Modern Life
10 best books like Modern Life (Matthea Harvey): The Ghost Soldiers, Mosquito, Elegy On Toy Piano, The Pajamaist, Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems, Bad Bad, Wind in a Box, Scary, No Scary, The Difficult Farm
| Author | James Tate |
| ISBN | 0061436941 |
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate returns with his fifteenth book of poetry, an exciting new collection that offers nearly one hundred fresh and thought-provoking pieces that embody Tate's trademark style and voice: his accessibility, his dark humor, and his exquisite sense of the absurd.
Tate's...
| 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 | Dean Young |
| ISBN | 0822958724 |
In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.
Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea...
| 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 | Joshua Marie Wilkinson |
| ISBN | 0877459819 |
Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem...
| Author | Frank Stanford |
| ISBN | 1557281939 |
Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction,...
| Author | Chelsey Minnis |
| ISBN | 0977106497 |
"Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both, are the themes of [Chelsey] Minnis's second collection."—Publishers Weekly
"Decadent! Childish! . . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."—Arielle...
| Author | Terrance Hayes |
| ISBN | 0143036866 |
The third collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award
Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a...
| Author | Zachary Schomburg |
| ISBN | 0977770990 |
SCARY, NO SCARY, the follow-up to Zachary Schomburg's acclaimed first collection of poems THE MAN SUIT, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys--at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own...
| Author | Heather Christle |
| ISBN | 0980193834 |
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...
Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor...
| Author | Jack Spicer |
| ISBN | 0819568872 |
In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative...
| Author | C.D. Wright |
| ISBN | 1556592736 |
C.D. Wright is one of America’s leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, “C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.”
Rising,...
| 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...
| 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 | Cathy Park Hong |
| ISBN | 0393082849 |
Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective consciousness...
| Author | Ben Lerner |
| ISBN | 1556592116 |
The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies...
| Author | Timothy Donnelly |
| ISBN | 1933517476 |
"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen Grossman
Timothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested...
