Items13The creator’s order
  1. 1Sleeping with the DictionarySleeping with the DictionaryMullen orders these poems alphabetically and uses dictionaries and a thesaurus to unsettle the language inside them. That arrangement puts pieces next to each other for reasons other than plot or mood. Read several in order to see when the wordplay starts making links the alphabet could never have…0
  2. 2Deaf Republic (2019)Deaf Republic (2019) 9.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2019A shooting in a town square sets the story in motion. The collection takes the shape of two acts, with shifts between public events and private lives, and includes drawings of signs. Read through the final poem to see how the book brings a question raised about the occupied town into a different…0
  3. 3Stag's leap (2012)Stag's leap (2012) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2012The first section takes in the year a marriage ends. It’s followed by poems grouped by season and a later section that looks back. Those intervals give different questions time to surface. A feeling that seems settled in one poem can be harder to name when Olds returns to it after time has passed.0
  4. 4Oculus (2019)Oculus (2019)Published Jan 1, 2019Poems in the imagined voice of actor Anna May Wong begin after a run of poems about images and looking. Read through to her first appearance and see how the collection moves from a question about what the camera shows to imagining what someone on the other side of it could say.0
  5. 5Life on Mars (2011)Life on Mars (2011) 8.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2011The early poems look toward space, science fiction and what people expect to find beyond Earth. The collection later turns toward the death of Smith’s father, who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. The sequence gives the distant images an intimate use as the poems move into grief.0
  6. 6Whereas (2017)Whereas (2017)Published Jan 1, 2017The first part presents concerns of language and history through individual poems. The second takes its title from the formal clauses used in a federal apology to Native peoples. Read the halves in order to hear how the official vocabulary changes when it appears after the language of the earlier…0
  7. 7The Tradition (2019)The Tradition (2019) 8.7/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2019Brown returns several times to a form he calls the duplex, which draws on sonnets, ghazals, and the blues. The repetitions you hear inside each poem become familiar across the book. The closing Duplex: Cento makes that memory useful by putting lines from earlier duplexes back together.0
  8. 8Native Guard (2007)Native Guard (2007) 9.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2007Poems about family losses occupy much of the first numbered section. The second brings in Civil War memory, including the title sequence about a Black soldier on Ship Island. Bringing the sections together changes how a reader hears the question of who gets remembered, in a household as well as in…0
  9. 9The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014)The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014)Published Jan 1, 2014A cartographer and a Rastaman keep returning to questions about what a map can tell you. Poems about place names take those questions into the landscape and the words people use for it. Follow the argument across the book to see how far the cartographer can move without simply learning to draw a…0
  10. 10A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (2021)A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (2021) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2021Fragments of family history return alongside poems about language, memory, and war. At the center is Nguyen’s mother, who rode motorcycles in a stunt troupe. Read in order to see what a later appearance can add to a figure you first encountered through a fragment of the archive.0