Certain Magical Acts
10 best books like Certain Magical Acts (Alice Notley): Death Is Not an Option, The Spice-Box of Earth, Our Andromeda, Complete Poems, 1904-1962, Seam, I, the Jury, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002, The Dead and the Living, Thirst
| Author | Suzanne Rivecca |
| ISBN | 0393072568 |
Death Is Not an Option is a bold, dazzling debut collection about girls and women in a world where sexuality and self-delusion collide. In these stories, a teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating high school finds a warped kind of redemption...
| Author | Leonard Cohen |
| ISBN | 0224006495 |
This is the second book of Cohen's poetry and it is filled with his unique brand of religion and sexuality, the sacred and the profane. One of the fascinating aspects of Leonard Cohen's poetry has been its elasticity and it's interesting to see how it has evolved over the years; you only have to look at the...
| Author | Brenda Shaughnessy |
| ISBN | 1556594100 |
Honored as a New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of 2013"
Honored by Cosmopolitan as the one poetry title on their list of “Best Books of the Year For Women, by Women”
"A heady, infectious celebration."—The New Yorker
"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy,...
Complete Poems, 1904-1962
| Author | E.E. Cummings |
| ISBN | 0871401525 |
At the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the...
| Author | Tarfia Faizullah |
| ISBN | 0809333252 |
The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi...
| Author | Mickey Spillane |
| ISBN | 0451165926 |
I woke up to the alarm clock at 5 am and did 100 knuckle pushups on the sidewalk outside the apartment building. In the rain. There were some fancy boys “jogging” and I glared a contemptuous good morning to them.
Inside I had my usual breakfast: three raw eggs and three fingers of Kentucky bourbon....
| Author | Rainer Maria Rilke |
| ISBN | 1573225851 |
At the beginning of this century, a young German poet returned from a journey to Russia, where he had immersed himself in the spirituality he discovered there. He "received" a series of poems about which he did not speak for a long time - he considered them sacred, and different from anything else he ever...
| Author | Joy Harjo |
| ISBN | 0393325342 |
Over a quarter-century's work from the 2003 winner of the Arrell Gibson Award for Lifetime Achievement.
This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous...
| Author | Sharon Olds |
| ISBN | 0394715632 |
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...
| Author | Mary Oliver |
| ISBN | 0807068969 |
Thirst, a collection of forty-three new poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver, introduces two new directions in the poet's work. Grappling with grief at the death of the love of her life and partner of over forty years, the remarkable photographer Molly Malone Cook, she strives to experience...
| Author | Katherine Mansfield |
| ISBN | 0141196130 |
Katherine Mansfield's perceptive and resonant writing helped to define the modern short story, observing apparently trivial incidents to create quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. In these three tales, aglow with light and colour, Mansfield describes an exultant epiphany, fading...
| Author | George Oppen |
| ISBN | 0811214885 |
George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost...
| Author | Dylan Thomas |
| ISBN | 0811215423 |
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) prepared this volume in 1952 the author's choice of the ninety poems he felt would best represent his work up to that time and it was published by New Directions in 1953 as The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, shortly after his death. This book was then and remained, for all practical...
| Author | Franz Kafka |
| ISBN | 0805209492 |
Collected after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, here are more than two decades' worth of Franz Kafka's letters to the men and women with whom he maintained his closest personal relationships, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium...
| Author | Fanny Howe |
| ISBN | 1555976824 |
The new poetry collection by Fanny Howe, whose "body of work seems larger, stranger, and more permanent with each new book she publishes" (Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize citation)
People want to be poets for reasons that have little to do with language.
It's the life of the poet that they want.
Even...
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
| Author | Susan Bordo |
| ISBN | 0520240545 |
"Unbearable Weight is brilliant. From an immensely knowledgeable feminist perspective, in engaging, jargonless (!) prose, Bordo analyzes a whole range of issues connected to the body—weight and weight loss, exercise, media images, movies, advertising, anorexia and bulimia, and much more—in...
Rich and powerful writing in these three novellas. I will definitely read more of this author.
The first novella, The Age of Discretion, centers around the aging process and the end of careers of both husband and wife. In addition, there’s the bitter disappointment the woman feels after...
