Other books that might interest you

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  The Crazy Bunch - Penguin Poets

  Willie Perdomo

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  From a prize-winning poet, a new collection that chronicles a weekend in the life of a group of friends coming of age in East Harlem at the dawn of the hip-hop era 
    
  Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixes “city life with a sense of the transcendent” (NPR.org). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a “crew” coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s. In poems written in couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo recreates a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events: “That was the summer we all tried to fly. All but one of us succeeded." 
    
  “This immersive poetry collection proceeds like a mixtape or a gnostic gospel … Oracular, intoxicating … Perdomo’s vibrant diction refashions the high lyric, drawing on local cant to render the intimacy of home, friendship, and shared loss. Part rhapsody, part elegy, the book memorializes neighborhood legends, and, even as it impishly indulges nostalgic romance, it never forgets, or forgives, the violence that threatens these young lives.”—The New Yorker 

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  Light at the Torn Horizon

  Paul Murray

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  There is a fresh candor and a new ease of utterance in this fifth volume of poems by the Dominican writer Paul Murray. What most immediately impresses, in lyric after lyric, are the moments of quiet epiphany. But such moments of vision have not been easily achieved. Throughout the work, rather than avoid the “torn” and wounded areas of our lives, a range of feelings and experiences—unnamed, invading, threatening, desired—are courageously explored. In the end, the vision, the spiritual awareness that is attained, is the more persuasive and convincing for having first been tested. 

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  Small Island (NHB Modern Plays)...

  Andrea Levy

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  Hortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica. Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer. Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots. Three intimately connected stories, tracing the tangled history of Jamaica and Britain.
  Andrea Levy's epic novel, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson, journeys from Jamaica to Britain in 1948 – the year that HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury.
  Small Island was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in 2019, in an acclaimed production directed by Rufus Norris. This revised edition of the play was published alongside the revival of the production in 2022.
  'Extraordinary. A spectacular adaptation of Andrea Levy's Windrush novel' - Observer
  'Edmundson has a knack for skilfully distilling story... ferociously entertaining' - Time Out
  
  'A landmark in the National Theatre's history: a tumultuous epic about first-generation Jamaican immigrants... skilfully adapted... one of the most important plays of the year' - Guardian

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  The Poet Li Po - A Study Of One...

  Arthur Waley

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  A dive into one of China's great poets by the first great populariser of Chinese literature, Arthur Waley.Also known as Li Bai (Chinese: 李白; pinyin: Lǐ Bái, 701–762), also pronounced as Li Bo, courtesy name Taibai (Chinese: 太白), was a Chinese poet, acclaimed from his own time to the present as one of the greatest and most important poets of the Tang dynasty and in Chinese history as a whole. He and his friend Du Fu (712–770) were two of the most prominent figures in the flourishing of Chinese poetry under the Tang dynasty, which is often called the "Golden Age of Chinese Poetry". The expression "Three Wonders" denotes Li Bai's poetry, Pei Min's swordplay, and Zhang Xu's calligraphy. - From the wiki

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  Somewhere Out There You (NHB...

  Nancy Harris

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  Casey's new boyfriend Brett is handsome, romantic and devoted – a dream come true. He writes poetry! He makes quiche! For once in her life, Casey is in a relationship with a man who attends to her every whim and desire.
  But when her suspicious sister Cynthia starts digging into Brett's past, she threatens to take away the one good thing that's ever happened to Casey…
  Nancy Harris's play Somewhere Out There You is a romantic comedy with a twist, playfully unravelling the love stories we weave for ourselves and inviting us to question what compels us to tell them in the first place. It was first performed in 2023 at the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, directed by Wayne Jordan.
  'Delightful… insightfully skewers the delusions and hypocrisies that are at the heart of most romantic relationships'The Stage
  'Bold and enjoyable'Irish Times
  'Sparkily original'Irish Independent
  'A refreshingly lighthearted comedy with some very funny lines and a Charlie Kaufmanesque twist… a warm and upbeat piece that makes you question the nature of love and its importance in our lives'No More Workhorse
  'Hilariously entertaining, with just a dash of romance, Somewhere Out There You is a laugh out loud delight. A perfect first date for hopeless romantics and the romantically hopeless'Arts Review

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  Catastrophic Molting

  Amy Shimshon-Santo

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  CATASTROPHIC MOLTING (FlowerSong Press) Amy Shimshon-Santo uses the tools of language to remind readers there is power in repudiation, comfort in collective mourning, and possibility in reimagining. The book title is inspired by the molting ritual of sea elephants (Mirounga Angustirostris) along the California coast. The mirounga rest together on the shore as social protection from violence when they are the most vulnerable. Only through these periods of dramatic change can they grow sleek new coats. The book’s journey begins with “Contagion,” revealing a world split in half like a calabash by a virus. “Beating, trembling,” a woman pleads for mercy while the poems confront the liminality of profound change. “A new cycle had begun / I would never be the same again.” The second section, Sangue, gives voice to mourning and rage. “when you murder the future of music / you are conjuring extinction.” Dysfunction on planet Earth reverberates from the street into the expansive galaxy. Refusing to normalize violence, the poet gathers war inside her own body to detonate it, then blows “tsunami-wind / to rattle clear the desks.” With the verve of Oya, the goddess of ancestral and radical change, the book claims ground for empathy and inter-being. The collection asks readers to imagine: “what if we were a part of a whole / that loved us without ceasing?” Catastrophic Molting breaks from inertia and seeks new ground. Our “foremothers greet the unborn” and are “betrothed to a story that doesn’t wish us dead.” Shimshon-Santo suggests that “stepping off might actually be, stepping in / turning away might actually be, turning toward.”

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