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  Anatomic

  Adam Dickinson

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  The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities. Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author’s biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we’re doing to our world -- and to our own bodies.

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  Modern Poetry - Poems

  Diane Seuss

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  Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor. 
   
   
   
  In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time's deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? "It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem," Seuss writes. "You can't hide / from what you made / inside what you made." What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

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  The Taxidermist's Daughter -...

  Kate Mosse

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  'The world is stacked against women like me. But things are different now.'
  1912. In an isolated house on the Sussex salt marshes, Connie Gifford lives with her father. Robbed of her childhood memories by a mysterious accident, she is haunted by fitful glimpses of her past – whilst her father has become a broken man, taking refuge in the bottle, since the closure of his once-legendary Museum of Avian Taxidermy.
  A strange woman has been seen in the graveyard – and a few miles away, two patients have, inexplicably, disappeared from the local asylum. As a major storm hits the coastline, old wounds are about to be opened as one woman, intent on revenge, attempts to liberate another from the horrifying crimes of the past.
  The Taxidermist's Daughter is a thrilling Gothic story of violence, retribution and justice, adapted for the stage by Kate Mosse from her own internationally best-selling novel, and first performed at Chichester Festival Theatre in 2022, directed by Róisín McBrinn.
  'A superb, atmospheric thriller, its Gothic overtones commanding attention'Daily Mail on Kate Mosse's novel

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  Shadow Play

  James Norcliffe

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  Norcliffe professes not to be a confessional poet; nevertheless he freely acknowledges that places and people served as prompts for the poems. New Zealand based, Norcliffe is well-travelled and his poems have international resonance. Placing Shadow Play with one other poetry collection as a finalist for the annual international Proverse Prize in 2011, the judging panel (reviewing entries with no knowledge of the writers) found an expert hand behind a wide variety of well-wrought poems on a range of topics, pleasingly interwoven with literary allusions.  
  "Though the 'ordinary world' most of these poems inhabit is rich with the familiar—ATMs, case managers, vindaloo—what James Norcliffe finds there is far from typical. And when he turns his considerable imagination up a notch, setting a giraffe on the Russian steppe, say, or exploring the largest statue of a strawberry in the world, the results have the surprise and gleam of the truly extraordinary. Shadow Play is a treasure chest of fresh, insightful work."—Don Bogen, poet and editor of the Cincinnati Review, USA. 
  "James Norcliffe is part bar wag, part trapeze artist, and every bit the literary raconteur. He wields his imagination like a spot welder, spraying out glowing trails of hot sparks. And yet so much in these pages happens in slo-mo, in fractured memory. There are poems for cartographers and window washers, personae poems for Hamlet, Alice in Wonderland, and sadistic Empress Dowager Cixi, love poems for books, ATMs, and vindaloo. But his great poem for the Icthyosaurus -- "not one centimetre / of human history in the / kilometres of its eyes" -- exposes the slinky sinister undertow at work. Suicide, heart attacks, suicide bombers, and auto da fe suck us in. Norcliffe pokes and prods the reader like a forensic tech and in the end his poems leave spatter patterns."—Richard Peabody, poet, novelist, and editor of Gargoyle Magazine, USA.

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  Poets on Poetry - The most...

  Matthew Arnold, Sarojini Naidu,...

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  Who has not tried to write a poem?  The poetic form of words seems to be rather easy.  In its basic form, which we learn as children, the rhyming couplet is, in a child’s written and spoken words, pure joy - success!  In the hands of a Shakespeare it is magnificent with a reach and understanding that the rest of us enjoy but are far from even attempting.    
   
  As we listen to various poetic forms, schools and movements we can only react with wonder at how these innocent words are assembled to create symphonies of ideas, wonder and revelation.  The emotions they seek to invoke can be anything from happiness to sadness, from love to revulsion. 
   
  Arnold, Stevens, Keats, Akhmatova, Browning, Herrick, Hood, Killigrew are but a few of the roll-call of wordsmiths who with mere words create ravenous beauty that reveals tender lines and sensitive verse on how and why they are who they are. 
   
  01 - Poets on Poetry - An Introduction 
  02 - When I Write Poems by Anna Akhmatova 
  03 - Of My Poems by Thomas MacDonagh 
  04 - An Apology For Her Poetry by Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish 
  05 - Sonnet 76 - Why is My Verse So Barren of New Pride by William Shakespeare 
  06 - The Austerity of Poetry by Matthew Arnold 
  07 - Of Modern Poetry by Wallace Stevens 
  08 - Poetry by Claude McKay 
  09 - The Poetry of Keats by George Meredith 
  10 - Future Poetry by Alice Meynell 
  11 - Sonnet 17 - Who Will Believe My Verse in Time to Come by William Shakespeare 
  12 - Poetic Eggs by Ezra Pound 
  13 - Poem by William Carlos Williams 
  14 - On the Grasshopper and Cricket by John Keats 
  15 - Ode on the Poetical Character by William Collins 
  16 - Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem by Alan Seeger 
  17 - A True Account of the Birth and Conception of a Late Famous Poem by Charles Sackville, Earl Of Dorset 
  18 - The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain by Wallace Stevens 
  19 - The Poet and the Poem by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 
  20 - Of English Verse by Edmund Waller 
  21 - Love, The Soul of Poetry by Anne Killigrew 
  22 - Why, If All Poets Crown Their Love with Verse by Emily Hickey 
  23 - Verse Making Was the Least of My Virtues by Robert Browning 
  24 - The Poet's Love-Song by Sarojini Naidu 
  25 - A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation by Aphra Behn 
  26 - Not Every Day Fit for Verse by Robert Herrick 
  27 - On the Poetic Muse by George Moses Horton 
  28 - Sonnet - Written in Keats by Thomas Hood 
  29 - Sonnet 86 -Was It the Proud Full Sail of His Great Verse by William Shakespeare 
  30 - Song in Imitation of Shakespeare by James Beattie 
  31 - The High-toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens 
  32 - Poetry is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens 
  33 - To My Most Dearly Loved Friend Henry Reynolds Esquire of Poets and Poesie by Michael Drayton 
  34 - His Poetry His Pillar by Robert Herrick 
  35 - To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses by Robert Herrick 
  36 - Poem for the End by Ivor Gurney

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  The Beginning of the Empress

  Kiara George

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  Step into a world where the spoken word meets the beats of the streets. "The Beginning of the Empress" invites you on a poetic journey infused with the rhythm and flow of modern rap. In this audacious audiobook, each verse pulsates with energy, weaving tales of triumph, love, and self-discovery. 
  From the first track to the final crescendo, you'll find yourself entranced by the syncopated cadence of her verses, carried away on a wave of introspection and joy. With each track, she paints vivid landscapes of emotion, inviting you to dance in the rhythm of her words and lose yourself in the magic of her storytelling. 
  "The Beginning of the Empress" isn't just an audiobook; it's an experience—an invitation to embrace the power of language and music in perfect harmony. So, plug in your headphones, turn up the volume, and let the journey begin. Welcome to a new era of poetry, where the empress reigns supreme, and every word is a testament to her majesty.

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