if we intend to hold onto a sense of compassion while trying to make a sensible way through these days, The History Hotel has cleared a rough path for us.” * Tim Seibles, author of 'Fast Animal' and 'One Turn Around the Sun' *“‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,’ wrote Shakespeare, and in The History Hotel Wormser does just that, beholding the world’s weariness with a thousand-yard stare and an eloquence that can spit nails or rain feathers. These all-too-aware poems have something sanguine to report: amid the soul-flattening wreckage of ‘greedy nations,’ somehow there is still amorous folly, chatter, longing, picnics in graveyards, childhood, and art. The History Hotel feels like poetry written at the event horizon of a black hole, in the stark light of a Hopper painting.” * Diana Goetsch, author of 'This Body I Wore' *“Wormser is a master wizard of world poetry and his stories in The History Hotel will frighten and exhilarate you while serving their forbidden and diabolic fruit. Wormser is writing here beyond the best of his already celebrated powers established early in his career with the American classic The White Words. In these new poems, each one a multi-faceted diamond of irony, pathos, nostalgia, wit, and wisdom, Wormser is riotously and painfully funny as the world teeters on its axis and hurtles towards oblivion, observing in ‘Ode to the Stock Exchange’ ‘that the earth was the cash / machine of the universe awaiting travelers from / other galaxies in need of a loan.’ In his elegy for the great Polish poet Zagajewski—and reading Wormser we enter a landscape smoldering after bombing, or hurtling on its own blind volition—Wormser finds a way to acknowledge the positive side of the two-faced coin and contradiction of human action; ‘Thank you, you said to Life / and somewhat remarkably she thanked you back.’ In this glorious volume written at the tail end of a comet sweeping dangerously close to earth, Wormser is building a house for today's inclement weather, thanking life in line after line for the chance to comment on the follies of its self-deluded and failed human stewards.” * Indran Amirthanayagam, author of 'Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant' *"The History Hotel is philosophical and charming, the work of a master poet that serenely takes the long view of life hope and despair swirled together." * The Lake *"Accomplished poetic craft has been a hallmark of Wormser’s poetry through more than four decades, and those who fear that the art’s traditional virtues–form, assonance, rhythm, deft rhyme–are endangered species will find them alive and well here.” * The Manhattan Review *Table of ContentsBriefI.OnceTalkNow and then it rains moneyOde to the Stock ExchangeNFL Poem (Annals of Male Americana)CountingThe New WaveElegy for the Poet Adam ZagajewskiII.State SongOn a Foreseen Death, August 4, 1962Dog Is My Co-PilotFor Raymond LévyA Memorable Occasion: Opening the DoorsAcesUpon the Death of the Actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, from “Acute Drug Intoxication”Reasons of StateSentenceIII.SelfieNight, Apartment Towers, ManhattanTwo Painters:1. Hopperesque2. John Singer Sargent1910Venus Aligned with MarsA Certain Teacher Does Some BankingThe ShuffleIV.And You, Thomas HardyTwo Songs:1. Outtake from Cymbeline2. DylanesqueSay “Uncle”Self-Portrait with BallOde to WorryOn EmpireLament for an Accountant (1959)“When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced”V.Lyric1893 1. Opium Den2. Plein AirThe BodyguardHerr Plath-DoktorRecalling Sophocles“I Have Themistocles the Athenian”Pandemic, Nursing Home, Wisconsin, November, 2020The History Hotel
£14.25
CavanKerry Press Boy
Book SynopsisA poetry collection focused on grief and the many ways it can impact a family. The death of a youngest child. An alcoholic and distant father. A grief-stricken family. A tentative faith. These are the building blocks of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history. Inspired by the death of her own younger brother, Tracy Youngblom has written a poetry collection that serves as a companion to grief. This book is for those who love poetry and those who are intimidated by it, those interested in the way childhood experience shapes life, and those interested in the psychology of addiction.Trade Review“‘I cried into a plaid shirt,’ Tracy Youngblom writes about the funeral of her younger brother. ‘Even / birdsong tacked to air scratched / our ears.’ Defiantly observant, fiercely intelligent, we meet the speaker of this book-length sequence as the pre-teen middle sister watching her family crumble and, decades later, as the mother of her own boys grappling with the past's ‘fragmented, mosaiced / wreckage.’ Youngblom pulls no punches here. In her thoroughly engrossing narrative, we find not elegy, but the powerful and intimate chronicle of a woman seeking answers.” * Annie Kim, author of 'Into the Cyclorama' and 'Eros, Unbroken' *“When Tracy Youngblom is a child herself, her younger brother dies, in a quick and utterly random accident. And then—the world goes on. This is the intimate and unvarnished truth of how that happens in a family, and the reality is so much more complex and varied than you could imagine: cold, desperate, cynical, cyclical, beautiful. Somehow Youngblom creates poems that are both unflinching and exquisite—just please read this book, you will never forget it.” * Kirsten Dierking, author of 'One Red Eye,' 'Northern Orchards,' and 'Tether' *"Though the individual poems capture unique insights into narrative microcosms, this work’s most generous offering is its presentation of a considered thought process on death and theodicy, arriving at the ongoing existential resilience that allowed the book’s own composition." * Michael Collins, Atticus Books *Table of ContentsPrologue"Imagine a mirror dropped" 1: The Other True Story"Before his heartbeat it was Christmas" "When my melon mother finally expelled" "The moon, that big innocent eye" "Up close everything is different" "A boy in a field is just a boy" "Breeze draws everything upward: sheets" "Stairs: a way to enter" “Late June: our world is giddy" "Such portent at your birth"2: Slide Becomes Fall"Summer: it’s wild, no holds barred" "In 1972, everyone has a finished basement" "Middle sister, I had time to grow" "Late June heat. I play catch" "We think a lot. But we can’t think" 3: Barely Any Words"To get really good at something" "Memories are like this: beach" "Silence of aftermath" "It sucks to be pure and predictable" "Even when it appears, the truth" "We could tell there was snot dripping" "We