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The City in Which I Love You

10 best books like The City in Which I Love You (Li-Young Lee): Dancing in Odessa, What the Living Do: Poems, Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, The Dead and the Living, Vice: New and Selected Poems, The Country Between Us, Human Wishes, Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, Song, Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems

Dancing in Odessa
AuthorIlya Kaminsky
ISBN1932195122
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....
What the Living Do: Poems
AuthorMarie Howe
ISBN0393318869
Informed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared...
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
AuthorYusef Komunyakaa
ISBN0819512117
Poetry "reconnects us to the act of dreaming ourselves into existence," Komunyakaa once wrote. Once you pause a minute to consider the pain that has served as an outline in this poet's life, and when you also consider the highfalutin awards and professorial prestige given to a man whom people still seem...
The Dead and the Living
AuthorSharon Olds
ISBN0394715632
I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth...
Vice: New and Selected Poems
AuthorAi
ISBN0393320189
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,...
The Country Between Us
AuthorCarolyn Forché
ISBN0060909269
“Here is poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major new voice.” — Margaret Atwood

The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché...
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...
Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993
AuthorHeather McHugh
ISBN0819512168
When McHugh got the MacArhtur nod last year, it made me scramble to find some of her work on the internets, but as anyone who's read McHugh knows, I think that's a bad way to read her work.... These are poems that I think require a level of attention, to sound as well as idea, that I can't quite sustain when I'm...
Song
AuthorBrigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN1880238136
I read "Song" in graduate school and immediately bought this book, but never made it all the way through. Now I am ashamed of my graduate school self, because this book? INCREDIBLE. It's not always easy to get through Kelly's poems, because they're very dense, but they're also immaculately crafted....
Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems
AuthorBrenda Shaughnessy
ISBN0374526982
The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

"The next illogical step
in love poetry
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world
always do sound like diseases.
It is because they are engorged.
G., I am a fool.
What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.
Halfway...
Winter Stars
AuthorLarry Levis
ISBN0822935112
Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. ...
What We Carry
AuthorDorianne Laux
ISBN1880238071
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...
What Work Is
AuthorPhilip Levine
ISBN0679740589
Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
 
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous...
Sweet Ruin
AuthorTony Hoagland
ISBN0299135845
Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation:  sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion.  With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,”  Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction...
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000
AuthorLucille Clifton
ISBN1880238888
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...
Domestic Work: Poems
AuthorNatasha Trethewey
ISBN1555973094
Winner of the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award

In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken...
An Atlas of the Difficult World
AuthorAdrienne Rich
ISBN0393308316
XIII (Dedications)

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore...
Sweet Machine
AuthorMark Doty
ISBN0060952563
Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective:...
The Great Fires
AuthorJack Gilbert
ISBN0679747672
JOYCE'S MOTTO has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many sleek and...
Between Angels
AuthorStephen Dunn
ISBN0393306585
Angels as a concept do not particularly resonate with me, which may be why a number of these poems failed to take flight in my mind. I don't want divine failsafes, watchful protectors, anthropomorphic saviors, nor gambling tables, nor luck; my hope takes different forms. If I'm to be really honest, my...
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