Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters

Author: Debora Greger

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1996-11-01

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1440673004

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Award-winning poet Debora Greger grew up in Washington near the site of the Hanford atomic plant, which, unbeknownst to its workers, manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. “The high school team was named the Bombers,” she writes. “The school ring had a mushroom cloud on it.” In Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters she uses what The Nation has characterized as her “deadpan wit, intelligence and marvelous insight” to explore the legacy of a Catholic girlhood spent in a landscape where “even the dust, though we didn’t know it then, was radioactive.” “Call us out of the animal,” Greger writes, invoking the ghost of a poet conjured in “Nights of 1995,” in what could be construed as the motto of a collection filled with what Poetry called “priceless instants where the mundane flares up into the miraculous.”

Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters

Author: Debora Greger

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9780140587746

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offers a poetic meditation on the legacy of the atomic bomb and how those who played a minor role in its creation can come to terms with the past

The Narrow Circle
The Narrow Circle

Author: Nathan Hoks

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-06-04

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 1101613092

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Dean Young John Ashbery called Reveilles, Nathan Hoks’s debut book, a “dazzling” collection and Hoks a poet whose “fine gradations of observation turn the reader into a barometer of strong subtleties like those of the weather, that can be minute even as they affect us powerfully.” The poems in Hoks’s new book, The Narrow Circle, perform a similar magic. In associative lyrics and fabulist prose, Hoks explores inner and outer experiences. The poems frequently focus on the body as a membrane where everything becomes inside-out—where the “face disperses with angels of teeth and loam,” where “sky comes out of the mouth,” where a giant green worm “burrows a hole in the head,” and where the heart is a vestibule that cannot be closed. Suites of pictures within the text further delineate this inward-outward pull, offering visualizations of interior voices and sketches of exterior shadows.

Owed
Owed

Author: Joshua Bennett

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0525505652

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a “rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the U.S.” (The New Yorker) Gregory Pardlo described Joshua Bennett's first collection of poetry, The Sobbing School, as an "arresting debut" that was "abounding in tenderness and rich with character," with a "virtuosic kind of code switching." Bennett's new collection, Owed, is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form--from elegy and ode to origin myth--these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.

Wind in a Box
Wind in a Box

Author: Terrance Hayes

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-03-28

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 1440626987

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The third collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. In his first collection, Muscular Music, he took the reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. His second collection, Hip Logic, continued these explorations of popular culture, fatherhood, cultural heritage, and loss. Wind in a Box, Hayes’s resonant new collection, continues his interest in how traditions (of poetry and culture alike) can be simultaneously upended and embraced. The struggle for freedom (the wind) within containment (the box) is the unifying motif as Hayes explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality. This new book displays not only what the Los Angeles Times calls the range of a "bold virtuoso," but also the imaginative fervor of a poet in love with poetry.

Absentia
Absentia

Author: William Stobb

Publisher: Penguin Group

Published: 2011-09-27

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 0143120182

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

New from the author of Nervous Systems, winner of the National Poetry Series. William Stobb has won acclaim for wide-ranging poetry that features tender realism, jazzy dissonance, luminous descriptions, and, in the words of Donald Revell, a "strange and elegantly accomplished serenity of tensions attenuated to their uttermost." The poems in his second collection, Absentia, see the big picture-the sweep of history, the ongoing evolution of consciousness, evidence of geological time in the landscape. Humbled by scales beyond comprehension, Stobb is nonetheless seduced and stricken by the present in its many manifestations. Whether dealing with family, friends, or nature, the poems in Absentia, with their rich emotional palette and vivid, precise language, respond and transform, calling us to attend to the wide skies above and inside us.

Quickening Fields
Quickening Fields

Author: Pattiann Rogers

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1524705063

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry A new collection by an award-winning poet who “presents her apprehensions of the natural world with striking accuracy and emotional impact” (Orion Magazine) Denise Levertov has called Pattiann Rogers a “visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed.” Quickening Fields gathers fifty-three poems that focus on the wide variety of life forms present on earth and their unceasing zeal to exist, their constant “push against the beyond” and the human experience among these lives. Whether a glassy filament of flying insect, a spiny spider crab, a swath of switch grass, barking short-eared owls, screeching coyotes, or racing rat-tailed sperm, all are testifying to their complete devotion to being. Many of the poems also address celestial phenomena, the vision of the earth immersed in a dynamic cosmic milieu and the effects of this vision on the human spirit. While primarily lyrical and celebratory in tone, these poems acknowledge, as well, the terror, suffering, and unpredictability of the human condition.

Scattered at Sea
Scattered at Sea

Author: Amy Gerstler

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 0698183304

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A dazzling new collection from an award-winning poet--longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

Ghost Girl
Ghost Girl

Author: Amy Gerstler

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2004-04-06

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 9780142000649

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD of Beethoven symphonies to an earthy exploration of toast. Gerstler’s abiding interests—in love and mourning, in science and pseudoscience, in the idea of an afterlife, in seances and magic—are all represented here. Entertaining and erudite, complex yet accessible, these poems will enhance Gerstler’s reputation as an important contemporary poet.

Madame X
Madame X

Author: William Logan

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-09-25

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 1101603429

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A new collection by one of our foremost masters of free verse as well as formal poetry. The moody poems in Madame X, the author’s tenth collection, find their subjects in the byways of the past two centuries. Henry James visits his birthplace, the most beautiful woman in Europe ends up in a barrel at a fun fair, and a minor writer succumbs to tuberculosis at a German spa. In the title poem, the portrait of Madame X offers our century a lesson in seduction; but such public shows are balanced by poems of private desire, of whispers, of age, of the present always vanishing before us. These densely figured poems, rich in language and appointment, argue for a knowledge not sustained by the everyday. This is a triumphant collection of shimmering intensities and hard truths. National Book Critics Circle Award winner William Logan is one of the most technically gifted poets of his generation; his work has frequently elicited comparison to W. H. Auden and Robert Lowell, and has been called brilliant, formidable, passionate, and cranky. Donald Hall has written of him that “he writes like an angel–an elegant, literary angel,” and Sven Birkerts has commented that “he is like the eel in the well–a purifying agent.” This new volume of fifty-four poems displays Logan’s trademark refinement and classicism.