didn't know him except" "His objects are hidden all over"4: Suddenly Incomprehensible"The funeral has passed, we" "Jesus and Lazarus came back” "Look, it's the moon" "That first Christmas: presents" "The moon was just past full" "September came with its flagrant" “We prayed for others, not" 5: No Leaving“Aristotle Said” 6: Shapeless as the Dark"The way the wind holds its breath" "This is how to bear losing" "Never a time I get up when" "Indian summer carves" "My sister stares at me" "There were so many who didn’t know”“First, I chose the man—leapt” "So many ways to fall: carrying" “When my oldest son fell down the stairs" "Each time one of my three boys" "His arm was in a cast from his recent fall" "They will devour the centers" 7: Cries of Such Pitch "Two things I have learned" "I may have gotten this wrong" "Suppose the carrots I tug" "Not a field—a garden" "So strange I want to" "I am 50, and I've never seen" "We go to the house of fun" "Holding onto belief" "I am still surrounded by boys”
£14.25
Cameron & Company Inc Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence
Book SynopsisCartoon characters are routinely tossed off cliffs, shot, exploded, have their limbs thrown about. They return for the next episode intact. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricature—a cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor. Through the politics of the personal, examining memory, desire, grief, faith, and love, these poems are a disembodiment sermon, the frantic gathering of memory before confabulation or gaslighting. They are wishes; howls in love's name. They are considerations of the separation between lived experience and the witness, even as they inhabit the same body, illustrating the unreality of depression, the whir and fragmentation of constant analysis. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is about the process of mistaking people for cartoons, of making fortitude limitless, here, at a point in our collective history, where we seem to be calling for change in the unjust and systemic mistreatment of Black people, who have always been expected to pick up their broken pieces and try again. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is the moment before the anvil falls from its midair suspension; the roadrunner running out of road; the thin line between the phenomenology of the real and a vaguely familiar Tooniverse.Trade ReviewEvery single poem in Alexus Erin’s Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence comes directly from the mouth. This is an important voice that makes us question what happens when we hold on tighter to the ever-passing commercials and pixelated cartoons, questioning and voicing our true realities, especially in the contexts of violence and injustice. Erin’s full-length debut is an ars poetica that makes us jump into love—this is a book of constant focal points and priceless camera asides—it will make you hungry. - Dorothy Chan, Revenge of the Asian WomanIn Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin transmogrifies her sure-tongued words into Acme-type explosives, defying physics to puncture reality's patchwork. From the star-shaped holes her poems cut, golden hour light illuminates divinity in stillness and brutality: holy incense rising from a post-prom coffee, the hollow erasure that comes with grief, and the gut-punch pleasures of choral chord changes and pop-punk push pits. Her sleight-of-hand etymological slicing makes detours for Medieval cantatas, 1960s sitcoms, dreams, dances, desserts, and so much more—a giddy trajectory that traces lucid, crucial messages in smoke across the bright celluloid sky. – Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13In Cartoon Logic Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin shows the heartbeat beyond the pixels of human perception to the pains and joys therein. These poems journey, with a relentlessly curious and personal speaker's voice, from loss to body image to the multifaceted Black experience. In this book, we are illuminated as if on a technicolor screen. We vibrate with inescapable life. – Ashley M. Jones, author of REPARATIONS NOW! and Alabama Poet Laureate Alexus Erin’s words defy gravity. Not just in their elastic critique of how the world runs out of road for Black folks, but in the stretching of space & logic. In this brilliant debut collection, Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Erin’s poems push past the limitations of this dimension & offer a close-eyed intimate navigation of a world by hand. We watch the hands drawing the boundaries of this world with Erin’s words, its positioning, its havoc . . . This collection is electric. – Nabila Lovelace, author of Sons of Achilles and editor at DivedapperAlexus Erin knows there is a "tide to turn" — these poems are the storm to swell the water. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence investigates the complexity of life at the intersections: between Blackness and being "wholly and entirely a woman," between portrait and caricature, between fixture and fleeting mirage. These poems gaslight, they hide, they accuse, they flaunt, they speed off the edges of cartoon cliffs and hang there — "gravity negated by fear" — all in the name of steadying our gaze on ourselves. Look deeper. "How else does one encounter the God / question?" Truly, an expansive work. - Adam Falkner, author of The Willies
£12.34
Cameron & Company Inc Insomniac Sentinel
Book SynopsisA new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.Trade Review“This message from the kinetic yet ghostly realm of Wisconsin that suffuses Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel alive with its rural glossary, with its hidden waking clandestinely complex within seeming quotidian display. It scripts a lingual fuse of heresy, that absorbs particulates of human brewing, and what follows is a slow magnetic glow that suffuses the text not unlike a susurrant under-ringing. Thus, it emits by complexity by this glow letting us know that verbal life continues to not only thrive but quietly erupt and cascade from regions that we seemingly thought to be inert, always poetically aware of yielding circuitous treasure from what was thought to be a less than magnetic hamlet.” – Will Alexander, Pulitzer finalist for Refractive Africa and author of The Contortionist Whispers “you know, i am the giver/back of sound.” This bardic claim could only be true of Abraham Smith, who sings open-throatedly the continuous song of a crane lifting off the junkpile and into history’s storm. His song pushes through and around the language of working, of working bodies, both human and inhuman, raising it all up, illuminating it, as in a manuscript, indicating what is precious, as if sound could be the one thing it is not, and shed light. That’s the sad note in this “gravy-to-cradle” threnody, this “lunged-up thud tender.” Reading Abraham Smith makes you ask the big questions, like, are our wings made of the shreds of where we came from? Does a bird fly on its wing, or on its song?” — Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne “I can hear Abraham Smith’s voice intoning in his breathless and headlong fashion throughout his latest collection of poems. The verses practically read themselves to me, accompanied by an insistent rhythm a backbeat for music that these poems conjure up.” – Charlie Parr, Smithsonian Folkways recording artist and author of Last of the Better Days Ahead “Abraham Smith is one of my favorite living poets keeping the art form alive. He is patiently stoking the fires of imagination and his persistence has kept the cinders of inspiration smoldering. It is a joy to read his work and thrill to hear him read it in person.” – Margo Price, Grammy nominee, Farm Aid board member, and author of Maybe We’ll Make ItTable of ContentsCONTENTSTHE INSOMNIAC SENTINEL 7THEY PAINT 16SHELL LIFE 22DOUBLE VISION 29BRAKE 4 CRANES 35NATOMY 41WHY DANCE 47RIVER BLUES 56IN TIMES OF LOVELY LOVE 68IN KEY OF WISH RABBIT SINGS 74HOODWINK AUBADE 80YOUR ANCIENT & FRANKLY BREAKING UNDERWEAR 90WESTFIELD 95PURPLE MOUTH LIFE 106TOUCHSTONE BLUES 109WHY EAT WHY KILL 121
£12.34
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press Would We Still Be
Book SynopsisPoems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language. In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence—grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty—into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book’s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty’s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages—those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become—Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul’s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.Trade Review“This gorgeous debut felt like it came to me from another time and held me spellbound. I’m awed at Knippen’s skillful tensions, crafting rhetorical movements that seem at once bold and simple. Deeply imagistic, these poems manage to simultaneously be rooted and sensory, as well as elusive and incantatory. Knippen deftly weaves ghosts and lilies, wrens and windows, nouns serving like legends on a grief map. Knippen’s language draws us closer to an unnamed loss until we feel the heat of the wound, but not the death itself. But more than the ghost, the wonder. More than the longing, the lyrical leap into what we don’t know is coming but trust will be beautiful.” -- Traci Brimhall“From its first poem, this marvelous first book makes way for Knippen’s affinity for likeness, not as simple mirroring but likeness in total, compelled to include dissimilarity, and this habit of mind results in image-dependent poems that gather, layer, re-gather in a precarious and lavish state of being between. Knippen’s poems can bear the weight of their layered, sensory-driven realities because he’s clearly devoted to language as the most supple and true means of navigation. Rare for poets of his generation, he gives voice to being drawn toward as often as he surrenders to his will to say. Encountering these poems is exciting; the world and our thinking about it both enlarge.” -- Kathleen Peirce
£11.70
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at
Book SynopsisA collection of poems that delve into the experience of living with bipolar disorder. This collection of poetry explores the disruptive state of psychosis, with all its insights and follies, and the challenges of living life after a departure from the self. These poems reach for an understanding of the ecstasy and tragedy of madness through both lyric and prose forms that mimic the sublime state of mania through their engagement with language. Ordinary life becomes strange in these poems, which are playful and humorous at times and dark at others, as they seek resolution to the question of what happens when the mind overthrows the body.Trade Review“‘You are not alone,’ writes the poet on her dedication page. That beautiful assurance is addressed in particular to ‘those who are struggling with mental illness,’ but it is something, these poems convince us, that each and every one of us may take to heart. So perfectly does Metsker render a mind under pressure—from a punishing surfeit of stimuli, obsessive thoughts, proliferating options in a world of impediment—that, paradoxically, we are deeply comforted. Logic—and its torqued economies—do the work we normally assign to images: ‘I scour the obituaries, but they have no specific plans for me.’ The images themselves are crystalline: ‘The sugar in the sugar bowl hardens into a rock to represent one idea of patience.’ I am profoundly grateful for this marvelous book. On page after page, it demonstrates how intelligence, compassion, and poetry can triumph over chaos.” -- Linda Gregerson“In her exploration of mental illness, Metsker reminds me that poets are natural chroniclers of the line between a mind’s inventiveness and its unmooring. For a poem to function, the figurative has to feel real. Poems that draw us into their irrationalities can allow us to reach more rational states and understandings. While in poetry there is often this leaving sense and coming back to it, with mental illness, there is a similar, more severe leaving but not always a return. ‘Tomorrow will be another story, another pause by the window that could turn into a lifetime wearing cinched jackets.’ Just the opposite of a straight jacket, this book reads as a liberation from the fear that a familiar self, once lost, cannot be regained. While it’s ‘hard to stick a landing in sand,’ to find a way to sense when sense has been taken away, Metsker has done just that.” -- Bob Hicok
£12.35
Autumn House Press under the aegis of a winged mind
