- Table View
- List View
How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons): Poetry
by Barbara KingsolverIn this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times bestsellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous. In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with “how to” poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins.Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders—birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees—all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It’s all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.
How to Love a Country: Poems
by Richard BlancoA new collection from the renowned inaugural poet exploring immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more, in accessible and emotive versesAs presidential inaugural poet, memoirist, public speaker, educator, and advocate, Richard Blanco has crisscrossed the nation inviting communities to connect to the heart of human experience and our shared identity as a country. In this new collection of poems, his first in over seven years, Blanco continues to invite a conversation with all Americans. Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, he addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all.The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse Nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.Seeking answers, Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. In the landmark poem “American Wandersong,” which forms the center of the book, the poet reveals himself to readers in a disarming and kinetic sequence of stanzas, striving to find his place amid the physical and emotional landscapes of our country.Through this groundbreaking volume, Blanco unravels the very fabric of the American narrative and pursues a resolution to the inherent contradiction of our nation’s psyche and mandate: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive.
How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope
by James CrewsWhat the world needs now – featuring poems from inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and more. More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting. This publication conforms to the EPUB Accessibility specification at WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird
by Mordicai Gerstein Jacques PrévertHow do you paint a portrait of a bird? First you paint a cage with an open door, then you wait for the bird to come. If it comes, you erase the cage and paint in a beautiful tree, and wait to see if the bird will sing.
How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang (How to Read Chinese Literature)
by Edited by Zong-Qi CaiHow to Read Chinese Poetry in Context is an introduction to the golden age of Chinese poetry, spanning the earliest times through the Tang dynasty (618–907). It aims to break down barriers—between language and culture, poetry and history—that have stood in the way of teaching and learning Chinese poetry. Not only a primer in early Chinese poetry, the volume demonstrates the unique and central role of poetry in the making of Chinese culture. Each chapter focuses on a specific theme to show the interplay between poetry and the world. Readers discover the key role that poetry played in Chinese diplomacy, court politics, empire building, and institutionalized learning; as well as how poems shed light on gender and women’s status, war and knight-errantry, Daoist and Buddhist traditions, and more. The chapters also show how people of different social classes used poetry as a means of gaining entry into officialdom, creating self-identity, fostering friendship, and airing grievances. The volume includes historical vignettes and anecdotes that contextualize individual poems, investigating how some featured texts subvert and challenge the grand narratives of Chinese history. Presenting poems in Chinese along with English translations and commentary, How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context unites teaching poetry with the social circumstances surrounding its creation, making it a pioneering and versatile text for the study of Chinese language, literature, history, and culture.
How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (How to Read Chinese Literature)
by Zong-Qi CaiIn this "guided" anthology, experts lead students through the major genres and eras of Chinese poetry from antiquity to the modern time. The volume is divided into 6 chronological sections and features more than 140 examples of the best shi, sao, fu, ci, and qu poems. A comprehensive introduction and extensive thematic table of contents highlight the thematic, formal, and prosodic features of Chinese poetry, and each chapter is written by a scholar who specializes in a particular period or genre. Poems are presented in Chinese and English and are accompanied by a tone-marked romanized version, an explanation of Chinese linguistic and poetic conventions, and recommended reading strategies. Sound recordings of the poems are available online free of charge. These unique features facilitate an intense engagement with Chinese poetical texts and help the reader derive aesthetic pleasure and insight from these works as one could from the original. The companion volume How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook presents 100 famous poems (56 are new selections) in Chinese, English, and romanization, accompanied by prose translation, textual notes, commentaries, and recordings.Contributors: Robert Ashmore (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Zong-qi Cai; Charles Egan (San Francisco State); Ronald Egan (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara); Grace Fong (McGill); David R. Knechtges (Univ. of Washington); Xinda Lian (Denison); Shuen-fu Lin (Univ. of Michigan); William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Univ. of Wisconsin); Maija Bell Samei; Jui-lung Su (National Univ. of Singapore); Wendy Swartz (Columbia); Xiaofei Tian (Harvard); Paula Varsano (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Fusheng Wu (Univ. of Utah)
How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse
by Thomas C FosterFrom the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles.No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree—a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history—and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers:How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning.The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries.How to listen for a poem’s secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up.How to hear the music in poems—and the poetry in songs!With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.
