{"title":"Phoenix Poets","description":"\u003cp\u003eDive into the heart of contemporary verse with the Phoenix Poets series. Showcasing diverse voices and styles, these collections offer a powerful reflection on modern life and the human experience. Browse and be inspired.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"thresherphobe-book-mark-halliday-9780226038704","title":"Thresherphobe","description":"Classic Blunder - After a noticeably happy day I sleep - and wake at dawn to a sudden sense of having erred. What have I done? I've made the classic blunder the blunder of living onward forwardly toward some disappointing future - what a fool - I should have lived not forwardly but sideways or circularly to stay in days like (what now has to be called) yesterday. Instead I've allowed the sun already to start pouring through the curtains the diminishments and inferiorities of a crude and unsentimental next day. To keep that train from leaving the station must call for some incredible level of concentration. In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries - both dire and hilarious - from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetnal frustration of our cravings for ego triumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit. Animated by belief in the possible truths to be reached in interpersonal speech, Halliday's voice-driven poetry wants to find insight - or at least a stay against confusion - through personality without being trapped in personality. History will leave much of what we are on the threshing floor, Halliday notes, but in the meantime we do what we can: let posterity (if any) say we rambled truly.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49527563026705,"sku":"GOR013374264","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50214221840657,"sku":"CIN022603870XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022603870X.jpg?v=1751425646"},{"product_id":"hard-bread-book-peg-boyers-9780226069654","title":"Hard Bread","description":"The poems in Peg Boyers's Hard Bread are spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91). While much of the book is based on Ginzburg's life her upbringing in Turin; her brief marriage to the resistance activist, Leone Ginzburg; her experience of Fascism and war; her work as novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist; her embattled friendships with writers like Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Hemingway, and Cesare Pavese much is invented. 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This is Ferry's fullest and most resonant book, demonstrating the depth and breadth of forty years of a life in poetry.  \"Though Ferry is perhaps best known for his eloquent translations of Horace and Virgil, \"Of No Country I Know\" demonstrates that he deserves acclaim for his own poetry as well.\"—Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times Book Review","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49593881559313,"sku":"GOR009739845","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49789704732945,"sku":"CIN0226244873G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51110519963921,"sku":"CIN0226244873VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226244873.jpg?v=1751005229"},{"product_id":"ozone-journal-book-peter-balakian-9780226207032","title":"Ozone Journal","description":"From Ozone Journal. 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Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49618077024529,"sku":"GOR008771384","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50297373557009,"sku":"CIN022620703XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000224776465,"sku":"NIN9780226207032","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51612420178193,"sku":"CIN022620703XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022620703X.jpg?v=1751227640"},{"product_id":"bitter-english-book-ahmad-almallah-9780226642642","title":"Bitter English","description":"Imagine you are a Palestinian who came to America as a young man, eventually finding yourself caught between the country you live in with your wife and daughter, and the home--and parents--you left behind. Imagine living every day in your nonnative language and becoming estranged from your native tongue, which you use less and less as you become more ensconced in the United States. This is the story told by Ahmad Almallah in Bitter English, an autobiography-in-verse that explores the central role language plays in how we construct our identities and how our cultures construct them for us.    Through finely crafted poems that utilize a plainspoken roughness to keep the reader slightly disoriented, Almallah replicates his own verbal and cultural experience of existing between languages and societies. There is a sense of displacement to these poems as Almallah recounts the amusing, sad, and perilous moments of day-to-day living in exile. At the heart of Bitter English is a sense of loss, both of home and of his mother, whose struggle with Alzheimer's becomes a reflection of his own reality in exile. Filled with wit, humor, and sharp observations of the world, Bitter English brings a fresh poetic voice to the American immigrant experience.