As of Tuesday morning, the Main Library continues to experience an Internet outage. No computers, printing, or phones. You must have your library card to check out materials. The Crown Branch is fully operational. Thank you for your patience.
April 1, 2014
If you’re anything like us, you’ve been counting down to this very day. Besides kick starting the showers that bring the flowers, April 1st officially makes it next year for the Cubs and gives you cause to unleash that new whoopee cushion. What’s most exciting, however, is that today means National Poetry Month is finally […]
March 29, 2014
This month for Poetry 365 we’re highlighting the impressive eleventh book from innovative poet August Kleinzahler. In The Hotel Oneira, the National Book Critics Circle Award winner adopts a mysterious Rod Serling-like persona as he visits his native North Jersey, the snowy battlefields of 19th-century Russia, an American ghost town, and a foggy San Francisco. […]
February 28, 2014
This month for Poetry 365 we’re featuring Alex Lemon’s stellar new volume The Wish Book. Tightly coiled, kaleidoscopic, and full of heart, this fourth collection from the author of Happy blends “the energy of a carnival barker with the precise prosody of a master craftsman.” Favorably compared to the work of Lucia Perillo and Laura […]
December 28, 2013
Poet Diane Raptosh This month for Poetry 365 we’re highlighting Diane Raptosh’s remarkable new volume American Amnesiac. Longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award, this fourth collection from the Boise Poet Laureate follows “the manic journey of a man stripped of memory” and forced to “confront the complexities of being American in an age of […]
November 23, 2013
This month for Poetry 365 we’re featuring Jaswinder Bolina’s accomplished new volume Phantom Camera. Winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize, the Lesley University professor’s second collection nimbly navigates readers through the chaos of contemporary life in 37 poems PW called “sophisticated but eminently embraceable, a tip-off of what’s to come.” So check out this […]
August 29, 2013
This month for Poetry 365 we’re highlighting the fantastic fifth book from celebrated poet Maurice Manning. In The Gone and the Going Away, the Pulitzer Prize finalist mines his own rural Kentucky roots while creating the folks of Fog Town Holler – a mythical, bygone land that “celebrates and echoes the voices and lives of […]
June 14, 2013
This month for Poetry 365 we’re featuring the profound eighth book from influential poet Frank Bidart. In Metaphysical Dog, the Wallace Stevens Award winner focuses his “spiky free verse” on poignant explorations of “the war between the mind and body, ecstasy and obliteration, his mother’s death, and his coming out.” Unconventional, emotional, and intellectually rewarding, […]
May 23, 2013
Another National Poetry Month has come and gone but that doesn’t mean the fun is over. Breathe easy, poetry friends, because here on Off the Shelf we like to celebrate year round with Poetry 365, a monthly-minus-April feature that highlights a contemporary poet’s most recent work. This month we pick back up with Bob Hicok’s […]
April 30, 2013
In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On […]
April 29, 2013
In an Artist’s Studio by Christina Georgina Rossetti One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same […]
