The Main and the Robert Crown Branches of EPL will be closed Dec. 24th & Dec. 25th. We will reopen Dec. 26th for regular library hours.
August 30, 2012
This month for Poetry 365 we’re highlighting Michael Robbins’ defiantly inventive debut Alien vs. Predator. Described as “equal parts hip-hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it,” these 55 strange, darkly funny poems are as impressive for their formal precision as they are for their frenzied name checking of everyone from Auden, […]
July 23, 2012
This month for Poetry 365 we’re highlighting Rebecca Lindenberg’s highly anticipated debut Love, An Index. Praised by National Book Award winner Terrence Hayes for “recovering, reclaiming, and remaking the elegy form,” this one-of-a kind collection serves as Lindenberg’s memorial to her late partner Craig Arnold, an acclaimed poet who disappeared while hiking a Japanese volcano in 2009. At once plainspoken […]
June 23, 2012
This month for Poetry 365 we’re featuring the latest collection from virtuoso poet Albert Goldbarth. Author of over 25 volumes and the only two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the prolific Chicago native is best known for a singular, sprawling style that mixes dense philosophical ideas with wildly energetic word play. In Everyday […]
June 14, 2012
Natasha Trethewey has just been named the 19th poet laureate by the Library of Congress. Creative writing professor at Atlanta’s Emory University, she’s the first Southerner appointed to the post since Robert Penn Warren in 1986 (the first poet laureate), and the first African American since Rita Dove in 1993. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize […]
May 29, 2012
The sun may have set on another National Poetry Month but that doesn’t mean the fun has to end. No, here at 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 Alan Shapiro’s ambitious new book […]
April 30, 2012
Walking around the Block with a Three-Year-Old by David Wagoner She sees a starling legs-up in the gutter. She finds an earthworm limp and pale in a puddle. What’s wrong with them? she says. I tell her they’re dead. . She scowls at me. She stares at her short shadow And makes it dance in […]
April 29, 2012
I Wrote a Good Omelet by Nikki Giovanni I wrote a good omelet…and ate a hot poem…after loving you . Buttoned my car…and drove my coat home…in the rain… after loving you . I goed on red…and stopped on green…floating somewhere in between… being here and being there… after loving you . I rolled my […]
April 28, 2012
A Silly Poem by Spike Milligan Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I’ll draw a sketch of thee, What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B? This poem was selected by Olivia M. (Readers’ Services) Poetry Copyright Notice
April 27, 2012
Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, […]
April 26, 2012
Stays by Jill Alexander Essbaum Everything alludes to the mood of us. This color, for instance, the color of you. Blood-blue like the walls of the house we share. Blue-black like the ravels in my hair. . Everything habituates the shatter of our glass. This tiger of yours that mauls on command. Or yours, the […]
