#the collected poetry of dorothy parker | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry · 1 year

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Oh, I should like to ride the seas,

A roaring buccaneer;

A cutlass banging at my knees,

A dirk behind my ear.

And when my captives’ chains would clank

I’d howl with glee and drink,

And then flight out the quivering plank

And watch the beggars sink.

I’d like to straddle gory decks,

And dig in laden sands,

And know the feel of throbbing necks

Between my knotted hands.

Oh, I should like to strut and curse

Among my blackguard crew. . . .

But I am writing little verse,

As little ladies do.

Oh, I should like to dance and laugh

And pose and preen and sway,

And rip the hearts of men in half,

And toss the bits away.

I’d like to view the reeling years

Through astonished eyes,

And dip my finger-tips in tears,

And give my smiles for sighs.

I’d stroll beyond the ancient bounds,

And tap at fastened gates,

And hear the prettiest of sounds,—

The clink of shattered fates.

My slaves I’d like to bind with thongs

That cut and burn and chill. . . .

But I am writing little songs,

As little ladies will.

— Song of Perfect Propriety by Dorothy Parker

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alienejj · 3 months

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Part 1: This is a collection of short stories, 50 penguin's modern classics.

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL by MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.

TELEVISION WAS A BABY CRAWLING TOWARD THAT DEATHCHAMBER by ALLEN GINSBERG. Profane and prophetic verses about sex, death, revolution and America by the great icon of Beat poetry.

THE BREAKTHROUGH by DAPHNE DU MAURIER. A scientist's attempt to solve the mystery of life after death has chilling consequences, in this eerie tale from a virtuoso writer of suspense.

THE CUSTARD HEART by DOROTHY PARKER. Wise-cracking and heartbreaking, these tales of women on the edge by the legendary wit Dorothy Parker show the darkness beneath the surface of the Jazz Age.

THREE JAPANESE SHORT STORIES by AKUTAGAWA & OTHERS. Three beguiling, strange, funny and hair-raising tales of imprisonment, memory and atrocity from early twentieth-century Japan.

THE VEILED WOMAN by ANAÏS NIN. Transgressive desires and sexual encounters are recounted in these four pieces from one of the greatest writers of erotic fiction.

NOTES ON NATIONALISM by GEORGE ORWELL. Biting and timeless reflections on patriotism, prejudice and power, from the man who wrote about his nation better than anyone.

FOOD by GERTRUDE STEIN. From apples to artichokes, these glittering, fragmented, painterly portraits of food by the avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein are redolent of sex, laughter and the joy of everyday life.

THE THREE ELECTROKNIGHTS by STANISLAW LEM. From a giant of twentieth-century science fiction, these four miniature space epics feature crazy inventors, surreal worlds, robot kings and madcap machines.

THE GREAT HUNGER by PATRICK KAVANAGH. By turns tragic and comic, irascible and exalted, these are some of the most beloved poems by a writer who transformed Irish verse.

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tenderbittersweet · 11 months

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Happiness is a Full Bookshelf 😊📚

My goal is to collect every Penguin Classic that has a black spine and cover, white title, and orange author name because they’re sooo aesthetically pleasing to me. My fun challenge of collecting/amassing them is by finding them exclusively through secondhand purchases (resale shops, ebay, garage sales, used bookstores, etc.) Then I only have to shell out $0-$7 each instead of $10-$30 each!

Penguin Classics

A Doll's House and Other Plays by Henrick Ibsen

A Nietzsche Reader by Fredrich Nietzsche

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Dolye

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

Angel of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin**

BUtterfield 8 by John O'Hara

Caleb Williams by William Godwin

Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories by Jack London*

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer*

Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple by Susanna Rowson

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker

Confessions by Saint Augustine

Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line by Charles W. Chestnut

Consolation of Philosophy by Ancius Boethius

Crucible by Arthur Miller

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane

Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley**

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck**

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Hedda Gabler and Other Plays by Henrik Ibsen

History of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë*

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman*

Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Memoirs by William Tecumseh Sherman

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka*

Middlemarch by Geroge Eliot

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Mysteries by Knut Hamsun

Narrative of the Lige of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave by Frederick Douglas

Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle*

Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Odyssey by Homer**

On Liberty and the Subjection of Women by John Suart Mill

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Passing by Nella Larsen

Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant

Portable Sixties Reader

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne**

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Song of Roland

Summer by Edith Wharton

Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Ancien Régime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville

The Bhagavad Gita

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Guide by R.K. Narayan

The Habor by Ernest Poole

The Hound of Baskerville by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Iliad by Homer

The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano

The Lais of Marie de France

The Marquise of O—and Other Stories by Heinrich Von Keist

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

The Odyssey by Homer

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli*

The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturlson

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Three Theban Plays by Sophocles

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

Utopia by Thomas More

Villette by Emily Brontë

A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

Washington Square by Henry James

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Non-Penguin Classics

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath**

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank*

Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood**

House on Mango Street by Sander Cisneros

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien*

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Collections, Compilations, and Anthologies

100 Best-Loved Poems (American & British)

101 Great American Poems

English Romantic Poetry

Four Great Comedies of the Restoration & 18th Century

Four Great Elizabethan Plays

Great Poems by American Women

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

Six American Poets (Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Frost, Hughes)

The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Victorian Love Stories

* = Started & didn’t finish (yet)/Read parts

** = Read ≥5 years ago

Strike-through = Read

Updated: April 14, 2024

Total count: 126

#classic literature #literature #penguin classics #my classics collection #bookblr #long post #personal #op

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cscclibrary · 8 months

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Some of the world's most beloved and influential authors were born in August! Click their names to find their work in our collection or via OhioLINK.

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819), fiction writer and poet. Notable works: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924), writer and activist. Notable works: Go Tell It on the Mountain, "Sonny's Blues," Notes of a Native Son.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792), poet, novelist, playwright, and husband of Mary Shelley. Notable works: "Ozymandias," "A Defense of Poetry," The Cenci.

Guy de Maupassant (August 5, 1850), author of the Naturalist school. Notable works: "The Necklace," "The Horla," Pierre and Jean.

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934), farmer, environmental activist, writer, and winner of the National Humanities Medal. Notable works: The Unsettling of America, Citizenship Papers, "The Vacation."

Walter Dean Myers (August 12, 1937), author of children's and young adult literature. Notable works: Hoops, Monster, Fallen Angels.

William Maxwell (August 16, 1908), writer and long-time fiction editor at The New Yorker. Notable works: So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Heavenly Tenants.

Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920), influential author of innumerable science-fiction short stories and novels, many adapted into other media. Notable works: Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, "The Veldt."

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893), poet, fiction writer, and satirist; member of the Algonquin Round Table. Notable works: Enough Rope, Death and Taxes, Laments for the Living.

Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899), author and translator. Notable works: The Aleph and Other Stories, The Book of Imaginary Beings, "The Library of Babel."

Theodore Dreiser (August 27, 1871), journalist and author of Naturalist fiction. Notable works: Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy.

Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797), novelist and early author of science fiction. Notable works: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mathilda.

Current Columbus State students and employees can check out items with their photo ID, or view ebooks using their Columbus State login and password. For help with research or finding items, contact our Reference department.

#august authors #columbus state community college

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ninja-muse · 2 years

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June felt like a really good reading month, though my Storygraph stats say I’m pretty much even on book count and seriously down on page count. Maybe it’s because I read some really good books and managed to finish three books over the last four days? Or because I managed to read “The Angel of Khan el-Khalili” by P. Djèlí Clark and a Seanan McGuire novella on top of everything*? Or because I’m really liking the history book I’ve just started so am ending the month on a high? I’ll go with a mix of those, I think.

*which I’m not counting here because neither was a physical book

I managed two books off my physical TBR this month—Stardust Thief, Rat Queens—and I only acquired one book, as long as you don’t count reading copies! We got remaindered copies of The Bookstore Cat this month and I couldn’t resist. He’s seriously the best cat and I love him. My ARC pile, on the other hand, is up by 5 books….

