Gwendolyn Brooks Selected Poems

Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks

1999

Weight: 6.1 oz

Method of Disposal: Giving Away

If you have not read Gwendolyn Brooks' poetry then you should go do that right away.  It is fantastic.  If you read this book, don't stop here.  My guess is that most of you know her or have at least read, "We Real Cool," as she is the first black person to win a Pulitzer and that is the poem I have seen the most.  I do find it shocking (though I know that I should not) that, given the number of awards she won, I did not hear about her before I went to college.  Read her, share her, and ensure that never happens to another student.  Brooks is too good and too important.

, said the shotgun to the head.

, said the shotgun to the head. by Saul Williams
2003
Weight: 8.5 oz
Method of Disposal: Donating

The look and design of this book is great.  I love that the poem has become an art form in looks and in words.  I loved this book for a long time, wooed by its good lucks.

Re-reading it now, I am less impressed.  In so many words, the book is about God being a woman and about a man being intimate with God.  I bet it makes a lot of Christians angry, which is no skin off my neck.  I just find it to be so particularly man-centric despite all the talk about SHE.  One reveiwer calls it feminsit babble.  I cannot imagine anything further from it.  As there always has been and seemingly always will be, woman is something to be ejaculated on and in even as a deity.  The penis is a gun, a weapon, a spreader of destruction.

Only a man would think of so many ways to fuck, fill up, and wallow around in God if there were one.  At once God is a woman and then later he is fucking God's wife.  I get it.  You have a powerful penis, an obsessive personality, a tendency to dream and ramble, and you feel important and disappointing all at once.  Women are better than you and pissing on them is the only way you feel like you can get close to their holiness. 

All in all, I still think it is a good poem, and the books design is great.  His subject matter is not my cup of tea, but it may be yours.  

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
1993
Weight: 1 lb
Method of Disposal: Left in the Oakhurst Public Lending Library Box Thing

I am in desperate need of a new job.  I must be if I am blogging online about it.  That is a professional no no.  I just must say this last bit anyway, job hunting leads me to despair and questioning my life and trajectory, which makes me think of...Emily Dickinson.

This book is one of the first collections of poetry I ever owned.  I got it as a wee middle schooler, and I loved it through high school.  I cannot remember which poems I loved but, interestingly, this is the only poem bookmarked in the whole 300 + pages:

LOVE VI

If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
as housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.

If only centuries delayed,
I'd count them on  my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen's land.

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I'd toss it yonder like a rind,
And Taste eternity.

But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time's uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.

 (pg 147)

In other exciting news, it is full of four leaf clovers I found in that same time period!  How cool is that?!