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."