Other books that might interest you

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  The Kingdom of Surfaces - Poems

  Sally Wen Mao

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  In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.At its heart, The Kingdom of Surfaces imagines the poet wandering into a Western fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives. The title poem is a speculative recasting of Through the Looking-Glass, set in a surreal topsy-turvy version of the eponymous China-themed 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. The Kingdom of Surfaces is a brilliantly conceived call for those who recognize the horrors of American exceptionalism to topple the empire that values capital over lives and power over liberation.

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  Bicycle Thieves - Poems

  Mary di Michele

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  pbiA masterwork from one of Canada’s most important poets/b/i/p
  pReferencing the post-war neorealist film by Vittorio De Sica, Mary di Michele’s iBicycle Thieves/i commemorates her Italian past and her life in Canada through elegy and acts of translation of text and of self./p
  pThe collection opens with a kind of hymn to life on the planet, sung from the peak of that urban island, Montreal — an attempt to see beyond death. The book moves into a sequence of poems described by Sharon Thesen as the poet “envisioning the passage of time under the ‘full and waning’ moon of Mount Royal’s beacon cross, recalling her Italian immigrant parents in Toronto and her current life in Montreal [. . .] a sort of iDecameron/i.”/p
  pThesen’s description is apt for the collection as a whole, which moves into the poet’s autobiography — in search of catharsis through literature — and pays tributes to poets who have been part of the literary landscape di Michele now inhabits. iBicycle Thieves/i is poetry as time machine, transcending the borders between life and death, language and culture./p

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  Poets of the Eighteenth Century...

  William Wordsworth, Robert...

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  For many in Europe the focus has shifted west to the Americas, both by settlement and by war against the indigenous tribes.  And then between themselves. 
   
  Democracy would be reborn by the American War of Independence. In the East India becomes the stage for further expansion. For our wordsmiths the world had become a wider page on which to write their thoughts.  Coleridge, Pope, Southey, Wordsworth speak with lyrical eloquence on subjects both great and small.  But always form the heart.

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  Spanish Plays (NHB Modern Plays)

  Elyse Dodgson, Mary Peate

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  A collection of modern Spanish and Catalan plays in translations by practising English playwrights, commissioned and first staged by the Royal Court Theatre.
  This volume contains:
  Sergi Belbel's Caresses translated by John London
  A disturbing picture of contemporary society against a background of urban alienation
  Juan Mayorga's The Scorched Garden translated by Nick Drake
  About a group of inmates locked up in a mental hospital since the Spanish Civil War
  David Planell's Bazaar translated by John Clifford
  Undercurrents of racism surface poisonously during the course of a hilarious attempt to get an accident video shown on TV
  Antonio Onetti's Bleeding Heart translated by Oscar Ceballos and Mary Peate
  Set in contemporary Seville where a naive, middle-aged transvestite encounters a petty thief nicknamed 'sour face'.
  Lluisa Cunille's Roundabout translated by Oscar Ceballos and Mary Peate
  A fascinating study of obsession and delusion.
  Paloma Pedrero's Wolf Kisses translated by Roxana Silbert
  A young woman returns to her rural village home to await her Parisian lover despite the hostility of the villagers.

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  Last Poems - Poetry of AE Housman

  A. E. Housman

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  Housman himself knew that his output as a poet would not be large. In his preface to this volume, he wrote, rather touchingly:  
  "I publish these poems, few though they are, because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more." He pulled Last Poems together because his life-long friend, Moses Jackson, was dying and Housman wanted Jackson to be able to read these poems before he passed away.The work in this volume is more varied in form and content than in his first book, and shows a change of heart, a greater acceptance of the human condition, along with a more impersonal voice. His sense of the finality of life is strong: Dead clay that did me kindnessI can do none to youBut only wear for breast-knotThe flower of sinner's rue. Yet, if anything, his voice is gentler, his spirit calmer and more accepting, and his sense of the eternal stronger than in his first book.  Enjoy!

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  The Autobiography of William...

  William Topaz McGonagall

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  William Topaz McGonagall is widely renowned as one of the world's worst-ever published poets. Yet his discordant muse is hugely popular all over the world - no less a figure than Spike Milligan was obsessed with him. But how do we account for this morbid fascination with verse of little or no discernible merit whatsoever?He didn't discover he was a poet until the comparatively advanced age of 52, when he underwent something of an epiphany - but once the muse descended, there was no stopping him. You can hear the details in his unintentionally hilarious and self-celebratory autobiography.Public Domain (P)2013 Creative Content

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