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49644190859537,"sku":"GOR013704326","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53361506025745,"sku":"CIN022664264XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022664264X.jpg?v=1751227749"},{"product_id":"tourist-in-hell-book-eleanor-wilner-9780226900322","title":"Tourist in Hell","description":"From What It Hinges On ...a letter here, a sentence there, years of work litter the field that lies outside the town that flood or fire took back, as the great tectonic plates grind out their harmonies below the sea, and the earth turns in its restless sleep, spun by what we cannot see, the hand that is no hand, but brings us calm to think it so, and think it ours to smite our enemies, forgetting as we turn it to a fist, it is ourselves curled, blind as newborn kittens, in the palm. 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A deep dive into sectarianism and forgiveness, this timely and nuanced book examines the many ways we are all implicated in the impulse to \"protect our own\" and asks how we manage the histories that divide us.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49727682740497,"sku":"NGR9780226613789","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346001793297,"sku":"CIN022661378XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50633558262033,"sku":"GOR014019512","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53622433382673,"sku":"GOR012870898","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022661378X.jpg?v=1751037723"},{"product_id":"portulans-book-jason-sommer-9780226737393","title":"Portulans","description":"Taking cues from medieval sea charts-portulans-the poems in Jason Sommer's collection bring a fresh variation to the ancient metaphor of life as a journey.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738144055569,"sku":"NGR9780226737393","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346832757009,"sku":"CIN022673739XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022673739X.jpg?v=1751450550"},{"product_id":"orange-tree-book-dong-li-9780226826165","title":"The Orange Tree","description":"Debut collection of poems that weaves stories of family history, war, and migration.       Dong Li’s The Orange Tree is a collection of narrative poems that braids forgotten legends, personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator examines a yellowed family photo to find resemblances and learns a new language, inventing compound words to conjure and connect family stories. These invented words and the calligraphy of untranslated Chinese characters appear in lists separating the book’s narrative sections.     Li’s lyrical and experimental collection transcends the individual, placing generations of family members and anonymous others together in a single moment that surpasses chronological time. Weaving through stories of people with little means, between wars and celebrations, over bridges and walls, and between trees and gardens, Li’s poems offer intimate perspectives on times that resonate with our own. The result is an unflinching meditation on family history, collective trauma, and imaginative recovery.    The Orange Tree is the recipient of the inaugural Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize for 2023.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742898626833,"sku":"NGR9780226826165","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50038194569489,"sku":"CIN0226826163G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000301584657,"sku":"NIN9780226826165","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226826163.jpg?v=1750694154"},{"product_id":"proceed-to-check-out-book-alan-shapiro-9780226817545","title":"Proceed to Check Out","description":"Award-winning poet Alan Shapiro offers a new collection of poems reflecting on mortality and finitude.     Alan Shapiro's fourteenth collection of poetry, Proceed to Check Out, is a kind of summing up, or stock-taking, by an aging poet, of his precarious place in a world dominated by the ever-accelerating pace of technological innovation, political disruption, personal loss, and racial strife. These poems take on fundamental subjects-like the nature of time and consciousness and how or why we become who we are-but Shapiro presses them into becoming urgent and timely.     Employing idiomatic range and formal variety, Shapiro's poems move through recurring dreams, the coercions of childhood, and the mysterious connections of mind and matter, pleasure and memory. They meet an abiding need to find empathy and understanding in even the most challenging places-amid disaffection, public discord, and estrangement. His grasp of contemporary life-in all its insidious violence and beauty-is distinct, comprehensive, and profound.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743407120657,"sku":"NGR9780226817545","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346024501521,"sku":"CIN0226817547G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52524015845649,"sku":"CIN0226817547VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226817547.jpg?v=1751005405"},{"product_id":"no-sign-book-peter-balakian-9780226784076","title":"No Sign","description":"New poetry collection from Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.     