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The Pajamaist

10 best books like The Pajamaist (Matthew Zapruder): Dance Dance Revolution, Worshipful Company of Fletchers, Loose Sugar, Shake, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems, Elegy On Toy Piano, Modern Life, Indeed I Was Pleased With the World, Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems

Dance Dance Revolution
AuthorCathy Park Hong
ISBN0393064840
Cathy Park Hong is a true artist of language. Here she has constructed a pidgin out of numerous major world languages, and wielded it masterfully in the voices of her characters to speak about revolution, corruption and the landscape of the future. Definitely read these poems aloud to fully enjoy the...
Worshipful Company of Fletchers
AuthorJames Tate
ISBN0880014318
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...
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,...
Shake
AuthorJoshua Beckman
Beckman’s new poems come to us directly and intimately. Compulsively readable, full of fear and persistence, they resonate with the wildness and generosity of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Ted Berrigan, turning the everyday into an encompassing, harrowing, humorous, necessary vision. Beckman is,...
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems
AuthorKaryna McGlynn
ISBN1932511768
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration...
Elegy On Toy Piano
AuthorDean Young
ISBN0822958724
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...
Modern Life
AuthorMatthea Harvey
ISBN1555974805
Matthea Harvey's Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world....
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,...
Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments
AuthorJoshua Marie Wilkinson
ISBN0877459819
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...
The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems
AuthorFrank Stanford
ISBN1557281939
Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction,...
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....
The Captain Lands in Paradise
AuthorSarah Manguso
ISBN1882295331
Holy fuck.

This is one of those books of poetry I keep next to my elbow while writing prose, so I can read it and be inspired when my own prose starts not to sound beautiful enough.

It's also one of those books of poetry that makes you desperate to be best friends with the author, and SURE that...
The Man Suit
AuthorZachary Schomburg
ISBN0977770931
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...
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 End of the West
AuthorMichael Dickman
ISBN1556592892
"Dickman's book moves with careful intensity as it confidently illuminates buried, contemporary suffering."—Publishers Weekly

"Elizabeth Bishop said that the three qualities she admired most in poetry were accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Michael Dickman's first full-length...
The Difficult Farm
AuthorHeather Christle
ISBN0980193834
The Difficult Farm is where you’ll find surprising jolts of the sweetest kindness delivered via poetry that’s new, urgent, blessed, beautiful, careful, tenacious, a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all. When I read a poem by Heather Christle I’m awed. – Dara Wier

This...
Human Dark with Sugar
AuthorBrenda Shaughnessy
ISBN1556592760
“Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems bristle with imperatives: ‘confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.’ There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy’s kidding. Or she is and she isn’t. If you just want to boss people around,...
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...
Awe
AuthorDorothea Lasky
ISBN1933517247
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...
Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions
AuthorMaurice Manning
ISBN0300089988
This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters,...
The Babies
AuthorSabrina Orah Mark
ISBN0975499017
Funny and frightening, moving and unsettling, the prose poems in Mark’s debut collection take readers on a wild ride

The Babies, by Sabrina Orah Mark, is the premier winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Contest, judged by renowned poet Jane Miller (Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected...
Ghost Girl
AuthorAmy Gerstler
ISBN0142000647
Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD...
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