I ROCK Poetry By: Kendall Reimink (2019, Paperback, 120 pages)

Hip-hop artist, rapper, songwriter and producer, Aesop Rock is a truly talented man. While his imagery-rich, meticulously crafted lyrics are ones he explicitly writes to be sung with a beat, they evoke intellect and emotion in their poetic magnificence. Listen along, or simply soak in the words for what they are: masterful.

To celebrate 50 years since the first moon landing by Apollo 11 in 1969, here is an original collection of 50 poems. In his poems Dom tells us of two incredible things--the Moon is incredible: it controls our tides, to give us 24-hour days, and it keeps our planet stable enough to have seasons. Dom reminds us that poetry too is incredible because it is the most flexible form of expressing ourselves and has been always how we used to tell stories, particularly about our ways of seeing this incredible Moon. The Moon is an inspiring rock of possibilities. To tell us this, Dom uses lots of poetry forms: short poems and long ones, silly ones and serious ones. There are haiku and sonnets, acrostics and shapes. He uses kennings and metaphors and slang. He uses established rhythms which you might find in older poems and he uses the rhythms he hears in his head when his son smiles at him. So take up the challenge: Read the poems, fly to the moon, land on it, orbit it. Go to walk on it, live on it, steal it, eat it!

Collection of letters and poems written by African-American authors, celebrating love between men and women, and exploring the love between parent and child.

Poetry. "Finally an oracle with a gorgeous sense of humor. Jessica Laser's vision is singular, her voice at once formidable and intimate. Its impeccable wit imparts a bracing metaphysics. 'I said to myself as a child do not / Mistake the ghost you fear for / The ghost you are.' Here intellect sings. Everywhere agile, coruscating syntax proves music isn't only a form of beauty, it's also a mode of inquiry. Rhyme tracks relations inaccessible to reason. Repetition conducts its tests of the present, its shadow appraisals of the past's part in the future. The visceral pleasure one experiences reading these poems corresponds to the depth of their ambition: to fathom human feeling--its contradictions, its infinite shifts--and 'see how full of changes change is.'"--Margaret Ross

During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.