In these poems, Peter Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities, including challenges for the human species amid planetary transmutation and the impact of mass violence on the self and culture. At the collection's heart is \"No Sign,\" another in Balakian's series of long-form poems, following \"A-Train\/Ziggurat\/Elegy\" and \"Ozone Journal,\" which appeared in his previous two collections. In this dialogical multi-sectioned poem, an estranged couple encounters each other, after years, on the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. The dialogue that ensues reveals the evolution of a kaleidoscopic memory spanning decades, reflecting on the geological history of Earth and the climate crisis, the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, the Vietnam War, a visionary encounter with the George Washington Bridge, and the enduring power of love..     Whether meditating on the sensuality of fruits and vegetables, the COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma and memory of the Armenian genocide, James Baldwin in France, or Arshile Gorky in New York City, Balakian's layered, elliptical language, wired phrases, and shifting tempos engage both life's harshness and beauty and define his inventive and distinctive style.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743437758737,"sku":"NGR9780226784076","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51334474858769,"sku":"CIN022678407XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53257658827025,"sku":"NIN9780226784076","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022678407X.jpg?v=1751439439"},{"product_id":"lookout-man-book-stuart-dischell-9780226817835","title":"The Lookout Man","description":"Vivid poems full of drama and action by award-winning poet Stuart Dischell.     Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, and always transformative, The Lookout Man embodies the energy, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. Inhabiting a mix of lyric structures, these poems are set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from the backyards of America to the streets of international cities. There is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, as Dischell allows his edgy vision and singular perspectives to co-exist with the music of his poems. In lines that close the book and typify Dischell's work, he writes, \"I will ask the dogwoods to remind me \/\/ What it means to live along the edges of the woods, \/ To be promiscuous but bear white flowers.\"","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743481864465,"sku":"NGR9780226817835","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226817830.jpg?v=1750876575"},{"product_id":"upstate-book-lindsay-turner-9780226828640","title":"The Upstate","description":"Poetry that sings of southern Appalachian beauty and crisis.     Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, Queen Anne’s lace on the roadsides, and toxic chemicals in the watershed, Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate is a book about southern Appalachia in a contemporary moment of change and development. Layering a personal lyric voice with a broader awareness of labor issues and political and ecological crises, The Upstate redefines a regional poetics as one attuned to national and global systems. These poems observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation and raging in their own quiet way against their continuation.     The poems in The Upstate arise from moments of darkness and desperation, mobilizing a critical intelligence against the status quo of place and history, all while fiercely upholding belief in the role of poetry to affect these conditions. 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Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49749630058769,"sku":"NGR9780226829715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50235201618193,"sku":"CIN0226829715VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000313774353,"sku":"NIN9780226829715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51322304299281,"sku":"CIN0226829715G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226829715.jpg?v=1751259544"},{"product_id":"portal-book-tracy-fuad-9780226831534","title":"PORTAL","description":"A poetry collection exploring inheritance and reproduction through the lenses of parenthood, etymology, postcoloniality, and climate anxiety.     Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans. The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread.     Peeling back the surfaces of words to reveal their etymologies, Fuad embraces playfulness through her formal range, engaging styles from the tersely lineated to the essayistic as she intertwines topics of replication, reproduction, technology, language, history, and biology.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753504645393,"sku":"NGR9780226831534","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000315707665,"sku":"NIN9780226831534","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226831531.jpg?v=1777544154"},{"product_id":"mandible-wishbone-solvent-book-asiya-wadud-9780226830957","title":"Mandible Wishbone Solvent","description":"A poetry collection that brings together word, image, and sound to reflect on fractured, fragmentary states of being.      The poetry of Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. 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Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud, the latest collection from enigmatic prose poet Killarney Clary, is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time. The details on which Clary chooses to focus suggest a narrative that will not resolve. The unnamed people with whom she interacts offer exchanges she is desperate to prolong, and in attempts to understand her place, she reaches beneath the fragile armor of those loved, especially those who can no longer answer her. 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As the poet struggles with reality's continuing failure to satisfy basic human needs, she develops a deepened reliance on the imagination as a source of restorative powers.  \"I like Christine Garren's poetry for its fervor and idiosyncrasy. It lives in the common places of daily life but opens into mysterious invisible orders. Afterworld is a strange and compelling book by a gifted visionary artist.\"—W. S. Di Piero  \"In Afterworld, Christine Garren calls up again and again how it feels to be touched by some relatively familiar thing that happens. A cluster of balloons rises from a birthday party, night falls, and it is left for her to sing about the separate moments with remarkable and unforced grace. Her poems confirm that there's as much at stake in evanescences as we've always suspected but not found ways to say.\"—James McMichael  \"The language seems but a shade, a muted rendering of Garren's images, so concrete and ethereal, knowing and innocent. If this reviewer is being abstract it's because these poems do that to you—they create an arrangement of words, so that, for a while, I believed there was none other.\"—Harvard Review","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49910360539409,"sku":"CIN0226284093G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226284093.jpg?v=1751389597"},{"product_id":"bewilderment-book-david-ferry-9780226244884","title":"Bewilderment","description":"Your Personal God From Horace, Epistles, II. 2. II. 180-89 Jewels, marble, ivory, paintings, beautiful Tuscan meter? Pottery, silver, Gaetulian robes dyed purple - Many there are who'd love to have all of these things. There are some who don't care about them in the least. Why one twin brother lives for nothing but pleasure, And loves to fool around even more than Herod Loves his abundant gardens of date-trees, while The other twin brother works from morning to night Improving his farm, ploughing and clearing the lands, Pruning and planting, working his ass off, only The genius knows, the personal god who knows And controls the birth start of every person There is in the world. Your personal god is the god Who dies in a sense when your own breath gives out, And yet lives on, after you die, to be The personal god of somebody other than you; Your personal god, whose countenance changes as He looks at you, smiling sometimes, sometimes not. To read David Ferry's \"Bewilderment\" is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. This is the passionate nature and originality of Ferry's prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. His diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against - and with - his genius for metrical variation, thus becoming an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry and which gives him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it's like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. 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To Forget Venice is the improbable challenge and the title of Peg Boyers's newest collection of poems. The site of several unforgettable years of her adolescence, the place she has returned to more frequently than any other, the city of Venice is both adored and reviled by the speakers in this varied and unconventionally polyphonic work. The voices we hear in these poems belong not only to characters like the mother of Tadzio (think Death in Venice), or the companion of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, or the Victorian prophet John Ruskin and his wife, Effie, but also to wall moss, and sand, and - most especially - an authorial speaker who in 1965, at age thirteen, landed in Venice and never quite recovered from the formative experiences that shaped her there. Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, the book insistently addresses the author's desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49949949722897,"sku":"CIN022618126XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022618126X.jpg?v=1750877252"},{"product_id":"executive-director-of-the-fallen-world-book-liam-rector-9780226706047","title":"The Executive Director of the Fallen World","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Worry of the Far Right\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Reverend Donald Wildmon, executive director\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOf the American Family Association in Tupelo, \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMississippi, birthplace of Elvis Presley, he who\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUnleashed the libido of a generation, announced today\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat he, the Reverend, wanted again an America\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn which he could drive his convertible into town, \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePark it, leave his keys in the ignition, \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd worry only that it might rain, \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRather than worry about Liam Rector.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmerica you are on notice. 