- Table View
- List View
Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words (American Readers Series)
by Interviews by Tony LeuzziPasswords Primeval sets aside the artificial boundaries of poetry "schools" and "movements" to cut to the art of the matter. Tony Leuzzi's astounding knowledge of poetry draws new insights from such luminaries as Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirshfield, Patricia Smith, and Martín Espada. These new interviews provide insights into the poets and their poems without losing any of their mystery. Whether you're looking for deeper understanding of your favorite poets or simply interested in the lives of contemporary artists, Passwords Primeval reveals the interconnectedness of these masters whose voices echo each other from opposite ends of the same canyon.
Postcards from the Interior (American Poets Continuum)
by Wyn CooperPostcards from the Interior is a collection of postcard poems written from different geographical locations and varied states of heart and mind. The first section, "Postcards from Vermont," is composed of poems about Vermont towns and historical landmarks. The second section, "Postcards from the Interior," stretches to include poems from far-flung places, real and imagined. Adroit at juxtaposing the exterior weather of landscapes and the interior weather of the human condition, Cooper writes poetry with the heft of a Romantic meditation and the breezy ease of contemporary song lyrics.Wyn Cooper has published three previous poetry collections. A poem from his first book was turned into lyrics for Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song "All I Wanna Do." He lives in Battleboro, Vermont.
Praises & Offenses: Three Women Poets from the Dominican Republic (Lannan Translations Selection Series)
by Aída Cartagena Portalatin Angela Hernández Núñez Ylonka Nacidit-PerdomoAs tropical as it is topical, this landmark anthology gives voice to three powerful women poets from the Dominican Republic. Together they present a wide array of linguistic and stylistic elements, and they address shared political and cultural issues that illuminate what it means to be a woman in the modern-day Dominican Republic. Translator Judith Kerman, who began the anthology as a Senior Fulbright Scholar, notes that "contemporary women poets from the Dominican Republic are the most underserved group when it comes to English-language translations." This anthology remedies that omission with poetry that is smart, edgy, and groundbreaking.
Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin
by Janice N. HarringtonA biographical reflection on the art and life of Horace H. Pippin-the best-known African-American artist of his time-Primitive is a critique on current perceptions surrounding African-American folk art, as well as the absence of key African-American history in present-day curricula. Award-winning poet Janice Harrington connects readers with a fascinating, odds-defying artist, all while underscoring the human need for artistic expression.
Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (American Poets Continuum #No. 21)
by Lucille CliftonBrilliantly honed language, sharp rhythms and striking syntax empower Lucille Clifton's personal and artistic odyssey. Hers is poetry of birth, death, children, community, history, sexuality and spirituality, and she addresses these themes with passion, humor, anger and spiritual awe.
Rail (A Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America #41)
by Kai Carlson-WeeSet against a landscape of rail yards and skate parks, Kai Carlson-Wee’s debut collection captures a spiritual journey of wanderlust, depression, brotherhood, and survival. These poems—a “verse novella” in documentary form—build momentum as they travel across the stark landscapes of the American West: hopping trains through dusty prairie towns, swapping stories with mystics and outlaws, skirting the edges of mountains and ridges, heading ever westward to find meaning in the remnants of a ruined Romantic ideal. Part cowboy poet, part prophet, Carlson-Wee finds beauty in the grit and kinship among strangers along the road.
Red Suitcase (American Poets Continuum #29.00)
by Naomi Shihab NyePoet, teacher, essayist, anthologist, songwriter and singer, Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the country's most acclaimed writers. Her voice is generous; her vision true; her subjects ordinary people, and ordinary situations which, when rendered through her language, become remarkable. In this, her fourth full collection of poetry, we see with new eyes-a grandmother's scarf, an alarm clock, a man carrying his son on his shoulders.Valentine for Ernest MannYou can’t order a poem like you order a taco.Walk up to the counter and say, "I’ll take two"and expect it to handed back to youon a shiny plate.Still, I like you spirit.Anyone who says, "Here’s my address,write me a poem," deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifting across our ceilings the momentbefore we wake up. What we have to dois live in a way that lets us find them.Once I knew a man who gave his wifetwo skunks for a valentine.He couldn’t understand why she was crying."I thought they had such beautiful eyes."And he was serious. He was a serious manwho lived in a serious way. Nothing was uglyjust because the world said so. He reallyliked those skunks. So, he re-invented themas valentines and they became beautiful.At least, to him. And the poems that had been hidingin the eyes of skunks for centuriescrawled out and curled up at his feet.Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give uswe find poems. Check your garage, the odd sockin your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.And let me know.
