Other books that might interest you

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  The Kingdom of Surfaces - Poems

  Sally Wen Mao

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  In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.At its heart, The Kingdom of Surfaces imagines the poet wandering into a Western fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives. The title poem is a speculative recasting of Through the Looking-Glass, set in a surreal topsy-turvy version of the eponymous China-themed 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. The Kingdom of Surfaces is a brilliantly conceived call for those who recognize the horrors of American exceptionalism to topple the empire that values capital over lives and power over liberation.

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  Enough Rope

  Dorothy Parker

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  “If I abstain from fun and such, / I'll probably amount to much, / But I shall stay the way I am, / Because I do not give a damn.” 
    
  American poet Dorothy Parker lived a life of heartache and hardship, but her writing became her weapon to fight back. She refused to temper her strong opinions, even at the cost of her editorial position at Vanity Fair. Parker continued to write—unfiltered and unapologetic—and found solidarity in community with other writers. Enough Rope was Parker’s first volume of poetry, featuring poems originally published in Life, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. Parker’s poetry has galvanized generations of strong-willed women, and the fire in her voice burns strong even a century after the first publication.

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  Public Displays of Affection:...

  Vona Groarke

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  Public
  
  Displays of Affection: Poetry Ireland Introductions 2020 is an anthology of
  
  poetry from Poetry Ireland, the national poetry organisation. This anthology
  
  features the very best of Ireland's emerging poets for 2020, as chosen by
  
  Vona Groarke, award-winning poet, editor and essayist. Along with a pair of
  
  superb poems, each poet provides an insightful prose piece on a favourite –
  
  favourite poet, musician, literary character – or writes a 'pandemic
  
  postcard' about the creative life in lockdown. Featuring Lani O'Hanlon, Eoin
  
  Hegarty, Kate Quigley, Nancy Graham, Nidhi Zak / Aria Eipe, Lianne O'Hara,
  
  Mícheál McCann, Charis McRoberts, Eva Griffin, Jake Hawkey, Mark Ward, Sinéad
  
  Nolan, and Tory Campbell, along with superb photographs from Samantha Obman. Quality
  
  poems and quality prose from Poetry Ireland: connecting poetry and people.

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  Pygmalion

  George Bernard Shaw

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  Relive this hilarious drama retold in audiobook format, complete with the witty narrative and directions of Shaw's original playscript. 
  Henry Higgins, a phonetician, agrees to coach and groom Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl and transform her into a socially acceptable person, no less than a duchess - in just six months! 
  Timeless themes of equality and social class are explored in a lighthearted, comical manner, raising many questions such as: 
  Can Eliza "I'm a good girl I am!" live up to their expectations? 
  What will become of her afterwards? 
  What happens when her Father, an "undeserving" dustman comes into money and becomes a "victim of the middle class"? 
  What is middle class morality? 
  Listeners are invited to answer these questions for themselves - or just sit back and be entertained by Shaw's comic wit in all it's glory. 
   

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  Ladies' Day (NHB Modern Plays)

  Amanda Whittington

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  An exuberant comedy about four likely lasses from the Hull fish docks on a day trip to the races, from the author of Be My Baby.
  Work, love and life are just one long, hard slog for the fish-filleting foursome Pearl, Jan, Shelley and Linda. But their fortunes are set to change when Linda finds tickets to Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot the year it relocated to York.
  Out go the hairnets, overalls and wellies as the four ditch work, do themselves up to the nines and head off to the races for a drink, a flirt and a flutter. If their luck holds, they could hit the jackpot - and more besides...
  'With its Yorkshire heart and soul it has all the warmth of a Calendar Girls or a Full Monty' - Yorkshire Post
  'Hull Truck Theatre Company clearly has a hit on its hands' - Hull Daily Mail
  'Exuberantly up-to-the-minute comedy' - Guardian

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  Girl with Death Mask

  Jennifer Givhan

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  The prize-winning poet “crafts a clear-eyed narrative of Latina womanhood in this lovely collection ripe with longing, hope, and broken faith” (Publishers Weekly).   Winner of the Pleiades Editors’ Prize and Miller Williams Poetry Prize, poet Jennifer Givhan now explores the path from girlhood to womanhood through love, tequila, sex, first periods, late nights, abuse, and heartache. She describes a journey brimming with transformative magic that heals even as it shatters.   In four rich movements of poems, Givhan profiles the suffering and the love of a Latina girl who enters motherhood while coming to terms with sexual trauma. Her daughter is a touchstone of healing as she seeks to unravel her own emotions and protect the next generation of women. Givhan uses changing poetic forms to expose what it means to mature in a female body swirling with tenderness, violence, and potential in an uncertain world.

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