Other books that might interest you

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  Ten Bridges I've Burnt - A...

  Brontez Purnell

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  In Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. "The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in," Purnell writes, "is simply existing." 
   
   
   
  The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I've Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers' rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement. 
   
   
   
  With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I've Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

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  Bunny Girls

  Angela Readman

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  Out of the doll's house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal, spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir, northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural ideals of femininity.
  Here in Readman's skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe's body double, squashed slugs, sexual awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds. Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and the worrying.

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  Europe Love Me Back

  Rakhshan Rizwan

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  Europe, Love Me Back is a collection of relentlessly questing, sharply satirical poems about the continent, and the poet's fraught relationship with it. Hurting yet clear-eyed, Rizwan explores and exposes what it means to be a small brown woman in Dutch suburbs, hospitals and academia
  
  This is an angry love letter, to a place left behind yet always there, continuing to matter and hurt and shape the poet's identity.
  "But no one was interested in eliciting my testimony;
  after all I wasn't dead – I wasn't ill – and hadn't this
  country treated me so well?
  For it is not a human right to be much more than Agamben's bare life,
  to exist in the hallowed halls of the academe,
  because there comes a point when our wanting
  is simply too much, obscene –"

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  MxT

  Sina Queyras

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  Winner of the 2014 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
     
  MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.
     
  'Like the central conceptual apparatus, Queyras is smart and insightful in her work to expand and challenge the nature of language and poetry … Lend Queyras your ears, your minds, your hearts, your Time. She will reward you, repeatedly.'
     
  – The Rumpus
     
  'A collection of gorgeous and cantankerous poems that ask testy questions of all contemporary poets,and for this, the book is a must-read.'
     
  – The Globe and Mail
     
  'This year's most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection.'
     
  – Telegraph-Journal

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  Please make me pretty I don't...

  Tawanda Mulalu

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  The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry 
   
   
   
  Please make me pretty, I don't want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. 
   
   
   
  The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring—one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: "The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country."

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  rock flight

  Hasib Hourani

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  rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.
  'rock flight is relentlessly potent. Merging resistance and poetry, Hasib Hourani writes back—against the "suffocating state" and imperial forces. Be ready to be transformed by Hourani's diasporic anticolonial poetics.' — Don Mee Choi
  'Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.' — Maxine Beneba Clarke

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