And now, my total books read in order of how glad I am to have read them:

Katzenjammer - Francesca Zappia Cat’s trapped in high school, her eyes have disappeared, her classmates are mutating and dying in the halls, and she doesn’t remember how any of this happened. - 🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters - warning: body horror, gore, blood, murder, bullying

Rosebud - Paul Cornell Five AI discover a strange ship. The Company wouldn’t want them to investigate, except maybe if they go anyway, they will be Heroes. Douglas Adams, but angry. - 🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters - warning: in-universe transphobia

Shadows of Berlin - David R. Gillham A woman in New York is torn between honouring her heritage and her dead, being a good 1950s housewife to escape her past, and being true to herself. - Jewish cast, mentally ill main character, Black secondary character - warning: the Holocaust, PTSD, child neglect and abuse, misogyny

Trailed - Kathryn Miles In 1995, a sapphic couple were brutally killed in a national park. Now a journalist does a deep dive into the investigation to understand where it went wrong. - 🏳️‍🌈 subjects - warning: murder, violence against women, dead queer women

Minique - Anna Maxymiw A girl in colonial Montreal witnesses the world around her and decides to pursue an independent life no matter what. - 🇨🇦 - warning: misogyny, sexual assault, rape

Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake - Alexis Hall Rosaline hopes to win on Bake Expectations and fix her life. Unfortunately, the first co-contestant she meets, she lies to about everything. But that’ll be okay, right? - 🏳️‍🌈 protagonist, South Asian secondary character, 🏳️‍🌈 author - warning: sexual assault

Elder Race - Adrian Tchaikovsky A princess seeks a wizard’s help in defeating a demon. The wizard is an isolated anthropologist who’s only meant to observe the locals—but he goes on the quest anyway.

Legends & Lattes - Travis Baldree Viv has retired from adventuring to start a coffee shop, but she can’t (and doesn’t want to) do it alone. - 🏳️‍🌈 protagonist, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character

The Stardust Thief - Chelsea Abdullah A dealer in illegal magical artifacts is blackmailed into a search for a lamp containing a djinn king. Nobody travelling with her is quite who they seem, and neither is the mission. - Arab cast, Arab author, #ownvoices

The Monsters We Defy - Leslye Penelope A woman who can speak to ghosts gathers a crew to steal a ring. If they don’t, they’ll neither save the poorest people in 1920s DC, or themselves. - Black cast, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character, albino secondary character, Black author, #ownvoices

The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker - Dorothy Parker Surprisingly relatable 100-year-old poetry. - warning: suicidal ideation

Rat Queens, Vol. 4: High Fantasies - Kurtis J. Wiebe, Owen Gieni (Illustrator) The Rat Queens are getting back into the questing biz, but now they have some serious competition. - Black main character, 🏳️‍🌈 main characters, 🇨🇦 author

Spellbound - Allie Therin Rory can read an object’s past and is trying to keep his head down. Arthur’s tracking magical artifacts and looking for someone with Rory’s talent. Neither expects sparks to fly when they meet. - 🏳️‍🌈 main characters, Black secondary character, Chinese-American secondary character

Currently reading:

Let's Do It - Bob Stanley A history of Anglo-Western pop music, from the early 1900s. - warning: racism, including slurs

Death by Bubble Tea - Jennifer J. Chow When her cousin comes to town, Yale finds herself drafted into co-running a stall at the LA Night Market. Then one of their customers turns up dead. - Chinese-American cast, Chinese-American author, #ownvoices The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle Victorian detective stories - major disabled character  

Stats 

Monthly total: 13  Yearly total: 79 + 1  Queer books: 3.5  Authors of colour: 2  Books by women: 7  Canadian authors: 2  Off the TBR shelves: 2 

January February March April May

#reading wrap-ups #read in 2022 #books #booklr #bookblr #book covers #book photography #my photos #book reviews

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megacrashcourse · 10 months

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Press Roundup for Periodic Boyfriends

Analog Science Fiction & Fact: "The land of the dead, like the realm of the microscopic, may be invisible to the naked eye, but it’s still there." (interview)

Chelsea Community News: "The poems run the gamut from sneakily humorous to outright hilarity to loss and longing, and sometimes encompass all of the above in a single entry."

CultureSonar: "...a masterpiece of love, lust, loss, and acceptance."

Full House Literary: "This collection of poetry should be on your must read list."

GCN: "...strangely beautiful in its resolve."

Highland Park Poetry: "Pisarra is skilled at emulating the classic moves of the Shakespearean sonnet, deploying enjambment to dazzle his audience..."

John V’s Eclectic Avenue: "...eloquent and masterfully constructed sonnets."

Loch Raven Review: "Much like punk culture, the most provocative, daring, and honest art often comes from the LGBT+ community. Periodic Boyfriends is no exception to this rule."

