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Only Bread, Only Light: Poems
by Stephen KuusistoStephen Kuusisto explores blindness and curiosity, loneliness and the found instruments of continuation. Exploiting the seeming contradiction of poetry's reliance upon visual imagery with Kuusisto's own sightlessness, these poems cultivate a world of listening: to the natural world, to the voices of family and strangers, to music and the words of great writers and thinkers.
Only Bread, Only Light
by Stephen KuusistoWith this, his first collection of poetry, Stephen Kuusisto (author of the memoir Planet of the Blind) explores blindness and curiosity, loneliness and the found instruments of continuation. Exploiting the seeming contradiction of poetry's reliance upon visual imagery with Kuusisto's own sightlessness, these poems cultivate a world of listening: to the natural world, to the voices of family and strangers, to music and the words of great writers and thinkers.Kuusisto has written elsewhere, "I see like a person who looks through a kaleidoscope; my impressions of the world at once beautiful and largely useless." So it is no surprise that in his poems mortal vision is uncertain, supported only by the ardor of imagination and the grace of lyric surprise. Sensually rich and detailed, Kuusisto's poems are humorous, complex, and intellectually engaged. This collection reveals a major new poetic talent."Only Bread, Only Light"At times the blind see light,And that moment is the Sistine ceiling,Grace among buildings--no one asksFor it, no one asks.After all, this is solitude,Daylight's finger,Blake's angelParting willow leaves.I should know better.Get with the businessOf walking the lovely, satisfied,Indifferent weather--Bread bakingOn Arthur AvenueThis first warm day of June.I stand on the cornerFor priceless seconds.Now everything to me falls shadowStephen Kuusisto's 1998 memoir Planet of the Blind received tremendous international attention, including appearances on Oprah, Dateline, and Talk of the Nation. The New York Times named it a "Notable Book of the Year" and praised it as "a book that makes the reader understand the terrifying experience of blindness, a book that stands on its own as the lyrical memoir of a poet." A spokesperson for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, Kuusisto teaches at Ohio State University.
Only Companion: Japanese Poems of Love and Longing
by Sam HamillWritten by court princesses, exiled officials, Zen priests, and recluses, the 150 poems translated here represent the rich diversity of Japan's poetic tradition. Varying in tone from the sensuous and erotic to the profoundly spiritual, each poem captures a sense of the poignant beauty and longing known only in the fleeting experience of the moment. The translator has selected these five-line tanka--one of the great traditional verse forms of Japanese literature--from sources ranging from the classical imperial anthologies of the eighth and tenth centuries to works of the early twentieth century.
Only Eternity Is Forever
by Richard ChamberlayneThere are many ways when sitting quietly whereby our emotions may be stirred. By pictures, static or moving, by sound, recorded or natural, by smell and even touch. However, the medium by which our minds have most latitude to wander is the written word. This can be in many forms but the one which arguably makes the lasting impression is poetry.Circumstances may change but the memories live on.
Only God Can Make a Kitten
by Rhonda Gowler GreeneOnly God Can Make A Kitten, written by award-winning author Rhonda Gowler Greene and illustrated by bestselling artist Laura J. Bryant, follows a conversation between a mother and child as the child repeatedly asks "Mama, who made . . . ?" In the end, children learn that God is responsible for everything in creation—including kittens!
Only on the Weekends
by Dean AttaMack. Karim. Finlay. Mack never thought he'd find love, let alone with two people. Will he make the right choice? And can love last for ever? A must-read queer love story for fans of Sex Education, written in verse by Dean Atta. Fifteen-year-old Mack is a hopeless romantic - he blames the films he's grown up watching. He has liked Karim for as long as he can remember, and is ecstatic when Karim becomes his boyfriend - it feels like love. But when Mack's dad gets a job on a film in Scotland, Mack has to move, and soon hediscovers how painful love can be. It's horrible being so far away from Karim, but the worst part is that Karim doesn't make the effort to visit. Love shouldn't be only on the weekends.Then, when Mack meets actor Finlay on a film set, he experiences something powerful, a feeling like love at first sight. How long until he tells Karim - and when will his old life and new life collide?
Only on the Weekends
by Dean AttaMack never thought he'd find love, but now two boys want to be with him. Will he choose Karim or Finlay? And can true love last for ever? A must-listen queer love story for fans of Sarah Crossan and Sex Education, written in verse by Dean Atta. <p><p>Fifteen-year-old Mack is a hopeless romantic—he blames the films he's grown up watching. He has liked Karim for as long as he can remember, and is ecstatic when Karim becomes his boyfriend—it feels like love. But when Mack's dad gets a job on a film in Scotland, Mack has to move, and soon he discovers how painful love can be. It's horrible being so far away from Karim, but the worst part is that Karim doesn't make the effort to visit. Love shouldn't be only on the weekends. <p><p>Then, when Mack meets actor Finlay on a film set, he experiences something powerful, a feeling like love at first sight. How long until he tells Karim—and when will his old life and new life collide? <p>(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry
by Margaret RandallFeaturing the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry.
Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008
by Clive James"A generous helping of [James's] very best, guaranteed to lift the spirit and raise the eyebrow."--Billy Collins Opal Sunset marks the exuberant introduction of Clive James's poetry to an American audience. Praised after the publication of Cultural Amnesia as one of the finest prose stylists of his generation, Clive James is now, with the publication of this collection, being granted recognition as the poet he has always been. For much of his long career it was hard to realize that James's gift for poetry underlay his achievements in other fields. First as a television critic on Fleet Street, and later as a television personality in his own right, he achieved such fame for writing the way he spoke that his poetry was regarded as an idiosyncratic sideline, as if no celebrity could write worthy verse. A conundrum presented itself: how could a serious poet also be a television star? But for James, a duty to the discipline of verse was always fundamental, and his accumulated poetic output became impossible to ignore. As early as the 1970s, James's long, mock epic "Peregrine Prykke's Pilgrimage through the London Literary World" received almost unprecedented attention in his adopted England, while later, his satirical short poem "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" became not only a standard verse quoted at fancy dinner parties but entered the culture as lines to be memorized by unpublished writers everywhere. James was suddenly in the odd position of having written famous poems well before he became a famous poet. Finally, the publication of a volume of his collected verse, The Book of My Enemy, earned him in 2003 the reputation as a serious poet that he has long deserved. Less inhibited by fixed categories, a new generation of critics has confirmed what James's public has instinctively known, that he brings his poems to life with all the resources to be found in his prose: wit, imagination, social observation, and a dazzling play of language. In addition, his poems have an unmistakably characteristic rhythm that makes it compulsory to read them aloud. Switching between strict stanzas and free forms as the occasion suits, James brings a compulsively readable coherence to either mode; and always, over and above the binding force of his metrical assurance, there is a lyricism that brings even the plainest statement to extra life, and which often enters deeply into realms of human emotion. His later poems about the tragedy that struck his mother and father, for example, show an intensity of regret that mark his maturity as a poet and bring out his unashamed nostalgia for his homeland, Australia. Opal Sunset is a treasure chamber of epigrammatic jewels to which the reader will return again and again.
Opal Sunset
by Clive JamesA collection of poems where James recalls not only personal memories, like the titular sunset (a phrase that, in an extravagantly clever poem, drifts down the stanzas like the poet moving towards home), but also cultural memories.
Open Air Bindery
by David HickeyDavid Hickey's second collection builds upon the myriad strengths of his first. In a specimen book of songs, stories, and covenants, Hickey's subjects range from art and astronomy to snowflakes and suburbia. These poems "take their time / Covering the roadside trees in forms of their careful willing . . . gesturing down to earth, unveiling new shapes / for all that they find."David Hickey is a past recipient of the Milton Acorn Prize, the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His work has appeared in magazines and journals across Canada and the United States.
Open All Night
by Charles BukowskiThese 189 posthumously published new poems take us deeper into the raw, wild vein of Bukowski's that extends from the early 1980s up to the time of his death in 1994.
Open Closed Open: Poems
by Yehuda AmichaiIn poems marked by tenderness and mischief, humanity and humor, Yehuda Amichai breaks open the grand diction of revered Jewish verses and casts the light of his own experience upon them. Here he tells of history, a nation, the self, love, and resurrection. Amichai’s last volume is one of meditation and hope, and stands as a testament to one of Israel’s greatest poets. Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is openin the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closedwithin us. And when we die, everything is open again.Open closed open. That’s all we are.—from “I WASN’T ONE OF THE SIX MILLION: AND WHAT IS MY LIFE SPAN? OPEN CLOSED OPEN”
The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine
by Don Share Christian WimanWhen Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. "May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!" For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door--William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now. Poetry's archives are incomparable, and to celebrate the magazine's centennial, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed them to create a new kind of anthology, energized by the self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive--or even to offer the most familiar works--they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtaposition, echo across a century of poetry. Adrienne Rich appears alongside Charles Bukowski; poems by Isaac Rosenberg and Randall Jarrell on the two world wars flank a devastating Vietnam War poem by the lesser-known George Starbuck; August Kleinzahler's "The Hereafter" precedes "Prufrock," casting Eliot's masterpiece in a new light. Short extracts from Poetry's letters and criticism punctuate the verse selections, hinting at themes and threads and serving as guides, interlocutors, or dissenting voices. The resulting volume is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and, most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.
Open Letter to Quiet Light
by Francesca Lia Block"[Francesca Lia Block] is the sorceress of iridescent language."--Kirkus ReviewsOpen Letter to Quiet Light will make readers feel as if they are peering at secret writings meant for the eyes of a lover alone, but these carefully crafted lines somehow transcend the personal to touch everyone who has experienced this kind of consuming, wrenching love.In these fiercely passionate, devastatingly revealing, sometimes spiritual, and often painful poems, Francesca Lia Block describes in fiery detail the rise and demise of a year-long love affair. Her rich use of language infused with the power of sex and spirit finally paint a transcendent, almost mythic portrait of the way two wounded people--both searching for connection--find each other, collide, and eventually separate. The words seem to bleed onto the page and even the most graphic moments have a devotional quality filled with nuanced expression and unbridled intimacy.Francesca Lia Block is renowned for her groundbreaking literary works, including the best-selling Weetzie Bat. Her writing transports readers through the harsh landscapes of contemporary life to realms of the senses where love is a saving grace. She lives in Los Angeles.
Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
by Emily DickinsonEmily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
Open Shutters
by Mary Jo SalterMary Jo Salter's sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, "Trompe l'Oeil," the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an "open lie." And yet "Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?"Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera--in the villanelle "School Pictures" or in the stirring sequence "In the Guesthouse," which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a social history of America and a love story.Darkness and light interact throughout the book--in poems about September 11; about a dog named Shadow; about a blind centenarian who still pretends to read the paper; about a woman shaken by the death of her therapist. A section of light verse highlights the wit and grace that have long distinguished Salter's most serious work.Fittingly, the volume fools the eye once more by closing with "An Open Book," in which a Muslim family praying at a funeral seek consolation in the pages formed by their upturned palms.Open Shutters is the achievement of a remarkable poet, whose concerns and stylistic range continue to grow, encompassing ever larger themes, becoming ever more open.From the Hardcover edition.
Open the Dark: Poems
by Marie Tozier“Tozier’s first book of poems clearly is emplaced in family, community, geography, history, and the seasonality of animals and plants in Western Alaska.” —Elizabeth Bradfield, author ofToward AntarcticaOpen the Dark is an exquisite collection of poems depicting a generational tapestry woven with the shared ebb and flow of land and sea and time. Loving hands, dyed sweet with raspberries and lingonberries, pass ancestral knowledge—of the hunt for seal and crab to pressing ironless, ruler-straight seams—from grandmother to mother, mother to daughter. This is a collection that beckons, like a mother’s warm embrace, into the vibrant scent and taste of Iñupiaq Alaska.“A lyrical guide to the life in Northwest Alaska experienced by the Iñupiaq poet and her family . . . Like most books of good poems, it is also a gallery of images for revisiting time after time.” —49 Writers“These deceptively simple poems enlarge with repeated readings; they unfold greater meaning each time and leave a reader with much to contemplate about identity, cultures, generational wisdom, and values. Marie Tozier’s fresh voice is a very welcome addition to Alaskan, Indigenous and American literature.” —Anchorage Daily News
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
by Seamus HeaneyAs selected by the author,Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler,The New Yorker)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."
The Opposite House: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)
by Claudia EmersonWith graceful lines swooping like a bird in flight, Claudia Emerson's newest collection explores the harsh realities of aging and the limitations of the human body, as well as the loneliness, fear, and anger that can accompany us as we live. Keenly observed and beautifully executed, these poems move from the grim façade that hides beauty-prosthetic eyes- to the beautiful scene that conceals violence-a rural retreat. Emerson also considers once common things that are fast becoming obsolete: cursive writing, telephone booths, barbers. At once hopeful and cognizant of all the reasons why humans might despair, these poems echo with remarkable insight into the true nature of life.
Opposites, More Opposites, and a Few Differences
by Richard WilburThis collection includes the full text and drawings from Opposites and More Opposites, plus seven additional poems and drawings about differences. Readers of all ages will delight in this volume of witty wordplay and clever illustrations from two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient and National Book Award winner Richard Wilbur.
Optic Nerve
by Matthew HollettPoems using fervent whimsy and wordplay to examine photography and seeing. Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by André Kertész, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions. Born of attentive walking and looking, of footsteps and snapshots, it bears witness to art history and alluvial light, portable keyholes, the pandemic, climate change, and the sheer strangeness of seeing everyday things with ecstatic eyes.
Opus Posthumous
by Wallace StevensWhen Opus Posthumous first appeared in 1957, it was an appropriate capstone to the career of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. It included many poems missing from Stevens's Collected Poems, along with Stevens's characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater. Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Opus Posthumous and Other Poems
by David R. SlavittAs he enters his sixth decade of publishing poetry, David R. Slavitt remains a determined wildcatter who ranges as far as he thinks necessary to drill for meaning, wherever and however he can get it. In his new collection, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, complete with visits to zoos, casinos, baseball fields, and cemeteries, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little. He translates verse from Yiddish and Provençal and offers commentaries on received wisdom, everyday events, and the vagaries of existence.With Opus Posthumous and Other Poems—the title is a joke, as he remains very much alive—Slavitt presents an august work possessed of a richness toward which he has worked throughout his long life. By turns wry, erudite, and dyspeptic, this new volume offers ample rewards of his maturity.
or, on being the other woman
by Simone WhiteIn or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.