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I Was the Jukebox: Poems

10 best books like I Was the Jukebox: Poems (Sandra Beasley): When My Brother Was an Aztec, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, Late Wife, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems, The Pajamaist, The Selected Levis, Rookery, Notes from the Divided Country: Poems, The Book of Men

When My Brother Was an Aztec
AuthorNatalie Díaz
"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone,...
Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft
AuthorTony Hoagland
ISBN1555974554
The anticipated first collection of essays by celebrated poet Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me


Meanness, the very thing that is unforgivable in human social life, in poetry is thrilling and valuable. Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless...
If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?
AuthorMatthea Harvey
ISBN1555976840
A brilliant combination of poetry and visual artwork by Matthea Harvey, whose vision is “nothing short of blazingly original” (Time Out New York)

She didn’t even know she had a name until one day she heard the human explaining to another one, “Oh that’s just the backyard mermaid.”...
Late Wife
AuthorClaudia Emerson
ISBN0807130842
In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for...
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems
AuthorKaryna McGlynn
ISBN1932511768
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration...
The Pajamaist
AuthorMatthew Zapruder
ISBN1556592442

“Zapruder’s hip lyricism offers both the slippery comedy and a surprisingly grave, ultimately winning, commitment to real people, emotions, locales.”—Publishers Weekly


Matthew Zapruder is a young poet reinvigorating American letters. In his second collection he...
The Selected Levis
AuthorLarry Levis
ISBN0822957930
Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John

When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering...
Rookery
AuthorTraci Brimhall
ISBN0809329972
Traveling to the most intimate extremes of the human heart

 

Fraught with madness, brutality, and ecstasy, Traci Brimhall’s Rookery delves into the darkest and most remote corners of the human experience. From the graveyards and battlefields of the Civil War to the ancient forests...
Notes from the Divided Country: Poems
AuthorSuji Kwock Kim
ISBN0807128732
Notes from a Divided Country, Kim's first collection of poetry, confronts a number of difficult subjects - colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family,...
The Book of Men
AuthorDorianne Laux
ISBN0393079554
The narrative poems in Dorianne Laux's fifth collection charge through the summer of love, where Vietnam casts a long shadow, and into the present day, where she compassionately paints the smoky bars, graffiti, and addiction of urban life. Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous"...
My Love Is A Dead Arctic Explorer
AuthorPaige Ackerson-Kiely
ISBN1934103276
Poetry. Poems of a loneliness that quarrels with itself from the far edge of love, this is a collection of would-be love poems chastened by experience. "I was a Promethean dilettante disabused of tinder," says the speaker, who later observes, "After you reach adulthood / no one bets you'll set this world...
The End of the West
AuthorMichael Dickman
ISBN1556592892
"Dickman's book moves with careful intensity as it confidently illuminates buried, contemporary suffering."—Publishers Weekly

"Elizabeth Bishop said that the three qualities she admired most in poetry were accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Michael Dickman's first full-length...
The Difficult Farm
AuthorHeather Christle
ISBN0980193834
The Difficult Farm is where you’ll find surprising jolts of the sweetest kindness delivered via poetry that’s new, urgent, blessed, beautiful, careful, tenacious, a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all. When I read a poem by Heather Christle I’m awed. – Dara Wier

This...
Factory of Tears
AuthorValzhyna Mort
ISBN1556592744
"Mort...strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language." —The New Yorker

“Valzyhna Mort . . . can justly be described as a risen star of the international poetry world....
Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems
AuthorCate Marvin
ISBN1932511512
update: I'm thinking this could have been edited into a slimmer and more powerful collection, because I feel like some of the poems were powerful and unique whereas others were just mediocre and not so unique.

Overall, 3 3/4 stars.

***

Macabre in a creepily sing songy manner....
Fire to Fire
AuthorMark Doty
ISBN0060752475
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop...
Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems
AuthorKim Addonizio
ISBN0393068528
A lyrically intense fifth collection from “one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets” (San Diego Union-Tribune).

With both passion and precision, Lucifer at the Starlite explores life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected...
Phantom Noise
AuthorBrian Turner
ISBN1882295803
Brian Turner was a rifle team leader in Iraq, and he draws on his own experience as well as the literary and political history of Iraq in this excellent collection of his poetry.

His most famous poems from this collection, "Al-A'imma Bridge" and "The Mutanabbi Street Bombing" place specific...
Lucky Fish
AuthorAimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN1932195580
Lucky Fish travels along a lush current — a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, “new hope,” and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song,...
Robinson Alone
AuthorKathleen Rooney
ISBN0983700141
The Nebraska-born poet, painter, critic, and musician Weldon Kees traced a brief, bright path through midcentury America before vanishing in 1955, an apparent suicide. Among the poems he left behind are a particularly unsettling four that feature the mysterious Robinson: both a prototypical member...
Begging for It
AuthorAlex Dimitrov
ISBN1935536265
In his debut collection of poems, Begging for It, Alex Dimitrov leads us through the streets, bridges, and bedrooms of New York City, sometimes as far away as Buenos Aires and Iceland, and as close as our own darkest corners. A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant...
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