Book SynopsisThe poems in under the aegis of a winged mind are inspired by the life and times of the jazz composer and pianist Earl “Bud” Powell. Powell was a leading figure in the development of jazz, but throughout his life, he also faced struggles with police brutality, harassment, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental illness. In this collection, makalani bandele explores Powell’s life through a blend of both formal and free verse persona poems. These poems are multivocal, with the speaker often embodying Powell himself and sometimes a close friend or family member, the spectator of a performance, or a fellow musician. While the book follows the narrative of Powell’s life, the poems are experimental in form and presentation. Playing with, reinventing, and restructuring poetic form, bandele draws on blues and jazz music theory to serve as a basis for much of the work’s construction. He uses language to recreate the experience of music itself, and his poetry includes a multitude of references and allusion to music lyrics and other poems. As the book recounts Powell’s life, it also explores how Black genius has encountered, struggled against, and developed mechanisms to cope with White supremacy in the United States. under the aegis of a winged mind won the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Trade Review“William Carlos Williams once wrote that it was difficult to get the news from poetry, but we die from the lack of what is there, and to transpose music, especially African-American music and all it contains into something fresh and revelatory on the page is just as complicated, but makalani bandele proves, page by page, poem by stunning poem, to be up for the task. And what news! under the aegis of a winged mind isn’t a book—it’s a neighborhood, it’s a nation. To quote this fine poet: ‘Just listen.’ makalani bandele is a poet who is just tuning up.” -- Cornelius Eady, author of "Brutal Imagination"Table of Contentsblues in b for charlie the sound of thinking about distant objects quick recipe for genius mary lou williams's piano workshop (after fred moten) earl of harlem meets the high priest of bebop (alternate take) ghost of the piano cutting contest: earl of harlem vs. art tatum (for who buys the next pitcher of pabst) gigan: the cruel blues coping earl of harlem meets the high priest of bebop leit[blue]motif earl of harlem swear he in love with the little piano girl of east liberty cutting contest: earl of harlem vs. art tatum (for who buys the next pitcher of pabst) (lost live recording) piano ode to the cabaret card riff on g7 mad man at the finger palace mad man at the finger palace (alternate take) after ect tune as an asylum scary meds what to do while fresh ideas are organizing earl of harlem in his simplest form, a poor man’s diagnosis earl of harlem swear he in love with the little piano girl of east liberty (bud’s take) pianism pearl of harlem pianism (alternate take) etude op. 8, no.7 etude op. 8, no.2 etude op. 8, no.6 etude op. 8, no.4 etude op. 11, no.5 etude op. 11, no.11 etude op. 15, no.1 etude op. 15, no.3 mnemonic fragments (ballad for crossing the unbridgeable chasm) earl of harlem at the golden shovel the negro section as frontage 12-bar F blues with a few substitutions thrown in wor studios, new york city, may 1, 1951 tempus fugue-it earl of harlem swear he in love with the little piano girl of east liberty (alternate take) piano solitaire last supper of bop mingus of the ninth circle the portrait of an artist in his daughter’s aural imagination crash homegoing & repass solo lost in the 8th arrondissement earl of harlem on bob thompson's garden of music dissipation: a bop off night: a piano trio last call fraternite aubade: earl of harlem composing extemporaneously gigan: epistle to neptune blue heron celia
£13.30
Autumn House Press Circle / Square
Book SynopsisThroughout Circle / Square, T. J. McLemore renders the language of physics and theoretical science into poetry to illuminate the mysterious ways we experience reality. Exploring the complex and at-times dense world of scientific language, MeLemore spins into verse the kind of material many poets might shy away from. Throughout the chapbook, the poet begins from theoretical physics and other realms of science to continue poetry’s endless search to define, explore, and represent the world truthfully through deep attention to language and form. Neutrinos, string theory, thermodynamics, and quantum entanglement become meditations and tools for self-examination as McLemore finds new ways to revel in and represent physical existence. Drawing from highly technical scientific materials, McLemore has crafted poems that are thoughtful, grounding, and expressively charged, leading readers through divine moments of wonder and contemplation. Trade Review"T.J. McLemore’s poems combine imagination and music as a single act of knowing. The gift of the ear embodies the discovery — as in all true poetry, and in McLemore’s distinctive way. This writing is alert, and fun to read. For example, here is a line about matter dissolving into the vibration of light, a form of energy that endures, 'humming whatever this song is we all run on, and run to.' I love how the clinching, intellectual turn of 'run' in those two meanings springs from the playful, charged energy of 'humming whatever this song is.'" -- Robert Pinsky, author of At the Foundling Hospital“What I appreciate about T.J. McLemore’s Circle / Square is how it embodies nonduality: it is both circle and square, both intellectually challenging and emotionally rich, imagistically startling and musically rich. . . . I kept rereading this chapbook for the way it illuminates the physic and metaphysic truths of being human. These are poems that work as proofs, proofs for the equations that hold the universe and our sublime natures together.” -- Gerry LaFemina, author of Vanishing Horizon
£9.50
Autumn House Press In the Antarctic Circle
Book SynopsisThis collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator’s gender skips and changes, and the characters’ self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney’s poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever. The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world.In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry. Trade Review"The Arctic, it seems, is a surprisingly relevant landscape for discussions of current events. Many will relate deeply to the call for change (environmental and otherwise) that Sweeney has woven into his white world. As an addition to the already extensive literary discussions of whiteness, the collection manages to lace history with the ability to conceptualize and imagine whiteness in a new way." * Heavy Feather Review *"In Sweeney’s debut collection of hybrid narrative prose poems, In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press), his writing travels. . . to the boundaries of the known world and its most inhospitable continent." * BOMB *“Of literary ‘whiteness’ Toni Morrison asked, ‘What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as “American”? ’ In this extraordinary debut collection, Sweeney revisits the question via the snowy, violent terrain of love, loss, and supreme isolation. . . . Through the lenses of dystopia and domestic upheaval, the poet braces us for the shrewd chill of this ultimately uninhabitable place. You almost want to direct the speaker-protagonist and lover Hank to turn back. It’s a fool’s errand. But you can’t stop flipping the pages: ‘Though no savior is due, we make a life of waiting. Everyone has every reason to fold.’” -- Yona Harvey, author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mar for Love “This elliptical, haunted document is as beautiful and dangerous as the cold continent of which it sings, whispering of loss, of loneliness, of identity, of extinction. A perfect Beckettian marriage between the spoken and the unspoken, the said and the unsayable, this sublime collection speaks as much from its white spaces as from its exquisitely ordered text. In the Antarctic Circle is an unforgettable experience from a master stylist.” -- Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion: A Novel"What is love in a habitat in crisis? How does desire survive when the land offers no mercy? These are the questions of Sweeney’s In the Antarctic Circle, with its precise and surrealist depictions of ice, snow and wind coupled with aching gestures toward the lover’s warm body, somehow always out of reach. 'I am alone in the whiteness. I stretch into it and huddle.' We don’t have to visit Antarctica to understand the thrust of these questions; all our landscapes now threaten to reject us. And nonetheless, 'the living are marking what they can.' This exquisite writing is a testament to the effort to survive and to love within a self-generated hostility, a 'climate' of 'whiteness' in which we can only, 'hold our wounds dear, open them repeatedly.'" -- Julie Carr, author of Someone Shot My Book"In the Antarctic Circle refreshingly diverges from much of contemporary environmentally focused poetry (what might have once been called 'nature poetry') in incorporating narrative elements, but little resolution is offered. Instead, space is cleared so new journeys can begin. Between the slow threat of geology and the faster threat of human violence, certainties of doom and redemption are both dispelled: 'The end has come and already left,' and in the wake of winter’s inexorable erasures, new forms of connection are awaiting their birth: 'Blankness, too, can gestate.'" * Public Books *
£13.30
Zephyr Press A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist
Book SynopsisDerek Chung’s poems capture the East-meets-West synergy of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan culture, while tracking the city’s myriad transformations over the past two decades. Though his poems bear the influence of Anglophone poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, Hong Kong is at the heart of his work. Writing through the lens of a father, restaurant-goer, dreamer, flaneur, protester, and more, Chung captures a city in motion—and the joy, loss, and heartbreak that comes with loving Hong Kong.
£11.39
Zephyr Press The Truffle Eye
Book SynopsisVaan Nguyen has been described as “a veritable juggler of Hebrew,” a poet whose work radically remixes world classics and pop culture, the personal and the political, past and present. Born in 1982 in Israel to refugees of the Vietnam War, Nguyen’s debut collection The Truffle Eye addresses questions of identity and cultural legacy from what she has described as “points of emotion and shock.” Her poems travel far and wide, between Tel Aviv and Hanoi, taking in views of Manhattan, Paris, Milan, Salzburg, Pasadena and more. Through these movements, Nguyen reflects on how our lives take shape in the daily migrations we make between lovers, family, work, and the places we call home.
£10.44
Black Ocean The Fastening
Book SynopsisThe fifth book of poetry by a true poet's poet with a unique mastery of language and experimentation.In Julie Doxsee’s The Fastening, the permanent imprints of love, childhood, death, and pleasure are elongated, handled delicately, celebrated, puzzled over, all while underpinned by hauntingly vicious origins. Landscapes in the book shift and jolt, melt into snowman slush or gash the flesh with matter-of-fact craters, thorns, rope burns, and rocks.The poet wants to scrub the sharp peaks with steel wool but recognizes how millions of these violence-borne imprints have ganged up to keep her alive. In The Fastening, bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.Trade Review“The Fastening posits time as an oil, a sap, a skin, a river (of course), as blood—whatever sustains or poisons, muffles or protects, fossilizes or commodifies us. A barb that pierces through to the raw nerve, or a balm that sheaths it. Its poems still the past, present, and future in Doxsee’s crystal ball, her amber deposits, which we must then chuck from the sea cliff. That's a life. Moments released bleed together in the sea, and we go through all this before the rest of the world wakes up. I'm obsessed with this book of days. Oh, baby. These days are golden in their perversity, outwardly blowing wide and returning.”—Danielle Pafunda, author of Spite
£11.39
Soberscove Press Secret Poetics
Book SynopsisThe first English-language translation of Oiticica’s "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) is widely considered one of Brazil’s most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar. Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled "Poética Secreta" (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica’s global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica’s art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory.Trade ReviewAs this book reveals, Oiticica was interested in language as early as 1964—a discovery that will undoubtedly lead Oiticica scholars to reevaluate established perceptions of his development as an artist. -- Antonio Sergio Bessa * Author of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing *Penned during the crucial years of Oiticica’s artistic and personal coming-of-age, these secret poems reveal a lyrical and intimate counterpoint to the transgressive interventions the artist staged in public during this same period. -- Irene V. Small * Author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame *As this elegant volume reminds us, the experience of language as an event is key to the not-so-secret poetics Oiticica’s work so staunchly enacts. -- Mónica De La Torre * Author of Repetition Nineteen *
