Download Free Straight Razor And Other Poems Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Straight Razor And Other Poems and write the review.

Straight Razor and Other Poems brings together Salvatore Ala's new poems and selections from his privately published broadsides. It is a beautiful and original collection. Both formal and lyrical, it is the work of a determined and committed craftsman.
Aubade Those who lack a talent for love have come to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls like lies on the surface; the slow red of a pilot’s boat; the groan of a fisherman hacking a small shark— and our speech like the icy water, a poor translation that will not carry us across. What brought us west, anyway? A hunger. But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed only on scenery, the safest form of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray deepening into gray, the color of heartbreak. Randall Mann’s Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a work both direct and unsettling. 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. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunnis at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal. Praise for Complaint in the Garden “We have before us a skillful, witty, passionate young poet. . . . Randall Mann is both attuned to and at odds with the natural world; he articulates the passions and predicaments of a self inside a massive, arousing, but sometimes brutal culture. And he accomplishes these things with buoyant lyric sensibilities and rejuvenating skills.”—Kenyon Review
The date, the time, the place are obscure, but of what we can be certain is that the Beggar Poet is in no position to call himself a "noble person" or a "superior man." He lives his life as would a mendicant writer or a solitary seeker--one who has tasted love, joy, and the depths of human despair. Like most of us, really. In fashioning his life to the changes of the I Ching, each of the sixty-four hexagrams, he is faced with challenges and riddles, thresholds to broach, subtle variations of insight from which, by living through them sincerely and with an unrelenting gaze, he can be said to be living an evolving revelation of consciousness. Anyone who has taken time to turn the pages of the I Ching will realize that as well as discovering uplifting and spiritually profound moments, there are those we truly fear and spend our lives trying to avoid. Instead of trying to maintain constantly a higher spiritual eminence--a perfect sense of proportion--we come to know by experience, if Heaven wills and for only brief interludes in an otherwise fulfilling life, its opposite, making our luminous spiritual flights all the more poignant and precious.
Time: 20 minutes into the future Setting: The treacherous margins of post-industrial society Cast: Sexual outlaws, serial murderers, techno-freaks, gender benders, rogue cops, punk anarchists Content: Horror, outrage, razor-sharp satire, virtuosic writing and visual beauty by two of the most original contemporary American artists, in collaboration In this uncanny collection of 12 stories, Harold Jaffe-author of Eros Anti-Eros, Beasts, and Madonna & Other Spectacles and Norman Conquest, artist illustrator extraordinaire, have produced a book with the precision of a laser and the charge of a land mine.
From “a writer of breathtaking honesty” (David Ulin, LA Times), gorgeous new poems that are satirical, open-hearted, and unrepentantly queer. In his poetry, “at once boisterous and lubed, anxious and ambivalent” (Kenyon Review), Randall Mann has always had his finger on the pulse of modern life. In his liminal new book of poetry, a gay, multiracial (“they called me yellow in Lexington”) speaker exists in the rift between the “fluorescent rot” of childhood and the “action; / transaction” of a sex-app midlife. The author of Straight Razor and Proprietary, Mann has long been admired for merging raw subject matter with formal ease. A Better Life shows him at the height of his gifts, in the clipped, haunting truth of its rhymes and rhythms.
"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."—Philip Levine The narrative poems in Dorianne Laux's fifth collection charge through the summer of love, where Vietnam casts a long shadow, and into the present day, where she compassionately paints the smoky bars, graffiti, and addiction of urban life. Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous" (San Diego Union-Tribune). from "To Kiss Frank," make out with him a bit, this is what my friend would like to do oh these too many dead summers later, and as much as I want to stroll with her into the poet's hazy fancy all I can see is O'Hara's long gone lips fallen free of the bone, slumbering beneath the grainy soil.
OF WHAT FUTURE ARE THESE THE WILD, EARLY DAYS? An exploration of the role that artists play in resisting authoritarianism with a sci-fi twist. In poetry, dialogue and visual art the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers. Part post-apocalyptic road journal, part alternate universe history of Hip Hop, and part “Letters to a Young Poet”-style toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders, it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility. NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING is a: -post-apocalyptic road journal -alternate universe history of Hip Hop -“Letters to a Young Poet” -toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility.
“Olivarez steps into the ‘inbetween’ standing between Mexico and America in these compelling, emotional poems. Written with humor and sincerity” (Newsweek). Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek and NPR. In this “devastating debut” (Publishers Weekly), poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in, with a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch. “The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez celebrates his Mexican-American identity and examines how those two sides conflict in a striking collection of poems.” —USA Today
Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of poems from an influential writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, and acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark on modern culture. Few writers have so brilliantly and poignantly conjured the desperation and absurdity of ordinary life as Charles Bukowski. Resonant with his powerful, perceptive voice, his visceral, hilarious, and transcendent poetry speaks to us as forcefully today as when it was written. Encompassing a wide range of subjects—from love to death and sex to writing—Bukowski’s unvarnished and self-deprecating verse illuminates the deepest and most enduring concerns of the human condition while remaining sharply aware of the day to day. With his acute eye for the ridiculous and the troubled, Bukowski speaks to the deepest longings and strangest predilections of the human experience. Gloomy yet hopeful, this is tough, unrelenting poetry touched by grace. This is Essential Bukowski.
From poolside to seaside, barroom to classroom, sex club to colonial Florida, Randall Mann's curiosity endeavors to discover, often ironically, the beauty of things in the world around him. These meditations-harsh, honest, explicit (though never vulgar), dark, and astute-reflect a sentiment for the urbane and the primitive in nature, history, love, and humankind. Mann invites readers into lush landscapes, sundry histories, and a contemporary gay San Francisco populated by those things and people loved and lost. Randall Mann was born in Provo, Utah, and now lives in San Francisco, California. His poetry and book reviews have appeared in the New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, Salmagundi, and Verse. He works as an administrative analyst at the University of California, San Francisco.