The poetry of Sappho (2007)

Ars Amatoria

Ovid

1494 · 198 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Positive

Originally published Manchester: Carcanet, 2003.

Citizen

Claudia Rankine

2014 · 160 pages · 5 reviews

Others: Overwhelmingly positive

You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary movement, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating sounds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition. --from back cover "Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV -- everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named 'post-race' society." -- from publisher's description.

City psalms

Benjamin Zephaniah

1992 · 64 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Positive

Crow

Ted Hughes

1999 · 96 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

De rerum natura

Lucretius

1486 · 285 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

This is regarded as a seminal text of Epicurean science and philosophy. Epicurians discarded both the idea of immortality and the superstitious worship of wilful gods for a life of serene contentment in the available pleasures of nature. Lucretius (c100-c55BC), in elucidating this belief, steers the reader through an extraordinary breadth of subject matter, ranging from the indestructibility of atoms and the discovery of fire to the folly of romantic love and the phenomena of clouds and rainstorms.

Fighters for life

Michael Rosen

2007 · 95 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive