'Musings of My Mind' is a beautiful book on poetry, by 16 year old writer, Suzanne Alexy, who has weaved her thoughts, emotions and experiences as a compilation of poems and songs, penned between the age of 8 and 16. This is a 'coming of age' poetry book, a labour of love that transcends childhood to teens. While the poems have a classic touch of rhyme and rhythm, the spectrum she covers, resonates with a contemporary context. Some will tickle your funny bone, some will tug your heart, some will have you shed a tear and some will put you in deep thought. So grab your copy today, flip the pages and savour a melange of emotions in her poetic musings.
Some people are like monarch butterflies—solitary by nature, on a passionate search for somewhere. Critically acclaimed songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews presents her first poetry collection. This poetry collection reads like a transformation, me, the narrator, being the figurative Old Monarch. Documenting this journey, the book is separated into three sections, "Sonoran Milkweed," "Longing In Flight," and "Eucalyptus Tree (My Arrival to Rest)." In the first stage of my journey, I explore my childhood in Arizona, and the naive assumptions of youth. At this stage in my journey, I am impressionable, seeing the world with all its nuances for the first time. Through the landscape of the Sonoran Desert, I explore some dark family dynamics and what a child sees. Several characters turn up in the early poems including my cowboy grandpa, and the single mother who raised me, despite many forthcomings. The early poems also explore my desire to see a brighter world of possibility beyond the dusty desert island, and see humans more clearly within the confounds of discovery. In the second stage, I have left home. I am falling in love for the first time, as I become a young woman. Finally, the last stage is the old monarch's arrival to the garden. There are a lot of metaphysical and philosophical poems in this section. I arrive at the figurative garden, and I finally understand the journey at the edge of my life. There are a lot of poems in the context of a garden here, accepting mortality and the ever-changing world. These are meant to be wise old woman poems.
From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck
How does one record an extraordinary time? Confined to his Delhi apartment, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee unravels the intimate paradoxes of life he encounters in the first weeks of a global pandemic. His stories about local fish sellers, gardeners, barbers and lovers merge with his concerns for the exodus of migrant labourers, the challenges faced by health workers, and a mother braving checkposts to bring her son home. Drawing inspiration from contemporary literature and cinema, The Town Slowly Empties is a unique window on a world desperate for love, care and hope. Manash is our Everyman, urging us to slow down and mend our broken ties with nature. Written with rare candour and elegance, this meditative book is a compelling account of the human condition that soars high above the empty streets.
The proverbial "Book of Olga," not yet half complete but already crammed to overflowing, journals a lifetime of music, work, study, love, loss, and passion of Olga Wilhelmine Munding, corroborating the principle that fiction sometimes pales in comparison to truth. The multifaceted singer-songwriter's latest enterprise, Blues & Musings, is comprised of 160 songs and lyrics, interspersed with stories and poems spanning over the twenty-three years since the creation of her alter ego Blues Babe. Blues & Musings accompanies an EP of never-before-heard demo recordings as a simultaneous release. There's more to the story, but it all begins here.
From Ian Williams, author of Reproduction, winner of the Giller Prize and a June 2020 Indie Next Great Read Frustrated by how tough the issues of our time are to solve – racial inequality, our pernicious depression, the troubled relationships we have with other people – Ian Williams revisits the seemingly simple questions of grade school for inspiration: if Billy has five nickels and Jane has three dimes, how many Black men will be murdered by police? He finds no satisfaction, realizing that maybe there are no easy answers to ineffable questions. Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. Two long poems cut through the text like vibrating basenotes, curiosities circle endlessly, and microaggressions spin into lyric. And all done with a light touch and a joyful sense of humour.
Please Come Off-Book queers the theatrical canon we all grew up with. Kantor critiques the treatment of queer figures and imagines a braver and bolder future that allows queer voices the agency over their own stories. Drawing upon elements of the Aristotelian dramatic structure and the Hero's Journey, Please Come Off-Book is both a love letter to and a scathing critique of American culture and the lenses we choose to see ourselves through.
A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetry's uniquely seductive spell "Oh! there are spirits of the air," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet's mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. "I am marking here what most marked me," she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the "growth of a poet's mind," as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an "erotics of interpretation": this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your "my poets," or "my novelists," or "my filmmakers," or "my pop stars," might be.
A Michael L. Printz Honor Award Winner in the vein of This is Where It Ends “A gentle, lyrical story of incomprehensible sorrow faced with quiet courage.”—ELIZABETH WEIN, New York Times bestselling author “Hubbard treats tragedy and new beginnings with a skilled, delicate hand.”—JOHN COREY WHALEY, author of Where Things Come Back, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award Senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school with a stolen gun, threatens his girlfriend, Emily Beam, and then takes his own life. Soon after, angry and guilt-ridden Emily is sent to a boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where two quirky fellow students and the spirit of Emily Dickinson offer helping hands. But it is up to Emily Beam to heal her own damaged self, to find the good behind the bad, hope inside the despair, and springtime under the snow. A Boston Globe Best YA Novel of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A Tayshas High School Reading List Selection A North Carolina Young Adult book Award Nominee * "As graceful as a feather drifting down, this lyrical story delivers a deep journey of healing on a tragic theme.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred * "And We Stay is a little gem of a book. . . . there is certainly something for anyone looking for a good read with a strong, believable female lead who is working her hardest to overcome tragedy.”—School Library Journal, Starred “Hubbard’s writing is elegant and emotional.”—Publisher’s Weekly “This novel is accomplished, polished, and mixes prose and poetry to stunning effect.”—Booklist “Hubbard . . . captures perfectly the turbulence of young love, the bonds of friendship, and the push-and-pull dynamic between teens and adults.”—VOYA
Spring was late in 1913 and Edward Thomas decided to go and search for winter's grave and the tell-tale signs of season's turn - he set out to cycle westwards from London to the Quantocks. Edward Thomas 1878-1917 turned from writing prose to poetry in 1914. His work as a poet has been widely celebrated and admired - Ted Hughes described Thomas as "the father of us all". The Pursuit of Spring, originally published in 1914, bridges the divide between Thomas the journalist/critic and Thomas the highly regarded poet.
