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Reading recommendations for fiction, nonfiction, and audiobooks across all reading levels.
1) Sight lines
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"From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to...
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"Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive....
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""Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry."-Rain Taxi"To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius."-Claudia RankineIn the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems,...
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A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.
"Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"--And very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that...
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"Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something...
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Award-winning poet Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying--from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science...
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"In her remarkable and assured debut, Alexandria Hall explores the boundaries and limits of language, place, and the self, as well as the complicated space between safety and danger, intimacy and isolation, playfulness and seriousness, home and away. With a keen eye for the importance of place, Hall shows us daily life in rural Vermont, illuminating the beauty and difficulty inherent in the dichotomies of human language and experience. Incisive and...
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"A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets. Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America's most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he's headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work- lyric...
10) Virgin: poems
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"Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo's debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman"--Provided by publisher.
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"Jenny George's debut showcases an astonishing poetic talent, a new voice that is intensely focused, patient, and empathic. The dream of reason explores the paadoxical relationships between humans and the animals we imagine, keep, fer, and consume..."--Cover unnumbered page 4.
12) The Human Half
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American poets continuum volume no. 173
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Deborah Brown's second collection looks with imagination to the limitless possibilities of language, following surprising associations to find that which feels deep and true. Threaded with echoes of familial trauma--a sister's battle with cancer, a brother's struggles with depression--these lyric poems reveal an open-hearted speaker who finds solace in the beauties of celestial navigation, the flowers along the railroad tracks, and the brushwork of...
13) Best bones
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Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Best Bones is a house. When you walk around the rooms of the house, you overhear the desires and griefs of a family, as well as the unresolved concerns of lingering ghosts. The various voices in the house struggle against the family roles and social identities that they must wear like heavy garments-mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother, servant, and master. All these voices crave unification;...
14) Dear, sincerely
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David Hernandez's Dear, Sincerely is his most intimate and dynamic collection to date, bringing the reader into poems that are simultaneously personal and universal, and sometimes political. With his characteristic dreamlike imagery, inventive rhythms, and biting wit, Hernandez's voice reaches toward us with an accessible profundity. Dear, Sincerely is an imaginative book that explores the Self, the collective We, the cosmos, and the murky division...
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Named "a poet to watch" by O Magazine, Camille Rankine's debut collection is a series of provocations and explorations. Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms."
16) Refuge/Es
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Intimate and explorative, Refuge/es intricately weaves together political, historical, and highly specific cultural movements across many countries and time periods; challenging themes of war, violence, love, and suffering. Michael Broek counters the macro worldly lens with a microscopic view of what makes us distinctly human, which exposes a deep irony: sometimes what we run from, we also create.
17) Chord
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"That art should once have been marked with this delicacy: always only one of each thing made, so that your poem has its one life on the sheet you have chosen for it, or the snapshot of the birthday party, everything in the room upended by the children's jubilation, survives only in the single defended piece of glass. Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of The Darker Fall and...
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""Priscilla Long would take a bridge anywhere to reach her lost sister, and these poems are replete with bridges literal and metaphoric. In her quest and resolve, these words resonate from 'Kaddish for Susanne': 'All praise to all that is.'""--Carole Simmons Oles, author of A Selected History of Her Heart: Poems.
19) Now, now
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In Now, Now, Jennifer Maier's second poetry collection, time is of the essence.Moving with quantum ease through the porous membranes of the past, present, and future, the speaker wonders: What is each moment but the swirling confluence (or shy first meeting) of past and future-of what happened, and what-has-not-yet-happened but will?Such phenomenological questions are sparked by ordinary events: a friend's passion for jigsaw puzzles; an imagined conversation...
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Charles Harper Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best comedy must, out of deep human drives, sorrows, and needs. Powerful immersions in what it means to be human, these poems explore the spectrum of emotions from love to hate, tenderness to brutality. They can be withering and vulnerable in the same breath. Models of clarity and vividness, they are mysterious when they need to be, ranging from lyric...