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Space, in Chains

10 best books like Space, in Chains (Laura Kasischke): Deaf Republic: Poems, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Magical Negro, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Soft Science, Lives of Girls and Women, The Collected Poems, Incarnadine: Poems, Jane: A Murder

Deaf Republic: Poems
AuthorIlya Kaminsky
ISBN1555978312
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...
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
AuthorChen Chen
ISBN1942683332
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...
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
AuthorOcean Vuong
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have...
Magical Negro
AuthorMorgan Parker
ISBN1947793187
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...
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
AuthorKaveh Akbar
ISBN1938584678
"The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." —Fanny Howe

This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous...
Soft Science
AuthorFranny Choi
ISBN1938584996
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness―how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation....
Lives of Girls and Women
AuthorAlice Munro
ISBN0375707492
The only novel from Alice Munro -- award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman -- is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's...
The Collected Poems
AuthorSylvia Plath
ISBN0808595040
The aim of the present complete edition, which contains a numbered sequence of the 224 poems written after 1956 together with a further 50 poems chosen from her pre-1956 work, is to bring Sylvia Plath's poetry together in one volume, including the various uncollected and unpublished pieces, and to...
Incarnadine: Poems
AuthorMary Szybist
ISBN1555976352
The troubadours
knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
                        -from “The Troubadours etc.”
 
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly...
Jane: A Murder
AuthorMaggie Nelson
ISBN1932360719
Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson...
Rapture
AuthorCarol Ann Duffy
ISBN0330433911
Falling in love
is glamorous hell, the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.

Another modern cycle-- sensing a theme in what I like here.

This follows the...
Little Labors
AuthorRivka Galchen
ISBN0811222969
Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors is a droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies and literature

Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book―a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen’s new book―contains a list of “Things That Make One Nervous.”...
The Widening Spell of the Leaves
AuthorLarry Levis
ISBN0822954540
For my money, this is Levis' best book. I admit there are times when I fluctuate between it and Elegy, which seems to be most people's favorite. But the longer sequence in this book, "The Perfection of Solitude," is one of the most sincere, confounding, and ambitious explorations into the lyric Levis...
Engine Empire: Poems
AuthorCathy Park Hong
ISBN0393082849
Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective consciousness...
A Scattering
AuthorChristopher Reid
ISBN0955455367
Memories. Weighty emptinesses. I live in a memory
the size and shape of a house.

As so often seems to happen to me, this collection came into my hands by serendipity. Perusing the shelves with poetry in the native language in the local library, A Scattering apparently had wandered off to...
Thrall
AuthorNatasha Trethewey
ISBN0547571607
The stunning follow-up volume to her 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard, by America’s new Poet Laureate

Natasha Trethewey’s poems are at once deeply personal and historical—exploring her own interracial and complicated roots—and utterly American, connecting them...
Live or Die
AuthorAnne Sexton
ISBN0395081807
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: A gripping poetry collection mapping the thorny journey from madness to hope.

Anne Sexton won immediate recognition as a strong voice in American poetry with the 1960 publication of her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, followed by critical acclaim of her...
Sleeping it Off in Rapid City
AuthorAugust Kleinzahler
ISBN0374265836
The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler’s career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant...
Eye Level: Poems
AuthorJenny Xie
ISBN1555978029
Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on...
Trout Fishing in America
AuthorRichard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called “the last of the Beats.” His early books became required...
Reconnaissance
AuthorCarl Phillips
ISBN0374248281
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most respected poets

There's
a trembling inside the both of us,
there's a trembling, inside us both.

The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering...
Whereas
AuthorLayli Long Soldier
ISBN1555977677
The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award

WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our...
Not Here
AuthorHieu Minh Nguyen
My review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, also can be found on my blog.

Over the course of a few dozen poems, Nguyen confronts his relationship to space, memory, and pain as a queer Vietnamese-American man. The collection consists of a mix of long and short pieces, addressing everything...
Hard Night
AuthorChristian Wiman
ISBN1556592205
Make no mistake: Christian Wiman’s poetic endeavors are ambitious. From the personal lyrics of solitude and loss to “Being Serious,” the long poem that concludes Hard Night, his poems examine emotions clearly, without sentimentality. A profound reverence for form and passion for poetry...
Can't and Won't
AuthorLydia Davis
ISBN0374118582
Here is a new collection of short stories from the writer Rick Moody has called “the best prose stylist in America.”

Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of “Bloomington” reads, “Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never...
Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries
AuthorSuad Amiry
ISBN1400096499
Based on diaries and e-mail correspondence that architect Suad Amiry kept from 1981 to 2004, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law evokes the frustrations, cabin fever, and downright misery of daily life in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Amiry writes with elegance and humor about the enormous difficulty of...
Something Sinister
AuthorHayan Charara
ISBN0887486053
These poems grapple with conflicts arising from a world in which the personal, political, cultural, and aesthetic are deeply entangled and often troubling. Charara does not shy away from the tensions, unease, doubts, regrets, or bafflement of this world; and his wide-ranging focus brings together...
Alice Munro: 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage', 'Runaway', 'Dear Life'
AuthorRobert Thacker
ISBN1474230989
The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian writer Alice Munro in 2013 confirmed her position as a master of the short story form. This book explores Munro's work from a full range of critical perspectives, focussing on three of her most popular and important published collections:...
SPRAWL
AuthorDanielle Dutton
ISBN0979956234
Shortlisted for The Believer Book Award

Fiction. An absurdly comic and decidedly digressive novel, S P R A W L chronicles the mercurial inner life of one suburban woman. With vertiginous energy and a deadpan eye, the narrator records the seeming uniformity of her world--the dissolving marriage,...
The Shipwrecked House
AuthorClaire Trévien
ISBN1908058110
Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien. These poems are sketches, lyrics, dreams, and experiments in language as sound.
Trévien’s is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like...
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