Currently Browsing: Poetry
A Box of Longing with 50 Drawers
A Revisioning of the Preamble to the Constitution
Jen Benka
Benka takes us on a re-imagining that cuts through the psychic landscape of America and explores the United States as a “a box of longing with fifty drawers.” She delves not so much into the growing cynicism of Americans as to the deep bewilderment and sadness of us. She asks the deepening question of what is...
A Gringo Like Me
Poems
Jennifer L. Knox
Borrowing its title from an Ennio Morricone ditty in the spaghetti western Gunfight at Red Sands, Jennifer L. Knox’s A Gringo Like Me contains poems at once raucous and sexy, tender and high. In favorites such as “Hot Ass Poem,” “Cruising for Prostitutes,” and “Chicken Bucket,” Knox’s speakers appear ornery, hickish,...
Before, During, and After
Hal Sirowitz
Hal Sirowitz’s new collection, Before, During & After, is all about the one word its title leaves out: sex. Hal shares the ups and downs of his romantic history from adolescence to adulthood and lets his girlfriends do most of the talking—the one with the perfect ass, the one who still lives with her ex, the one who demands a signed statement from his therapist, the...
Bend, Don’t Shatter
Poets on the Beginning of Desire
Edited by T. Cole Rachel and Rita D. Costello
Bend Don’t Shatter is an anthology of poetry for young adults that realistically and beautifully deals with what it means to come of age as gay, lesbian, transgender, or, as is perhaps more often the case in adolescence, totally confused. The anthology approaches the seemingly unnavigable territory of teenage...
Deviant Propulsion
CAConrad
CAConrad’s poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. The poems that emerge from this life long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to...
Final Girl
Daphne Gottlieb
Final Girl is the last girl left alive in the syntax of the “slasher” traces the history of the femme fatale in a sequence of poems and stories that display the verve and wit readers have come to expect from Gottlieb. In Final Girl Gottlieb is the survivor, the one who remains to tell the story: what was done to others, what was done to her, what might yet be done to her.
Sexy...
In the Time of Assignments
Douglas A. Martin
In the Time of Assignments is a generous collection that showcases more than a decade’s worth of feeling and musing in the form of poetry. As the collection performs its own slow creep of structural irony, though, it also serves to undercut and critique, through realistic stocktaking, romantic idealism. The reader familiar with Martin’s work will find a repurposing...
No Sleep Till Brooklyn
New and Selected Poems
Kevin Powell
No Sleep Till Brooklyn is a searingly honest collection at once powerful and disturbing. Written between 1989 and 2008, the poems encompass Powell’s early career as a slam poet when he regularly participated in slams, open mics, featured readings, and as the original cast member of MTV’s Real World, to a poet operating in a private sphere,...
Cult poet and musician Mike Doughty makes his print debut with
Slanky, a black-comic stroll through the demimonde of pop culture and modern urban life. Doughty’s poems are at once absurdest and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he re imagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse.
Subduing Demons in America
Selected Poems 1962-2007
John Giorno
Edited by Marcus Boon
An innovator of poetry and performance, John Giorno’s career spans fifty years and is intertwined with contemporaries like Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Whether written, performed, recorded, filmed or exhibited, Giorno’s work – as a poet, and as a sexual, spiritual and political radical – is a...
The Amputee’s Guide to Sex
Jillian Weise
The Amputee’s Guide to Sex is an authentic exploration of disability and sexuality. Tired of seeing “cripples” appear as asexual characters in all forms of media, Weise took on a subject close to home: her own disability. This does not mean that these poems “happened” to Weise in real life. While based on the experience of an...
The Art of the Possible! Comics Mainly Without Pictures
Kenneth Koch, Introduction by David Lehman
The Art of the Possible: Comics Mostly without Pictures is infused with the same energetic wordplay, humor, and tenderness as the best of Koch’s poems, and illustrated and lettered in his own hand, studded with visual puns and jokes, peopled with recognizable characters from the worlds of arts and letters....
The Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates
Edited by Louis Reyes Rivera and Bruce George, Foreword by Jim Brown
Urban youth gangs and street associations are viewed more often than not as training grounds for thugs and felons. Left out are their members’ emotional sensitivities, their political consciousness, their individual and collective capacities to assess the social...
Words in Your Face
A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
The first definitive history of one of the 21st century’s most explosive art movements, WORDS IN YOUR FACE explores the birth, growing pains and continuing development of the Poetry Slam—a raucous poetry event that has been called “a popular culture phenomenon” (Roger Ebert, Chicago...
