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Derek McDow

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Derek’s Bookshelves

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Derek is Currently Reading

Derek McDow is currently reading

Journeys in Dream and Imagination: The Hallucinatory Memoir of a Poet in a Coma

by Artur Lundkvist

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Feb 26, 2024 07:07PM

Derek McDow is currently reading

Footnotes in Gaza

by Joe Sacco

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Jun 21, 2025 03:04PM

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The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

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Mar 05, 2023 12:46PM

See all 14 books that Derek is reading…

Derek’s Quotes

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

tags: power, sex

7171 likes

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

tags: language, perception, power-of-words

1653 likes

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

tags: books, fuck, profanity, reading

5234 likes

“Can you understand,' asked my father, 'the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mache, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is,' he continued with a pained smile, 'the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

44 likes

“What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'--not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.”
― Martin Amis, Experience

76 likes

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Derek’s Groups

International Reads — 591 members — last activity Aug 31, 2019 08:44PM
This book club's focus is on reading as diversely as possible. We hope to read books we may not otherwise have read or even heard of! This book club ...more

Women and Men — 229 members — last activity Nov 07, 2025 04:09AM
Women and Men began as a reading group for Joseph McElroy's masterpiece. It has developed into All Things McElroy. We have chapter threads for discuss ...more

Reading the Classics — 4049 members — last activity May 10, 2025 07:28AM
This is a group for people who want to read the classics and discuss them as a group. Each month we will choose as a group a book to read. Everyone is ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22572 members — last activity Dec 24, 2025 01:37PM
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

Loosed in Translation — 525 members — last activity Jan 14, 2026 02:22PM
Are you interested in world literature, and works in translation? Come here for recommendations, resources, links, advice on who the best translator o ...more

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