How to Read a Japanese Poem
by Steven D. CarterHow to Read a Japanese Poem offers a comprehensive approach to making sense of traditional Japanese poetry of all genres and periods. Steven D. Carter explains to Anglophone students the methods of composition and literary interpretation used by Japanese poets, scholars, and critics from ancient times to the present, and adds commentary that will assist the modern reader.How to Read a Japanese Poem presents readings of poems by major figures such as Saigyō and Bashō as well as lesser known poets, with nearly two hundred examples that encompass all genres of Japanese poetry. The book gives attention to well-known forms such as haikai or haiku, as well as ancient songs, comic poems, and linked verse. Each chapter provides examples of a genre in chronological order, followed by notes about authorship and other contextual details, including the time of composition, physical setting, and social occasion. The commentaries focus on a central feature of Japanese poetic discourse: that poems are often occasional, written in specific situations, and are best read in light of their milieu. Carter elucidates key concepts useful in examining Japanese poetics as well as the technical vocabulary of Japanese poetic discourse, familiarizing students with critical terms and concepts. An appendix offers succinct definitions of technical terms and essays on aesthetic ideals and devices.
How to Read a Poem
by Terry EagletonThis book is designed as an introduction to poetry for students and general readers. In this book, Terry Eagleton argues that the art of reading poetry is as much in danger of becoming extinct as thatching or clog dancing.
How to Read a Poem
by Terry EagletonLucid, entertaining and full of insight, How To Read A Poem is designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends the subject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personal possession of the students and the general reader. Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and its relation to content. Takes a wide range of poems from the Renaissance to the present day and submits them to brilliantly illuminating closes analysis. Discusses the work of major poets, including John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H.Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and many more. Includes a helpful glossary of poetic terms.
How to Read a Poem: Seven Steps
by Thomas H. FordHow to Read a Poem is an introduction to creative reading, the art of coming up with something to say about a text. It presents a new method for learning and teaching the skills of poetic interpretation, providing its readers with practical steps they can use to construct perceptive, inventive readings of any poem they might read. The Introduction sets out the aims of the book and provides some basic operating principles for applying the seven steps. In each subsequent chapter, the step is introduced and explained, relevant points of interpretative theory and methodology are discussed and illustrated with multiple examples, and the step is put into practice in a final section. Through these final sections, step by step, the book develops an extended reading of a single poem, Letitia Landon’s "Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter" from 1822. That reading is sustained across the whole arc of the book, providing a detailed worked example of how to read a poem. This accessible and enjoyable guide is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching the detailed study of poetry for the first time and offers valuable theoretical insights for those more experienced in the area.
How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers
by Wislawa SzymborskaAt once kind and hilarious, this compilation of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s advice to writers is illustrated with her own marvelous collages In this witty “how-to” guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories,” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave—anonymously—for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. “I sigh to be a poet,” Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. “I groan to be an editor,” Szymborska responds. Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry’s “prosaic side”: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?” This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike. Perhaps you could learn to love in prose.
How to Stay Bitter Through the Happiest Times of Your Life
by Anita Liberty"I had a lot of bad dates. But I wrote a lot of good poems."So maintains Anita Liberty, the caustically funny New York City performance artist who was going along happily healing her hurt by hating and humiliating her detestable ex-boyfriend on stage and in print until the unthinkable happened: she had a good date. And one good date deserves another. And another. And another. And, all of the sudden, Anita Liberty finds herself in a predicament. Getting dumped launched Anita's career-Will falling in love finish it? Who's more important: her devoted audience or her newly devoted boyfriend? And on top of everything, Hollywood won't stop calling and Anita can't figure out if It wants a serious commitment or just a little bit of no-strings-attached fun. From digging mercilessly into the minutiae of her new relationship to dramatically torching every professional bridge she crosses in L.A., Anita refuses to let a big load of bliss get dumped right in the middle of her career path."He said that my work was amazing and hilarious and smart and that he can't wait to see me perform.So I had sex with him.""My boyfriend asked me to change my look.To something other than contemptuous."{BARGAIN} Whatever Hollywood ends up paying me for the rights to the story of my life."It's easier to go back to fantasizing about perfection . . .than to accept that perfection is just a fantasy.""Boyfriend thinks I'd rather be right than happy.Boyfriend's right.But I'm not telling him that."Through blog entries, film scenes, poems, and to-do lists, Anita Liberty documents the perils and pitfalls of dating, sex, relationships, artistic success, and the kind of true love that sucks the creative life out of you to the point where you just end up staring at a blank computer screen and thinking gooey thoughts about your new boyfriend even though you should be writing.From the Trade Paperback edition.
How to Survive the Loss of a Love: 58 Things to do When There is Nothing to be Done
by Harold Bloomfield Melba Colgrove Peter McWilliams"This remarkable book deals in a warm, informative and directly helpful way with one of the most common (and certainly most painful) of human experiences--loss. Written by a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a poet, this kindly, witty and companionable book is a unique guide to overcoming grief and unhappiness--a practical manual for emotional survival. Divided into fifty-eight sections, HOW TO SURVIVE THE LOSS OF A LOVE offers a gathering of things the reader can do, things that comfort and help in a real and natural way."
How to Trick a Christmas Elf (Magical Creatures and Crafts #3)
by Sue FliessTo find out whether Santa thinks you&’re naughty or nice, you&’ll need to trick an elf into letting you see the list! Legend has it that the only way to find out if you&’re on Santa&’s naughty or nice list is to trick an elf into letting you sneak a peek! But be careful: elves are tricky themselves! To get a look at the list, you&’ll need to be clever in crafting a distracting craft to catch the elf&’s attention. So, grab some Christmas supplies like ribbons, twinkle lights, bows, and candy canes, and get prepared for your sly holiday visitor! On the nights leading up to Christmas, one of Santa&’s elves will show up to keep watch on kids and to report on their naughty or nice behavior! However, if you&’re careful and clever and quick, you can set up a beautiful little sleigh that will distract your elf, and then you&’ll be sure to get a glimpse at Santa&’s list! Sue Fliess&’s poetic read-aloud text and Simona Sanfilippo&’s vibrant, whimsical illustrations will provide much fun for young readers eager to trick their own Christmas elf and find which list they&’re on! Also included are guides for teachers and parents about how to engage children in building an elf sleigh themselves and how to interest them in the history of the holiday and the many cultures that celebrate Santa&’s tiny helpers.
How to Write Poetry
by Paul B. JaneczkoFrom getting started to the finished product, How to Write Poetry is an essential book for every young poet to own. Paul B. Janeczko, an award-winning poet and compiler of best-selling poetry anthologies for young people, shares his very thorough tips on the art of writing poetry. Where do you get ideas? What are simple poems to write? How do you find just the right word? What pitfalls should you watch out for? These and many other questions are answered by the author, in example poems, and through quotes from other famous poets.
How to Write a Poem
by Kwame Alexander Deanna NikaidoIn this evocative and playful companion to their New York Times bestselling picture book How to Read a Book, Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander teams up with poet Deanna Nikaido and Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet to celebrate the magic of discovering your very own poetry in the world around you. <P><P> Begin <P> with a question <P> like an acorn <P> waiting for spring. <P><P> From this first stanza, readers are invited to pay attention—and to see that paying attention itself is poetry. Kwame Alexander and Deanna Nikaido’s playful text and Melissa Sweet’s dynamic, inventive artwork are paired together to encourage readers to listen, feel, and discover the words that dance in the world around them—poems just waiting to be written down. <P><P><i>Advisory: Bookshare has learned that this book offers only partial accessibility. We have kept it in the collection because it is useful for some of our members. Benetech is actively working on projects to improve accessibility issues such as these.</i>
How to Write a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem "Introduction to Poetry"
by Tania RunyanIs it possible to teach someone how to write a poem? Or does poetry simply "come from the heart" or from a special talent only some can ever hope to have? Of course there's no formula for writing an amazing poem. If poems came with instructions like IKEA(R) coffee tables, we'd all be missing the point. But this book will give you some strategies-some tools, if you will-to assemble your personal, imaginative raw materials into poems that will surprise and intrigue. These strategies are focused primarily on free verse, yet many of the concepts can also be applied to form poetry, at both the inception and revision stages.
Howdie-Skelp: Poems
by Paul MuldoonThe Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection.A “howdie-skelp” is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an “affront” to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.
Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg William Crarlos WilliamsPoems by the voice of the Beat Generation. Introduction by William Carlos Williams.
Hsin
by Nanci LeeNanci Lee’s debut explores 4th Century Su Hui’s palindrome of longing. Hsin arises from an ancient Chinese ethical philosophy, less a set of moral standards than an appeal to tune. Heart-mind and nothingness are fair English translations of Hsin, but their tidiness risks losing some of the sharper, wider sides of absence and appetite. As a historical process, according to Hang Thaddeus T’ui-Chieh, Hsin frustrates, “the psychological fragmentation and compartmentalization of the West.” Born to a Syrian father and a Chinese mother, who gave her up for adoption, Lee explores her origins in a compendium of poem fragments where form embraces the process of its unfolding. These are Koan-like poems, resonant with tones at turns ageless and contemporary; Hsin holds silence in ways that both claim and keep at bay.