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Halliday's poetry exploits the vast array of dictions, idioms, rhetorical maneuvers, and tones available to real-life speakers (including speakers talking to themselves). Often Halliday gives a poem to a speaker who is distressed, angry, confused, defensive, self-excusing, or driven by yearning, so that the poem may dramatize the speaker's state of mind while also implying the poet's ironic perspective on the speaker. Meanwhile, a few other poems (for instance \"A Gender Theory\" and \"Thin White Shirts\" and \"First Wife\" and \"You Lament\") try to push beyond irony into earnestness and wholehearted declaration. 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Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry’s “complex of complaint and praise,” Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son’s baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9\/11.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50033123721489,"sku":"CIN0228103096G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51323497578769,"sku":"CIN0228103096VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226890465.jpg?v=1762339019"},{"product_id":"medicine-show-book-tom-yuill-9780226971650","title":"Medicine Show","description":"From \"Veritas\": Imagining Heaven as Istanbul, or a beach south of Istanbul, Where your friends are preparing an apartment for you. And your Beloved. And sleeping fathers, babies plump. And shining as good faith, memory in the faithful heat. You and she in the fastening-unfastenings of heat. And poetry. Just capers in the leafy thoughts above. Just Orpheus exhausted. Now but coughing little plaints. Just memory rewritten, Honey, just like Louis Armstrong's voice, like some. Big happy face. Just living, living, Honey, just believe, Don't understand so much. Just come to bed, she says. In \"Medicine Show\", inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, Tom Yuill's book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with all the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop, when city meets small town, and when provincialism confronts urbanity. Here, the poems talk to one another, one poem nudging the cusps of many others, those poems touching still others' circumferences. Yuill, by invoking the Rolling Stones as muses and as background music, offers cover versions of Shakespeare, Keats, and Dylan Thomas, ultimately giving us a new kind of verse, funneled through the languages and rhythms of his masters' voices.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50038218752273,"sku":"CIN0226971651VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226971651.jpg?v=1759834033"},{"product_id":"voices-of-the-lady-book-stuart-z-perkoff-9780943373485","title":"Voices of the Lady","description":"This collection, the first major one to appear since Perkoff's death at 44, should reestablish him as a major figure of the Bear Generation. Perkoff, a central figure in the West Coast Beat Scene, published several books and dozens of poems in leading avant-garde journals. Charles Olson said that Perkoff's fineness of ear and touch makes it possible to reintroduce materials that so many others have torpedoed. This collection contains all of his books, his journal publications, and much unpublished work, including the sequence The Venice Poems.\u003cp\u003eBobbie Louise Hawkins says that Stuart Perkoff was the only one she knew who could use the common street walk, the then hip phrasing, in a way that felt un-dramatic, natural, not just an attempt to be like some other side of life or person. 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Sieved our alluvial sounds - \"Romey's Order\" is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry. As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records - and tries to order - the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his 'blood-home' and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform 'every burn-mark and blemish', to 'bind our river-wrack and leavings', Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. 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When cancer overshadows the ordinary—engrossing the labor of love, work, and friendship—disease becomes a collaborator and proposes new rules of exchange.    The forms of Elliott’s works highlight reciprocity. Here you’ll find ekphrastic poems that describe modern jazz songs, letters and letter fragments, and free verse poems in wildly variable line lengths. “When I was a wave,” the speaker repeats, each time telling a different story about intimacy and risk. Blue in Green moves through the struggle of processing the damaging interpersonal reverberations of racism, sexism, and environmental damage, while navigating intertwined personal and political incarnations of care. While a slow-growing disease burns its way through the speaker’s body, these poems reveal the feeling of perpetually existing in the shadow of catastrophe and document the slow and strange process of coming to terms with that way of living.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50242990637329,"sku":"CIN022678388XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022678388X.jpg?v=1751005396"},{"product_id":"my-bishop-and-other-poems-book-michael-collier-9780226570860","title":"My Bishop and Other Poems","description":"Think of a time when you've feigned courage to make a friend, feigned forgiveness to keep one, or feigned indifference to simply stay out of it. What does it mean for our intimacies to fail us when we need them most?  