A wry and dark debut of sharply compressed lyrics by a precocious new voice in poetry. These powerful poems are like wrecked pastorals whose narrator seeks temporary pleasure in wit, form, rhyme, or the borrowed weekend house. Inching toward consolation in the face of sudden loss, the poet examines the reconfigured world. The elegies are like conversations overheard or recounted dreams: full of portent and mystery.
This is one of the wisest books I've read in years... —New York Times Book Review No writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act—the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back... Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle’s work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that’s vital and welcome, that doesn’t make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon Review Profound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny...These informal talks have far more staying power and verve than most of their kind. Readers may come away dazzled, as well as amused... —Publishers Weekly This is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way. This is a desert island book. —Matthew Dickman The accomplished poet is humorous and self-deprecating in this collection of illuminating essays on poetry, aesthetics and literature... —San Francisco Examiner Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.
Poems about sex, marriage, and the desire for a child from a “scary-cool and edgy-smart” poet (J. D. McClatchy). The frank, raw lyrics of Dana Goodyear’s second collection draw on the scenery of Los Angeles—the teenagers, vagrants, pornographers—and the beautiful decay that serves as an insistent reminder to them all. The poems are unsparing but tender, candid but sly, and open to the force of nature on an individual human life. from “Wildfire” We want this. The end to sleeping, the bittersweet arousal, the peeling back, the soft bath in resin, the release. It can’t come quick enough, the hot touch that breaks the crust and lets us go. Hear it now: a crackling, as the woods begin to sing alongside the birds.
Worlds out of time still exist. Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering, just as the poem lasts. In the concert of being present. —from "Arriving" Linda Gregg's abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems for the first time collects the ongoing work of Gregg's career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and thirty remarkable new poems.
Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."
2022 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARD FINALIST — BUSINESS, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, & SMALL BUSINESS • 2022 AXIOM BOOK AWARD BRONZE MEDALIST — ENTREPRENEURSHIP/SMALL BUSINESS • NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD SILVER WINNER — BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP “Redefining Rich is inspiring, thought-provoking, and highly recommended both as a fascinating story in its own right and as a call to reconsider what one truly aspires to in life.” —Midwest Book Review In our dysfunctional economy, “success” often comes at great personal cost . . . we’re tired, we’re stressed out, and we have no time for family and friends. It’s time to redefine “rich.” From a third-generation farmer and successful entrepreneur, Redefining Rich is an entrepreneur’s guide to balancing work and family with the pleasures of the good life, with simple exercises and important lessons to serve everyone from the new sole proprietor to a seasoned CEO. Shannon Hayes was in the final months of her PhD program, recently engaged, and beginning to plan her future. Having grown up on a northern Appalachian sheep farm, she had two advantages: a hard-won education and hillbilly pragmatism. But when it came time to enter the job market, Hayes made a tough discovery: the economy just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for women, for free thinkers, for the working class, or for white-collar professionals. It doesn’t work in rural America, much less in the cities and the suburbs. It forces us to choose between career and family, profit and creativity. So, Hayes and her husband walked away from their career paths and chose to forge a life on her family’s frost-plagued mountain farm, starting up a small café in town. Together, they found their sweet spot: a place where the Appalachian farm culture and sensibilities she and her community have lived by helped them thrive, even in a tough economic environment. Against the odds, the Hayes family built a business that lets them live abundantly, spend time with family, and enjoy the gifts of nature. And the business even helped reinvigorate their chronically economically depressed town. But the journey to this point was rife with challenges, tumbles, and mistakes. With humor, lively stories, and assurance, Hayes reveals the best lessons she’s learned for taking an alternate path, whether it lies in rural America, in the ‘burbs, or the heart of the city. She outlines the fundamentals of sustainable wealth, how to develop income streams, get organized, bring family into the business, ask for fair prices and market efficiently, and—the most important lesson of all—set personal boundaries and say “no” even while sustaining relationships. Hayes shows entrepreneurship is the means to build sustainable communities, keep families together, and foster great creative fulfillment. Redefining Rich will comfort, instruct, amuse, and inspire those of us who are trying to make our lives work in untraditional ways.
"In her third collection, Amy Beeder offers worlds past and contemporary in diction nearly Elizabethan, in poems as witty and sly as any from that virtuosic literary era" - Dana Levin
A Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry A New York Times Notable Book of the Year From the Winner of the Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and finalist for a Lambda, Tommy Pico's Feed is the final book in the Teebs Cycle. Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.
