Book Logging (Poetry)
Jul. 1st, 2020 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI'm no longer trying to write notes on all of the books of poetry that I've read. I keep not recording any details and then having the books blur together so that I no longer remember which books were which. Even a few days after I finish a book of poetry, I likely won't remember much about it. I regret the loss of information because knowing what I liked or disliked and why helps me when I'm looking for more poetry. The library is apt to have multiple books by the same authors.
I've probably got notes on half of these titles.
I think I tagged all of the Project Gutenberg books as such, but I may have missed some. A few of these are from various university presses that made some books free online during April, May, and June of this year (I don't remember which ones, sadly).
Blount, Tommye. What Are We Not For.
Bramer, Shannon. Climbing Shadow: Poems for Children - The author wrote these poems for kindergarten students that she met while working as a lunchroom supervisor. I liked some of them a lot; others didn't work as well for me. It was a very quick read.
Budin, Sue. After the Burn.
Clifton, Lucille. The Book of Light - I may have read this before. At least, some poems felt familiar. I think that I have to be in the right mood to appreciate Clifton's poetry. This time, I was. Other times, I'm not necessarily.
Collins, Billy. Questions About Angels - These poems talk about getting old with a lot of references to the span of history. Nothing really stuck with me.
Dunn, Stephen. Everything Else in the World.
Emerson, Claudia. Late Wife - These poems most held bitterness and grief. Those that didn't held melancholy.
Erdrich, Louise. Baptism of Desire - I found some bits of these poems viscerally unpleasant and/or creepy. I think they were meant to be. The imagery was striking with hooks to strip flesh.
Espada, Martin. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed.
Farjeon, Eleanor. Sonnets and Poems - Project Gutenberg. There are a lot of dying children in here. The sonnets seemed to be a cycle of youth/hope frustrated and, eventually, withering without even a chance at children.
Foerster, Jennifer Elise. Bright Raft in the Afterweather - I liked this a lot.
Forche, Carolyn. The Angel of History - Oh, yea. Genocide and guilt and much of it about experiencing mutually exclusive (temporally or geographically) genocides. The poems worked, but they felt unearned and kind of appropriative.
Frost, Robert. A Boy's Will - Project Gutenberg. Reading Frost's stuff on Project Gutenberg, I'm constantly surprised that so much of it is... kind of bad. Some of it is brilliant, of course, but a lot isn't. I also keep tripping over little nuggets of racism.
Gailey, Jeannine Hall. Field Guide to the End of the World - Poems about coping with the aftermath (or immediacy) of various kinds of end of the world scenarios. Still broadly emotionally applicable anyway, and figuring out the type of apocalypse was mildly interesting.
Gouirand, Rae. Must Apple - Most ot the poems center on fruit, how it grows, how people eat it, how people prepare it. I'm pretty sure there are layers of metaphor.
Gregerson, Linda. Magnetic North.
Hall, Donald. The Back Chamber - This was mostly tedious.
Harrison, David L. After Dark: Poems About Nocturnal Animals - I didn't really care for these poems and only finished the book because it was very short.
Hayes, Terrance. Lighthead.
Indivisible: Poems for Social Justice - Anthology of poetry about various experiences of living in the US. There are a lot of different points of view in here, a lot of different poets.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Calendar of Sonnets - Project Gutenberg. One poem for each month.
Joseph, Lawrence. So Where Are We?
Karr, Mary. Viper Rum - The latter third of this book is an essay that I chose not to read, so this could be labeled a DNF. The poems mostly center on suicidal ideation or on aging toward death. Not uplifting.
Kilmer, Joyce. Trees and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. Mostly trite and kind of judgmental. One or two quite good poems.
Luna, Claudia Castro. Killing Marias: A Poem for Multiple Voices - Poems each titled for a different woman named Maria who was murdered in Juarez.
Matthews, Airea D. Simulacra.
Miller, Alice Duer. Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times - Project Gutenberg. This is an interesting historical document. The poetry is kind of trite, but it's all politically pointed and much is sarcastic. Each poem is prefaced with a quote to which it is a response. Some of the buzzwords of the various anti-women speakers, but... Those quotations sound very familiar. The author's responses very clearly demonstrate the way that the anti-women folks set up no-win situations, the way that they contradict themselves and ignore real people and their circumstances. (I'm pretty sure that a lot of these could, with little alteration, be made to respond to racist or homophobic bullshit because the suppression tactics used there are the same. The buzz words change; the tactics don't.) A lot comes down to "I won't give this to you because you're asking wrong, and if you were the sort of person who could ask the right way, you wouldn't want or need this to begin with, and we'd all be happy again.” The poet mocks that attitude constantly. I'm sad that it's such a constant of human behavior.
