If you could write love poems on cocktail napkins, what would they be? For Janice Lynch Schuster, what was once a challenge became a habit. These short poems, written during the early months of the 2020 pandemic, describe love, comfort, and the longing to belong that so many people recognize as the desire to escape isolation and loneliness. Each short poem is just a few lines, yet each contains a world of mystery and hope, of love and desire, of belonging and connection that we so need today.
“A breezy, tantalizing view of the woman who, through wiles and a complete lack of scruples, briefly transcended the role of presidential mistress—and may have paid for it with her life.” —The New York Times John F. Kennedy said he needed sex every three days or he got a headache. In the White House, he never had a headache. Kennedy met Mary Pinchot in 1935, when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. Twenty years later, when she was living in Virginia and married to Cord Meyer, a high-ranking CIA official, she was Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s next-door neighbor. In 1962, she was an artist, divorced, living in Washington—and Kennedy’s first serious romance. Mary Pinchot Meyer was more than a bedmate. She was Kennedy’s beacon light: his sole female adviser, spending mornings in the Oval Office, and, at night, discussing issues. After the 1964 election, Kennedy said, he would divorce Jackie and marry her. After the assassination, Mary didn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and she shared that view, loudly and often, in Washington’s most elite circles. Her ex-husband urged her to be silent, but when the report of the Warren Commission was released, she was even more loudly critical. On October 10, 1964, two days before her forty-forth birthday, as she walked in Georgetown, a man shot her in the head and the heart. That night, Mary's best friend called her sister. “Mary had a diary,” she said. “Get it.” The diary was filled with sketches, notes for paintings—and ten pages about an affair with an unnamed lover. Her sister burned it. In JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story, Jesse Kornbluth recreates the diary Mary might have written. Working from a timeline of Kennedy’s presidency and every documented account of their public relationship, he has written a high-octane thriller that tracks this secret, doomed romance—and invites readers to solve Mary’s murder.
A love story about the bonds shared by women and their children, across years and miles, time and space. Full of joyful images, the story will resonate with anyone who loves a child, or who has been a beloved child.
The Four Loves is a 1960 book by C. S. Lewis which explores the nature of love from a Christian and philosophical perspective through thought experiments. The book was based on a set of radio talks from 1958 which had been criticized in the U.S. at the time for their frankness about sex. C.S. Lewis examines storge or empathy love; philia, friendship love; eros, romantic love; and agape, or God love. Excerpt: "GOD is love," says St. John. When I first tried to write this book I thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that human loves deserved to be called loves at all just in so far as they resembled that Love which is God."
A new collection of poems by Michael Hofmann—his first in twenty years Michael Hofmann, renowned as one of our most brilliant critics and translators, is also regarded as among our most respected poets. Hofmann’s status—he is the author of “one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half-century" (The Times Literary Supplement)—is all the more impressive for his relatively concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse is his fifth collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since Approximately Nowhere in 1999. Tt is also one of the most anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, his voice is as unmistakable as ever—sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate—and this collection shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European and American imaginations. The poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as aging and memory, place, and the difficult existence of the individual in an ever-bigger and more bestial world. One Lark, One Horse is a remarkable assemblage of work that will delight loyal readers and enchant new ones with Hofmann’s approachable, companionable voice.
ONE OF PUBLISHERS WEEKLY'S TOP 10 POETRY BOOKS OF FALL 2017 NPR'S MOST ANTICIPATED POETRY BOOKS OF 2017 A striking, full-length debut collection from Virgin Islands-born poet Nicole Sealey The existential magnitude, deep intellect, and playful subversion of St. Thomas-born, Florida-raised poet Nicole Sealey’s work is restless in its empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human. The ranging scope of inquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast—at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential—is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history, and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.
“Robbins’s comic philosophical musings reveal a flamboyant genius.”—People Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.
Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, showcasing a powerful new Brazilian voice Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing into a turning point in a person’s life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers. Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolano, and Rachel Cusk.
A collection of work focused on the day-to-day activities that accumulate as poetry in our lives. Poems range from reflections on motherhood to experiences as a boxer.
