Other books that might interest you

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  Out for Air

  Olly Todd

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  Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place.
  From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things.
  'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut...The language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' - Luke Kennard
  'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut...With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.' - Martha Sprackland
  'Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' - Nick Jensen
  'Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard-to-pin-down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' - Will Burns

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  The Underlook

  Helen Seymour

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  The Underlook balances precariously between the real and the surreal. Informed by experiences of physical disability, surgery, and medical trauma, this collection articulates a life lived under the bed, at the bottom of a well, in the glances exchanged between doctors. The poems revel in the uncanny and in the power of ignored or repressed spaces, summoning us under to 'listen … crouch down … press [a] hand against the white gloss shuddering'.

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  Testimony A Tribute to Charlie...

  Yusef Komunyakaa

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  Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa is well known for his jazz poetry, and this book is the first to bring together the verve and vitality of his oeuvre. The centerpiece of this volume is the libretto "Testimony." Paying homage to Charlie Parker, "Testimony" was commissioned for a radio drama with original music by eminent Australian composer and saxophonist Sandy Evans. Remarkably rich and evocative, encompassing a wide range of musical energy and performers, this moving affirmation of Parker's genius became a milestone in contemporary radio theater. Twenty-eight additional poems spanning the breadth of Komunyakaa's career are included, including two never previously published. Accompanying the poems are interviews and essays featuring Komunyakaa, Evans, radio producer Christopher Williams, jazz critic Miriam Zolin, jazz writer and editor Sascha Feinstein, and musical director, Paul Grabowsky. Sascha Feinstein writes the foreword. The print edition includes two CDs with the entire Australian Broadcast Company recording of Testimony, ebook contains imbedded audio. Check for the online reader's companion at testimony.site.wesleyan.edu.

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  The Accounts

  Katie Peterson

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  The death of a mother alters forever a family’s story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth—a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother’s life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin’s nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called “Arguments,” two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn’t stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.

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  Poems From The Chinese - A...

  Arthur Waley

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  These are called ''' Poems from the Chinese"" and we have Mr. Waley's assurance that there are in existence Oriental originals. But if it be so (and, of course it is) then we have here a literary miracle. It is a platitude that translation of poetry is either bad verse or bad translation. But Mr. Waley, translating not merely from one language into another, but almost from one planet into another, has produced a body of living poetry, in which there is every reason to believe he re-creates, without distorting, the Chinese poets. This is an unparalleled feat. But as we are, with about six exceptions in the whole of Great Britain, incapable of comparing the English and the Chinese, we must address ourselves to these poems as though they had been written by an Englishman of the twentieth century, and judge them on that basis. It is a severe test to apply to translations, but Mr. Waley emerges from it serenely victorious. Indeed, serenity is the keynote of all this work—the serenity of assured mastery in a difficult medium but still more of outlook. The beauty with which these poems are. inlaid is fundamentally a wise beauty and the wisdom is as much in the shape of Mr. Waley's mind as in that of China. There is no need to hurry here. Wisdom goes at an even pace, and has time between her penetrations of the stars to observe the smallest things of life. Her leisurely glance sweeps over them with patient gold, and they settle, almost without a sigh, into decoration and into pattern. We have lost {and the Chinese have lost) the secret of their enamels of the great periods. But Mr. Waley has private access to them, and his poems, varnished with just that cool and even certainty of paint and texture, achieve one filial translation— the translation of colour into speech. -- Humbert Wolfe.

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  Swanwhite - A Fairy Play in...

  August Strindberg

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  Step into the enchanting world of August Strindberg's "Swanwhite," a captivating fairy tale filled with magic, romance, and happy endings (who knew Strindberg was capable of that!). Swanwhite (a spirited young princess with a heart as pure as gold), at the behest of her father, begrudgingly obliges to marry a visiting King while he is away on campaign. But, when the young, handsome prince comes to her as a messenger for the King (a young prince who was spoken of in prophecy), Swanwhite finds herself torn between duty and love. How will she choose?  
  Come see all of the enduring hallmarks of the fairy tale genre in this gloriously fashioned fairy play for the stage; safe for all ages, and enjoyable for those who are still kids at heart.

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