A Miscellany 1922 - Project Gutenberg. An anthology of poetry published in the United States in 1922. Contains works by about a dozen authors. Some anti-Semitism, some racism.
Newcomb, Tim. Riding Long Rails in Canada and the States - Kind of tedious, actually. Poems centered on the experience of riding trains crosscountry.
Nurkse, D. Leaving Zaia.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. Red Suitcase - I like Nye's poetry, generally.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. You & Yours.
Oliver, Lin. Little Poems for Tiny Ears - Book of poetry aimed at preschoolers and younger. Illustrated by Tomie dePaola. I think the target audience would enjoy these. They've got a nursery rhyme sort of bounce.
Oliver, Mary. Felicity.
Oliver, Mary. The Leaf and the Cloud.
Oliver, Mary. Red Bird - I enjoyed these poems and generally felt that they were saying things about life that I agree with. Sad but not bleak.
Oliver, Mary. Thirst - Heavily theological nature poems.
Ortiz, Simon J. From Sand Creek.
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Waiting for the Light.
Padgett, Ron. Big Cabin - I found these mostly boring but inoffensive.
Phillips, Carl. Double Shadow - When I put a hold on this at the library, they discovered that their copy was missing. Then they replaced it. Without the delay, I'd have lumped this in with the Phillips books in my previous log. These felt more tired, as if the author still had a lot to say but not much energy left for communicating it.
Robin, Valencia. Ridiculous Light.
Saenz, Gilbert. Edge of a Fantasy and Other Poems - The author writes in both Spanish and English. Each poem in this book is presented in both languages. The layout of the physical book doesn't work as well as it should because it's impossible to view the English and Spanish versions simultaneously; the Spanish is printed on the verso of the page with the English. My Spanish is good enough for me to read the poems out loud to get the sound of the language but not good enough for me to comprehend more than about two thirds of the words (if that), so I'd have appreciated the chance to compare. The English versions sounded kind of trite, and I wonder if the Spanish had more punch.
Sanchez, Sonia. Morning Haiku - I liked some of the turns of phrase here, but I kept being distracted by seeing things labeled as haiku that didn't fit the syllable count. The poet found a different meaning for the form than what I'm used to, and I understand why she'd apply it here because we don't have a word for this format, not that I know of. It just bothered me the way I'm bothered by a 1500 word 'drabble' or a 127 word 'drabble.'
Sangster, Margaret E. Cross Roads - Project Gutenberg. Warning for racist language, poems about infant and child death, poems about WWI from the home front. I liked some of these; others grated for various reasons. Still others weren't really memorable.
Silverman, Sue William. If the Girl Never Learns.
Smith, Patricia. Blood Dazzler - All of these poems are about people in New Orleans during and after Katrina. There's a lot of horror here, especially for anyone who remembers the broader context, and a lot of concrete details.
Trethewey, Natasha. Native Guard.
Torres, Edwin. Ameriscopia.
Van Kley, Emily. The Cold and the Rust.
Villarreal, Vanessa Angelica. Beast Meridian - These poems are full of striking images, painfully striking ones, with a lot of violence. The violence is ancient and inevitable but also malicious toward the vulnerable. There are a lot of body parts strewn about the landscape, both metaphorically and literally. Hope never goes anywhere, but people keep trying because there's nothing else. I'm not sure that reading the whole book all at once works well because I got to the point where I just wasn't processing the layers any more.
Viorst, Judith. Nearing 90.
Walker, Margaret. For My People - I'm glad that this book was short because most of the poems didn't work for me. I think I'd have been more interested in them if I had more detailed historical/cultural context. I understood some things pretty clearly.
World Make Way: Poems Inspired by Art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art - Ebook with poetry facing photographs of works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are about a dozen of each, each by a different poet.
Wright, Jay. Polynomials and Pollen.
Yolen, Jane. Finding Baba Yaga - The poems in this book work together to tell a single story. I knew that going in. I was just surprised about how many of them were set up to explain the protagonist's family. Baba Yaga herself didn't appear until at least halfway through the book.
Young, C. Dale. The Halo - Poems about wings & broken necks. The wings seemed to be some sort of sexual identity realization metaphor in that way that feels too obvious for me to be reading it right but really can't be taken any other way. The broken neck thing is more about an accident and long hospitalization/recovery with a lot of focus on the brace screwed to the narrator's skull as the titular halo.
Yu, Josephine. Prayer Book of the Anxious - I think that a lot of the meaning of these poems is in the lacunae which I lacked the context to fill, so I felt like I had a lot of broken pieces that almost made a picture.
Zandi, Jordan. Solarium: Poems - I'm not at all sure that I followed the thoughts in these. Most of the lines were brief, and I couldn't always see how they fit with each other.
Zucker, Rachel. Museum of Accidents - miscarriage and exhaustion and parenting and...
Started but not finished:
Bradfield, Elizabeth. Approaching Ice - As far as I can tell these are all poems about the physical and psychological risks of polar exploration. I didn't care enough to fight through more than about six of them.
Carlson-Wee, Anders. The Low Passions - These read like short essays rather than as poems in spite of being formatted as poems. They're mostly descriptions of mundane interactions and of frustration. I didn't want to deal with them.
Derr-Smith, Heather. Thrust - These were a bit too violent for me.
Frazier, Santee. Aurum - DNF. No idea why at this remove.
Gouirand, Rae. Glass Is Glass Water Is Water - I couldn't get the words in these to flow in a way that made them make sense, so I gave up. I think I was missing some of the author's assumptions about sentence structure and meaning.
Herrera, Juan Felipe. Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream - The posted scans were poor quality, so this was mostly an issue of legibility.
Hicok, Bob. This Clumsy Living - I couldn't follow any sort of thread of meaning in the few poems I read in this book.
Le, Aimee & Fiona Chamness. Feral Citizens - There was too much body horror in here for me.
Lopez, Casandra. Brother Bullet: Poems - About violent death of the poet's brother.
Lovelace, Amanda. "the princess saves herself in this one" - I found this just too brutal.
Nethercott, Gennarose. The Lumberjack's Dove - This didn't really work for me. I think I understood what the author was trying to do, but it wasn't a thing that worked for me. What I read was playing with branching stories and the intersections of reality and myth/magic. The author was also saying something about how fiction works.
Perillo, Lucia. Luck Is Luck.
Stein, Evaleen. Child Songs of Cheers - Project Gutenberg. DNF because twee.
Stern, Gerald. Everything Is Burning.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Ballads - Project Gutenberg. I found these impenetrable. The style aimed at high epic poetry in ways that didn't work for me.
Willard, Nancy. A Visit to William Blake's Inn - These are the author's poems in tribute to Blake's work. I didn't really enjoy them. There was a lot of nonsense, and the rhythms weren't compelling enough to carry the day.
I've probably got notes on half of these titles.
I think I tagged all of the Project Gutenberg books as such, but I may have missed some. A few of these are from various university presses that made some books free online during April, May, and June of this year (I don't remember which ones, sadly).
Blount, Tommye. What Are We Not For.
Bramer, Shannon. Climbing Shadow: Poems for Children - The author wrote these poems for kindergarten students that she met while working as a lunchroom supervisor. I liked some of them a lot; others didn't work as well for me. It was a very quick read.
Budin, Sue. After the Burn.
Clifton, Lucille. The Book of Light - I may have read this before. At least, some poems felt familiar. I think that I have to be in the right mood to appreciate Clifton's poetry. This time, I was. Other times, I'm not necessarily.
Collins, Billy. Questions About Angels - These poems talk about getting old with a lot of references to the span of history. Nothing really stuck with me.
Dunn, Stephen. Everything Else in the World.
Emerson, Claudia. Late Wife - These poems most held bitterness and grief. Those that didn't held melancholy.
Erdrich, Louise. Baptism of Desire - I found some bits of these poems viscerally unpleasant and/or creepy. I think they were meant to be. The imagery was striking with hooks to strip flesh.
Espada, Martin. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed.
Farjeon, Eleanor. Sonnets and Poems - Project Gutenberg. There are a lot of dying children in here. The sonnets seemed to be a cycle of youth/hope frustrated and, eventually, withering without even a chance at children.
Foerster, Jennifer Elise. Bright Raft in the Afterweather - I liked this a lot.
Forche, Carolyn. The Angel of History - Oh, yea. Genocide and guilt and much of it about experiencing mutually exclusive (temporally or geographically) genocides. The poems worked, but they felt unearned and kind of appropriative.
Frost, Robert. A Boy's Will - Project Gutenberg. Reading Frost's stuff on Project Gutenberg, I'm constantly surprised that so much of it is... kind of bad. Some of it is brilliant, of course, but a lot isn't. I also keep tripping over little nuggets of racism.
