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The Widening Spell of the Leaves

10 best books like The Widening Spell of the Leaves (Larry Levis): Talking to My Body, The Country Between Us, The Beforelife, Human Wishes, My Alexandria, Loose Sugar, Science and Steepleflower: Poetry, Deepstep Come Shining, Song, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

Talking to My Body
AuthorAnna Świrszczyńska
Anna Swir's poetry is featured in the best-selling anthologies Ten Poems to Set You Free and Risking Everything

Anna Swir (1909–1984) famously said “A poet should be as sensitive as an aching tooth.” Swir was one of Poland’s most distinguished poets, and she was open in her feminism...
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...
The Beforelife
AuthorFranz Wright
ISBN0375709436
In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery....
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...
My Alexandria
AuthorMark Doty
ISBN0252022106
A versatile, technically astute poet, Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. Particularly moving is "Days of 1981," in which he recalls the memory of his first gay lover--a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained/or lethal offered....
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,...
Science and Steepleflower: Poetry
AuthorForrest Gander
ISBN0811213811
His poetry has been called "desperately beautiful" by Thom Gunn in Agni Review, and "original and fascinating" by John Ashbery. With poems in the leading journals of the day -- American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few -- Gander plumbs the erotic depths...
Deepstep Come Shining
AuthorC.D. Wright
In C.D. Wright’s book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining, the eye and the ear are center. In the book, the result of a road trip taken with photographer Deborah Luster through Georgia and the Carolinas, the speaker of the poem is the “hand of the selenographer, mapper of lost roads.” Wright’s...
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....
Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003
AuthorJean Valentine
ISBN0819567132
Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers...
Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo
AuthorRichard Hugo
ISBN0393307840
I think of this collection as an unintentional autobiography. If you read the poems from start to finish in the order presented, you follow Richard Hugo's progression from loneliness to love and friendship, addiction through recovery, and depression to hope. Most appealing of all are his poems revealing...
The Pajamaist
AuthorMatthew Zapruder
ISBN1556592442

“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...
The Insistence of Beauty
AuthorStephen Dunn
ISBN0393327434
"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair;" So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning....
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...
Appalachia: Poems
AuthorCharles Wright
ISBN0374526249
Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright (who teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry) began a poetic project of astonishing scope--a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy was collected in Country Music,...
The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target / The Lice / The Carrier of Ladders / Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment
AuthorW.S. Merwin
ISBN1556590547
W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca, and has translated from French, Spanish, Latin and Portugese. He has published more than a dozen volumes of orignal poetry and several volumes of prose. Mr. Merwin...
King Me
AuthorRoger Reeves
ISBN1556594488
From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s, King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became...
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...
Collected Poems
AuthorLynda Hull
ISBN1555974570
The definitive collection of the poems of Lynda Hull, "perhaps the most intensely lyrical poet of her generation." (Mark Doty)


If each of us
contains, within, humankind's totality, each possibility
then I have been so fractured, so multiple & dazzling . . .
--from "The...
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,...
Bone Map: Poems
AuthorSara Eliza Johnson
ISBN1571314695
Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection, Bone Map (2013 National Poetry Series Winner), pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse, where violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied...
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