£19.80
Wave Books SoundMachine
Book SynopsisThrough heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, Rachel Zucker trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay—and not limited by any of these categories—SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.Trade Review"Artfully layered . . . these pieces defy genre and interrogate the role of wife, mother, and artist as fixed identities. . . . Zucker renders even the simplest inquiries—such as ‘hasn’t anyone tried to stop this?—resonant and profound in this restless and thoughtful book."— starred review,Publishers Weekly"SoundMachine's immediacy and urgency make reading it an imperative."—Katie Berta, PloughsharesTable of ContentsContents Song of the Dark Room It’s the World Committing Suicide Said One Mom Seven Beds Six Cities Eight Weeks Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits I Can Barely Stand to Go to Weddings Rough Waters Death Project [Poem] Let the World Unfurl One Word at a Time Snapshot Five Months Later I Finally Have Something to Say SoundMachine Need to Know In the End Confessional Planet Hulk After the New Couples Therapist Sex with Famous Poet The Feeling Enough Is Enough And Still I Speak of It It Has Come to My Attention The Moon Is in Her Caul Tonight There Are Two Magics We Cannot Make Them Happy Behave Passionate Patient Safe Sorry Residency
£14.24
Wave Books The Shore
Book SynopsisThe five poem-essays of Chris Nealon's The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of power. Nimbly exploring connections among beauty, friendship, and politics, The Shore gives our era of crisis a language at once vernacular and philosophical, in a form that's both teeming and fluid.Table of ContentsCONTENTS The Victorious Ones You Surround Me White Meadows The Shore Last Glimpse
£11.39
BOA Editions, Limited Holy Moly Carry Me
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Erika Meitner’s fifth collection of poetry plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.Trade Review“In her graceful fifth collection, Meitner (Copia) displays a sense of urgency informed by parenthood in this strange and particularly turbulent American moment.” —Publishers Weekly “Meitner has created a keen social record of, and commentary on, our persistent human atrocities, but she also admirably transcends the dire in a search for salvation.”—Booklist “This is a book that really is dealing with raising kids in difficult environments and also kind of facing down the epidemic of gun violence in this country — which makes it sound like it might be kind of a depressing book. But what really impressed me about it is how beautiful and tender it is. It's really just a live wire. She's a Jew in Appalachia raising an African-American adopted son. She is and isn't at home. She's kind of meditating on these things but she does so in this very incantatory, almost prayer-like way.” —Tess Taylor, NPR Books "Erika Meitner is the quintessential 21st century storyteller bearing witness from the vantage point of a social critic with heart, humor, and an incomparable voice. Holy Moly Carry Me is an urgent document of our complex ties with the past, and the dangers of letting histories, private and public, repeat themselves. She reminds us that “We are under the care of each other and sometimes we/ fail mightily to contain the damage.” This collection is Meitner at the height of her powers." —Carmen Giménez Smith "Holy Moly Carry Me is a triumph! In these formally dexterous poems Meitner vibrates wildly between the song & the document, exploding the shadowy space between history & memory. The opening poem tells us, “There are holes in all of these stories—open-mouthed gaps in the fence, a singing presence.” The voices in this books fill those gaps with a brilliant & difficult noise. In this necessary unprecedented book Meitner has assembled the materials of our apocalyptic present & past and invites us in to revel & quake with her." —sam sax “In the stunning, exact, and haunting book Holy Moly Carry Me, Meitner’s strong signature voice is on full display, but with a complex empathy for the violent, messed-up world. These are powerful poems that wonder, ache, fear, question, delve into history, and somehow never stop praising the human capacity for survival.” —Ada Limón "Reading one of Meitner’s poems feels like having an intimate talk with a close friend over dinner; revealing the details of romantic encounters, and musing about the value of poetry. She’s often wryly funny, and always tender."—Huffington Post
£12.99
not a cult LLC Grocery List Poems
Book SynopsisLONG LISTED FOR THE 2021 POETRY BOOK AWARDThe second full-length title to award-winning poet and former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles Rhiannon McGavin.If the word stanza means “room,” then this book is an orchard. Former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, Rhiannon McGavin crafts poems with scraps of the everyday, from dream diaries to postcards. She integrates the facts of daily life into lyric verse, switching out traditional forms easily as trying on new sweaters. Led by emotions “real as the mosaic air between screen and projector,” McGavin explores what it means to become your own calendar.Trade Review"Rhiannon McGavin guides us on an emotionally rigorous excursion into the reflexive nature of language, powered by the voice of a seductress, taunting the senses with spell-binding imagery, at once engaging and mesmerizing." —James Ragan, poet and author of The Hunger Wall and Too Long a Solitude. Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California
£11.39
White Pine Press Letdown
