Tag: poetry

Poetry 365

September 21, 2012

Poet Heather Christle

This month for Poetry 365 we’re featuring Heather Christle’s nimble new volume What Is Amazing.  Following 2011’s inventively quirky The Trees the Trees, the jubilat editor’s third collection expands her formal range while retaining the voracious curiosity and playfulness found in her earlier work.  Hip, irreverent, and darkly funny, these 49 poems “feel like pages from a secret notebook” as they explore the world with a sly mixture of childlike wonder and adult gravitas.  So check out this excellent new collection, sample a poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

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Poetry 365

August 30, 2012

Poet Michael Robbins

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, Frost, and Yeats to Nirvana, Star Wars, and M*A*S*H.  So check out this University of Chicago grad’s brave new collection, sample a poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

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Poetry 365

July 23, 2012

Poet Rebecca Lindenberg

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 and uniquely musical, the volume stays fresh with forms both adopted and invented including prose poems, sparse free verse, and the lengthy title poem which appears as an index.  Beautiful, fierce, humbling, and human, this first title in the newly minted McSweeney’s Poetry Series  is simply not to be missed.  So make sure to sample an “index” poem below and don’t forget to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

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Poetry 365

June 23, 2012

Poet Albert Goldbarth

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 People, he presents 66 new poems that nimbly explore the wonders of everyone from Hercules and Jesus to overprotective parents, online gamblers, and newlyweds.  Fearless, funny, and tender, Everyday People argues that “our ordinary failures, heroics, joy, and grief are worth giving voice to and giving thanks for.”  So check out this extraordinary new book, sample a shorter poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

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New U.S. Poet Laureate

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 for her collection Native Guard, and her newest book of poetry Thrall will be published this fall.  Much of her work deals with memory, “in particular the way private recollection and public history sometimes intersect but more often diverge. “The ghost of history lies down beside me,” she writes in one of her poems, “rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.”  See the library catalog for more of her writings, and check out this NYT article and the NPR link to hear Ms. Trethewey read two of her poems.

Laura

Poetry 365

May 29, 2012

Poet Alan Shapiro

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 Night of the Republic.  Inventive, urgent, and moving, this twelfth collection from the L.A. Times Book Prize winner takes readers on a dreamlike tour of America’s public places.  Breathing fresh life into generic spaces such as a gas station restroom, a dry cleaner, and a funeral home, the book offers unexpected insights that “illuminate the mingling of private obsessions with public space.”   So while you bask in the afterglow of National Poetry Month, check out this excellent new collection, sample a poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

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Local Art @ EPL

May 17, 2012

“Rose in Winter” by Laura Dudnik

We are happy to announce an exciting May treat for our ongoing exhibition series Local Art @ EPL.  Throughout this month, we’re proudly featuring Art Play with Poetry, a creative collaboration that showcases nine diverse artists from the Noyes Cultural Arts Center and their interpretations of twelve honored poems from the 2006-2011 Jo-Anne Hirshfield Memorial Poetry Awards.  Featuring photography along with works in watercolor, oil, and pastels, this impressive marriage of local artists and poets is on display on the 2nd floor of EPL’s Main Branch through the end of May and is not to be missed.

National Poetry Month: April 30th

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 the road. She shakes its head.
Daddy, you don’t look pretty, she says. I agree.
.
She stomps on a sewer grid where the slow rain
Is vanishing. Do you want to go down there?
I tell her no. Neither do I, she says.
.
She picks up a stone. This is an elephant.
Because it’s heavy, smooth, slate gray, and hers,
I tell her it’s very like an elephant.
.
We’re back. The starling is gone. Where did it go?
She says. I tell her I don’t know, maybe
A cat took it away. I think it’s lost.
.
I tell her I think so too. But can’t you find it?
I tell her I don’t think so. Let’s go look.
I show her my empty hands, and she takes one.

This poem was selected by Russell J. (Readers’ Services)

Poetry Copyright Notice

National Poetry Month: April 29th

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 bed…turned down
my hair…slightly
confused but…I don’t care…
.
Laid out my teeth…and gargled my
gown…then I stood
…and laid me down…
.
To sleep…
after loving you

This poem was selected by Lesley W. (Head of Adult Services)

Poetry Copyright Notice

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