Other books that might interest you

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  suddenly we

  Evie Shockley

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  Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for PoetryIn her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.perchedi am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world.under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside me, a love of beauty riseslike sap, sprouts from my scalpand stretches forth. i send out my song, an ariablue and feathered, and grow toward it,choirs bare, but soon to bud. i amblack and becoming.         —after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

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  Birds Knit My Ribs Together

  Phil Barnett

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  what if / I actually – am – a bird / my cupped hands / opening to release me... Phil Barnett's relationship with birds is so close that his poetry blurs the distinctions between himself and the birds - a kind of ornimorphology where rather than giving the birds human characteristics, the reverse happens, and he imagines himself as a bird. Phil Barnett is a photographer, writer, musician, artist and naturalist, who has a passion for the birds that kept him company through a long hard illness. His photography and poetry have quite a following on social media, which is where we found him, on The Daily Haiku. His skill as a photographer leads to an acute visual sensibility, and his slow recovery moves from a tick sheet his mother had to fill in for him, to extraordinary poetry - full of wit and wonder and spectacular language.

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  Flame and Shadow

  Sara Teasdale

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  Praised for the exquisite refinement of her lyric poetry, Sara Teasdale's Flame and Shadow has been a favorite since it was first published in 1920. Although Sara Teasdale won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Love Songs in 1918, Flame and Shadow is considered to be one of her best works. Her insightful poems sing with her reverence for nature and beauty, her philosophy of love and loss. 
  copyright 2021 (P) alenbeebooks 
  AnnaLisa Bodtker is the narrator of the popular audiobooks The Rainbow and the Rose by Edith Nesbit, and With Trumpet and Drum by Eugene Field. 
  Cover Image: Sunset at Tewaukoa National Wildlife Refuge by Al Sapa, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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  Life expectancy begins to fall

  Tom Sastry

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  Is your retirement plan dying in the climate wars? Are you getting on with things in the meantime? In Life expectancy begins to fall, Tom Sastry asks how we normalise an apocalypse, taking us on a tour of bad coping strategies, unwelcome epiphanies, and striking reminders of what we still have.
  Part-elegy and part-satire, these poems do not show you what to do in a crisis, nor do they promote the cliches of positive thinking that tell you how to be a good worker, an effective activist or a spiritual person. Instead, quietly and persuasively, Sastry develops a subtle meditation on hope. The poetry shows us as we mostly are, lost in the enormity of it all and busy with other things. Explore a world where 'pessimism is complicated by love' and optimism is found hiding in moments where 'nothing happens, in the most lavish way'.

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  Wound from the Mouth of a Wound...

  torrin a. greathouse

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  A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry 
  A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry 
  “Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead. 
  These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.” 
  Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

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  Perfection Comes at a Price

  Ulla Beattie

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  Eric has a miserable childhood in a violent, drunken family in a tough London housing estate. He compensates by looking for perfection. For him, this means worldly success in a diplomatic career as far away from his childhood as possible. His single-minded ambition comes at a price. It makes him leave his childhood sweetheart Katie behind, since he knows that she can’t keep up with him. Their ways part. Eric marries an upper-class woman and becomes an Ambassador. However, Katie and he never quite lose touch. After his wife’s death Eric and Katie come together again. There is action and pace, fun and sadness, a huge variety of life experiences and a sense of providence and redemption.

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