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Science and Steepleflower: Poetry

10 best books like Science and Steepleflower: Poetry (Forrest Gander): alphabet, Human Wishes, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, Loose Sugar, Necessary Stranger, Indeed I Was Pleased With the World, My Life, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, Erosion, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

alphabet
AuthorInger Christensen
Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally...
Human Wishes
AuthorRobert Hass
ISBN0880012129
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...
Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form
AuthorMatthea Harvey
ISBN1882295269

I came to "Pity..." after having read "Sad Little Breathing Machine," so my thoughts on the collection are a bit in reverse. Dean Young's string-of-similes blurb, "this book astonishes me the way I am astonished by jeweled clockworks, siege machinery, the musculature of the shark and hummingbird,"...
Loose Sugar
AuthorBrenda Hillman
ISBN0819522430
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,...
Necessary Stranger
AuthorGraham Foust
ISBN0978746716
Poetry. Graham Foust's third book offers agile poems of dread and humor. Robert Creeley writes, "These poems move in close to luxuriant circles, round and round each particular syllable, neither hurrying nor dragging behind--just there. At times there seems an almost physical presence to them,...
Indeed I Was Pleased With the World
AuthorMary Ruefle
ISBN0887484670
from Indeed I Was Pleased with the World by Mary Ruefle:

Grief


First, it will comfort you to know there are crows.
And calipers for measuring the amount of sunshine
that can escape from under the shadows
of thought. Far out at sea ships go down
in a crippled light,...
My Life
AuthorLyn Hejinian
ISBN1931243336
Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman’s fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first publication by Sun & Moon Press (the edition reprinted here)...
This Connection of Everyone With Lungs
AuthorJuliana Spahr
ISBN0520242955
Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought....
Erosion
AuthorJorie Graham
ISBN0691014051

From Erosion
SAN SEPOLCRO




Jorie Graham
?
. . . . How clean
the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into
labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the...
Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
AuthorC.D. Wright
ISBN1556592167
C. D. Wright takes her title from a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before having had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder.

Cooling Time is a new type of book, an unruly vigil that is an interconnected...
The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990
AuthorCharles Wright
ISBN0374523266
The heart of this volume is made up of long journal-like dated entries in free verse. Deliciously absorbing and meditative, they concern themselves with landscapes and the natural world, with ideas, memory, and autobiography. I think of poetry as a kind of wisdom. I get the idea Wright dedicates his...
Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems
AuthorCate Marvin
ISBN1932511512
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
AuthorD.A. Powell
ISBN1555973957
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...
Plot
AuthorClaudia Rankine
In her third collection of poems, Claudia Rankine creates a profoundly daring, ingeniously experimental examination of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression. Liv, an expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, are at an impasse from her reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering...
The Lichtenberg Figures
AuthorBen Lerner
ISBN1556592116
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...
Letters to Wendy's
AuthorJoe Wenderoth
ISBN0970367201


TELL US ABOUT YOUR VISIT


JULY 1, 1996

I had such a wonderful meal, in every sense of the word. I especially liked the ordering of the food. It asserts an altogether proper dominance. And how do you manage to hire such attractive people! Often I visit Wendy's just to take a...
So Much Synth
AuthorBrenda Shaughnessy
ISBN1556594879
"Shaughnessy's particular genius . . . is utterly poetic, but essayistic in scope."—The New Yorker

"Brenda Shaughnessy's work is a good place to start for any passionate woman feeling daunted by poetry." —Cosmopolitan

"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip...
A Wave
AuthorJohn Ashbery
ISBN0374525471
First published in 1984 and now appearing in a new edition, A Wave is widely considered one of Ashbery's finest books of poetry. The 44 pieces collected here--particularly the long title-poem--find the poet applying his uniquely lyric, meditative, and often hilarious sensibility to the mysterious...
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