Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Author	Nadine Gordimer
ISBN	0140165347

In these sixteen stories ranging from the dynamics of family life to the worldwide confusion of human values, Nadine Gordimer gives us access to many lives in places as far apart as suburban London, Mozambique, a mythical island, and South Africa. In "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight, " a girl's innocent...

Author	Lawrence Ferlinghetti
ISBN	0811200418

This is one of the best-selling poetry books of all time, and, although that is no guarantee of poetic excellence—after all, Rod McKuen and Martin Farquar Tupper both sold a lot of books in their day—it is a sign that the author had his finger on the pulse of his time, that his work embodies the yearnings...

Author	Paul Celan
ISBN	0856462659

"In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a music tilted against music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fused together and broken apart; syntax chopped...

Author	Wallace Stevens
ISBN	0679726691

i fell in love with two men in my undergrad senior seminar. it was on wallace stevens and t.s. eliot.

the way i loved both of these writers hurt. (i'll set eliot aside for another time).

stevens kills me when he uses very innocent symbols - making ice cream, in "the emperor of ice cream",...

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	Marianne Moore
ISBN	0140188517

How many of you have even heard of Marianne Moore?

I'm genuinely curious on this point because I hadn't until last week. Her relative obscurity (at least here in the UK) is a bit of a shame because she has an important voice in the world of poetry.

Her poetry is unusual and it’s very hard...

Author	Hart Crane
ISBN	0871401789

This edition features a new introduction by Harold Bloom as a centenary tribute to the visionary of White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930). Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July...

Author	Frank O'Hara
ISBN	0872860353

Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations,...

Author	John Berryman
ISBN	0374530661

This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his...

Author	Elizabeth Bishop
ISBN	0374514402

Second read. I haven’t the faintest recollection of writing the below review in 2014. .

Author	Charles Wright
ISBN	0374525366

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects...

Author	Lyn Hejinian
ISBN	1931243336

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)...

Author	Frank O'Hara
ISBN	0520201663

Frank O’Hara

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up....

Author	Gertrude Stein
ISBN	0486298973

Tender Buttons is the best known of Gertrude Stein's "hermetic" works. It is a small book separated into three sections - Food, Objects and Rooms each containing prose under subtitles. (Kellner, 1988, p. 61-62). Its publication in 1914 caused a great dispute between Mabel Dodge Luhan and Gertrude,...