You Kiss by th' Book
New Poems from Shakespeare's Line
Published on 22. March 2016
108 pages
978-1-4521-4856-4 (ISBN)
Description
Inspired by Shakespeare, an award-winning poet creates "smart, surprising and affecting [poetry]... Poems that are easy to read and difficult to forget" (David Scott Kastan, Yale University).
In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto's fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of "thee" and "thine," kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the bard's time and language and our own here and now.
"I read Gary Soto's poems with delight. There's no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him." -Gerald Stern, National Book Award-winning poet
"Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world." - Publishers Weekly
"Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller... Intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults." -Martin Espada, National Book Award-winning poet
"Shakespeare's words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased." - The Norton Shakespeare
In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto's fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of "thee" and "thine," kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the bard's time and language and our own here and now.
"I read Gary Soto's poems with delight. There's no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him." -Gerald Stern, National Book Award-winning poet
"Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world." - Publishers Weekly
"Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller... Intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults." -Martin Espada, National Book Award-winning poet
"Shakespeare's words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased." - The Norton Shakespeare
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03/2016
Chronicle Books
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Person
Gary Soto is the author of 11 poetry collections for adults, including New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and publications. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Content
- Cover
- Title
- Dedication
- Copyright
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- CONTENTS
- Introduction
- ONE
- I'll not budge an inch
- This wish I have, then ten times happy me
- What's in a name? That which we call a rose
- Words are no deeds
- You kiss by th' book
- One half of me is yours, the other half yours
- 'Tis like a pardon after execution
- My salad days, when I was green in judgment
- The sight of lovers feedeth those in love
- Who alone suffers, suffers most i' the mind
- What would you have me do?
- For ever and a day
- All that glisters is not gold
- A stage, where every man must play a part
- Love will not be spurred to what it loathes
- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
- This above all: to thine own self be true
- Most true it is that I have looked on truth
- The more I give to thee, the more I have
- Men's flesh preserved so whole do seldom win
- Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes
- My thoughts are whirlèd like a potter's wheel
- Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee
- Pitchers have ears
- Take him and cut him out in little stars
- That comfort comes too late
- We would, and we would not
- Love is blind, and lovers cannot see
- TWO
- What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl?
- You blocks, you stones
- Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse
- The evil that men do lives after them
- Drunk? and speak parrot?
- The fault and glimpse of newness
- The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt
- The time will come that foul sin, gathering head
- They come not single spies, but in battalions
- Who so firm that cannot be seduced?
- This fellow is wise enough to play the fool
- 'Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss
- To have seen much and to have nothing
- Nothing will come of nothing
- He can speak French
- and therefore he is a traitor
- To say there is no vice but beggary
- What village, friends, is this?
- By the pricking of my thumbs
- Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No.
- Every man has his fault, and honesty is his
- He jests at scars that never felt a wound
- But for mine own part, it was Greek to me
- He hath not drunk ink
- An honest tale speeds best being plainly told
- How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?
- If money go before, all ways do lie open
- I have a touch of your condition
- My pride fell with my fortunes
- Neither a borrower nor a lender be
- He hath eaten me out of house and home
- I am a great eater . . .
- But yet I run before my horse to market
- The king was weeping-ripe for a good word
- It lies as coldly in him as fire in a flint
- Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind
- We must not make a scarecrow of the law
- For they say an old man is twice the child
- There's many a man hath more hair than wit
- To kings that fear their subjects' treachery
- To one not sociable
- The colt that's backed and burdened being young
- Have is have, however men do catch
- THREE
- Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath
- Th' inaudible and noiseless foot of time
- What do you read, my lord?
- Youth's a stuff will not endure
- There comes the ruin, there begins confusion
- This disease is beyond my practice
- We see which way the stream of time doth run
- Marry, this is the short and the long of it
- Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer?
- Every one can master a grief but he that has it
- And one man in his time plays many parts
- I wasted time, and now doth time waste me
- And many strokes, though with a little axe
- Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth
- Sir, I'm a true laborer
- The wheel is come full circle
- Since brevity is the soul of wit
- His worse fault is that he is given to prayer
- Die single, and thine image dies with thee
- There's place and means for every man alive
- Saint Peter . . . shows me where the bachelors sit
- Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
- We are such stuff . . . rounded with a sleep
- About the Author
- Chronicle Ebooks
- Blank Page
