World Poetry Day
Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings. – United Nations World Poetry Day Page
In celebration of World Poetry Day (March 21), I decided to take the chance to feature some of the items that can be found in the RRC Libraries digital collection. If you need instruction on how to use our EBSCOhost e-book collection check out this blog post we did explaining how to use the E-Book collection.
I like poetry, but I tend to have a hard time pinning down the titles and collections I want to read when in a book store. E-Books offer the perfect ability to browse and find something you like out of a superior selection to what you will find on (or what would fit on) a shelf. From a quick online browse of the collection, I pulled a list of about 30 titles I liked. All were worth featuring on this blog post. I couldn’t manage to par it down to less than 11 titles even though I was only planning to feature 10.
A quick search of the E-Book collection under the subject ‘poetry’ gave 6,907 titles for me to browse through. There is a lot discover, all of which is available free to students as part of the RRC online collection.
With the rise in popularity of formats like graphic novels you see a current demand for shorter reads. Poetry browsing and reading makes for a quick study break for students, so take a shot at browsing our E-Books collection to find what you like.
To get you started, take a look at the following list of titles that cover quite a range of interests, you’ll find Love Poems for Supervillains, anti-hero busboys, post-apocalyptic worlds, compelling descriptions of nature, the complexity of human relationships, and the outcomes of human actions explored in these collections of poems. Happy World Poetry Day!
Doom : Love Poems for Supervillains
Love Poems for Supervillains is an edgy and erotic investigation of comic book bad boys. These poems employ a language that is highly technical and dense, but it becomes witty, intimate and even tender in its specificity. These poems address the results of abuses of power and taken together present a case study in the pathology of villainy… – Google Books
In American Busboy, a wry anti-mythology, the anti-hero busboy in an anonymous Clam Shack! tangles with the monotonous delirium of work, the indignities and poor pay of unskilled labor, the capricious deus ex machina of mean-spirited middle management, the zombified consumption of summer tourists, while jostling for the goddess-like attentions of waitresses and hostesses—all battered up in sizzlingly crisp wit and language, and deep-fried in a shiny glaze of surrealism. —Lee Ann Roripaugh –Google Books
Creamsicle Stick Shivs : Poems
John Stiles’ first collection of poetry, Scouts Are Cancelled, explored the dialect and the dilemmas of down-home life in Nova Scotia’s rural Annapolis Valley. In his second collection, the poet expands his horizons. Chronicling his movements from Canada’s east coast to Toronto’s self-obsessed urban core, following his heart around the world to find love and employment in England, these poems resonate with profound ideas and offbeat observations on people and place, on the variables that combine to create a person’s identity, and what it means to leave, to seek, and to desire a home.Alive with Stiles’ distinct linguistic charms and poetic good nature, Creamsicle Stick Shivs is a book of subtle inventiveness and undeniable roguish delight. – Google Books
In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety. – Google Books
Spare yet evocative, the poems in Mister Martini pair explorations of a father-son relationship with haiku-like martini recipes. The martini becomes a daring metaphor for this relationship as it moves from the son’s childhood to the father’s death. Each poem is a strong drink in its own right, and together they form a potent narrative of alienation and love between a father and son struggling to communicate. – Google books
In Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, Jeff Latosik considers states of durability and longevity in an age of ephemeral mores and instant gratification. Probing the pressure points where notions of physical, psychological, and technological strength continually threaten to erupt into their opposites, these poems ask which aspects of our daily lives might actually last beyond the here and now, beyond their own inherent limitations of time, person, and place. –Insomniac Press Publisher
Wry, spry, entrancing and intelligent, the poems of Little Black Daydream invite us into a richly imagined future: not just post-apocalyptic, but post-everything. What a haunting, dark, and oddly comic world, where inhabitants “fashion hobo bags out of surplus Che Guevara tee-shirts / and fill them with the molars of the dead,” and where “the Secretary of Consolidated Debt tells his sons each morning: / when I was your age, no independent clause.” We wake from our Little Black Daydream bolstered by our imaginative sojourn in this precisely rendered world. This book is a major accomplishment.
–Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables
In this debut collection, Voodoo Inverso, Mark Wagenaar composes a startling mystical imagism and sets it to music, using self-portraits to explore differing physical and spiritual landscapes. He uses a variety of personae—a victim of sex trafficking in Amsterdam, a fichera dancer, a portrait haunted by Dante, a carillonneur of starlight, an elephant in pink slippers remembering its beloved—to silhouette the intricacies and frailties of the body and the world. In a series of “gospels” and “histories”—such as the poems “History of Ecstasy” and “Moth Hour Gospel”—he shines a light on the possibilities of transcendence and transfiguration, weaving together memory and loss with desire and hope. – Google Books
… Currin’s poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life. – Google Books
Li’l Bastard : 128 Chubby Sonnets
…Li’l Bastard is a collection of ‘chubby sonnets’ – sixteen-line poems organized in eight twenty-poem sequences – that explore the poet’s obsessions and engagements with America and Canada, popular culture, love and death, aging, baseball and beer and Barnaby Jones. Adopting a wild array of tone and artistic strategies, from picaresque to fantasy, to observational humour and the simple song lyric, these poems map the poet’s midlife crisis on a wild flight that touches down in Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li’l Bastard will no doubt cement McGimpsey’s status as a beloved and ever-surprising original. This work was a Finalist for the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. – Google Books
In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the “Utne Reader” has noted, what makes this work ‘so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.’ “The Porcupinity of the Stars” sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.”
