Notes from the Divided Country: Poems

Author	Cathy Park Hong
ISBN	0393064840

Cathy Park Hong is a true artist of language. Here she has constructed a pidgin out of numerous major world languages, and wielded it masterfully in the voices of her characters to speak about revolution, corruption and the landscape of the future. Definitely read these poems aloud to fully enjoy the...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	0393065421

Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the United States s most beloved poets. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward...

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1932195122

Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language....

Author	Kimiko Hahn
ISBN	0393061892

I find it interesting that several people have remarked on how much they enjoyed reading The Narrow Road to the Interior, mentioning in particular how easily it read and flowed from entry to entry. Although I had a somewhat similar experience in reading The Narrow Road to the Interior as I enjoyed Hahn’s...

Author	Tarfia Faizullah
ISBN	0809333252

The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi...

Author	Yusef Komunyakaa
ISBN	0819512087

Komunyakaa vividly evokes his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity, and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts. He portrays a child's dawning awareness of the natural and social order around him, rhythms of life in the community, the constant struggle for survival in the...

Author	Tyehimba Jess
ISBN	0974635332

“It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake.”—Brigit Pegeen Kelly, National Poetry Series judge

A biography in poems, leadbelly examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a variety...

Author	Ai
ISBN	0393320189

Ai's collection is startling, difficult, and important. Selected from the five books preceding this collection - Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and Greed - these poems tackle dangerous parts of the human spirit in ways that leave readers gasping for air. Her metaphors and similes are often spiritual,...

Author	Kevin Young
ISBN	0375709894

In this jaunty and intimate collection, Kevin Young invents a language as shimmying and comic, as low-down and high-hearted, as the music from which he draws inspiration. With titles such as “Stride Piano,” “Gutbucket,” and “Can-Can,” these poems have the sharp completeness of vocalized...

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	Sandra Beasley
ISBN	0393076512

“These poems are fresh, crisp, and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”—Joy Harjo, prize citation


from...

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...

Author	Jenny Boully
ISBN	0977901904

Poetry. [one love affair]* meditates on mud daubers, Duras, and the deaths of mentally ill and drug addicted lovers, blurring fiction, essay, and memoir in an extended prose poem that is as much as study of how we read as it is a treatise on the language of love affairs: a language of hidden messages, coded...

Author	Lucille Clifton
ISBN	1880238888

Lucille Clifton: Ave Atque Vale

Lucille Clifton is gone but her legacy of simple, honestly felt, seemingly spontaneously written poems about the live of ordinary people who become icons almost by accident will live on, especially through the collection of her works in this award winning...

Author	Aimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN	0971031088

Poetry. As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates...

Author	Lucie Brock-Broido
ISBN	0375710221

With Trouble in Mind, her long-awaited third collection, Lucie Brock-Broido has written her most exceptional poems to date. There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,”...

Author	Myung Mi Kim
ISBN	0520231449

Myung Mi Kim's Commons weighs on the most sensitive of scales the minute grains of daily life in both peace and war, registering as very few works of literature have done our common burden of being subject to history. Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until...

Author	Jericho Brown
ISBN	1930974795

Poetry. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. PLEASE explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, PLEASE is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African...

Author	Aracelis Girmay
ISBN	1931896364

Stunning, highly original poems that celebrate the richness of the author's multicultural tradition, Teeth explores loves, wars, wild hope, defiance, and the spirit of creativity in a daring use of language and syntax. Behind this language one senses a powerful, inventive woman who is not afraid...