BooksList.Best
Search

An Atlas of the Difficult World

10 best books like An Atlas of the Difficult World (Adrienne Rich): The Book of Delights, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, The Topeka School, How We Fight For Our Lives, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Don't Call Us Dead, The Wild Iris, In Mad Love and War, American Primitive, The Dead and the Living

The Book of Delights
AuthorRoss Gay
ISBN1616207922
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed...
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
AuthorAudre Lorde
ISBN0895941228
in college, in the late 80s and early 90s, i discovered that i had two aunts. this is one (and this is another). aunt Audre intimidated me at first. she was a stern, moody, melancholy woman who had lived a life of so many ups and downs. but as i got to know her, her innate gentleness became clear. this was a woman...
The Topeka School
AuthorBen Lerner
ISBN0374277788
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the new right

Adam Gordon...
How We Fight For Our Lives
AuthorSaeed Jones
ISBN1501132733
From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.

“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to...
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
AuthorOcean Vuong
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have...
Don't Call Us Dead
AuthorDanez Smith
ISBN1555977855
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten...
The Wild Iris
AuthorLouise Glück
ISBN0880013346
I had a Creative Writing teacher who asked me once if I would like anyone other than myself to read my poetry. When I answered, “Yes,” she advised me to make the suffering in my poems more universal and less personal.

Poetry is obviously personal, but she explained to me that, if I had a husband...
In Mad Love and War
AuthorJoy Harjo
Joy Harjo is a powerful voice for her Creek (Muscogee) tribe (“a stolen people in a stolen land”), for other oppressed people, and for herself. Her poems, both sacred and secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they...
American Primitive
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0316650048
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Her most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.

"American Primitive enchants me with the purity...
The Dead and the Living
AuthorSharon Olds
ISBN0394715632
I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth...
Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (Faber Library)
AuthorTed Hughes
ISBN0571176550
Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A. Alvarez wrote in the Observer, 'Each fresh encounter with despair becomes the occasion for a separate, almost...
If They Come for Us
AuthorFatimah Asghar
Poet and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series "Brown Girls" captures the experience of being a Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America, while exploring identity, violence, and healing.

In this powerful and imaginative debut poetry collection, Fatimah Asghar nakedly captures...
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
AuthorCharles Bukowski
ISBN0876850050
Once upon a time I went through a Buk phase, a time when he was the only thing I could read. He got me through some tough times, and for that, I’ll always love the dirty old man.

But that was long ago, so I wondered if he was really as awesome as I remembered, or if he just resonated with me because of...
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems
AuthorAlice Walker
ISBN1577319303
“Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.”
— from the preface

I was born to grow,
alongside my garden of plants,
poems
like
this...
Be With
AuthorForrest Gander
ISBN0811226050
WINNER OF THE 2019 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Book of 2018

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical...
Whereas
AuthorLayli Long Soldier
ISBN1555977677
The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award

WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our...
About
Feedback
© BooksList.Best 2024