Other books that might interest you

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  Girls on the Run - A Poem

  John Ashbery

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  John Ashbery’s wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger’s Vivian GirlsHenry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a “realm of the unreal” where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivians, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark forces of chaos. Darger’s work is now renowned for its brilliant appropriation of cultural ephemera, its dense and otherworldly prose, and its utterly unique high-low juxtaposition of popular culture and the divine—some of the very same traits that decades of critics and readers have responded to in John Ashbery’s many groundbreaking works of poetry. In Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s unmatched poetic inventiveness travels to new territory, inspired by the characters and cataclysms of Darger’s imagined universe. Girls on the Run is a disquieting, gorgeous, and often hilarious mash-up that finds two radical American artists engaged in an unlikely conversation, a dialogue of reinvention and strange beauty. 

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  The Supine Cobbler

  Jill Connell

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  A contemporary clinical abortion in the spirit of a Western.
  
   
  The Doctor introduces the gang: The Supine Cobbler (wanted), her estranged sister (dead by hanging), her former best friend (missing, presumed dead) and her apprentice (a turncoat). Together they negotiate integrity in a lawless world. The Supine Cobbler is an unsentimental legend and a true story. It is a hero myth for girls.
  
   
  Praisefor the productions of The Supine Cobbler:
  
   
  ‘The show is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.’
  
   
  – Theatre Reader
  
   
  ‘Jill Connell … is consistently one of the most innovative playwrights in the country.’
  
   
  – Vue Weekly
  
   
  ‘The Supine Cobbler is brilliant, subversive and deeply hilarious. The play is about an abortion – but also: waiting, haunting, cheating, hurting, daring and the private cultivation of one’s humanity. It is singular and surprising and epic and lean as Bowie. You cannot help but talk about this play. It is the work of a lover and a rebel. To miss it, would be to miss a master in her early bloom.’
  
   
  – Claudia Dey, author of Trout Stanley and Stunt
  
   
  ‘I love this absolutely idiosyncratic play. It’s very funny, moving and sharp, and the only work of art about abortion I can think of that doesn’t sentimentalize or simplify the experience, but gets the strangeness and banality of it exactly right.’
  
   
  – Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

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  El Dorado Freddy's - Chain...

  Danny Caine, Tara Wray

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  A charming and accessible collection of poems dedicated to one of the most American of inventions—fast food. “I went back for seconds.” —Dallas Crow, Rain Taxi Review of Books  El Dorado Freddy’s may be the first book of fast-food poetry. In poems like “Olive Garden,” “Culver’s,” “Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen,” “Cracker Barrel,” “Applebee’s (after James Wright),” Danny Caine—owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas—“reviews” chain restaurants, bringing our attention to a slice of American life we often overlook, even though it’s everywhere. Along the way, he touches on such topics as parenting, the Midwest, politics, and the pitfalls of nostalgia. Caine’s wry, deceptively accomplished poems are paired with Tara Wray’s color-drenched photos. The result is a literary yet goofy homage to American food and identity, set in a midwestern landscape dotted by the light of fast-food restaurants’ glowing signs. Perfect for those readers who love both poetry and Popeye’s.  “Caine’s work has a tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek appeal that is sly enough to fool the people who believe Popeye’s chicken could be considered healthy, and funny enough to make the rest of us laugh, or groan, to ourselves. Wray’s images in El Dorado Freddy’s are understated in their Steven Shore-esque ability to capture the essence of a meal when we’d rather not admit to, but cannot stop from embracing.” —Cary Benbow, F-Stop Magazine

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  The Metaphysical Poets

  John Donne, Anne Bradstreet,...

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  Samuel Johnson wrote in reference to the beginning of the seventeenth century that there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets".  Widely regarded in the years since as a distinct Poetical movement it is interesting to note that from what we now know the Metaphysical poets did not, in the main, read or know one another. Samuel Johnson was not an admirer of the group as he decried their distinct lack of the decorum of the day and stylistic impurity but the poems here testify that it bands together a wonderful group of poets and their poems in an inspiring and thought provoking volume.

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  Heaven

  Rupert Brooke

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 8 recordings of Heaven by Rupert Brooke.  This was the weekly poetry project for the week of August 16th, 2008.

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  I Hope This Finds You Well - Poems

  Kate Baer

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  An Instant New York Times Bestseller 
  The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller What Kind of Woman returns with a collection of erasure poems created from notes she received from followers, supporters and detractors—an artform that reclaims the vitriol from online trolls and inspires readers to transform what is ugly or painful in their own lives into something beautiful.  
  “I'm sure you could benefit from jumping on a treadmill” 
  “Women WANT a male leader . . . It’s honest to god the basic human playbook” 
  These are some of the thousands of messages that Kate Baer has received online. Like countless other writers—particularly women—with profiles on the internet, as Kate’s online presence grew, so did the darker messages crowding her inbox. These missives from strangers have ranged from “advice” and opinions to outright harassment.  
  At first, these messages resulted in an immediate delete and block. Until, on a whim, Kate decided to transform the cruelty into art, using it to create fresh and intriguing poems. These pieces, along with ones made from notes of gratitude and love, as well as from the words of public figures, have become some of her most beloved work.   
  I Hope This Finds You Well is drawn from those works: a book of poetry birthed in the darkness of the internet that offers light and hope. By cleverly building on the harsh negativity and hate women often receive—and combining it with heartwarming messages of support, gratitude, and connection, Kate Baer offers us a lesson in empowerment, showing how we too can turn bitterness into beauty. 

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