Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems

10 best books like Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems (Brenda Shaughnessy): Human Wishes, Loose Sugar, The Good Thief, Song, Mosquito, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems, Steal Away: Selected and New Poems, The Master Letters: Poems, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, The End of Beauty

Human Wishes

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0880012129

my boyfriend studied with robert haas in grad school. my dad lives in the same neighborhood as robert haas and keeps meeting him at uc berkeley lectures where they end up seated together. when my dad and my boyfriend met, they bonded by unceasingly talking about robert haas as "bob." this sounds slightly...

Loose Sugar

Author	Brenda Hillman
ISBN	0819522430

Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold,...

The Good Thief

Author	Marie Howe
ISBN	0892551275

Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Ms. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence....

Song

Author	Brigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN	1880238136

I read "Song" in graduate school and immediately bought this book, but never made it all the way through. Now I am ashamed of my graduate school self, because this book? INCREDIBLE. It's not always easy to get through Kelly's poems, because they're very dense, but they're also immaculately crafted....

Mosquito

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...

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems

Author	Karyna McGlynn
ISBN	1932511768

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...

Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

Author	C.D. Wright
ISBN	1556591942

Now in paperback, Steal Away presents C.D. Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness...

The Master Letters: Poems

Author	Lucie Brock-Broido
ISBN	0679765999

I ordered this book from a second-hand site and enjoyed the annotations a previous reader included in this collection. Reading someone else's thoughts on the poems and their editing suggestions (which actually made a couple poems better!) was really fun and interesting.

More to do with the...

Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields

Author	Ashley Capps
ISBN	1931968373

In her first book, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, Ashley Capps sounds like the voice of a fresh generation of poets, where the familiar turns suddenly elliptical, straight talk goes engagingly crooked, and the lyric negotiates with the matter-of-fact. Desperate for something solid to believe...

The End of Beauty

Author	Jorie Graham
ISBN	0880016167

This podcast (a Q&A between Graham and Silverblatt) helped me tremendously in my reading of Graham: http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/jor...

I love the story in this of Graham's teenage daughter coming to her and saying that she felt "bad." Graham's response: a thesaurus, to look...

Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems

Author	Cate Marvin
ISBN	1932511512

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....

Cocktails

Author	D.A. Powell
ISBN	1555973957

kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late
it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home

no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like
breaking glass
they return to smear the ______. and you're it
--from "[you'd want to go to the reunion: see]"

In...

Awe

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...

At the Drive-In Volcano

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,...

Sad Little Breathing Machine

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1555973965

Harvey, whose debut collection was praised by the New Yorker
as "intensely visual, mournfully comic and syntactically
inventive," offers her second stunning collection

Units are the engines
I understand best.

One betrayal, two.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.
-from...

Lampblack & Ash: Poems

Author

Simone Muench

There is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling.
—from the introduction by Carol...

Ghost Girl

Author	Amy Gerstler
ISBN	0142000647

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD...