Other books that might interest you

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  Why I Was Late

  Charlie Petch

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  With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.   
  Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, bringing a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing—Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject—grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence—is off limits.  
  A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.

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  Bird Sisters

  Julia Webb

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  'Bird Sisters exerts a powerful hold, as if to read it is to be haunted by things one half-remembers.' – Moniza Alvi
  'All is strange or estranged in fact, but it is articulated in poems of supple inventive concentration. In that sense Bird Sisters is a book that casts deep shadows.' – George Szirtes
  Julia Webb's Bird Sistersis a surreal journey through sisterhood and the world of the family via the natural world. Fascinated by the 'otherness' of things, her poems expose places and relationships that are not always entirely comfortable places to exist. Many of them feature transformations of some kind – both real and metaphorical: a woman wears a dress of live bees or becomes a bird and family members turn into owls and sparrows.
  In exploring the ways in which both adults and children are casually cruel to one another, often within a mythological framework, Julia Webb blurs the boundaries between fairy tale and reality. These families are terrifying in their complexity and dysfunction, yet utterly compelling and convincing and with dark undercurrents of humour that ensure the poems are never bleak.

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  Ballad of Reading Gaol The...

  Oscar Wilde

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  In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor for acts of ‘gross indecency’. During his time at Reading Gaol, he witnessed a rare hanging, and in the three years between his release and his untimely death in 1900, was inspired to write the following poem, a meditation on the death penalty and the importance of forgiveness, even for (and especially for) something as heinous as murdering one’s spouse; for even the murderer, Wilde argues, is human and suffers more so for being the cause of his own pain, for ‘having killed the thing he loved’; for everyone is the cause of someone else’s suffering and suffers at the hands of another. It is this that Jesus Christ could see; he could continue to see the beauty of our humanity, despite all that we may do to each other, and encouraged us to love each other just the same. 
   “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published in 1898 and would gain Wilde greater recognition as a poet (in addition to being a great playwright); although his only other volume of poetry, one of his earliest works that he’d published, was also well-received. Sadly, ‘The Ballad’ would be his last. 
  (Summary by Linda Leu).

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  Slabs of the Sunburnt West -...

  Carl Sandburg

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  This is Carl Sandburg's fourth collection of poetry. His signature style, a rough-and-ready free verse that often transforms into poetic prose, is in full view. Like Whitman before him and like Masters and Frost in his own time, he puts his focus directly on life as he sees it around him, life in the rough-and-tumble Chicago of the early 20th century and life in the American West, at a time when that wild country was finally succumbing to civilization. 
  Sandburg can be emotionally brutal; he writes of death with a rare and unflinching directness. He can also be emotionally transcendent, writing of the beauty of the world with a soaring eye. Sandburg is a newspaperman turned poet, or perhaps a poet turned journalist; his writing has the direct immediacy of the daily beat. There is nothing dated about his work; in fact, he speaks to us today as if he wrote today, hitting fundamentals about the way we live with clarity and force.

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  Pro Patria

  Julia Caroline Dorr

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  This is a collection of seven patriotic long poems by Julia Caroline Dorr.  - Summary by Carolin

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  Walking On The Stars - Poems...

  Rachel Lawson

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  A pretty, dark and eclectic book of poetry by Allpoetry.com's Poet called The Poette.Requiem 
  Under the moon's silver glow, 
  I could forget everything and live in this moment forever, 
  tugs on the heartstrings like a beautiful voice in song, 
  words are the dreams the heart makes, 
  all now of the dream I have is a requiem.

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