Perspective (And Other Poems) is a collection of poetry that I have written as I transcended adolescence. It focuses on keeping the magic, finding yourself, connecting with nature, and opening one's eyes to the many different perspectives of reality. There is a tone of curiosity and questioning, as well as a love for life, nature, and oneself. There are poems that focus on family, self-worth, love and growth, and nature.
"Welcome my friends to the Upside Down House," a topsy-turvy place where anything is possible. Inside its wacky walls you'll meet a girl with a beard, a boy who never gets out of bed, a sword swallower, a pirate, a dinosaur who plays basketball, and the Grunk, who would love to take you to a dance-and maybe even have you for dinner. Find out what really happened to the three little pigs. Dare to ride your sled down Speedwell Street. Have lunch with Solid Stomach Steven, a boy who eats the grossest food imaginable, or watch a show with Jugglin' Joe, who juggles everything from soup, to staplers-to you! Not since Shel Silverstein has there been such an outrageously funny and thought-provoking collection of poems. The Upside Down House is truly a delight for all ages, and is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages!
Thankful for this book, and Michael Chang's ability to weave seamlessly in between scenes, to honor the full ecosystem of a narrative-people, places, images, metaphor. This is a rich book, it felt like stepping into a generous and welcoming world. -HANIF ABDURRAQIB Michael Chang's debut collection is bold, unapologetic, and vibrantly defiant. An interrogation into the confines that govern us on our nation's journey to racial and gender equality. -RICHARD BLANCO This book attempts to have more fun and fuck more shit up than any debut collection I've ever read. Michael Chang's irreverence is an ethos, their way of pushing back against a culture that finds them "disposable ... not colored/White enough ... not the arbiter of anything ..." Against that tide, Chang stands the fuck up and says things most poets wouldn't dream of saying, in the process queering American poetry in a bracingly necessary way. -JASON KOO Michael Chang hits hard and refuses to apologize. Unabashedly crass, brash, provocative and funny, these poems, beneath their comic exteriors, explore an American landscape full of joy and despair-never flinching from the big subjects of desire, belonging, sexuality and race. Chang takes everything in, somehow managing to console even as they trouble us. Once you start reading, it's hard to look away. As they write: "I will dominate you. I will come back." -BRUCE SNIDER This collection is, and I mean this literally, everything: grief-full and endlessly flirtatious, an epic ars poetica with an undercurrent of hero's journey, incisive critique of white supremacy and PoBiz, a little hurty and hurt, bursting with heart and language lavish with tinder and fire. We don't need Whitman. We've got Michael Chang to take us beyond the beyond. We're heading out now. It's "time for the beautiful revenge of self-love." -TC TOLBERT
An utterly delightful collection of responses to poems written across the centuries, these modern poems are not only engaging themselves but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems that inspired them.
There are two acts of recovery in this book - one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl and young woman. Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger's, she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world. Collaging lines and phrases drawn from the two Alice books, she creates a disturbingly effective language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experiences. In her neurodiverse verse, a text can become a rabbit-hole to another world, or a mirror. The poems that make up the book's opening sequence, The Oxygen Man, originally published as a pamphlet, were written in response to the death of Limburg's younger brother, a brilliant chemist who took his own life in 2008. They follow her as she visits the mid-Western town where he lived, worked and died; range back over their shared childhood; and look ahead as she tries to work out what it means to be the one who stays behind.
Through 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.
‘Funny but serious, accessible but rich in meaning, consistently surprising – the world looks slightly different after reading a Billy Collins poem. He’s a one-off, an American treasure’ Nick Laird These are poems of whimsy and imaginative acrobatics, but they are grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the proper way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and invites us to his own funeral. Facing both the wonders of being alive and the thrill of mortality, these new poems can only solidify Collins’s reputation as one of America’s most durable and interesting poets.
The author of Gift from the Sea presents a collection of poems that offers enduring meditations on love, loss, beauty, and the sweep of time. 15,000 first printing.
Now one of Booklist's 30 Best Books of the Year! "Genius!" – Wired.com “Marilyn Singer's verse in Follow Follow practically dances down each page . . . the effect is miraculous and pithy.” – The Wall Street Journal Once upon a time, Mirror Mirror, a brilliant book of fairy tale themed reversos–a poetic form in which the poem is presented forward and then backward–became a smashing success. Now a second book is here with more witty double takes on well-loved fairy tales such as Thumbelina and The Little Mermaid. Read these clever poems from top to bottom and they mean one thing. Then reverse the lines and read from bottom to top and they mean something else–it is almost like magic! A celebration of sight, sound, and story, this book is a marvel to read again and again.