Book SynopsisA hybrid memoir and valentine to her firstborn, Letdown encompasses the story of a woman when fertility issues arise at the same time the diagnosis of her son’s autism, complicating motherhood in unexpected ways. Portrays the transcendence found amidst difficulty.Trade Review“With Letdown, Sonia Greenfield proves herself a master of the prose poem, finding just the right metaphor, just the right syntax. This book-length sequence reads like a love story between a mother and her son, and like all love stories—all the true ones, anyway—there is pain alongside the joy. Greenfield takes us down into the dark, confronting what it is to feel helpless against your child’s suffering, to mother a child with special needs, to recalibrate one’s life after loss. But she also leads us back into bright California sunlight, where we find the boy—and this messy life—rising from the depths, ‘buoyant, better than expected.’ ” —Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones “Beautifully constructed in sixty stand-alone parts, this book-length poem presents—artfully, honestly—a woman’s difficult parsing of motherhood. We first meet her in the hospital suite, the careful birth-plan abandoned, as it was as effective as ‘closing a sliding door on a tsunami.’ Later, we follow her confusion and terror through her son’s autism diagnosis; during the EEG test, she distracts him as wires are gelled to his head, saying, ‘Look, now you get to become a robot.’ Her son’s traumatic medical journey is detailed alongside her hidden trauma, fertility loss. Sonia Greenfield has used her excellent ear and metaphorical power to create a moving and necessary book.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-MemoirsTable of Contents[I checked Kent town records] 1 [At fifteen and a half weeks I experienced] 2 [The mud season sank in after the snow season] 3 [If I had to describe it, I would tell the whole story] 4 5 [They can’t help but make symbols of themselves] 5 [Post-partum, you were an island because you] 6 [Winter Snapshot: the sky is orange and gold] 7 [Late summer and the sun was muscular] 9 [The weather channel runs the local forecast] 10 12 [Frank O’Hara, my sentimental doppelganger] 11 [Anaphylaxis: The shawarma eaters dripped] 12 [The down on your back whorls to the center] 13 [You seized as we crawled through the interchange] 14 [I try to teach you how to blow dandelion parachutes] 15 [We walk the reservoir after dark where a neighbor] 16 [The second time I noticed the preschool teacher] 17 [We search the spring for carnivals] 18 [All I could think about were cells dividing. Clean] 19 [EEG Creation Date: 15:29:39 Aug 23, 2012 I think] 20 [Another heat wave, and succulents send up] 22 [They found the body of the non-verbal boy] 23 [We were waiting in line for another train in Griffith Park] 24 [Some days you serve word salad and long moments] 25 [Today's paper reports a woman rolled] 26 [You drag your leg cast across the living room] 27 [A baby was rolled in to your room. His crib] 28 [Multiple Punctate Bilateral White Matter Lesions.] 29 [Joy is pocket-sized. Like quarter rides.] 30 [In the great green room what he said can’t be taken back] 32 [Your father wanted me to say we made the decision] 33 [Focal: That sweet unguent glue of hose water] 34 [After the procedure, they give young women] 35 [Focal, local, multiple occurrences: Running] 36 [They’re slip-ons with three elastics] 37 [Your Psychological Evaluation: a four-year-old Caucasian boy] 38 [At your swim school fountains burble, lilies bloom] 39 [Miscarriage happens [x] percent of the time] 40 [You continue to try and understand words] 41 [According to the newsletter I signed up for,] 42 [Déjà vu was the same bright red gem of blood] 43 [Someone says to me this is really about shame,] 44 [We’re at the zoo where the Los Angeles sun] 45 [At the aquarium, we head to the garden eels] 47 [You say I don’t want to calm down, I want to calm up.] 48 [We pressed our way through faux Kahlos] 49 [The small print on your pill bottle: Side-Effects:] 50 [Side Effects: I keep trying to tether you since] 51 [Side Effects: We're titrating up one medication] 52 [The bland face of the fertility doctor smiles up] 53 [At the human development exhibit the eleven vats] 54 [Sunday evening, and the days have gotten longer] 55 [Your favorite song is Water and your girl is Sarah] 56 [A flip book of your years gone is history never] 57 [I feel bad for kids unfortunate enough] 58 [We were deep into the plush monotony] 59
£12.34
White Pine Press Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems: Selected
Book SynopsisStill Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño’s poetry. Her poems draw on motherhood, the loses in the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s and, most of all, the natural world. She is a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own.Trade ReviewIn “Elegy for the Road,” Tatiana Orono writes, “Poetry is the place where the things go that have no solution.” Her book, Still Life with Defeats, provides the solution I didn’t know I needed. What gratitude I feel to Jesse Lee Kercheval for this inspired translation. Without it, we’d be bereft of Orono’s taut, compelling poems, rich with sly surprise and haunting imagery. —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton Tatiana Oroño’s place amid the motherlines of Uruguayan and Latin American poetry is beyond dispute; in Kercheval’s English translations, Oroño’s svelte lyrics are revealed to be in conversation with a litany of English-language poets writing before and alongside her, from Emily Dickinson to Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe to Cathy Wagner. This is the poetry of cosmic concentration, in which any object, any syllable, no matter how domestic or mundane, becomes a doorway on the Infinite by being so resolutely itself. —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Percussion Grenade Tatiana Oroño's Still Life With Defeats is, like all good poetry, an attempted response to those questions that seem unanswerable. A search for unity underpins these poems, a quest for ultimate meaning, but, as in a still life painting of varied objects, there remains a gulf that cannot be bridged, a chasm that is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. These poems represent an ongoing movement toward finding the connection and wholeness shared by all living things. Translator Jesse Lee Kercheval has joyfully accompanied the author on this journey; uniting passion with precision, she preserves the dazzling complexity of the original while continuing to ask the questions that have no easy answers. —Jeannine Pitas, translator of I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio
£12.34
White Pine Press Aflame
