Recommended Summer Reading - Bernadette Geyer

During the month of June, No Tells is featuring "Recommended Summer Reading" selections by No Tell contributors.


Bernadette Geyers's recommendations:

To me, summer is a time for delight, so I will list a selection of poetry collections that have delighted me. If you ask me again next week, I will probably come up with a completely different list.

Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees by Julianna Baggott (LSU Press)
Wit and sass abound in this collection. In fact, they mambo fiercely together.

Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man - Volume 2 by Marvin Bell (Copper Canyon Press)
This collection poked a cattle prod into my previously staid way of thinking about poetry.

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
If only this had been the version taught in my high school English class!

Selected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco Press)
Fabulist poems with generous doses of subversive politics and inanimate objects that “reprove us constantly for our instability.”

Burning the Empty Nests by Gregory Orr (Harper and Row) Out of print, sorry. But it’s available on AbeBooks.com
How can you resist a poet who is able to make you cry over the love life of a stone?

The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder (No Tell Books)
If contemporary fairy tales could kick sand in the faces of those Brothers Grimm, these would.

Selected Poems by Mark Strand (Knopf)
This was my introduction to how well surrealism can be woven into the fabric of a poem.

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Bernadette Geyer is the author of a poetry chapbook, What Remains, and recipient of a 2010 Strauss Fellowship from the Arts Council of Fairfax County. Her poems have most recently appeared in Los Angeles Review, Waccamaw, Center, and Barn Owl Review.