Here are 100 books that Life on Earth fans have personally recommended if you like
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I fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
I heard about this delightful book from a friend and knew I had to read it. It is a meditation on the color blue. Each of Nelson’s “propositions” explores blue metaphorically, literally, historically, emotionally.
Reading this book I immersed myself in blue and all its facets, and through doing so I discovered the worlds of other colors, so that when I step outside, I see not only green but all greens, not only brown but all browns, and blue, of course, everywhere.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color ...A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
I fell in love with Pablo Neruda and his poetry when I read this book, initially for a course called the Poet’s Voice in grad school. I’ve been reading it ever since. The book takes me through Neruda’s entire career, from 1924, when he published Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair, to 1967, when he published La Barcarola.
This book is the story of a life in poems. When I read this book, I discovered that I could write about anything because he did. I took hypnotic walks with him through his consular postings in Burma, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. With his odes, I saw the beauty in even the most mundane pieces of life—laziness, a book, a tomato. I basked in the wry and generous voice of a poet.
Pablo Neruda, el gran poeta chileno del siglo xx, premio Nobel de Literatura en 1971, es mucho más que un poeta político, comprometido o de denuncia. También nos ha dejado la sencillez optimista de las odas, esos homenajes llenos de amor a las cosas concretas (la madera, un tomate, una campana, el tren...) en los que fija una mirada amable y esperanzada sobre la vida corriente de la gente corriente... El recorrido poético de este creador inagotable bebe de las principales tendencias estéticas de vanguardia de la época que le tocó vivir: modernismo, surrealismo, expresionismo... En esta antología, adornada con…
I fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
This is the book I turn to for inspiration. Similar to Neruda’s poetry, Crooker turns the everyday into poetry. No matter the page, I find a poem that inspires more poems. I rediscover the magic of this morning, this day, again and again.
Crooker has trouble writing a poem and turns to Betty Crocker, the dry martini, cream puffs. I can then enter my own day with my eyes open wide enough to see its gifts in even the simplest of things.
Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker's ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O'Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cezanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I fell in love with reading and writing as a child, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered the magic of poetry and began writing it myself. I began to immerse myself in poetry and, in particular, the poetry of Pablo Neruda through a course on The Poet’s Voice in which we explored how the poet’s voice changes over a lifetime of writing. For many years, I thought of myself as a fiction writer, but gradually I turned to poetry, and poetry saved my life. I start each day with a poem or two, and much of my work is inspired by the poets and poems that I read.
I love kisses, and this is a book full of them. I was reminded of Neruda’s first book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
This is a book about love and loss, good kisses, bad kisses, and even “Generic Kisses.” This is a small book, literally, a portable book I can take with me in my coat pocket or a purse and bring out to read whenever I need the kiss of a poem.
'Ideally, a reader should finish this book, then find someone to kiss.' - Tess Gallagher
'This is the best book of love poems since Neruda's.' - Bill Knott
'There are as many nuances and inflections for kisses as there are lips to kiss,' says American poet Tess Gallagher. And so with these playful, serious and sassy poems about kisses, a whole book devoted to the kiss. Portable Kisses is a book which kept growing. The earliest poems were published in a hand-printed limited edition called Portable Kisses in 1978. But the poems wouldn't stop, like the best of kisses, and…
People come to songwriting from all different directions. Some have wanted to do this since they were little kids. Some like to make their parents mad. Some are wildly talented but crippled with doubt. All I can say is that no matter which way you’re facing, I think I can help you. I say this because I’ve been teaching college-level songwriting for years now, and every semester I have students who want to meet with me for office hours. They’re all repeat customers and I’ve noticed that many of them ask repeat questions. The point of my book, Music, Lyrics, and Life, is to try to address those repeat questions because chances are good that you have them, too.
A series of poetry lectures not intended for publication, they combine to form an astounding journey into language and art. You don’t need to be a poet to love the casual way she delivers bomb after bomb, and to wish you’d been her student. I guess this is as close as I’ll get, and it’s taken a long time (I’m still not done) because I can just sit on a phrase or a page for an entire subway ride. Definitely would have failed her class, but having the lectures written out is like getting an extension without needing to grovel for it.
This is one of the wisest books I've read in years...--New York Times Book Review No writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act--the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back...Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle's work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that's vital and welcome, that doesn't make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon…
I have been writing and teaching about African American poetry and poetics for more than two decades. My passion began when I kept discovering long-lost poems that were published once, in Black newspapers, and then forgotten. I wondered why I had never learned about Gwendolyn Brooks in school, though I’d read about e.e. cummings and Robert Frost. Once I stumbled on the fact that Claude McKay discovered cummings, I realized how much the questions of influence and power aren’t really central topics in thinking about the genealogy of Black poets and their influence on each other and on poetry in general.
Marilyn Nelson’s poetry is staggeringly good, particularly the way she writes formal poems—sonnets!—in a humble voice, like her sonnet “From an Alabama Farmer.” Nelson’s poem “To the Confederate Dead,” with its epigraph by Allen Tate is a better poem than Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” with which it is in conversation. Nelson’s ‘wreath’ of sonnets, “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” is simply sublime.
Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities.
Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. ""Bivouac in a Storm"" tells the story of a group…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
Ever since I was a child and my father first pointed me to a few of his favorite poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley), I have been passionate about poetry, particularly poems that speak plainly of the world in a very relatable way. I’ve found that I can learn something about myself and my humanity by reading my favorite poets who often teach me something new about the world. They are my guides and companions.
I love how crystalline and to the absolute point these poems are. “Where do I begin/being a minimalist?” the poet writes. These poems make me see the world in a fresh but very relatable way. “What would I/think, coming/up after/my world/had evaporated?/I’d wish/I were water."
So much said, so few words. The longing is implicit. This book is home to breathtaking lyricism–as well as narrative poems of mystery, loss, and wonder. It is a book I keep coming back to.
About Andrea Cohen’s poems, Christian Wiman has said: “One is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul.” In The Sorrow Apartments, Cohen’s eighth collection, those signature gifts are front and center, along with sly humor, relentless economy, and the hairpin curves of gut-punch wisdom. How quickly Cohen takes us so far:
Bunker
What would I think, coming
up after my world
had evaporated? I'd wish
I were water.
The Sorrow Apartments is home to spare and uncanny lyricism––as well as leaping narratives of mystery and loss and wonder.…
I’ve been writing poems since an inspirational period of study in Stirling in my twenties, when I did a lot of hill walking in the Scottish Highlands. For me, poetry that doesn’t move you, that doesn’t make you feel, is just words on a page. I love poems that make you shiver as they incongruously bear the full load of life’s mystery. I like all kinds of poetry but have a special place reserved for nature poems, poems that find the heart and soul in the landscape, rivers, and wildlife.
Alice Oswald is one of our best living poets, renowned for her nature poetry and particularly her long poem about the River Dart in Somerset. I love this first collection, full of heart-stopping attention to detail and transcendental shiver. She follows very much in the tradition of our great poets writing about nature. Try the poem "Mountains" for a Wordsworthian sense of a hidden, almost pantheistic presence in the world.
This is Alice Oswald's first book of poems. More confident and achieved than many first collections, it shows her writing in an already distinct voice. The poems are intensely musical: she recites them from memory. Influenced by the rhythms of Hopkins, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language. A long poem, `The Wise Men of Gotham', which makes up the second part of the book, is, by contrast, a version of the folk-legend about the three men who went to sea in a…
I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
Hirshfield’s craft of language in this book knocks me off my feet. My head rings in the resonance of her poignant and pointed images.
The way she fuses intimate, personal experience with the immensity of nature and the fearless way she takes on the loss and peril of climate change makes me want to be a better writer and a better human. When I read the poems in this masterful collection, I am at once moved to sadness and awe and inspired to take action.
Jane Hirshfield's urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives' dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth's continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry - loyal instruments…
Ever since my parents gave me a copy of Dorothy Aldis’ The Secret Place and Other Poems, I have enjoyed a lifelong love of poetry. Now, as a traditionally-published children’s author, I have had numerous books and poems published over the years, including books that began as poems, like Flashlight Night (Astra Young Readers, 2017) and Once Upon Another Time (Beaming Books, 2021). My poems can be found in various anthologies including The National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry (N.G. Children’s Books, 2015) and Construction People (Wordsong, 2020) as well as Highlights for Children magazine.
Given poet David L. Harrison’s background and interests (he holds science degrees from both Drury and Emory Universities), it should not be surprising to see his books show up on two of my lists. While he has published numerous poetry collections about animals, A Place to Start a Family stands out because of its tight focus – poems about animals that build nests, hives, and other types of homes – and the writer’s incredible talent for wordplay.
From ingenious internal rhyme to intriguing back matter to Giles Laroche’s masterful cut-paper illustrations, this work of creative nonfiction is equally at home in libraries and classrooms as it is on children’s bookshelves.
A poetry collection introducing animal architects that build remarkable structures in order to attract a mate and have babies.
Many animals build something--a nest, tunnel, or web--in order to pair up, lay eggs, give birth, and otherwise perpetuate their species. Organized based on where creatures live--underground, in the water, on land, or in the air--twelve poems bring fish, insects, reptiles, mammals, and birds to life. Back matter includes more information about each animal.
"A fine synthesis of poetry and science" — Kirkus Reviews
"An inviting introduction to a dozen industrious creatures" — Publishers Weekly
