Mules of Love
10 best books like Mules of Love (Ellen Bass): Deaf Republic: Poems, The Tradition, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Magical Negro, When My Brother Was an Aztec, Don't Call Us Dead, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Meditations in an Emergency, What We Carry, Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature & the Inhuman
| 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 | Jericho Brown |
| ISBN | 1556594860 |
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
| Author | Chen Chen |
| ISBN | 1942683332 |
In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family—the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces...
| Author | Morgan Parker |
| ISBN | 1947793187 |
Magical Negro is an archive of Black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They...
"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone,...
| Author | Danez Smith |
| ISBN | 1555977855 |
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten...
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
| Author | Ross Gay |
| ISBN | 0822963310 |
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death,...
Meditations in an Emergency
| Author | Frank O'Hara |
| ISBN | 0802134521 |
Frank O’Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, "which, by its vitality alone, became the...
| Author | Dorianne Laux |
| ISBN | 1880238071 |
Hadn't read this in a dozen or more years (thanks again Boone), and it's hot-damn fantastic. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorites, "After Twelve Days of Rain," which you can hear her read here:
Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went...
| Author | George Steiner |
| ISBN | 0300074719 |
How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as...
Be terrified.
It's you I love,
perfect man,
Greek God, my own;
but I know you'll go,
betray me, stray
from home.
So better by far for
me if you were stone.
—from "Medusa"
Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau...