The London Grip: "Rabelaisian, witty, wistful and intelligent, Drew Pisarra’s poems are a delight to read."

Misfit Magazine: "Pisarra has written a one-of a kind collection of gay 'love poems' that even a straight person can love."

Modern Literature: "...there is no time better than now for reading this voluptuous collection of sensual poetry."

Modern Literature (part 2): "Why do you always write about sex?" (interview)

Ocean State Review: "If you want to celebrate pride by reading something by a queer author that will make you laugh, gasp, and give you what the kids call 'the feels', and make you go, 'Huh? Huh!', then I highly recommend it."

Other Terrain: "The humanness of this collection is striking, that cannot be understated."

Out in Print: "These poems exist beyond their origins, all 118 of them." Ovunque Siamo: "Pisarra shows not only a keen understanding of chemistry theory and poetic craft, but of psychology and human relationships. These poems are, by turns, incisive, beautiful, salacious, wistful, and flat-out entertaining." (not online)

Penumbra Journal of Literature and Art: "The work is sexual and heady, but brings much more than that to the table the deeper one reads."

Sacred Chickens: "It’s a rare writer who can combine laughter and tragedy, light and darkness, not only in the same poem, but in the same sentence. Drew Pisarra is that writer."

Vagabond City: "Pisarra’s poetry playfully explores a wide swath of experiences and feelings, making the collection’s specific vision all the more impressive and admirable."

The Washington Blade: "...like hanging out on a summer’s night with the acclaimed queer poet Frank O’Hara and Dorothy Parker."

Your Impossible Voice: "Everything changed for me once I’d experienced Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers." (interview)

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finishinglinepress · 1 year

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: It Was Not Right To Love Him So Much by Sondra Melzer

ADVANCE ORDER: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/it-was-not-right-to-love-him-so-much-by-sondra-melzer/

Sondra Melzer’s poems reflect a lifetime of #surviving and thriving. She plumbs her memory to write of a #family plagued by #alcoholism and held together by a mother’s strength. She writes deeply about losses — a child in infancy, an adult son. Other poems tell of her long and happy marriage, a daughter who brings laughter and joy, and the rewards of a decades-long teaching career. This suite of poems, full of passion and intensity, go straight to the reader’s heart.

Dr. Sondra Melzer taught for forty years in the public schools of Stamford, Connecticut, and is now a faculty emerita at Sacred Heart University. A scholar of the novels of Philip Roth, she is the author of Rhetoric of Rage, a groundbreaking critical study of women in the work of Dorothy Parker. Dr. Melzer’s writing has previously appeared in the National Council of Teachers of English publication, WILLA, and the James Joyce Quarterly. Dr. Melzer lives with her husband Frank, an attorney, in Stamford, Connecticut.

PRAISE FOR It Was Not Right To Love Him So Much by Sondra Melzer

Sondra Melzer’s heart-rending collection traverses the territory of intimacy and recollection with skill and tenderness. She traces for us, her fortunate readers, the most private corners of experience as she engages in “talking in women’s talk, of children born and unborn.” We come away from her words moved, enlightened, emboldened, forever changed for having read her poetry.

–Heather Corbally Bryant, author, Orchard Days

In these tenderly beautiful poems, Sondra Melzer explores a liminal, luminous space between “never enough” and “too much.” Here is the grieving and joy and sweetness and terror of a life well and deeply lived—from a teacher who shows us how to feel.

–Dominique Browning, author, Slow Love Life

Melzer’s book opens with an urgent chant, “it must be told, it must be told”—and it must. It must be told that girls who “listen to their heartbeats” can survive a violent childhood and the griefs of motherhood. It must be told that there’s joy in finding a profession that “fills you up/to give so much.” The final poem, an ode to a daughter, a gifted child loved “not enough, not enough,” serves as a fitting final mantra for this suite of poems about a life so full of passion.

–Marietta Brill, author, Ravita and the Land of Unknown Shadows

Sondra Melzer captures the wisdom of a lifetime spent among great literature, love and loss, turning that knowledge into poetry that reaches the reader’s heart. She shows how teachers are called to “breathe life into those empty faces or waiting bodies sitting, standing as if you had such power.” Melzer’s readers will understand why they love so much the teachers who’ve used that power to change lives.

