Poetry

Maggie Nelson's fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer's attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight -- of feeling lost, then found, then lost again. The book's three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niedecker-esque meditations written at the shore of a polluted urban canal, a harrowing long poem written at a friend's hospital bedside, and a series of unsparing, crystalline lyrics honoring the conjoined forces of love and sorrow. Whatever the style, the poems are linked by Nelson's singular poetic voice, as sly and exacting as it is raw. The collection is a testament to Nelson's steadfast commitment to chart the facts of feeling, whatever they are, and at whatever the cost.

Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman’s fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first publication by Sun & Moon Press (the edition reprinted here) the publication Library Journal described the book as one that "is an intriguing journey that both illuminates and perplexes, teases and challenges, as it reveals an innovative artist at work."Lyn Hejinian is the author of The Cell, The Cold of Poetry, Writing Is an Aid to Memory and A Border Comedy. She lives in Berkeley and teaches at the University of California.

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

Selected Poems is the classic volume by the distinguished and celebrated poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This compelling collection showcases Brooks’ technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world.By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’ Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a collection of as-yet uncollected poems.This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, her first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage—including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective consciousness of fictionalized boomtowns in order to explore the myth of prosperity. The first sequence, called "Ballad of Our Jim," draws inspiration from the Old West and follows a band of outlaw fortune seekers who travel to a California mining town during the 1800s. In the second sequence, "Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!" a fictional industrialized boomtown draws its inspiration from present-day Shenzhen, China. The third and last section, "The World Cloud," is set in the far future and tracks how individual consciousness breaks up when everything—books, our private memories—becomes immediately accessible data. One of our most startlingly original poets, Hong draws together individual voices at odds with the world, voices that sing their wonder and terror.

In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:The cowboy grins through the terrible din,***And in the Ninth, a choking woman wailsLook like this country done left us for dead.An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Visit her website at www.wordwoman.ws.