Huellas de agua
by Milagrosa Díaz Gálvez¿Puede el recuerdo del agua marcar una vida y modificar su fluir? «Si hay magia en este planeta, está contenida en el agua». Esta frase de Loran Eisely refleja fielmente el sentir de este poemario. Es una huida hacia delante de la autora de Huellas de agua, que sintió desde su niñez esa magia casi mística, hasta el punto de dejarle marcas reales que se disfrazan de poemas intimistas, cuyo protagonista es el agua en todas sus formas; poemas que quieren hablar de vida, belleza, incluso de lágrimas. Huellas de Agua es un poemario cargado de simbolismos, imágenes y metáforas que tratan de revelar la verdadera percepción de una serie de cosas intangibles y nace como un homenaje a la más importante fuerza motora de la naturaleza, elemento constante generador de vida.
Hum
by Ann LauterbachFrom Hum: Things are incidental Someone is weeping I weep for the incidental The days are beautiful Tomorrow was yesterday The days are beautiful Since the mid-1970s, Ann Lauterbach has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. In Hum, her seventh collection of poetry, loss and the unexpected (the title poem was written directly in response to witnessing the events of 9/11) play against the reassurances of repetition and narrative story. By turns elegant, fierce, and sensuous, her musically charged poems move from the pictorial or imagistic to a heightened sense of the aural or musical in order to depict the world humming with vibrations of every kind from every source--the world as a form of life.
Hum
by Jamaal MayIn May's debut collection, poems buzz and purr like a well-oiled chassis. Grit, trial, and song thrum through tight syntax and deft prosody. From the resilient pulse of an abandoned machine to the sinuous lament of origami animals, here is the ever-changing hum that vibrates through us all, connecting one mind to the next."Linguistically acrobatic [and] beautifully crafted. . . [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel." -Publishers Weekly"The elegant and laconic intelligence in these poems, their skepticism and bent humor and deliberately anti-Romantic stance toward experience are completely refreshing. After so much contemporary writing that seems all flash, no mind and no heart, these poems show how close observation of the world and a gift for plain-spoken, but eloquent speech, can give to poetry both dignity and largeness of purpose, and do it in an idiom that is pitch perfect to emotional nuance and fine intellectual distinctions. Hard-headed and tough-minded, Hum is the epitome of what Frost meant by 'a fresh look and a fresh listen.'" -Tom Sleigh"Jamaal May's debut collection, Hum, is concerned with what's beneath the surfaces of things-the unseen that eats away at us or does the work of sustaining us. Reading these poems, I was reminded of Ellison's 'lower frequencies,' a voice speaking for us all. May has a fine ear, acutely attuned to the sonic textures of everyday experience. And Hum-a meditation on the machinery of living, an extended ode to sound and silence-is a compelling debut." -Natasha Trethewey"In his percussive debut collection Hum, Jamaal May offers a salve for our phobias and restores the sublime to the urban landscape. Whether you need a friend to confide in, a healer to go to, or a tour guide to take you there, look no further. That low hum you hear are these poems, emanating both wisdom and swagger." -A. Van JordanFrom "Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines":There is no work left for the husks.Automated welders like us,your line replacements, can't expectsympathy after our brightarms of cable rust over. So comecollect us for scrap, grind us upin the mouth of one of us.Let your hand pry at the accesspanel with the edge of a knife,silencing the motor and thrum.Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Believer, NER, and The Kenyon Review. Jamaal has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.
Human Dark with Sugar
by Brenda Shaughnessy"Brenda Shaughnessy's poems bristle with imperatives: 'confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.' There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy's kidding. Or she is and she isn't. If you just want to boss people around, you're a control freak, but if you can joke about it, then your bossiness is leavened by a yeast that's all too infrequent in contemporary poetry, that of humor."--New York Times"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."--Harvard Review"Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O'Hara."--Exquisite Corpse"In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time's 'scarce infinity,' this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition." --Publishers Weekly, starred review"Human Dark with Sugar is both wonderfully inventive (studded with the strangenesses of 'snownovas' and 'flukeprints') and emotionally precise. Her 'I' is madly multidexterous--urgent, comic, mischievous--and the result is a new topography of the debates between heart and head."--Matthea Harvey, a judge for the Laughlin Award"Seriously playful, sexy, sharp-edged, and absolutely commanding throughout....Here you'll meet an 'I' boldly ready to take on the world and just itching to give 'You' some smart directives. So listen up."--Library JournalIn her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. "You're a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There's a hero."Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance--anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin--then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. "I'll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me." In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet's ease in a variety of genres, from "Three Sorries" (in which the speaker concludes, "I'm not sorry. Not sorry at all"), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover's body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images --not the least of which is human dark with sugar.Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.