Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit

By Bukowski, Charles

Publishing Date: 2003

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.5 BUK

A collection of short poems ruminates upon advancing age, dissipation, loneliness, and death.

Call us what we carry: poems

By Gorman, Amanda

Publishing Date: 2021

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.6 GOR

"The luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, her poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future."--

The merry recluse: a life in essays

By Knapp, Caroline

Publishing Date: 2004

Classification: 800

Call Number: 814 KNA

From the best'selling author of Drinking: A Love Story and Appetites: Why Women Want comes this unforgettable collection spanning fifteen years of observations on modern culture and women's lives. Caroline Knapp's readers are known not just for their number, but for their intense connection to her work. Knapp connected so well in part because of the intense focus she brought to her subjects. Now, with The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays, Knapp shows us that her vision through a wider lens is as brilliant as through a narrow one. These essays paint the fullest picture of this wonderful writer that we've yet seen, but they are also a full portrait of a writing life, showing how the same themes can engage''and expand''a writer over a lifetime. Knapp, who died in 2002, was considered one of the country's more intelligent and graceful voices in memoirs. This collection also shows her to be a witty, provocative observer of the world around her. - (Random House, Inc.)

The journal, 1837-1861

By Thoreau, Henry David

Publishing Date: 2009

Classification: 800

Call Number: 818.303 THO

Henry David Thoreaus Journal was his lifes work: the daily practice of writing that accompanied his daily walks, the workshop where he developed his books and essays, and a project in its own rightone of the most intensive explorations ever made of the everyday environment, the revolving seasons, and the changing self. It is a treasure trove of some of the finest prose in English and, for those acquainted with it, its prismatic pages exercise a hypnotic fascination. Yet at roughly seven thousand pages, or two million words, it remains Thoreaus least-known work.

Orwell's roses

By Solnit, Rebecca

Publishing Date: [2021]

Classification: 800

Call Number: 828.912 SOL

Shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain in 1936, George Orwell planted roses. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. Solnit presents a neglected side of Orwell, who took enormous pleasure in the natural world and found great meaning and value in it. She explores the roses in various contexts, perspectives, and meanings, following the contours of Orwell's life and tracking how deeply enmeshed the love of nature is in all his writing--Adapted from jacket

Getting lost

By Ernaux, Annie

Publishing Date: [2022]

Classification: 800

Call Number: 843.914 ERN

"Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying "his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of." She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire"--