Robert Recommends

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Staff Books: 

Goldenrod: Poems By Maggie Smith Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9781982185060
Availability: Not on hand, usually available within 1-5 Days
Published: Atria/One Signal Publishers - July 27th, 2021

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR

??“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time
“A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of


Big Girl, Small Town By Michelle Gallen Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781643750897
Availability: On Our Shelves Now--Subject to Availability
Published: Algonquin Books - December 1st, 2020

“An immensely lovable debut novel . .


Your Art Will Save Your Life By Beth Pickens Cover Image
$14.95
ISBN: 9781936932290
Availability: On Our Shelves Now--Subject to Availability
Published: Feminist Press - April 10th, 2018

A candid guidebook about art-making in the midst of oppression--a slim, necessary revelation (Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts).


Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency By Olivia Laing Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9780393867398
Availability: On Our Shelves Now--Subject to Availability
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - May 4th, 2021

“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era.

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century.


Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice By Ellen McGarrahan Cover Image
$28.00
UNAVAILABLE
ISBN: 9780812998665
Published: Random House - February 2nd, 2021

EDGAR AWARD FINALIST • A private investigator revisits the case that has haunted her for decades and sets out on a deeply personal quest to sort truth from lies.
 


Shelter in Place By David Leavitt Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781620404881
Availability: On Our Shelves Now--Subject to Availability
Published: Bloomsbury Publishing - November 23rd, 2021

I recently got to see Tommy “Teebs” Pico read at the wonderful Women and Children First bookstore in Chicago. If you get a chance to hear him read, take it! I doubt there’s a funnier, braver, or more bracingly intelligent poet working today. He’s fresh from winning a “genius grant” from the Whiting Foundation. In their award citation the committee said, “Pico writes poetry of rare brilliance, assured in form and forceful in its interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self. His ability to move among those spaces gives the work the feeling of an opened ceiling.” In the book-length poem Junk, gay, urban, Native American Pico tackles all possible meanings of the word “junk” to give us an amazing portrait of the complexity of the world. With its rampant consumerism, its heady and possibly poisonous mix of politics, personal history, class, sexuality, race and consumption, and with its ode to the snack foods that are so good (but so bad for us), Junk uses a breakneck, high-speed internet pace to let us into the mind and point-of-view of a new, vital voice in American poetry. And then buy Pico’s 2017 collection Nature Poem while you’re at it—a searing critique of racism, colonialism, and contemporary society, all with Pico’s disarming honesty, humor, and mad skills.


How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton By Lucille Clifton, Aracelis Girmay (Editor) Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9781950774142
Availability: Not on hand, usually available within 1-5 Days
Published: BOA Editions - September 8th, 2020

Selected poems from celebrated poet Lucille Clifton's 50-year career selected by Whiting Award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay.


The Big Book of the Dead By Marion Winik Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781640092532
Availability: On Our Shelves Now--Subject to Availability
Published: Counterpoint - September 17th, 2019

Marion Wink is esteemed for bringing humor and wit to that most unavoidable of subjects: death.


Truth & Beauty: A Friendship By Ann Patchett Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780060572150
Availability: Not on hand, usually available within 1-5 Days
Published: Harper Perennial - May 9th, 2023

I had not read any Seuss but the good Doctor until I discovered this remarkable collection, although the Kalamazoo-based Diane Seuss has been publishing poetry since the late 1990s. I obviously have some catching up to do, because her ekphrastic poems in this collection are evocative, brilliant, startling in their imagery and flow, and take autobiography to a new level, where one’s sensations, feelings, and thoughts upon meeting a painting reveal the inner core of the viewer. In a series of “Still Life” poems and “Self-Portraits,” Seuss crosses genres, not only from poetry to prose but also poetry to painting and back. In the series “Walmart Parking Lot,” Seuss gives us the seemingly banal scene as if told from the art and point of view of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keefe, Andy Warhol, and Alice Neel, and in doing so shows how much each artist has to offer to the world. I dare you to read poems like “I Look Up from My Book and Out at the World through Reading Glasses,” “Self-Portrait with the Ashes of My Baby Blanket,” and “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise,” and not be at least a little changed. That’s what a good poem can do.


The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara By Frank O'Hara, Donald Allen (Editor), John Ashbery (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Frank O'Hara, Donald Allen (Editor), John Ashbery (Introduction by)
$26.95
ISBN: 9780520201668
Availability: Not on hand, usually available within 1-5 Days
Published: University of California Press - March 31st, 1995

Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.