soft magic (2015)

Homie

Danez Smith

2020 · 96 pages · 4 reviews

Others: Overwhelmingly positive

"Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez's friends and for you and for yours."--

Postcolonial Love Poem

Natalie Diaz

2020 · 104 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

A Portable Paradise

Roger Robinson

2020 · 84 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

A portrait of the artist as Filipino

Nick Joaquin

1966 · 122 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

A Shropshire lad

A.E. Housman

1896 · 95 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

First published in 1896, this is Housman's first and most widely known collection of poems. Dismal and fatalistic, Housman speaks of the cruelty of life. In contrast to the dreary subject matter, the poetry itself is brisk and lively. Considered by many to be among the finest works of modern British poetry.

A thousand mornings

Mary Oliver

2012 · 87 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

In this collection of poems the author returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. In these pages, she shares the wonder of dawn, the grace of animals, and the transformative power of attention. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her adored dog, Percy, she is ever patient in her observations and open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments. A chronicler of physical landscape, she opens our eyes to the nature within, to its wild and its quiet. With clarity, humor, and kindness these poems explore the mysteries of our daily experience.