Book SynopsisVia both associative lyrics and disjunctive narratives, Aflame looks to the intersection of T/time and experience, sex and fatherhood, husbandry and the cosmos, and whether the experiences Aflame dictates are quotidian or ecstatic, these poems stabilize and arrest.Trade Review“Gary McDowell writes “light can travel so fast/ but observation happens immediately” which is probably insight into his great gift as a poet: McDowell’s ability to see into the world of things and work with them or against them. Alfame takes this level of observation and puts it to work in both sinuous and staccato’d lines about the body and breath of his wife; his children; suburbia; a state park; aging; our political rights; and the city of Nashville where he lives. These poems move fluidly between narrative and fragmentation, between the body and the spirit’s flame. These are serious poems which seek to find, particularly in the long title poem, something about existence. This is poetry as ontology. Poetry as love letter. Something meandering between prayer and praise. It may sound corny but if not that ambitious, why even write? The stakes are always high in McDowell’s poems. Or how he tells us, “My daughter’s hand: how I know God is.” —Sean Thomas Dougherty, Judge 2019 White Pine Press Poetry Prize “Reading these poems, I am more than myself. I am etymology and egg, am the mysterious rabbit hole of fact, am as massive and tiny as a star. This book has the patience of a stone and the urgency of a library on fire. It is the prayer I wish could be written in cursive on God’s ear.” —Traci Brimhall on Mysteries in a World That Thinks There Are None (Burnside Review Press, 2016) “Not one line in this collection of dispatches does less than delight and amaze. McDowell’s poems are wise and hilarious. I couldn’t stop reading them.” —David Dodd Lee on Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014) “Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral has done the impossible—made an odyssey of the mind that is just as compelling as the eponymous one, only McDowell never leaves home. His ships and sorceresses and capricious gods are domestic. In this amazing undertaking, the poet regards his life, addressing his imagination,…thrilling us with aphorisms that pierce and pervert. ‘Pigeons cant’ tell the difference between night and a vision of night,’ McDowell writes. The difference makes no difference, he suggests, and that’s what makes this book, which is both odyssey and tapestry, poetry at its best.” —Larissa Szporluk on Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014)Table of ContentsI. Desire and Keep Quiet / 7 Binary Code / 9 Sorrow from Far Away Is a Kind of Power / 10 Miranda Rights / 11 What If There Are Deer in the Afterlife? / 12 Upon a Concussion / 13 History Repeats Itself, As Seen from My Hotel Room Window / 15 Marriage, Ten Years In / 18 II. Aflame / 21 III. Long Hunter State Park, Late Winter / 39 Follow Me, Dear / 40 The Lazarus Reflex / 42 Sometimes Spilled Spices on a Countertop Look Like the Night Sky / 43 First Image of the Moon / 46 The Itch / 48 Reading Plath in Early April / 49 First Celestial Body / 50 Entrance to the Underworld / 53 IV. By Age 60 We Lose 200,000 Things / 57 Prayer Is Not Asking / 58 Palindrome / 60 Church / 61 Suburbia / 63 They All Chatter Mouthful / 64 Don’t Shoot the Messenger / 66 Winter in Nashville / 68 The Stars and Our Response / 70
£12.34
White Pine Press An Audible Blue: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisThis important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016.This important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016. Throughout his career, Swiss Poet Klaus Merz has been praised as an artisan of the understatement, and it is precisely in these smallest of details that the great unexpected has the potential to be illuminated. As Merz himself has said: “The poetry nudges toward a secret, hopefully without ostentation, rather through the power of its own alphabet.” This seminal volume brings together selections from Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry (1963-2016).“Reading Merz' spare illuminating poems is like entering Plato's cave and witnessing the light behind the shadows.” –Nin Andrews“Merz takes careful notes, thinking and feeling himself into his subject as if from fragments. A strange exhilaration, curiously impersonal yet packed with personality.” –Brian Swann“Merz’ world is a shimmering window onto beauty and insight, so precisely understated that many of the poems border on the hypnotic and can be read time and time again. It’s no wonder that so many are short, eight or ten lines or less: his eye and ear are both so incisive that if he wrote at too great length the resultant intensity could be painful. Merz is a poet who expands and deepens with his conciseness, who embodies imagism’s implied aesthetic of ‘less is more.’”—Lit Pub“An artisan of the understatement, a craftsman of finely-tuned precision.” –Neue Zuricher ZeitungKlaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian (Der Argentine, Haymon, 2009) and his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust (Aus dem Staub, Haymon, 2010), Unexpected Development (Unerwarteter Verlauf, Haymon, 2013), What Helios Hauls (Helios Transport, Haymon 2016) and firm (firma, Haymon, 2019)Marc Vincenz is a poet, translator, fiction writer, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. His newest books are There Might Be a Moon or a Dog (Gazebo, Australia, 2022) and The Pearl Diver of Irunmani (White Pine Press, forthcoming 2023).
£14.24
Ugly Duckling Presse 11
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£14.40
Ugly Duckling Presse Awaiting
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£14.40
Ugly Duckling Presse Read Me: Selected Works
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£14.40
Ugly Duckling Presse MA
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£14.40
Ugly Duckling Presse Proximal Morocco—
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£14.40
Ugly Duckling Presse Feast of the Ass
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£14.40
Ugly Duckling Presse Interior Landscape
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£14.40
Acre Books Manatee Lagoon – Poems
Book SynopsisThe third full-length collection from physician and poet Jenna Le blends traditional form and the current moment. In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself. Le aligns the genial but vulnerable sea cow with mermaids, neurologists, the month of November, harmful political speech, and even a family photo at the titular lagoon. In these poems, Le also reflects on the experience of being the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in today’s sometimes tense and hostile America. The morning after the 2016 election, as three women of color wait for the bus, one says, “In this new world, we must protect each other.”Manatee Lagoon is a treasury of voices, bringing together the personal and the persona, with poems dedicated to Kate Spade, John Ashbery, and Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. With this book, Le establishes herself as a talented transcriber of the human condition—and as one of the finest writers of formal verse today.
£12.35
Clemson University Digital Press The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual: Volume 3
Book Synopsis
£104.02
