Poetry
Contemporary poetry that knows the formal rules but isn't afraid to break them.
A deeper dive into the questions and shifting answers we generate to manufacture meaning. This new exploded annex of poetry goes further, deeper, wilder, weirder, once more into the breach, "explaining" everything from how to tie a tie, get a job promotion, resign from your job, pray, find redemption, grieve, approach swans, die, and make a sandwich. The book's third section deconstructs selected poems in the previous two sections through partial erasures: new skeletal poems emerge from the mist to contradict the original poems--or to untie their knots, revealing their essence.
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Invites us into a world in which multiple timelines erupt into each other. Sometimes a broken-down old house turns out to be a portal to an underworld, and a spider becomes a guru. The collection centers on the experience of not knowing what is real, of living a long time with a version of reality that is not easy to verify but that occupies a lot of psychic real estate. Personal experience is interwoven with historical research into the lives and challenges of such figures as Gertrude Stein, Ruth Benedict, Rachel Carson, Robert Oppenheimer, and others.
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Thirty works of speculative poetry that celebrate the ability of humanity to adapt to, surpass, and possibly transcend its environment and its origins. Sprinkled throughout this Afrofuturist collection are a series of recurring characters called the Ghettobirds, cybernetic beings created out of a technological singularity event that occurs in a slum. O’Hara works with a love of both the natural and the artificial world, and uses rhythm and cadence to compress thought into images of just how strange our experiences can become as we learn to shape—and be shaped by—both worlds.
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Explores the spaces from which questions arise—the memories, musings, and metaphysics we use to seek out meaning. Riffing on the literal translation of the Spanish phrase "hacer preguntas," these sixty-nine (or are there?) poems focus on the making of questions, rather than the answering of them.
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This collection of poetry arose from the author's experiences as the fill-in receptionist at an "adult services" massage parlor in Pittsburgh. Informed by theories of feminized eroticism and a feminist inquiry of power dynamics, these poems reflect the real stories of the real women who worked there.
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