Not sure what to read at the beach this summer? We’re pretty sure you would like one of these:

The Collected Poems
by Ai
Bringing together thirty years of poetry across eight books, this first complete edition of Ai’s work reveals her mastery of the dramatic monologue.

Quick Question
by John Ashbery
Despite his nerves and his remembrances, Ashbery’s rollicks show that he’s still one of our youngest poets at heart.

red doc >
by Anne Carson
This book finds Carson once again blurring the lines of prose and poetry, and challenging both genres within a single poem.

88 Sonnets
by Clark Coolidge
This welcoming embrace of the mind’s ghosts and dalliances amounts to a remarkable intimacy in Coolidge’s latest collection.

Senegal Taxi
by Juan Felipe Herrera
Herrera takes on Sudanese injustice in this latest collection of monologues, transcripts, and prose poems, telling the story of three children as they try to escape a ravaged village. 
Lake Superior
by Lorine Niedecker
Written in the spare style that typifies her work, Niedecker’s poem was the distilled product of a road trip she took with her husband Al Millen in 1966. 

Partially Kept
by Martha Ronk
Throughout her ninth collection, Ronk calls upon language to reconcile the space in which the body ends and nature begins. 

Sorry Was in the Woods
by Michelle Taransky
Unlike Frost, who stopped himself from entering the woods out of fear, Taransky’s latest sends her headlong into darkness and deepness. 

Meme
by Susan Wheeler
Much like memes themselves, which operate by means of refrain and repetition, each of these poems begins with a stock phrase that will ring familiar to most who grew up in America in the last fifty years. 

Fall Higher
by Dean Young
Like Whitman, Young is a wandering poet whose tongue refuses nothing in its desire to taste the multitudes. 

Make some. Of both.

(via momalibrary)

smallpressdistribution:

1. The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral edited by Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep (Ahsahta Press)
2. Nets by Jen Bervin (Ugly Duckling Presse)
3. Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me by Mark Leidner (Factory Hollow Press)
4. Pink Elephant by Rachel McKibbens (Cypher Books)
5. Face by Sherman Alexie (Hanging Loose Press)
6. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford (Lost Roads Publishers)
7. The Business of Fancydancing by Sherman Alexie (Hanging Loose Press)
8. Fjords Vol.1 by Zachary Schomburg (Black Ocean)
9. This Can’t Be Life by Dana Ward (Edge Books)
10. Up Jump the Boogie by John Murillo (Cypher Books)
11. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place (Les Figues Press)
12. Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg (Black Ocean)
13. The Trees The Trees by Heather Christle (Octopus Books)
14. Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity edited by Jed Rasula and Tim Conley (Action Books)
15. you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin (Action Books)
16. Ascension by giovanni singleton (Counterpath Press)
17. selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle (Muumuu House)
18. Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood (Octopus Books)
19. Journey to the Sun by Brent Cunningham (Atelos)
20. Goat in the Snow by Emily Pettit (Birds, LLC)

(Source: michaeljohansson.com, via fuckyeahbookarts)

jenbenka:

responding to the shuttered heart. or this by Pablo Neruda.

from “The Essential Neruda, Selected Poems,” published by City Lights

Banned for a reason. 

from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal

Happy Banned Book Week, Walt.

(Source: whitmanarchive.org)

Folger Shakespeare Library, circa 1932.

(Source: flickr.com)