Here are 100 books that Be With fans have personally recommended if you like
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I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
Hirshfield’s craft of language in this book knocks me off my feet. My head rings in the resonance of her poignant and pointed images.
The way she fuses intimate, personal experience with the immensity of nature and the fearless way she takes on the loss and peril of climate change makes me want to be a better writer and a better human. When I read the poems in this masterful collection, I am at once moved to sadness and awe and inspired to take action.
Jane Hirshfield's urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives' dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth's continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry - loyal instruments…
I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
The poems in this book are intimate conversations between the living, the dead, and the soul. I love these poems because they are at once piercingly direct and also delicate and loving. As my parents enter the final years of their lives, I find myself both celebrating my time left with them and also pre-grieving their loss.
Clifton courses this transom, above and below the ground, with a surety of craft that I can only aspire to in my own work. This collection includes a daily poem journal covering the seven days starting with 9/11. I am struck by this sequence of poems in their ability to cover the nation’s fear and grief, the commonality of the global experience, and the minutely personal, all in a few short lines.
Lucille Clifton's poetry carries her deep concerns for the world's children, the stratification of American society, those people lost or forgotten amid the crushing race of Western materialism and technology. In turns sad, troubled and angry, her voice has always been one of great empathy, knowing, as she says, "the only mercy is memory." In this, her 12th book of poetry, the National Book Award-winner speaks to the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters, the debilitating power of cancer, the open wound of racial prejudice, the redemptive gift of story-telling. "September Song," a sequence of seven poems, featured on National…
I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
Ah, Carver…where do I begin? This collection is packed with gems that, as Dylan sang, glow like burning coal. Carver’s poems make me want to drink too much, lament, get sober, and love so hard that my heart cracks open. These poems make me want to live a damn full life. Most of all, Carver makes me want to blow the shavings off my pencil and write.
This collection is a conversation with poetry and art itself; Carver invokes the pantheon from Balzac to Hemingway to Renoir. I want to join that conversation and write for dear life.
A rich collection of poems from not only “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), but one of America’s most large-hearted and affecting poets.
Like Raymond Carver’s stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy.
This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver’s five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual…
I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
I love poetry that employs new takes on old forms. The sonnet is once again brought alive by Hayes in a collection that feels poignant, playful, and urgent. I personally struggle with writing in the form and am blown away by the range and inventiveness of the nearly 80 sonnets in this action-packed collection.
My experience in reading these sonnets is one of joy: the pointed wit that paints Sylvia Plath as a drama queen and Trumpet (thinly veiled) as sexually tormented, the clear-eyed social and political criticism, the warm, broken, self-knowing heart. This collection rings true to me as a full and authentic ledger of the American experience.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead
"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the…
I am a Professor of Management at the University of York, England. My interest in ambulances and paramedic work is derived from research I have conducted into England’s National Health Service. This is a ‘free at the point of use’ service which, at its best, provides world-class care to citizens without charge. But the system is terribly underfunded. I am always struck by paramedics’ growing clinical ability, compassion, and devotion to their patients. But equally, I’m alarmed by the extent to which ambulance organizations are desperately overstretched, to the point where the system–and its workers face extreme everyday challenges.
This book is engrossing. Because of its fascinating setting, it is unique among the new wave of sociological or anthropological books on paramedic work. Jusionyte has written a remarkable ethnography about paramedics and EMTs working in the US-Mexico borderlands.
While much of the details of ambulance work are familiar, this setting is novel, alien, and disturbing. The book is a powerful critique of the militarization of borders and why this is detrimental, divisive, and degrading. Jusionyte writes with great style and panache; it’s a gripping story crafted in a polemical but persuasive fashion.
I learned a great deal about how the distinctiveness of geographical and political settings can massively influence and shape occupational culture and worker behavior. This is a creative and original work.
"Jusionyte explores the sister towns bisected by the border from many angles in this illuminating and poignant exploration of a place and situation that are little discussed yet have significant implications for larger political discourse."-Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review
Emergency responders on the US-Mexico border operate at the edges of two states. They rush patients to hospitals across country lines, tend to the broken bones of migrants who jump over the wall, and put out fires that know no national boundaries. Paramedics and firefighters on both sides of the border are tasked with saving lives and preventing disasters in the harsh…
I have loved history since I was a child, and very early on, I realized that history was not something that was made only by famous people. My own relatives had migrated, worked at different jobs, served in wars, etc., and ordinary people like them have been the most important drivers of events. I had a chance to study in Mexico in my early twenties and rapidly fell in love with its people and history. Yet, ever since I was a child, I have been interested in the history of wars. My work on the Mexican-American War combines all of these passions.
I have long been interested in Native American and Mexican history, and I found this to be a wonderful book that explains how the actions of Native American groups shaped not only the area that became the American Southwest but also Northern Mexico.
Native Americans in the early nineteenth century did not produce many documents, and I am extremely impressed by DeLay’s ability to recover their history.
An award-winning look at how Apaches, Navajos, Kiowas, and especially Comanches played a decisive role in America's watershed victory over Mexico
"An engaging book that enlivens the debate over the clash between Indians, Mexicans, and Americans in the Southwest."-Gary Clayton Anderson, Western Historical Quarterly
"Action-packed and densely argued."-Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books
In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called "the barbarians" descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across…
I’ve been fascinated with the topic of immigration since childhood. My father is an immigrant, and my mother grew up overseas. My first job after college was working for a youth program for immigrant and refugee kids in Chicago. Now, I am a professor who teaches and writes about migration law. I find stories about how moving across borders shapes people’s lives to be endlessly interesting, bringing up themes of belonging, home, memory, trauma, and identity. I also think that the topic of global migration is intimately linked to questions of justice and equality and requires us all to reckon with the ways in which the colonial past shapes the present.
This book is an unflinching, harrowing look at the violence that borders commit. It is painful but essential reading for anyone who cares about immigration. It permanently opened my eyes to the reality of what happens on the doorstep of the United States every day. After reading it, I could not escape the fact that the US purposefully uses the natural danger of the Sonora desert to help keep people out by killing them.
In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De Leon sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time-the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Leon uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of "Prevention through Deterrence," the federal border enforcement policy that…
I’ve been deeply struck by the rise in violence occurring in Mexico because I have seen it evolve before my eyes while living in and out of the Mexican countryside, places where the wealth and power of drug cartels and their collusion with the state and its institutions, can be seen first-hand. I have come to realize that literature has been the most accurate means of capturing this phenomenon, which has become the zeitgeist of the country, an issue that has bicultural and cross-border connotations because the main consumer is the United States of America, while the ravages of violence are felt in Mexico daily
This novel explores one of the many subplots and dynamics occurring around popular culture and cartel expansion in Mexico.
Following the life of a composer and performer of narco-corridos—a musical genre that sings praises to drug lords and kingpins—, this novel delves into the peripheries of violence and the adulation of drug cartel personalities in mainstream culture while at the same time offering a glimpse at the dangers posed to artists delving into such themes.
Having a composer and musician as the central figure of the narrative makes this novel one of the most lyrical texts exploring subjects of violence.
In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part noir romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.
My own experiences have made me a strong believer in the potential of journeys, big and small, to change our lives and the way we navigate the world. I made a journey in highly unusual circumstances, a journey that became a pilgrimage, and I think I know now that devotion is the key to transformation on the road. It may be the key to everything, in fact. That’s what I want to read about. Devotion is what every one of these books has in abundance, as well as care for the task, total honesty, and no fear of feeling.
A major part of why I read is to feel. Few books have moved me as strongly as this one. I deeply loved John Grady, and reading this book as he fought for love, his life, and the lives of his friends was a terribly painful experience.
Of course, it was worth it for the redemption, the passion and fidelity, the horses, the rivers, and the open plains. The emotions of McCarthy’s characters blaze through their sparse and natural dialogue.
When I emerged, heart wrung out and now strangely energised and peaceful, I felt differently about the world and for a while found it easier to belong to. My sense that beauty could emerge from adversity had been bolstered.
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
The first volume in McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about the passing of childhood, of innocence and a vanished American…
As a child, I learned that I was able to lucid dream at will, speaking to the beings I met in these places I’d never seen before, and it always gave me a sense of interconnectedness. A thread that goes through all of us and our histories. I believe that the ancients dedicated so much of their energy and resources to preserving their stories in order to maintain this connection because it’s so important. Inside all of us is a darkness that, if left unchecked would lead us to ruin. These books all demonstrate the inner struggle we have to understand and redirect that darkness toward the light and the good.
I often ask what the nature of laws and authority is. In the "Old West," when there was no overarching central authority, the survival of the fittest was the law. I’m curious how the clash of the old world with the new becomes a never-ending cycle and where it may lead.
I loved how none of the characters were all good or all bad, they were just survivors. This book is not meant to be liked or disliked. It’s meant to be experienced and "danced with."
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
