Other books that might interest you

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  The Atlas of Lost Beliefs

  Ranjit Hoskote

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  Commenting on Hoskote's poetry on the Poetry International website, the poet and editor Arundhathi Subramaniam observes: "His writing has revealed a consistent and exceptional brilliance in its treatment of image. Hoskote's metaphors are finely wrought, luminous and sensuous, combining an artisanal virtuosity with passion, turning each poem into a many-angled, multifaced experience."

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  For Display Purposes Only

  David Seymour

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  These poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, where the act of living becomes more and more like watching a film in which we play no role.

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  The Hayflick Limit

  Matthew Tierney

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  Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry
     
  To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.
     
  The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?
     
  Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.
     
  ‘The most thoroughly engaged and inventive book of poetry I have read in a long, long time. Brimming with hi-lo wit, keenly apprised and settled with cultured repose, Matthew Tierney takes The HayflickLimit to the hoop.’ – David McGimpsey
     
  ‘Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight ... Call it science fiction for the melancholic.’
     
  – Eye Weekly

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  Tam O'Shanter A Tale - This...

  Robert Burns

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  Many nations have produced outstanding poets who they would gladly have represent their Culture.  But can any Nation say they have an equivalent of Robbie Burns?  Rabbie. The Ploughman Poet.  The Bard (Of Scotland).  This one poet is indelibly linked and intertwined with the culture and people of Scotland.  His life, loves, politics, verse and songs speak as them and for them.  
  From humble roots, the eldest son of seven born in 1759 to parents, both from tenant farming stock, the family endured both hardship and poverty.   Burns endured the test and began to write first at 15 and to publish his first volume some two years later.    
  He wrote in both true Scottish, dialect and English as well as turning his hand to song.  Politically he was an inspiration to both liberalism and socialism as well as a Scottish parliament.  His unique ability enabled him to appeal to all and quite rightly to be viewed as the National poet.    
  As well as creating his own great works he was also an avid collector of Scottish Folk Songs preserving for posterity the works of others.  
  However his own life was short dying at the young age of only 37.   What further greatness would have lain before him is impossible to say.  But, poetically, on the day of his death his son, Maxwell was born.    
  His fame today is worldwide and celebrated in January each year with the Traditional Burns night.  Each New Years Eve friends and families the world over link arms to ‘Auld Lang Syne’, giving immortality to his words and aims.  
  As former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan says:  Burn’s poems dignify and illuminate the struggle faced by the vast majority of the world’s population today.

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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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  The Great Highway - A...

  August Strindberg

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  Life, a fleeting shadow, a whisper in the wind, 
  We wander lost, adrift in the void, 
  Seeking solace in the darkness, 
  Yet finding only echoes of our own despair. 
  What is truth? What is meaning? 
  These questions haunt me, torment me, 
  As I tread the great highway of existence, 
  Alone, and yet surrounded by the clamor of life. 
  Oh, to find redemption in this wilderness, 
  To glimpse the light amidst the shadows, 
  But alas, it eludes me still, 
  A distant dream, a fading hope. 
  And so I wander on, a pilgrim of the soul, 
  Seeking answers in the silence, 
  Hoping against hope for a glimpse of truth, 
  In this vast expanse of nothingness.

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