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Iona

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Iona is Currently Reading

Iona is currently reading

Poems of the Past and the Present

by Thomas Hardy

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""Time, where two immortal shades abide" I don't often read full poetry collections, but Thomas Hardy is just incredible." — Jun 13, 2015 11:10AM

Jun 13, 2015 11:08AM

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Bodies

by Susie Orbach

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Apr 09, 2020 08:20AM

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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

by Mary Wollstonecraft

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Oct 16, 2016 11:56AM

See all 7 books that Iona is reading…

“The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

tags: sadness, solitude

9 likes

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll e flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

29 likes

“It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters... any more than these little things that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'Use unknown.'"
"Yes, but meanwhile -"
"Ah, meanwhile -”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

27 likes

“I mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

7 likes

“. . . once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

tags: marriage

14 likes

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¡ POETRY ! — 22526 members — last activity May 04, 2026 06:38PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more