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?’Despite owning Oliver’s two volume New and Selected Poems, I couldn’t resist snatching up this tiny collection when I stumbled upon it at a library book sale in the fifty cents bin. Although it was her American Primitive that achieved her Pulitzer recognition, House of Light remains my favorite collection of Oliver’s picturesque poetry. After spending a few days in poetic rapture through each word and staggered stanzas, I realized the former owner had discretely placed a small dot next to three different poems in the table of contents. To my joy, these three poems—assumingly singled out for being the ones closest to the former owner’s heart—coincided with my personal favorites as well. In a collection about the unity of all life as it breaches the limits of life and into death, it seemed all the more poignant to find two people across space and time sharing Oliver’s words and, as if in subtle conversation, agreeding upon the words that moved us the most. House of Light, Oliver’s metaphor of the afterlife, glides like a swan into the pond of your heart, sending out little ripples of joy and comfort as she looks towards death without fear but with acceptance and wonderment.Some Questions You Might AskIs the soul solid, like iron?Or is it tender and breakable, likethe wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?Who has it, and who doesn’t?I keep looking around me.The face of the moose is as sadas the face of Jesus.The swan opens her white wings slowly.In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.One question leads to another.Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?Like the eye of a hummingbird?Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?Why should I have it, and not the anteaterwho loves her children?Why should I have it, and not the camel?Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?What about the blue iris?What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?What about the grass?The soul is a theme that floats through this collection as Oliver grapples with the possibility of its existence and the question of what becomes of us when we die. Oliver asks ‘why should I hate it, and not the anteater who loves her children’, and rejects the notion that humans are above any other living thing on earth. She envies the quiet life of flowers in the breeze in Lilies, she spends a day contemplating a mother bear moving down a mountain with ‘her wordlessness, her perfect lovein Spring, and seems to find her inner peace when deep in the wilderness. Out doors, in the company of nature and not people, is when the quiet answers to the universe seem to whisper themselves in her heart. Oliver seems herself a Buddhist as she declares a soul, a light inside all living things, none less beautiful than the rest.\ I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—that the light is everything—that it is more than the sumof each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.\ Taken from the conclusion to The Ponds, this reflects Oliver’s belief in the perfect universal soul, that the light of existence burns away the impurities. Her words are immensely uplifting and empowering as she urges us to maintain a quiet serenity in our hearts. Her words are always so clear, simple and still, like a cool body of water on a sunny day where the rocks on the bottom many feet down can be seen from the surface. Reading her words are like a walk in the forest, refreshing and humbling as they remind you of the things that really matter in life.The Buddha’s Last Instruction “Make of yourself a light,”said the Buddha,before he died.I think of this every morningas the east beginsto tear off its many cloudsof darkness, to send up the firstsignal – a white fanstreaked with pink and violet,even green.An old man, he lay downbetween two sala trees,and he might have said anything,knowing it was his final hour.The light burns upward,it thickens and settles over the fields.Around him, the villagers gatheredand stretched forward to listen.Even before the sun itselfhangs, disattached, in the blue air,I am touched everywhereby its ocean of yellow waves.No doubt he thought of everythingthat had happened in his difficult life.And then I feel the sun itselfas it blazes over the hills,like a million flowers on fire –clearly I’m not needed,yet I feel myself turninginto something of inexplicable value.Slowly, beneath the branches,he raised his head.He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.This light, this purity, speaks to us in every poem. Oliver reminds us to be good to one another, to respect the world around us, and to humble oneself in its immense beauty and mysteries. We are each insignificant, just a speck in all this vastness, yet we are also ‘of inexplicable value’ at the same time. We must accept love and give love, we must try to be a light, because a light can spread and cover the world, comforting and improving the lives of all those it touches.SingaporeIn Singapore, in the airport,A darkness was ripped from my eyes.In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.A woman knelt there, washing somethingin the white bowl. Disgust argued in my stomachand I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket. A poem should always have birds in it.Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountainrising and falling.A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. When the woman turned I could not answer her face.Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, andneither could win.She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?Everybody needs a job. Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,which is dull enough.She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big ashubcaps, with a blue rag.Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.She does not work slowly, nor quickly, like a river.Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird. I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.And I want to rise up from the crust and the slopand fly down to the river.This probably won’t happen.But maybe it will.If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Of course, it isn’t.Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but onlythe light that can shine out of a life. I meanthe way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,The way her smile was only for my sake; I meanthe way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.This is such a moving poem (one of the three singled out with a dot in the Table of Contents) and is unique in this collection, being an incredible humanizing poem as it turns a eye of pity on our species instead of an eye of wonder towards nature. It is a perfect example of Oliver remembering the Buddha’s words, to not look down on others with disgust and remember that a ‘light can shine out of a life’ and that we all value our own existence, regardless of where in the social standings it falls. We watch Oliver chastise herself for her initial disgust, her initial pretentions against the lower classes of society, and learn to love the smiling face.Death is a constant companion lurking behind each rock and tree in Oliver’s poems. Yet she never applies a foreboding tone, but instead looks at it as the natural course. A flower never fears its demise, so why should we. Her impressions of death reshape as the collection progresses, often asking if there is a life on the other side, often viewing it as a void or then a darkness, yet finally, in White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field, Oliver reveals to be pure brilliant beauty. To merely give the final few lines that I wish to highlight, instead of the entire poem, would be an insult.\ Coming down out of the freezing skywith its depths of light,like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,it was beautiful, and accurate,striking the snow and whatever was therewith a force that left the imprint of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —and the grabbing thrust of its feet,and the indentation of what had been runningthrough the white valleys of the snow —and then it rose, gracefully,and flew back to the frozen marshesto lurk there, like a little lighthouse,in the blue shadows —so I thought: maybe death isn't darkness, after all,but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers —that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,and shut our eyes, not without amazement,and let ourselves be carried,as through the translucence of mica,to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —in which we are washed and washedout of our bones.\ What a phenomenal depiction of death, as a white owl that silently snatches us from life. Death is not to be feared, it is a comforting light, warm like a heavy blanket, in which we are ‘washed out of our bones.’ How can one fear the end when viewing it like this?This collection is breathtakingly beautiful, and probably my favorite of all Oliver’s works (although Dream Work has a few favorite poems). Death and the soul are discussed with such delicate, simple phrases of supreme potency that will wash the readers heart and soul in order to make it glow with the light of the Buddha. Mary Oliver is a national treasure.5/5Five A.M. in the PinewoodsI'd seentheir hoofprints in the deepneedles and knewthey ended the long night under the pines, walkinglike two muteand beautiful women towardthe deeper woods, so I got up in the dark andwent there. They cameslowly down the hilland looked at me sitting under the blue trees, shylythey steppedcloser and staredfrom under their thick lashes and even nibbled some damptassels of weeds. Thisis not a poem about a dream,though it could be. This is a poem about the worldthat is ours, or could be.Finallyone of them — I swear it! — would have come to my arms.But the otherstamped sharp hoof in thepine needles like the tap of sanity,and they went off together throughthe trees. When I wokeI was alone, I was thinking:so this is how you swim inward,so this is how you flow outward,so this is how you pray.

In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century. I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present.Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).

In this outstanding first book of poems, Lee is unafraid to show emotion, especially when writing about his father or his wife. "But there is wisdom/ in the hour in which a boy/ sits in his room listening," says the first poem, and Lee's silent willingness to step outside himself imbues Rose with a rare sensitivity. The images Lee finds, such as the rose and the apple, are repeated throughout the book, crossing over from his father's China to his own America. Every word becomes transformative, as even his father's blindness and death can become beautiful. There is a strong enough technique here to make these poems of interest to an academic audience and enough originality to stun readers who demand alternative style and subject matter. — Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York

Frank O’Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, "which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition.”Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O'Hara’s untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, "the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.” This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O'Hara’s conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, "you just go on your nerve.”

"An "astounding" (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems - Winner of the 2016 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"--

A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.—from "tributaries"Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

Second read. I haven’t the faintest recollection of writing the below review in 2014.

The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions. Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.

Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex―a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues―testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.