–Harris Lirtzman, literacy coach

Please share/please repost

#flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems #family #surviving #alcoholism

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nobletruths · 2 years

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From her collection of poetry Enough Rope | Dorothy Parker | 1926

#dorothy parker

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adrasteiax · 3 years

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I give her sadness, And the gift of pain, The new-moon madness, And the love of rain.“

Dorothy Parker, from Godmother in “The Collected Poetry Of Dorothy Parker”

#poetry #dorothy parker #godmother #the collected poetry of dorothy parker #literature #poem #lit #from my collection #fave

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ijustkindalikebooks · 2 years

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'Unfortunate Coincidence' From The Collected Poems by Dorothy Parker.

[ID: Unfortunate Coincidences by Dorothy Parker:

By the time you swear you're his,

Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is

Infinite, undying-

Lady make a note of this:

One of you is lying.]

#booklr #books #bookblr #fiction #book #dorothy parker #collected poems #classics #poetry #poem #poems #poets #classic poets

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pastnotfuture · 3 years

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Let me, for our happiness, Be the one to love the less

The Collected Dorothy Parker. Dorothy Parker

#The Collected Dorothy Parker #books #quotes #literature #happiness #love #life #Dorothy Parker #poems #poetry

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luthienne · 5 years

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Dorothy Parker, from “One Perfect Rose”

#dorothy parker #collected poetry of dorothy parker #one perfect rose #words #poetry #typography

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yetibaba · 6 years

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It started with me finding the O'Connor and Parker books (and coveting them) and then, you know, once you get the ball rolling, what the hell? I went back into our cooking section to pull a book for a special order and came out with a couple for me, haha. Somehow the DFW was going to clearance (No No No!) and minding my own business in our metaphysics section, I found the Drury book on magic. And it's always good to know what poets think. "Don't worry," I told them all, "You're Safe now." ;)

#books #reading #collecting #literature #poetry #cooking #magic #flannery o'connor #dorothy parker #david foster wallace #personal library #bookstores #bargains #independent #hpb

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derangedrhythms · 3 years

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Hello! 🖤

I was wondering if you had any quotes about heartbreak, or more specifically, someone you loved choosing another over you? Ty, have a wonderful day!

Hello! I’ve also included poems and quotations about heartbreak in general following on from the specific theme you requested 🖤

Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘I’m glad your sickness’, ‘An Attempt at Jealousy’', 'Yesterday he still looked in my eyes'

Anna Akhmatova, ‘He Loved…’

Carol Ann Duffy, 'Unloving'

Dorothy Parker, 'The Burned Child'

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 'Time does not bring relief; you all have lied'

Mary Oliver, 'Letter to______.'

"She took you the way a woman takes / a bargain dress off the rack / and I broke the way a stone breaks. / I give back your books and fishing tack. / Today’s paper says that you are wed. / At night, alone, I marry the bed."

— Anne Sexton, Love Poems; from 'The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator'

"Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves. It is a dance with a dialectical nature. For the jealous lover must balance two contradictory realities within her heart: on the one hand, that of herself at the centre of the universe and in command of her own will, offering love to her beloved; on the other, that of herself off the centre of the universe and in despite of her own will, watching her beloved love someone else."

— Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera; from ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’

"I cannot pray: ‘Let me have her.’ Yet often she seems to be mine. I cannot pray: 'Give her to me.’ For she is someone else’s."

"Sometimes it is beyond my comprehension that any other man can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her solely, with such passion and so completely and know nothing, understand nothing, have nothing but her."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ tr. David Constantine

"But I didn’t look after my heart / And it was stolen from me."

— Anna Akhmatova, Rosary: I, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer

"And my whole heart under your hammer,"

— Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition; from 'To Others than You'

"And what are you that, wanting you, / I should be kept awake / As many nights as there are days / With weeping for your sake?"

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles; from 'The Philosopher'

"Every breath was a heartache."

— Janet Fitch, from 'The Revolution of Marina M.'

"This hole in my heart is in the shape of you."

— Jeanette Winterson, from 'Written on the Body'

"What is my heart to you / that you must break it over and over"

— Louise Glück, The Wild Iris; from ‘Matins’

"…I never was bereft / so utterly."

— Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; from ‘Coda’

"After loving you so much, can I forget / you for eternity, and have no other choice?"

