Insomnia Diary
10 best books like Insomnia Diary (Bob Hicok): Some Ether, Talking Dirty to the Gods, The Beforelife, Skid, The Poems of Marianne Moore, Mosquito, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, Winter Stars, Modern Life
| Author | Nick Flynn |
| ISBN | 1555973035 |
Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award
Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry
Some Ether is one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing...
| Author | Yusef Komunyakaa |
| ISBN | 0374527938 |
A daredevil poetic achievement nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award
. . . A god isn't worth
A drop of water in the hell of his good
Imagination, if we can't curse
Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
In his storehouse of belladonna,
Tiger hornets,...
| Author | Franz Wright |
| ISBN | 0375709436 |
In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery....
| Author | Dean Young |
| ISBN | 0822957809 |
Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the...
| Author | Marianne Moore |
| ISBN | 0670031984 |
More than thirty years after her death, Marianne Moore continues to be one of America's most beloved poets. However, her Collected Poems (1951) omits twenty years of later beauties. And her inaccurately titled Complete Poems (1967) is likewise incomplete, leaving out nearly half of her body of verse...
| Author | Alex Lemon |
| ISBN | 0977312747 |
Lyrical and explosive, this debut book of poetry explores Alex Lemon’s experiences as a brain surgery patient. Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him...
| Author | Alan Dugan |
| ISBN | 1583225129 |
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his...
| Author | Elizabeth Bishop |
| ISBN | 0374530769 |
From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some ninety poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box presents, alongside...
| Author | Larry Levis |
| ISBN | 0822935112 |
Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. ...
| Author | Matthea Harvey |
| ISBN | 1555974805 |
Matthea Harvey's Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world....
| Author | Matthew Zapruder |
| ISBN | 1556592442 |
“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...
| Author | Mark Doty |
| ISBN | 0060935405 |
This bold, wide-ranging collection -- his sixth book of poems -- demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made Mark Doty's poems special to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox...
| Author | Tony Hoagland |
| ISBN | 1555973868 |
An eagerly awaited new collection of poems by contemporary favorite Tony Hoagland, author of Donkey Gospel
How did I come to believe in a government called Tony Hoagland?
With an economy based on flattery and self-protection?
and a sewage system of selective forgetting?
and...
| Author | Weldon Kees |
| ISBN | 0803258283 |
During his forty-first year, Weldon Kees’ depression deepened. He had institutionalized Ann, his wife of sixteen years, when a mammoth drinking binge (plus her compulsive TV viewing of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings) precipitated a psychotic episode; her failure to stay in treatment afterward...
| Author | Stephen Dobyns |
| ISBN | 1852242647 |
Dobyns is a poet for those who like their language weave loose, narrative, funny, profound. It's not condensed poetry, in general (though some of the early poems, based on Anglo-Saxon riddles are gnomic, riddling, epigrammatic), but rather the wise-cracking writing of a poet with a great sense of...
| Author | Michael Dickman |
| ISBN | 1556592892 |
"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...
| Author | Brigit Pegeen Kelly |
| ISBN | 1929918488 |
Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader...
| Author | Dorothea Lasky |
| ISBN | 1933517247 |
If the book of Revelations had been scribbled in the diary of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, the prophecies might look something like Awe. Dorothea Lasky is a daring truth-teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession. The secrets she tells are truths we recognize in...
| Author | Aimee Nezhukumatathil |
| ISBN | 1932195459 |
The astonishing second book by a lively and inventive American poet of Filipina-Indian descent. Naomi Shihab Nye says of this book, "Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are . . . ripe, funny and fresh. They're the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements-animals,...
| Author | Grace Paley |
| ISBN | 0374299064 |
Just before her death in 2007 at the age of eighty-four, Grace Paley completed this wise and poignant book of poems. Full of memories of friends and family and incisive observations of life in both her beloved hometown, New York City, and rural Vermont, the poems are sober and playful, experimenting...
| Author | James Tate |
| ISBN | 0880015624 |
Speakers in James Tate's poems are and are not like those we know: a man's meditation on gardening renders him witless; another man traps theories and then lets them loose in a city park; a nun confides that "it was her / cowboy pride that got her through"; a gnome's friend inhabits a world where "a great...