Gailey, Jeannine Hall. Field Guide to the End of the World - Poems about coping with the aftermath (or immediacy) of various kinds of end of the world scenarios. Still broadly emotionally applicable anyway, and figuring out the type of apocalypse was mildly interesting.
Gouirand, Rae. Must Apple - Most ot the poems center on fruit, how it grows, how people eat it, how people prepare it. I'm pretty sure there are layers of metaphor.
Gregerson, Linda. Magnetic North.
Hall, Donald. The Back Chamber - This was mostly tedious.
Harrison, David L. After Dark: Poems About Nocturnal Animals - I didn't really care for these poems and only finished the book because it was very short.
Hayes, Terrance. Lighthead.
Indivisible: Poems for Social Justice - Anthology of poetry about various experiences of living in the US. There are a lot of different points of view in here, a lot of different poets.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Calendar of Sonnets - Project Gutenberg. One poem for each month.
Joseph, Lawrence. So Where Are We?
Karr, Mary. Viper Rum - The latter third of this book is an essay that I chose not to read, so this could be labeled a DNF. The poems mostly center on suicidal ideation or on aging toward death. Not uplifting.
Kilmer, Joyce. Trees and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. Mostly trite and kind of judgmental. One or two quite good poems.
Luna, Claudia Castro. Killing Marias: A Poem for Multiple Voices - Poems each titled for a different woman named Maria who was murdered in Juarez.
Matthews, Airea D. Simulacra.
Miller, Alice Duer. Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times - Project Gutenberg. This is an interesting historical document. The poetry is kind of trite, but it's all politically pointed and much is sarcastic. Each poem is prefaced with a quote to which it is a response. Some of the buzzwords of the various anti-women speakers, but... Those quotations sound very familiar. The author's responses very clearly demonstrate the way that the anti-women folks set up no-win situations, the way that they contradict themselves and ignore real people and their circumstances. (I'm pretty sure that a lot of these could, with little alteration, be made to respond to racist or homophobic bullshit because the suppression tactics used there are the same. The buzz words change; the tactics don't.) A lot comes down to "I won't give this to you because you're asking wrong, and if you were the sort of person who could ask the right way, you wouldn't want or need this to begin with, and we'd all be happy again.” The poet mocks that attitude constantly. I'm sad that it's such a constant of human behavior.
A Miscellany 1922 - Project Gutenberg. An anthology of poetry published in the United States in 1922. Contains works by about a dozen authors. Some anti-Semitism, some racism.
Newcomb, Tim. Riding Long Rails in Canada and the States - Kind of tedious, actually. Poems centered on the experience of riding trains crosscountry.
Nurkse, D. Leaving Zaia.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. Red Suitcase - I like Nye's poetry, generally.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. You & Yours.
Oliver, Lin. Little Poems for Tiny Ears - Book of poetry aimed at preschoolers and younger. Illustrated by Tomie dePaola. I think the target audience would enjoy these. They've got a nursery rhyme sort of bounce.
Oliver, Mary. Felicity.
Oliver, Mary. The Leaf and the Cloud.
Oliver, Mary. Red Bird - I enjoyed these poems and generally felt that they were saying things about life that I agree with. Sad but not bleak.
Oliver, Mary. Thirst - Heavily theological nature poems.
Ortiz, Simon J. From Sand Creek.
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Waiting for the Light.
Padgett, Ron. Big Cabin - I found these mostly boring but inoffensive.
Phillips, Carl. Double Shadow - When I put a hold on this at the library, they discovered that their copy was missing. Then they replaced it. Without the delay, I'd have lumped this in with the Phillips books in my previous log. These felt more tired, as if the author still had a lot to say but not much energy left for communicating it.
Robin, Valencia. Ridiculous Light.
Saenz, Gilbert. Edge of a Fantasy and Other Poems - The author writes in both Spanish and English. Each poem in this book is presented in both languages. The layout of the physical book doesn't work as well as it should because it's impossible to view the English and Spanish versions simultaneously; the Spanish is printed on the verso of the page with the English. My Spanish is good enough for me to read the poems out loud to get the sound of the language but not good enough for me to comprehend more than about two thirds of the words (if that), so I'd have appreciated the chance to compare. The English versions sounded kind of trite, and I wonder if the Spanish had more punch.
Sanchez, Sonia. Morning Haiku - I liked some of the turns of phrase here, but I kept being distracted by seeing things labeled as haiku that didn't fit the syllable count. The poet found a different meaning for the form than what I'm used to, and I understand why she'd apply it here because we don't have a word for this format, not that I know of. It just bothered me the way I'm bothered by a 1500 word 'drabble' or a 127 word 'drabble.'
Sangster, Margaret E. Cross Roads - Project Gutenberg. Warning for racist language, poems about infant and child death, poems about WWI from the home front. I liked some of these; others grated for various reasons. Still others weren't really memorable.
Silverman, Sue William. If the Girl Never Learns.
Smith, Patricia. Blood Dazzler - All of these poems are about people in New Orleans during and after Katrina. There's a lot of horror here, especially for anyone who remembers the broader context, and a lot of concrete details.
Trethewey, Natasha. Native Guard.
Torres, Edwin. Ameriscopia.
Van Kley, Emily. The Cold and the Rust.
Villarreal, Vanessa Angelica. Beast Meridian - These poems are full of striking images, painfully striking ones, with a lot of violence. The violence is ancient and inevitable but also malicious toward the vulnerable. There are a lot of body parts strewn about the landscape, both metaphorically and literally. Hope never goes anywhere, but people keep trying because there's nothing else. I'm not sure that reading the whole book all at once works well because I got to the point where I just wasn't processing the layers any more.
Viorst, Judith. Nearing 90.
Walker, Margaret. For My People - I'm glad that this book was short because most of the poems didn't work for me. I think I'd have been more interested in them if I had more detailed historical/cultural context. I understood some things pretty clearly.
World Make Way: Poems Inspired by Art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art - Ebook with poetry facing photographs of works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are about a dozen of each, each by a different poet.
Wright, Jay. Polynomials and Pollen.
Yolen, Jane. Finding Baba Yaga - The poems in this book work together to tell a single story. I knew that going in. I was just surprised about how many of them were set up to explain the protagonist's family. Baba Yaga herself didn't appear until at least halfway through the book.
Young, C. Dale. The Halo - Poems about wings & broken necks. The wings seemed to be some sort of sexual identity realization metaphor in that way that feels too obvious for me to be reading it right but really can't be taken any other way. The broken neck thing is more about an accident and long hospitalization/recovery with a lot of focus on the brace screwed to the narrator's skull as the titular halo.
Yu, Josephine. Prayer Book of the Anxious - I think that a lot of the meaning of these poems is in the lacunae which I lacked the context to fill, so I felt like I had a lot of broken pieces that almost made a picture.
Zandi, Jordan. Solarium: Poems - I'm not at all sure that I followed the thoughts in these. Most of the lines were brief, and I couldn't always see how they fit with each other.
Zucker, Rachel. Museum of Accidents - miscarriage and exhaustion and parenting and...
Started but not finished:
Bradfield, Elizabeth. Approaching Ice - As far as I can tell these are all poems about the physical and psychological risks of polar exploration. I didn't care enough to fight through more than about six of them.
Carlson-Wee, Anders. The Low Passions - These read like short essays rather than as poems in spite of being formatted as poems. They're mostly descriptions of mundane interactions and of frustration. I didn't want to deal with them.
Derr-Smith, Heather. Thrust - These were a bit too violent for me.
Frazier, Santee. Aurum - DNF. No idea why at this remove.
Gouirand, Rae. Glass Is Glass Water Is Water - I couldn't get the words in these to flow in a way that made them make sense, so I gave up. I think I was missing some of the author's assumptions about sentence structure and meaning.
Herrera, Juan Felipe. Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream - The posted scans were poor quality, so this was mostly an issue of legibility.
Hicok, Bob. This Clumsy Living - I couldn't follow any sort of thread of meaning in the few poems I read in this book.
Le, Aimee & Fiona Chamness. Feral Citizens - There was too much body horror in here for me.
Lopez, Casandra. Brother Bullet: Poems - About violent death of the poet's brother.
Lovelace, Amanda. "the princess saves herself in this one" - I found this just too brutal.
Nethercott, Gennarose. The Lumberjack's Dove - This didn't really work for me. I think I understood what the author was trying to do, but it wasn't a thing that worked for me. What I read was playing with branching stories and the intersections of reality and myth/magic. The author was also saying something about how fiction works.
Perillo, Lucia. Luck Is Luck.
Stein, Evaleen. Child Songs of Cheers - Project Gutenberg. DNF because twee.
Stern, Gerald. Everything Is Burning.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Ballads - Project Gutenberg. I found these impenetrable. The style aimed at high epic poetry in ways that didn't work for me.
Willard, Nancy. A Visit to William Blake's Inn - These are the author's poems in tribute to Blake's work. I didn't really enjoy them. There was a lot of nonsense, and the rhythms weren't compelling enough to carry the day.