— Robert Lowell, Lizzie and Harriet; from 'Obit'

"When you give your heart to somebody, you can’t take it back. If they don’t want it, it’s gone."

— Sylvia Plath, quoted by Elizabeth Compton in ‘Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness’ by Edward Butscher

"You are a splinter in my soul, always."

— Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan; ‘Houses Under the Sea’

"…and in this / splendid night there are / saw-teeth going over my heart."

— Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems; from ‘Insomnia’, tr. Elaine Feinstein

"You have left an indelible mark, / an unfaded bruise I lean into."

— Lorie Miseck, from ‘Pronouncing the Dead’; published in ‘Death Poems: A Disinformation Anthology’, ed. Russ Kick

#compilations #long post #heartbreak

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macrolit · 4 years

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The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker (with a cameo by Antic Hay)

#dorothy parker #poetry #poems #antic hay #aldous huxley #old books #vintage books #book cover art #modern library

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theresabookforthat · 3 years

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National Poetry Month Celebrates 25 Years!

Happy National Poetry Month – the largest literary celebration in the world! 2021 marks 25 years since the Academy of American Poets launched National Poetry Month in April, 1996. The choice of April was inspired by the first line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”: “April is the cruellest month…”

Ushering in a new appreciation for the power of poetry is Amanda Gorman and her inaugural poem THE HILL WE CLIMB. Clearly, there’s no wasteland when it comes to poetry at Penguin Random House. Whether your proclivities are for free, blank or rhyming verse, lyrical poetry, prose poems, sonnets, elegies, odes… We’ve got it all! Here are just some of the astounding poets, a range of brilliant voices, we’ve published in the past year:

THE HILL WE CLIMB: AN INAUGURAL POEM FOR THE COUNTRY by Amanda Gorman; Foreword by Oprah Winfrey

Amanda Gorman’s powerful and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition.

INDEX OF WOMEN by Amy Gerstler

From a “maestra of invention” (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood. Women’s voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

GOD I FEEL MODERN TONIGHT: POEMS FROM A GAL ABOUT TOWN by Catherine Cohen

In these short, captivating lyrics, Catherine Cohen, the one-woman stand-up chanteuse who electrified the downtown NYC comedy scene in her white go-go boots, details her life on the prowl with her beaded bag; she ponders guys who call you “dude” after sex, true love during the pandemic, and English-major dreams. “I wish I were smart instead of on my phone,” Cat Cohen confides. A Dorothy Parker for our time, a Starbucks philosopher with no primary-care doctor, she’s a welcome new breed of everywoman—a larger-than-life best friend, who will say all the outrageous things we think but never say out loud ourselves.

FINNA: POEMS by Nate Marshall

Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope:

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF NAMES: POEMS by Michael Torres, Raquel Salas Rivera

An astonishing debut collection looking back on a community of Mexican American boys as they grapple with assimilation versus the impulse to create a world of their own. When Torres returns to his hometown to find the layers of spray-painted evidence he and his boyhood friends left behind to prove their existence have been washed away by well-meaning municipal workers, he wonders how to collect a list of names that could match the eloquent truths those bubbled letters once secured.

LEAN AGAINST THIS LATE HOUR by Garous Abdolmalekian, Idra Novey, Ahmad Nadalizade…

The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a mesmerizing, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise.

OWED by Joshua Bennett

Bennett’s new collection, Owed, is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form—from elegy and ode to origin myth—these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair.

LITTLE BIG BULLY by Heid E. Erdrich

Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled we – how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women’s resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. These poems are immediate, personal, political, cultural, even futuristic object lessons. Here, survivors shout back at useless cautionary tales with their own courage and visions of future worlds made well.

THE NIGHTFIELDS by Joanna Klink

A new collection from a poet whose books “are an amazing experience: harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable” (Louise Glück)

ASYLUM: A PERSONAL, HISTORICAL, NATURAL INQUIRY IN 103 LYRIC SECTIONS by Jill Bialosky

Taken together, these piercing pieces—about the poet’s nascent calling as a writer; her sister’s suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the monarch butterfly; and the woods where she seeks asylum—form a moving story, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope.

BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME by Jasmine Mans

This coming-of-age collection from spoken word poet Jasmine Mans presents unforgettable poetry about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America—and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.

COLLECTED POEMS by Sonia Sanchez

A literary event! Spanning four decades, here is a representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement. As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”

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