Barbara Guest Books

Based on the head-butt happy antics of a real cow in the illustrator's herd, Nosy Noodles: The Curious Cow is the story of a black cow with white legs who is too nosy for her own good! After causing trouble in the barn, among the chickens, and at feeding time, she gets away from the farm and wanders out on her own - and into trouble! Fortunately, Neighbor Joe and his trusty tractor come to her rescue. After giving him a cow-sized lick of thanks, she resolves to be less nosy and nicer. The gentle color illustrations of a vibrant farmscape add the perfect touch to this humorous tale of four-footed adventure.

Based on the head-butt happy antics of a real cow in the illustrator's herd, Nosy Noodles: The Curious Cow is the story of a black cow with white legs who is too nosy for her own good! After causing trouble in the barn, among the chickens, and at feeding time, she gets away from the farm and wanders out on her own - and into trouble! Fortunately, Neighbor Joe and his trusty tractor come to her rescue. After giving him a cow-sized lick of thanks, she resolves to be less nosy and nicer. The gentle color illustrations of a vibrant farmscape add the perfect touch to this humorous tale of four-footed adventure.

I have such vivid memories of this episode. It's the best hunter episode there is, in my opinion. The rapist character, Lloyd Fredericks, played by frederick Coffin, is at once frightening, and pathetic.The opening scene of him in his car, listening to oldies, grabbing latex gloves out of the glove compartment is a compelling beginning.
The camera (cleverly used) follows him to the front door of his victims house, where we see his gloved hands open the door with a key..Interesting. Then once inside in the dark, while his unsuspecting victim is in the shower, we see him pull a stocking mask over his face, grotesquely distorting his features. This is a scary transformation to witness in real time, and, like a good movie, sets the scene in motion. Later in the episode, when we see Dee Dee on the phone with hunter, confirming that she is home safe, and alone, the camera cuts to Lloyd's creepy sheer, stocking masked face waiting quietly upstairs...Dee Dee shows incredible strength +cunning, as she traps the sadistic rapist, as he attempts to attack her again. The imagery, story line, woven 3 different ways, makes for exciting 80's television, and the bad guys smushed features beneath the tight stocking mask, remains the most shocking tv moment from my childhood.

Having been the Captain of a pleasure boat the last 16 years, I found the information contained in Guest Afloat a big help not only to me and my crew, but also to our guests. All too often, my wife and I have invited guests aboard only to realize that our friends have little or no knowledge of what to expect during the voyage. By reading Guest Afoat our friends are introduced to the essentials of cruising so that their apprehension of getting involved in the day to day routine is avoided. The book contains information for both the guest and crew, and I have found many points that I have forgotten over the years. The book is well written and well illustrated and I found the material informative and entertaining. This book should a be "must" for every boats required equipment list.

Otto the Blind Otter is a great children's book. It teaches children kindness and respect to all, It is truly a book that children of all ages may enjoy with their parents. This book will enter into the pages of history with legendary books. It will be a great addition to any childrens library, and will be enjoyed from generation to generation.

Guest offers us an eliptical vision of artistic modernity through a nostalgic lens. Her poetic language is precise and elegant. The poems are not quite as elliptical as those in other recent books of hers. My favorite is "Imagined Room"

Do not forget the sky has other zones.

Let it rest on the embankment, close they eyes...

I can't say I understood this writer's work, but it was very pretty, no not exactly that, it was inventive and sharp, but I didn't really know what was going on. I read it three times, and still didn't know. It's like the moment when an ant falls asleep. You can't quite catch it doing it, and this poetry is something like that. I wish I could talk to the author about what she was up to. This is even harder than Marianne Moore. She is kind of the Marianne Moore of the postmodern set, I'm to understand. Maybe it will take a long time to get her. She feels worth it. Let's keep trying.

Barbara Guest is a very interesting experimental poet. This book is so short -- & thsre are usually so few words on every page -- that it makes for a very good half hour or so of reading. But there's more. If the reader gives enough attention & time to the poems, they become more & more lucid. In their own way, their way of fantastic leaps & enigmatic surprises.

This Book Is good If You prepared To Read stufff That may make You Squeemish I Read It All The Way Through And It Was A Little Icky But They pretty Much Anwsered All My Questions I recommend it IF You Are Ready
It Really Helped Me With My Acne Questions This Book is Helpful

This was a good introductory book for me and my daughter to "break the ice" on her growing up and approaching puberty

I just found this book at a thrift store, and started reading it after i bought it, I cant believe anyone would give this book a bad review, I dont think nine is to young AT ALL, when I was 9 all my friends were talking about all this stuff and I knew nothing about it, I felt secluded and not a part of my class at all, anything I did know is what i had heard my friends talk about but I never got to see the whole picture or find out what the missing peices to the puzzle was, until now,my whole life my parents have always kept these things from me and and never exlplained anything, still today I have not ever heard them say any of the words in this book to me or explain any thing in to me even though I knew bits and peices, I was to embarrassed to ask my friends because i had always played along, I didnt want to feel like an outsider because they thought I knew, and I was to embarrassed to ask my parents!! I love this book and will give it to my little sister when shes old enough!! These are some of the things I have never known the definition of until I read this book: Puberty, period, circumsision (even though are bible teacher talks about it,never told us what it was), tampon (how to use it, how old Ihave to be to use one,Ihave always been afraid to ask,) Ihave always wondered how you can put one in and still pee or can you still pee, now I know!! I am so glad I got this book , I think that parents should give this book to there children as soon as possible so they dont have to go through embarrassment, holding back from asking, and feeling left out, and never finding those missing peices to the puzzle that they have been trying to put together, its there body, they have to experience all these things, they look at these things on there body, and dont know what they are, or what they do, like I have done all these years!! They need this book to find out, if you think some of the pages in the back are to horrible then just copy or scan in some of the book and print of the pages at least so they can know these things , dont RIP OUT PAGES, thats just dumb, they can never be put back like they came out, they will have to be taped and if they pass it down the book will be torn up and ugly and any kid thats gets it in that condition might not even read it!! If your kids are doing things with boys unapropriete and you dont know it and they havent read this because you are keeping it from them because you think it is to disturbing and so called unhelpful, they might not know that they could get a deadly disease, or something they might need to know that might affect them when they grow up and TRY or CANT have your grandchildren because there was something in here that could have helped them, like I saidbefore if you dont want them to have the shole book or some sectiond scan it in, print it off,m copy it, buy the ebook , so you can print it off, or if your brave enough and they dont feel embarrassed read it to them, but give them the info on stds and the important stuff so they know!! If you have comments oon my review please dont hesitate to email me at monkey64224@yahoo.com !! If you have taken your time to read this I want to thank you sooo much!! I hope it has done some good in someone!!

