Cover of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast

"Like the favorite daughters of a Sufi master, these liberating poems love contradiction and whirling, and intimacy—their seriousness is droll, their humor warm and dark, their fables of selfhood are teasing and honest in marvelous and uncommon ways. They are truly delightful and robustly original—a poetic joy."—Tony Hoagland

Selected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, these poems engage the structures of family and intimacy, exposing the viscera of the everyday, all its frailties and familiarity rendered absurd and remade through language.

Read more

Outside there's a world where every love-scene

begins with a man in a doorway;

he walks over to the woman and says "Open your mouth."

Hannah Gamblehas received fellowships from Rice University, The University of Houston, and The Edward F. Albee Foundation. She teaches literature and writing at Prairie State College and is the poet-in-residence at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 88 pages
Form
poetry

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Animal Eye Shares poetry, contemporary poetry, poems
  2. The Grief Performance Shares poetry, contemporary poetry
  3. Black Box Shares poetry, contemporary poetry, poems
  4. Dispatch from the Future: Poems Shares poetry, poems

“People who read Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Awe
  2. Mercury
  3. Ghost Machine
  4. Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys

“If you want more of the same, start with these.”

  1. The Pisan Cantos
  2. Flying Change
  3. Pierre Reverdy
  4. Keats: Poems

“If it was the poetry that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Master of Disguises
  2. Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You
  3. Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions
  4. Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Selected Poems
  2. Mercy
  3. 20th Century Poetry and Poetics
  4. The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems