A gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse from poet Matthew Rohrer. In a Russian-doll of fictional episodes, we follow a midlevel publishing assistant over the course of a day as he encounters ghost stories, science fiction adventures, Victorian hashish eating, and robot bigfoots. Rohrer mesmerizes with wildly imaginative tales and resonant verse in this compelling love letter to storytelling. this night they all seemed asleep for a while the stark shadows held me only my mind moved wildly behind my eyes until I heard a tiny song coming from the driver song of a bandit’s broken heart, song of his betrayal I slept and dreamed I was awake Matthew Rohrer is the author of Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.
From the Cow's Eye and Other Poems is a 42-page chapbook containing 26 poems by Loretta Diane Walker. The book won the William D. Barney Memorial Chapbook Prize, 2021, from the Fort Worth Poetry Society.
From tongue-in-cheek sonnets to lyrical free verse, this collection of poems explores the many kinds of home animals make for themselves. Readers will meet better-known animal dwellings like the spiderweb and the bird's nest as well as the more unusual: a fawn's thicket bed, a hare's bowl-shaped ground nest, and a sea anemone's ever-changing tide pool home. Readers experience different habitats—desert, grasslands, shoreline, wetland, and woodland—and the animals that build their dwellings there. Jamie Hogan's expressive line art complements this clever anthology. Back matter provides more information on the highlighted habitats, poetic forms, and the writing process.
"A treasury of the greatest science poetry for children ever written, with a twist" (NSTA Recommends) THE POETRY FRIDAY ANTHOLOGY FOR SCIENCE (K-5 Teacher/Librarian Edition) features 218 poems by 78 award-winning and popular poets connecting science with reading and language arts. Take 5! activities highlight concepts and topics identified in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) plus state science standards such as the Texas TEKS. The "Take 5!" activities also incorporate the literacy skills identified in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Poetry TEKS. This book makes it easy to incorporate STEM and language arts. There are several easy ways to use this book: Match poems and science lessons using the weekly themes or the index at the back of the book to identify relevant science topics. Add poetry sharing to a planned science lesson by taking one minute to read aloud a science poem to set the stage for the instruction. Or end with a poem to reinforce the concepts introduced in a science lesson and build knowledge retention. * * * The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science includes poems by 78 poets: Newbery and Newbery Honor winners Margarita Engle, Linda Sue Park, and Joyce Sidman; National Book Award winner Virginia Euwer Wolff; Children's Poet Laureates Mary Ann Hoberman, J. Patrick Lewis, and Kenn Nesbitt; and more, with Spanish bilingual poems by Alma Flor Ada, Carmen T. Bernier-Grand, F. Isabel Campoy, Margarita Engle, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, and Carmen Tafolla. Pair this Teacher's Edition with THE POETRY OF SCIENCE (the illustrated companion Student Edition, arranged by theme). For more information about the other books in THE POETRY FRIDAY ANTHOLOGY series, see www.PomeloBooks.com.
Honored as one of "10 Favorite Books of 2014" —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Honored as a "Standout Book of 2014" —American Poet magazine “Belieu oscillates between dark humor, self-consciousness, and pointed satire in a fourth collection that’s equal-opportunity in its critique. In the world of these poems, no one is innocent; everyone is confined to the complexity, absurdity, and, above all, fallibility of their human condition…. Anchoring the work is a conversational, lyrical speaker willing to implicate herself as part of the political and social constructs she criticizes, as when she depicts a Southern American culture still reeling from its history of social injustice, and even the Civil War: “Don’t tell us/ history. Nobody hearts a cemetery/ like we do.” It’s a fantastic collection; Belieu desires not to dress issues up but confront them.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “A smart and nettling book of poems — about love, sex, social class and our free-floating anxieties — from a writer who is a comedian of the human spirit. Her crisp free verse has as many subcurrents as a magnetic field.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Politics, pop culture, and parenthood appear here along with reflections on our collective moments of hypocrisy and hope. '12-Step,' one of the most resonant entries, begins innocuously with a meditation about lighthouses, then the speaker gathers speed and confidence and reaches a risky but profound one-word stanza—'myself'—before ending with a haunting inversion of the Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous. Amid the quips and the elegant observations about immortality, Belieu's speakers never forget their responsibilities, or their possibilities." —Booklist "From poem to poem in the smart, savvy Slant Six, Belieu channels an updated American idiom, one of stubborn in-betweenhood. Like the plain-spoken poetry that plumbed the depths of American consciousness in the 20th century, Belieu trawls the shallows of today’s America and finds just as much caught in its oily reflections as in its murkier subcurrents. It’s '[b]etter,' she suggests, 'to forget perfection.'" —The Boston Globe “I’ve never read a poem by Erin Belieu that I didn’t want to immediately rip from its bindings so I could fold it up and carry around in my pockets and read so many times that the paper turned back into pulp. She’s just that good. That honest and brave and beautiful and wise and funny. She writes poems we need. Poems that say who I am and who you are and how and why we got to be this way. Poems that wonder if we can ever change. Poems that know us and show us and grace us. Poems that remember us and forget us and leave us dazzled in their dust. In Slant Six, she’s outdone herself. It’s a spellbinding, heart-opening beauty of a book.” —Cheryl Strayed "Erin Belieu . . . is always ready to surprise, to astonish, and, ultimately, to defy comparison."—Boston Book Review "[One] of America's finest poets."—Robert Olen Butler Erin Belieu's fourth collection, Slant Six, is an inundation of the humor and horror in contemporary American life—from the last saltine cracked in the sleeve, to the kitty-cat calendar in an office cubicle. With its prophecies of impending destruction, and a simultaneous flood of respect for Americans, Erin Belieu's poems close like Ziploc bags around a human heart. From "12-Step": I am considering lighthouses in a completely new light— their butch neutrality, their grand but modest surfaces. A lighthouse could appear here at any moment. I have been making this effort, placing myself in uncomfortable positions, only for the documented health benefits . . .
Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.
"In this book you'll find 248 poems about science, technology, engineering, math-- and all your favorite topics! If you like learning about animals, machines, Earth and space, famous scientists, science projects, and how things work...you'll find a ton of poems to inspire you. Read about being a citizen scientist, an inventor, an engineer, a video game programmer, and astronaut & more!"--