Thanks,
Kristin

My neice's daughter is will be 12 this week and really doesn't have anyone to talk to about "girl things." So, I purchased this book for her. She enjoyed it so much that she read straight through it, coming very close to finishing it the same day she received it.

While I would never, ever, ever recommend this book for girls under tge age of 9 or so, I feel this is an appropriate book for girls ages 10-16.

Yes the book talks about things that may make a parent squeamish, but the book is there so your child gets the information you may not want to come out and say because you are uncomfortable with it.

At times the book is a bit more detailed than I prefer, such as the description of foreplay, however the book is never suggestive or graphic. The information is quite accurate and presented in a mature and gentle fashion.

This book is everything I wish I had known as a preteen and teen that my mother didn't share with me, instead I learned falsehoods from my friends at school. I am much more open and upfront with my daughters but I know there are things they want to ask about but don't know how to ask. It is for those things that I am glad this book is available.

I liked this book better than the other fellow, but I can sympathize with his feeling that these poems make no sense. (I'm just guessing that the other reviewer is a guy, maybe because of the approving reference to August Kleinzahler, a poet unlike any other currently working.) ROCKS ON A PLATTER: NOTES ON LITERATURE to me sounded like a great idea, for Barbara Guest was an infinitely patient reader and any of her opinions on the writing of others were always welcome, sometimes a little astringent, more often felt and generous. So even a book of her table talk a la Coleridge woiuld have been a precious gift.

However these NOTES ON LITERATURE are something more and something less than the subtitle denotes. I believe that each page is her notes on a different text, but she has swept away most of the referents, like sand out of the foyer to her beach house, and so we come to them feeling the generosity and the asperity, but supplying our own texts. Like the Publishers Weekly review who guesses that, if trees are in the first line of the poem, then they are probably the trees branded by John Ashbery in SOME TREES. "No ideas but in trees." Thus a hundred texts propose themselves and disappear, like the same sands you're trying to hold back from the tide, running through your fingers. A feeling of "crewlessness," as she advises.

I misunderstood her and thought it was going to be about rock music, thinking of the way 50s DJ in movies like THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT refer to 45s as "platters." In her work you always hear the surf music, and the other great California invention, the "wall of sound" Phil Spector ran in Los Angeles. "Pockets jingle," she writes. "highly responsive place in the shelter/ of thoee rocks at last the jingle of your pockets/ / HEARD ON THE PAGE." For her it became increasingly a question of punctuation, and indeed what alphabetical characters sat on top of others in the lines of a poem, the way John Cage would spell out the subject of his writing by enlarging one character and lining up the lines so you could read them vertically with greater ease than the horizontal. Must have driven the compositors mad! But then you get the wonderful tips, the tips of her hat to the poeets and prose writers she loved. For example in "Shattered Rocks," where the letters D, H and L line up on top of each other like faces on a totem pole," to salute Lawrence and his animalist, inclusive poetics (and his modernity of course). Like Guest, he was a painter too and thus deeply invested in the ethereal, yet scarily down to earth quality they called "tonality"

All in all ROCKS is a book that will repay dozens of readings. As I say, I was puzzled about it when it came out, and only now, in the silence of mid-August, do I start getting the beat.

This poetry makes no sense. There is a certain pleasure in the deliberate avoidance of meaning and sense, especially if one can ascertain some depth behind the surface. But here the experience of evasion is valued for its own sake, and anyone enamored of the concrete actualities of, say, August Kleinzahler, whose critique of Language I recommend, will find in these poems less than meets the eye.

There is a certain dimension of ironic cleverness that we have a right to expect from soi-disant language writers, but lacking here is that joie de vivre that enlivens language. I'm afraid that a gust of Guest, blowing hard, won't do much more than huff and puff.

Guest is an important poet, but this book of prose sketches or "movie stories" can be appreciated by those who might not find their way into her more ethereal verse. What really comes through is a tremendously subtle sensibility both to language and to the visual arts, expressed with a sharp, intelligent sense of humor.

Very disappointing. This poetry is all defense, no rapture. Guest has managed to go from unsung to overrated without a proper period of acknowledged mediocrity.

This is a beautifully produced book that provides the best entry into the strange and elusive poetry of Barbara Guest, one of the original "New York" poets who has only in the past 10 years come to be more widely recognized. Readers attuned to innovative poetry appreciate Guest for her charmed, ethereal elegance and her elliptical narratives. Check out "A Handbook of Surfing" and "The Emphasis Falls on Reality."