what book should I read next?

[Pryderi Agni]

Try this book that I'm currently proofreading for Gutenberg right now: Abraham Lincoln's Cardinal Traits: A study in ethics (Link goes to the Internet Archive, where you can find the digitized original).

[Red-Headed]

Based on my tastes, what book should I read next?
I like biographies

I can personally recommend these:

1/ George Eliot, The Last Victorian ~ Kathryn Hughes.

2/ The Life of Charlotte Bronte~ Mrs Gaskell.

3/ A Life of Matthew Arnold ~ Nicholas Murray.

4/ Sean O'Casey ~ Bernard Benstock.

5/ William Shakespeare ~ Anthony Holden.

6/ Tolstoy ~ Henri Troyat.

7/ John Stanislaus Joyce ~ John Wyse Jackson.

8/ Timebends ~ Arthur Miller.

9/ Looking Back ~ John Osbourne.

10/ Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist ~ Richard Freeborn.

[DM951]

I have just started to get into poetry for the first time, and found a really accessible, interesting read called 'Jazz' by Jeanpaul Ferro. It's by a small indie called Honest Publishing and available on Amazon. Can anyone else recommend any alternative poetry?

[Seasider]

@ Red Headed
Good to know we don't live a Men Only World.

[endgame]

1984 by George Orwell ...i think it's one of the best book of all times.. love it

[stlukesguild]

I have just started to get into poetry for the first time, and found a really accessible, interesting read called 'Jazz' by Jeanpaul Ferro. It's by a small indie called Honest Publishing and available on Amazon. Can anyone else recommend any alternative poetry?

"Alternative" to what...? The number of people who actually seriously read poetry is already minuscule. (Just look at the small number who participate here in the poetry discussions and how few ever think to nominate a work of poetry among the continual "greatest/favorite" book lists.) The number who seriously read Modern and Contemporary poetry is microscopic. If you are just getting into poetry, I question why you would wish to begin with what might be defined as "alternative" poetry. You mention that the book you just read was quite accessible. This is not commonly true of a lot of the more experimental/alternative strains of poetry.

If you seriously want some Modern and Contemporary poets who employ experimental forms, look into:

Anne Carson-Plainwater, The Autobiography of Red
Paul Celan- Collected Poems (tr. M. Hamburger)
Guillaume Apollinaire- Alcools, Calligrammes
Louis Zukofsky- A
Charles Olson- The Maximus Poems
Arthur Rimbaud- A Season in Hell, Illuminations
Andre Breton- Earthlight
Ezra Pound- Cantos
F.T. Marinetti- Selected Poems

If, on the other hand, as I suspect, you are seeking poetry that is accessible as well as being Modern or Contemporary (as opposed to an older classic), then I might recommend some of the following:

Dylan Thomas- Collected Poems
Allen Ginsberg- Howl
Pablo Neruda- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (W.S. Merwin tr.), 100 Love Sonnets
e.e. cummings- Collected Poems
Frank O'Hara- Selected Poems
Octavio Paz- Sunstone
George Barker- Street Ballads
Stevie Smith- A Selection
Galway Kinnell- A Book of Nightmares
Richard Howard- Inner Voices
Anthony Hecht- Selected Poems
Richard Wilbur- Collected Poems
Charles Simic- Hotel Insomnia, 60 Poems

Seriously, if you truly wish to get deeper into poetry you would do well to read some older works as well as contemporary poems as well as check into some books on poetry and its forms and mechanics. New art is built upon the foundation of what went before. Some books I might recommend would include:

Edward Hirsch- How to Read a Poem (and fall in love with poetry)
Burton Raffel- How to Read a Poem
(both poets)
Czeslaw Milosz- A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland- The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Poetry

[ZTay]

Plutarch's "Lives"


Or


Washington Irving's "The Life Of George Washington"

[Waldo]

Going off of your love of biographies and your interest in The Picture of Dorian Gray, I would greatly recommend a biography of the poet Lord Byron. Specifically this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Leg...ref=pd_sim_b_3