Free Download Then and Now : Poems By James Cummins
2004 | 87 Pages | ISBN: 0804010676 | PDF | 1 MB
James Cummins’s first book of poems, The Whole Truth, became known throughout much of the poetry world as the "Perry Mason sestinas." His second book, Portrait in a Spoon, was chosen by Richard Howard for the James Dickey Prize Contemporary Poetry Series. His latest and most accomplished work is collected in Then & Now, which reflects the same inventiveness and wit evident in his earlier books, with a deepening of tone and spirit. The result is a collection of poems filled with feeling and with Cummins’s signature anguished humor. If the language of poetry is a way into a hall of mirrors of the self, it can be a way out, too. The voice that emerges in Then & Now is sane, imaginative, bemused, and sly, not only taking responsibility for the character of the writer put fully on display, but ironically and affectionately exploring how this process occurs. Doing LunchYou have lunch with a friend.You put on a false face for him, because he is your friend.You want to spare him yourmaunderings, your lies and malfeasance.But this is just what your friend desires, because he is your friend.He wants your face to fall openin front of him and twitchlike a rabbit hit on the fly.He says he wants the latest wordfrom the border region betweennarcissism and an inner life.And laughs.Shamelessly, you tell him everything, because he is your friend.

Free Download Photographing Eden : Poems By Jason Gray
2008 | 73 Pages | ISBN: 082141836X | EPUB | 1 MB
Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur. The poems are always attentive to artistic mediums and the craft behind them because our struggle is to make something perfect in the imperfect world in which we live, while acknowledging the impossibility of that quest. Gray’s poems range all over, from adventures in Egyptian ruins with machine-gun-toting tourist police to the western edge of the foggy Irish coastline, and to the mythic past, where Adam and Eve visit a zoo and Eden has become a nature preserve.

Free Download No Second Eden : Poems By Turner Cassity
2002 | 70 Pages | ISBN: 080401051X | EPUB | 1 MB
If you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun.Surprisingly, there is a poem about the Mississippi in which Cassity grew up. Unsurprisingly, it is a vision quite unlike others of that state. Its chilly and amusing precision is about as far from Southern Gothic as you can get, although elsewhere there are faint hints of a failed Good Ole Boy. Indeed, the final poems in the collection are a bit more personal than one expects of this writer.As rigorous in form as they are in feeling, the poems of No Second Eden are not for those with preconceived ideas of poetry or its purpose. Early in Cassity’s career, James Merrill described Cassity’s work as "an opera house in the jungle." True so far as it goes, but he might also have called it the jungle in the opera house: a glimpse at the savagery behind every facade."

Free Download Unsettled Accounts : Poems By Will Wells
2010 | 82 Pages | ISBN: 082141903X | EPUB | 1 MB
To take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For Will Wells, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals-Albert Einstein, Andrea Yates, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother-to extract the personal value embedded there for him.By turns funny, shocking, gentle, and musing, the poems of Unsettled Accounts reflect Will Wells’s constant attention to his environment and to his past-and to our environment and our past-and his persistent effort to keep them real and whole by turning them into art.Ping-Pong with the NazisBored couriers have kicked off boots and settheir pipes aside, a Dutch interior.The slapped ball clacks over the tablelike a telegraphic code, then trickleslike faint hope across the marble floor.How quickly he bends to retrieve itand puts it back in play, the Jewish boyliving with false papers in a villaowned by his mother’s Gentile friends, and nowcommandeered by retreating Germansas divisional headquarters. The youngblond soldiers, deferential to a socialbetter, muss his blond locks like the kidbrothers back in the fatherland, like bigbrothers steeped in genial menace. He begs another game, so they relent.As the ball resumes its chatter acrossthe no-man’s-land strung with a net, he calculates the risk that each shot brings.And so do they. He holds his pee and serves.

Free Download The Room Within : Poems By Moore Moran
2010 | 95 Pages | ISBN: 080401129X | EPUB | 1 MB
The Room Within is a retrospective survey of a poetic career dating back to the late fifties. A student of Yvor Winters at Stanford, Moore Moran has deservedly earned a reputation, along with fellow Winters students Turner Cassity and Edgar Bowers, as a "poet’s poet." He stands, though, not as a disciple, but as a poet who has earned his own voice over the decades, a voice at once familiar and haunting, down-to-earth and carefully wrought-a unique sensibility that emerges not full blown, but rather line by careful line.

Free Download The Quarry : Poems By Dan Lechay
2004 | 81 Pages | ISBN: 0821415336 | EPUB | 1 MB
"Marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence."Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there. Like James Wright, Robert Bly, Ted Kooser, and Jared Carter before him, Dan Lechay reshapes our imagination to include his distinct and profound vision of this undersung region.The poetry of Dan Lechay, collected in The Quarry, constructs a myth of the Midwest that is at once embodied in the permanence of the landscape, the fleeting nature of the seasons, and the eternal flow of the river. Lechay writes of memory and the mutability of memory, of the change brought on a person by the years lived and lost, and of the stoic attempts made by those around him to elicit an order and rationale to their lives.The Quarry is the first full-length collection from this seasoned poet. Final judge Alan Shapiro in writing about The Quarry said: "If Dan Lechay’s poems often begin with the ordinary details and circumstances of life in a small Midwestern town or city, they always end by reminding us that no moment of life is ever ordinary, that ‘Nothing is more mysterious than the way things are.’The Quarry is a marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence. Under Lechay’s soulful gaze, the backyards, neighborhoods, animals, and landscapes he describes dramatize the often wrenching connection between beauty and loss, evanescence and memory. The Quarry is a thoroughly mature and accomplished book."

Free Download The Optimist : Poems By Joshua Mehigan
2005 | 73 Pages | ISBN: 0821416111 | EPUB | 1 MB

Free Download The Rabbits Could Sing : Poems By Amber Flora Thomas
2012 | 81 Pages | ISBN: 1602231591 | PDF | 1 MB
The poems included in The Rabbits Could Sing delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book Eye of Water, showing even more clearly how "the seam has been pulled so far open on the past" that "the dress will never close." Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in The Rabbits Could Sing invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the far north, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.

Free Download Spirits of the Dead: Tales and Poems (Penguin Popular Classics) by Edgar Allan Poe
English | January 1, 1997 | ISBN: 014062239X, 9780141925455 | True EPUB | 288 pages | 1.8 MB
This is a unique one volume collection of all Poe’s best tales and poems. Full of variety, the entries include: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Roget", "The Purloined Letter" – three classic detective stories – plus "The Raven", one of his greatest poems. A wonderful selection of tales and poems that are representative of every genre written by Poe, from the macabre and horrifying to the humorous and purely descriptive.