Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:
- Poetry book competition winners, mostly. Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe); Chuck Carlisle, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf); Mark Conway, Any Holy City (Silverfish); Becky Gould Gibson, Need-Fire (Bright Hill); Michelle Gillett, The Green Cottage (Ledge); Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw); Jason Irwin, Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw); Joshua Kryah, Glean (Nightboat); Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works (White Eagle Coffee Store); Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline (Nightboat); Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (Ahsanta); Heather Aimee O’Neill, Memory Future (Gold Line); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Arizona); Pitt Poetry Series, New and Selected 2012; Liz Robbins, Play Button (Cider Press Review); Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker’s Corridor (Louisiana State); Cider Press Review, Vol. 12; Slipstream, No. 31. By and large, how dreadful – even meaningless or worse, false – I find these hermetic works of creative writing MFAs, often incestuously selected by associate professors of creative writing or literature. Far from finding anything I might wish I had written, I’m instead left grasping at straws for anything I might even admire – even a single line or stanza seems elusive. On top of it, the pervasive anti-Christian invective in many seems to amplify the shallowness of much of any thought running through these – often, there’s only a vague link to the title. And all of these similes! Admittedly, many of these are gorgeously produced – their covers, especially. So what I’m keeping, this round: Need-Fire, with its impeccable scholarship of early Christianity in England and its lovely reconstruction of early English verse; Glean, with its lacy evocations. Ortiz remains in a class by himself.
- Albert Goldbarth: Heaven and Earth. Wonderful collection (poems).
- Poetry, December 2011-April 2012. Catching up! Some good work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Dick Allen, and Linda Kunhardt (December), varied responses to prayer and faith (“One Whole Voice,” February), Marina Tsvetaeva plus Kabbalah-influenced work (March).
- American Poetry Review, March-April 2012. No keepers, apart from an essay on metaphor.
- George Fox: Book of Miracles. A reconstruction of pastoral work by Fox, with extensive introduction looking at the expectation of miracles and providences at the time.
- Evelyn Underhill: Abba. A close gloss on the Lord’s Prayer and its radical implications.
Jnana's Red Barn 
ah, books! they color and clutter our lives, hoho… 😉
One of the arguments for ebooks is that their so much easier to transport and store.
One of the arguments against, I suppose, is that you don’t have those fascinating bookshelves to explore … or, especially, the ones when you visit other households. Add to that, then, the shelves and boxes of books to photograph for your blog.
One of the arguments for ebooks (if you’ll allow the plug) is that my own series of novels is available only as ebooks, which are much more affordable than paper editions.
Any way you look at it, we love books … lots and lots of fascinating pages.
oh, or, so people say… :c am not an ebook user yet, sir. hardcopy books loyalist here, hoho.
i have books in boxes similar to yours above, is why. hahaha. 😉
am still warming up for the digital age, sir. have yet to learn how to read electronically. blogging is a way to start. perhaps when ebooks are so common or even obselete already, i’d then be adjusted, lol.
anyway, i hope your ebooks are selling well. love your topic – the hippie era… 🙂 about 10 years ago, i read Am. Lit circa Ken Keyes and his contemporaries and also, the subcultures that followed. you see, the LSD era in the Phils. came much later than in America. but the “alternative culture” and hippie ways also found their ways here – 70s and 80s. just saying… warm regards. 🙂
Sounds like you’d fit right in … someone who can simply enjoy life and a circle of lively spirits. Glad you’re enjoying this mini-series.