The poems of this collection explore such everyday dualities-how the human need for attachment is as much a source of pain as of vitality and how our longing for transcendence often leads to sinister complicities. The title poem tells the conflicted and devastating story of the poet's friendship with the now-disgraced Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, interweaving fragments of his parents' funerals, which the Bishop concelebrated, with memories of his childhood spiritual leanings and how they were disrupted by a pedophilic priest the Bishop failed to protect him from.  This meditation on spiritual life, physical death, and betrayal is joined by an array of poised, short lyrics and expansive prose poems exploring how the terror and unpredictability of our era intrudes on our most intimate moments. Whether Collier is writing about an airline disaster, Huey Newton's trial, Thomas Jefferson's bees, a piano in the woods, or his own fraught friendship with the disgraced Catholic Bishop, his syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and flawless ear bring the felt-and sometimes frightening-dimensions of the mundane to life. 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Pondering the bodies we inhabit, the words we speak, these poems discover infinitude in the most familiar places. The revelation is disorienting and, as a result, these poems talk to themselves, revise themselves, fashioning a dialogue between self and soul that opens outward to include other voices, lovers, children, angels, and ghosts. For James Longenbach, great distance makes the messages we send sweeter. To be divided from ourselves is never to be alone. \"If the kingdom is in the sky,\" says the body to the soul, \"Birds will get there before you.\" \"In time,\" says the awakening soul, \"I liked my second\/Body better\/Than the first.\" To live, these poems insist, is to arise every day to the strange magnificence of the people and places we thought we knew best. \"Draft of a Letter\" is an unsettled and radiant paradiso, imagined in the death-shadowed, birth-haunted middle of a long life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50337707131153,"sku":"CIN0226492680VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226492680.jpg?v=1751070263"},{"product_id":"weave-room-book-michael-chitwood-9780226103983","title":"The Weave Room","description":"The poems in The Weave Room reveal the life of a textile mill as it weathers a decisive social and human moment. 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I work hard on it, bending there until he speaks and walks on. But as he is dead, his voice and step make no sound. In his third book of poems, David Gewanter takes on wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities. The constructs of our social lives, the conventions of our political values, the ambitions of our private fantasies - all these collide comically and tragically. Here, the far right marries the far left, and the sacred is undone by the profane. Gewanter's ironic vision pulls together details from science, history, philosophy, the disappearing dailies, and the emotional life of an engaged and singular mind into poems on the move with tense rhythms, rich correspondences, and daring hairpin turns. \"War Bird\" gives the lie to the shining moral complacencies of the homefront. Unsettling yet radiant, this collection is a book for troubled times, for what Whitman called in '1861', our 'hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year'.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345948021009,"sku":"CIN0226289788G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226289788.jpg?v=1751227656"},{"product_id":"classic-rough-news-book-kenneth-fields-9780226248615","title":"Classic Rough News","description":"With a half-dozen books of poetry published to date, Kenneth Fields distills some forty years of teaching and writing about poetry into Classic Rough News, a collection of fresh sonnets and sonnet-like lyrics that attests to both Fields's skills as a writer and the inexhaustible possibilities of the form. Classic Rough News follows a skeptical, cosmopolitan, intelligent, poetic presence aware that its carefully constructed veneer could crumble at any moment. In poems that mine interior dialogue for the discovery of great truths, Fields conveys feelings of awkwardness, incompleteness, conflict, and insanity - all in finely crafted verse. Ironic and skeptical, the voice in these poems records the flux of the mind, ruefully acknowledging how easy it is to deceive oneself with mixed emotions. 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In true Virgilian style, Partridge builds poems a word and a line at a time, discarding all but the most perfect formulations for her verse. The result is a collection that is, paradoxically, both old-fashioned and innovative - in the best senses of those words.Full of wit and empathy yet utterly free of the sensationalism that mars so much contemporary verse, Partridge's poems draw inspiration from sources as whimsical as snails and frogs, as poignant as a homeless woman taking shelter inside a post office on a winter's night, and as deeply personal as her own diagnosis of cancer at a young age. 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Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is 'pitiless', the trees 'thin and bloodless', the words 'like the icy water' of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the 'graceful erosion' of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. 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