The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
Sara Habein on the last book of poems she loved, Richard Blanco’s Looking for the Gulf Motel.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Snow for Wallace Stevens” by Terrance Hayes
The only time I had the privilege to meet Jake Adam York was after a panel he participated in at the 2012 AWP Conference. The panel was called “In White: White Poets and Race,” and I was hooked. For so long I had yearned to write blues poetry, to sit down and dialogue about race and history (as James Baldwin discusses in his essay “Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes”) with other people and through poetry.
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The Last Book I Loved: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place
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The Last Book I Loved: The Unnamed
Little bits of The Unnamed are stuck in my head. A man clinging to a telephone pole in a flood. A daughter and her father on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A sense of loss. A sense of isolation.
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The Last Book I Loved: House of Leaves
There is nothing about the act of reading House of Leaves that is passive. This book requires effort.
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The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
Ernest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers—especially once-famous, forgotten ones.
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The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down
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The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents.
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The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones
My dreams, for so long unrestrained by land, air, or even death—and frequently including scenes of me tumbling through the air on glossy black feathered wings or jumping into an abyss with a smile on my face—now generally take place in a building with four walls and a roof.
...moreThe Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head
The first time I read Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head, I was screening manuscripts for a book prize on my honeymoon. Admittedly, it’s an odd way to celebrate nuptials, but I thought I might read some of the manuscripts during afternoons on the beach.
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The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs
My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself.
The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
Rents, Sick Boy, and sweet addled Spud are the same as ever—only here they are pre-skag and still naïve about a world that will leave them jaded and vicious in a few books’ time.
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The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
The front cover of the last book I loved bears neither gold seals nor laurels to rest on. If you’re looking for flashy art direction, keep moving. Here, there’s just a shadowy still life photo (inventory: one open notebook, one glass ashtray, one bowl, two pens, many loose leaves of paper)
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Last Book I Loved + Tumblr Storyboard
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Tumblr Storyboard!
Building on our Last Book I Loved series, we’re teaming up to highlight Tumblr writers and the books they love.
Got a book you can’t stop thinking about? Send us a writeup – a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it – along with a short bio.
...moreLetter to An Imaginary Friend: Super-Sized Rockin’ Poetry
If Thomas McGrath were a painter, he would apply fat brushes to giant canvasses in complex color and texture. Gershwin’s gloss and the landscape of Copland are tame music compared to his. McGrath writes in the dissonance of Ives – American cacophony in contrasting threads of autobiography and cause, the red-white-and-blue Midwest against a vein of committed activism.
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Jeva Lange: The Last Book I Loved, Life of Pi
Neither of my parents finished reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. My father abandoned the novel halfway through, pleading boredom, and my mother couldn’t get past the first few chapters due to her infamously weak stomach and a detailed lesson in tiger dangerousness.
...moreThe Last (Poetry) Book I Loved: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
As if Anne Carson were a geological epoch, a little ice age or a period of Cretaceous warming, I divide my life into B.A.C. (Before Anne Carson) and after A.A.C. (After Anne Carson). Few people can write like a verb is a dog they command.
...moreThe Last Book I Loved: “Please” by Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown’s Please explores the way love and violence coexist with each other and how the two sometimes intertwine. The collection of poems is categorized by four sections: “Repeat,” “Pause,” “Power,” and finally, “Stop”; the first three sections address self-identification both psychologically and sexually, his relationships with his father, mother, and lovers, and what it is like to tame terrorized beauty.
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Oh Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie” by Philip Appleman
Of all of the people I know who own a smartphone (a majority, anymore), most of them get up in the morning and immediately reach for said smartphone from their cozy nest in bed. The first thing they do is check Facebook and/or Twitter, or they check the news and post links to news stories on Facebook and Twitter.
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Sleeping Lioness” by Larry Levis
As a fiction writer, and as a reader, I gravitate toward stories from the perspective of a specific, imperfect and alert, outward-and-inward-looking consciousness, a transparent eyeball with legs and, at least occasionally, uncomfortable shoes. The danger of a story centered around the drama of attention and understanding—of a character trying to see and not only act but also understand the world—is the ever present pull toward (even temptation of) a resolving moment of insight, an epiphany, that may not be necessary, earned, correctly scaled.
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Y” by Andrew Grace
I always make my students read Andrew Grace’s “Y,” and they always hate it at first. Because undergrads are undergrads and are hung over approximately one hundred percent of Monday and Wednesday mornings. Even the enthusiastic ones balk at the shores of poetry like water-shy horses.
...moreThe Last Web Comic I Loved: Forming by Jesse Moynihan
As a fiction writer, I sometimes get jealous of the storytelling freedom in comics.
With prose writing, everyone seems determined to fit stories into predefined boxes. A work must be “literary” or it must be “genre,” it must be “science fiction” or it must be “fantasy,” it must be “serious” or it must be “comedy,” etc.
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Under the Maud Moon” by Galway Kinnell
A round-
cheeked girlchild comes awake
in her crib. The green
swaddlings tear open
I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers ago, after a short trip to a novel writing workshop in Iowa City.
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “The Bells” by Adam Zagajewski
My maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland in 1924 after experiencing the horrors of World War I. They arrived here with pockets full of hopes and dreams and little else. I never met them; they died before I was born. I know them only through Mother’s stories and the handful of cherished items left her: three Catholic prayer books, written in Polish; a thread supposedly from the robe of the Black Madonna, a Polish saint; and a crucifix for last rites crafted in Germany.
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Alex Gallo-Brown: The Last Book I Loved, Magic Hours
Magic Hours, Tom Bissell’s recent collection of non-fiction, surveys his magazine writing over the last decade or so. It is a genre, he informs us in the Author’s Note, he fell into more or less accidentally; it is also the genre for which he has become best known.
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Michael Jauchen: The Last Book I Loved, Miss Lonelyhearts
I read a lot in the bathtub.
This isn’t because I’m particularly drawn to cleanliness, but because I’m drawn to the readerly space that a hot tub of water can create. The stillness of a full bathtub—that sporadic spigot drip, the lazy drawdown of heat, the tiles’ passionless whiteness—spins a hive of deep focus for me.
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Mark Ellis: The Last Book I Loved, I Am Ozzy
Betsy Stewart: The Last Book I Loved, Birds of America: Stories
I am a voyeur to the core. Keep your house lit at night and I will peer in to see how you spend your time alone, or what colors you’ve painted your walls. Invite me in and I will pick through your bookshelves and look at all your family photos on the mantle while you make me a drink. Ask me to stay and I will rummage through your things for what you’ve been hiding in those closets of yours. Write me a book with characters who are so real and precisely drawn that I can feel their warmth in the seat next to me, and I will sign out of Facebook and devour it.
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Teow Lim Goh: The Last Book I Loved, Storming the Gates of Paradise
Three years ago, I bought Rebecca Solnit’s essay collection, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, on a lark.
At that time I was beginning to write, trying to find my voice. Three years before that, I had moved from the Midwest to Colorado with the boy I would much later marry.
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Alexa Dooseman: The Last Book I Loved, Never Let Me Go
The problem with writing about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is that I can’t discuss the plot. A blend of science fiction and literary narrative, the novel hinges on a secret, a secret so all-encompassing and imposing, so carefully revealed, that if I were to divulge it, I would ruin the book.
That being said, here’s what I can tell you…
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