In Search of Small Gods

10 best books like In Search of Small Gods (Jim Harrison): Life on Mars, Insomnia Diary, Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, Repair, This Clumsy Living, Black Aperture, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, Eye Level: Poems, Greed

Life on Mars

Author	Tracy K. Smith
ISBN	1555975844

You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk? 
                                                           —from...

Insomnia Diary

Author	Bob Hicok
ISBN	0822958422

One of the best books of poetry I've read. Hicok can hit hard, but he doesn't lose himself in savagery--there's room in his attitude for sensitivity and bemusement. Often, when he does work with a bitter pen, he aims it at his own self, but even there he flavors his vinegar with compassion. Most importantly,...

Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction

Author	Brenda Miller
ISBN	0072512784

This is a great book, and if you look for it, try for the earlier edition with the anthology in the back. The most recent edition took the essays out and that makes no sense. Why read about how to write creative nonfiction and not immediately have an example?

At this point I have read most of the book...

Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present

Author	Lex Williford
ISBN	1416531742

From memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism - this unique, indispensable anthology brings together fifty unforgettable works from all genres of creative nonfiction. Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country,...

Repair

Author	C.K. Williams
ISBN	0374527067

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets

"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."
Always, "What will have been done to me?"
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent...

This Clumsy Living

Author	Bob Hicok
ISBN	0822959534

I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close the door of summer behind them, their heads floating on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds, I saw their hips lie down inside those birds, inside the day of shy...

Black Aperture

Author

Matt Rasmussen

In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother s suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In Outgoing, the speaker erases his brother s answering machine message to save his family from the shame of dead you / answering...

Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys

Author	D.A. Powell
ISBN	1555976050

I have this rearrangement to make:
symbolic death, my backward glance.
The way the past is a kind of future
leaning against the sporty hood.
                  —from “Bugcatching at Twilight” In D. A. Powell’s fifth book of poetry, the rollicking line...

Eye Level: Poems

Author	Jenny Xie
ISBN	1555978029

Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on...

Greed

Author	Ai
ISBN	0393312011

These poems are intense, David Ignatow says she is, "The hardest-hitting poet of her generation." The book starts with a poem after the 92 riots, and includes persona poems after the likes of Marion Berry, Jack Rudy, Edger J. Hoover... reading made me wonder about my own knowledge of history. Times I...

Indecency

Author	Justin Phillip Reed
ISBN	1566895146

Intricate, Intimate, Difficult, and Confrontational Poems That Push at the Boundaries of Selfhood, Skin, Culture, Sexuality, and Blood.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity...

Tout Seul

Author	Christophe Chabouté
ISBN	2749304296

An entire life spent alone on a rock. What's he do all day?

This graphic novel is stunning.

First published in France in 2008, Alone was just translated into English this year, and I'm grateful I had the chance to read this beautiful book. It's about a disfigured man who lives alone in...