Men in the Off Hours

Author	Andrea Lawlor
ISBN	0986086991

It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from...

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1555978312

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political...

Author

Ocean Vuong

The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have...

Author	Euripides
ISBN	1854594117

Dionysus is my favourite ancient Greek god. Why? Because he is the coolest, simple as.

“He is life's liberating force.
He is release of limbs and communion through dance.
He is laughter, and music in flutes.
He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep!"


- The Young...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0375712259

Stag’s Leap is stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.

In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart...

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0374152012

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry

A luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's...

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0374530742

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the...

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0880013346

I had a Creative Writing teacher who asked me once if I would like anyone other than myself to read my poetry. When I answered, “Yes,” she advised me to make the suffering in my poems more universal and less personal.

Poetry is obviously personal, but she explained to me that, if I had a husband...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0822953145

Poems examine life as a child, a woman, and a mother; death; and our relationship to the world. This book, Olds's first, was published when she was 37, and it launched her Pulitzer-winning career.

I am trying to write my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me...

Author

Euripides

The modern reader may have difficulty conceiving of Iphigeneia in Tauris as tragedy, for the term in our sense is associated with downfall, death, and disaster. But to the ancient Greeks, the use of heroic legend, the tragic diction and meters, and the tragic actors would have defined it as pure tragedy,...

Author	László Krasznahorkai
ISBN	0811226085

The Last Wolf features a classic, obsessed Krasznahorkai narrator, a man hired to write (by mistake, by a glitch of fate) the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another, dragged about a cold foreign place, appalled by a...

Author	Susan Sontag
ISBN	0241339707

'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.'

These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering...