Shake
10 best books like Shake (Joshua Beckman): The Cow, Worshipful Company of Fletchers, The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems, Mosquito, Necessary Stranger, Elegy On Toy Piano, The Pajamaist, Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, Next Life, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs
| Author | Ariana Reines |
| ISBN | 0977106470 |
1. Reines is brave and honest because she's willing to admit that being socialized as female is, effectively, being trained to be a corpse.
2. This book starts out politely invitational and theoretical, but something terribly scatological happened about 20 pages in where the lingua bacteria...
| Author | James Tate |
| ISBN | 0880014318 |
bought this used. The dipshit before me underlined some nice parts and put marginalia in, some examples of: during the poem "An Eland, In Retirement" in response to the underlined couplet - beating drums, and women with/dinner plates in their lips - they wrote in curly cue blue pen, "it's like the poem...
| Author | Lorine Niedecker |
| ISBN | 0917788613 |
Poetry. Edited by Cid Corman. The section headings in this book of poems are all vintage Niedecker, but they stake out the poems in three large masses. The earlier work-apprentice to Zukofsky but finding her voice; the central work when she discovers her range and depth; the final work much of it known...
| 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 | Graham Foust |
| ISBN | 0978746716 |
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,...
| 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 | Rae Armantrout |
| ISBN | 0819568201 |
In her latest collection, Rae Armantrout considers the shaping effects of language in the context of new and frightening global realities. Attempting to imagine the unimaginable and see the unseen, Armantrout evokes a "next life" beyond the current, and too often degraded, one. From the new physics...
| Author | Juliana Spahr |
| ISBN | 0520242955 |
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....
| Author | Zachary Schomburg |
| ISBN | 0977770931 |
Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelg�ngers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables...
| Author | Jeffrey McDaniel |
| ISBN | 0916397793 |
I've never been much of a poetry reader, but I picked up this and The Endarkment (which I have yet to read) and have been consuming his poems slowly. His words pop, his lines are edgy but poignant, with metaphors that are fresh yet apt, and so many of his poems have last lines in them that have me murmuring with...
| Author | Ted Berrigan |
| ISBN | 0520251555 |
Amazing collection. For those of us who had owned (and in my case, worn out) So Going Around Cities, the Collected surprises, since it is HUGE! and has a lot of work that we (or I) hadn't seen before. I knew Ted's work for years, sat in a class of his (with Alice) back in the 1970's at Naropa. For me, Ted's work...
| 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 | George Oppen |
| ISBN | 0811214885 |
George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost...
| Author | Cate Marvin |
| ISBN | 1932511512 |
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....
| Author | Chelsey Minnis |
| ISBN | 1933517417 |
A fearless and uproarious litany of contentions and revelations on poetry and the poetic mind, continuing the charge against the sacred in contemporary poetry. Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous.
If you open your mouth to start to...
| 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 | Matthew Henriksen |
| ISBN | 0984475222 |
Poetry. Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous...
| Author | Bob Hicok |
| ISBN | 1931229112 |
Chosen alongside celebrated poets Louise Glück and Czeslaw Milosz, Bob Hicok’s Animal Soul was the standout surprise of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award nominations. According to author David Wojahn, a three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, this collection of poetry “is the best...
| Author | Matthew Rohrer |
| ISBN | 0972348778 |
Matthew Rohrer’s simple, hilarious, generous and strangely disquieting poems conjure versions of the most familiar aspects of our lives—friendship, marriage, childhood, work—into which intrude incongruous, peculiar, fantastical, yet somehow totally recognizable elements. Over...