Refuge (American Poets Continuum)
by Adrie KusserowDeeply cross cultural, humanitarian, political and global poems about how humans deal with suffering across the world. These are poems about cultures rubbing up against each other, war, refugees, child soldiers, spiritual refugees trying to find a home, and a mother who is witnessing these firsthand. Rare ethnographic poetry by a world traveling cultural anthropologist and human rights activist.
Remnants of Another Age (Lannan Translations Selection Series)
by Nikola Madzirov"These poems move mysteriously by means of a profound inner concentration, giving expression to the deepest laws of the mind. Their linguistic 'making' is informed by vivid evidence of a serious self-making, soul-making, and heart-making. We are lucky to have these English incarnations of Nikola Madzirov."-Li-Young LeeBorn 1973 in a family of Balkan Wars refugees, Nikola Madzirov's poetry has already been translated into thirty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the United States, Europe, and Asia. A regular participant in international literary festivals, he has received several international awards including an International Writing Program fellowship at the University of Iowa. Remnants of Another Age is his first full-length American collection and carries a foreword by Carolyn Forché who writes, "Nikola Madzirov's Remnants of Another Age is aptly titled, as these poems seem to spring from elsewhere in time, reflective of a preternaturally wise and attentive sensibility. As we read these poems, they begin to inhabit us, and we are the better for having opened ourselves to them. Madzirov is a rare soul and a true poet.""I SAW DREAMS"I saw dreams that no one remembersand people wailing at the wrong graves.I saw embraces in a falling airplaneand streets with open arteries.I saw volcanoes asleep longer thanthe roots of the family treeand a child who's not afraid of the rain.Only it was me no one saw,only it was me no one saw.
Revising the Storm (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America)
by Geffrey DavisThis debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family.Some nights I hear my father's long romancewith drugs echoed in the skeletal choirof crickets.Geffrey Davis teaches at Penn State University.
Rose (New Poets of America)
by Li-Young LeeTable of ContentsI.EpistleThe GiftPersimmonsThe Weight Of SweetnessFrom BlossomsDreaming Of HairEarly In The MorningWaterFalling: The CodeNocturneMy IndigoIrisesEating AloneII.Always A RoseIII.Eating TogetherI Ask My Mother To SingAsh, Snow, Or MoonlightThe LifeThe WeepersBraidingRain DiaryMy Sleeping Loved OnesMnemonicBetween SeasonsVisions And Interpretations
Rue (American Poets Continuum #176)
by Kathryn NuernbergerIn this fiercely feminist ecopoetic collection, Kathryn Nuernberger reclaims love and resilience in an age of cruelty. As the speaker—an artist and intellectual—finds herself living through a rocky marriage in conservative rural Missouri, she maintains her sense of identity by studying the science and folklore of plants historically used for birth control. Her ethnobotanical portraits of common herbs like Queen Anne’s lace and pennyroyal are interwoven with lyric biographies of pioneering women ecologists whose stories have been left untold in textbooks. With equal parts righteous fury and tender wisdom, Rue reassesses the past and recontextualizes the present to tell a story about breaking down, breaking through, and breaking into an honest, authentic expression of self.
Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (American Poets Continuum #125)
by Sean Thomas Dougherty"These soul-infused, deftly crafted stanzas pulse with the rhythms of a poet who lives his life out loud. Sean Thomas Dougherty has always shunned convention in favor of his fresher landscapes-and this book will be the one that stamps his defiant signature on the canon."-Patricia SmithSasha Sings the Laundry on the Line is a powerful, grief-driven, deeply felt collection that finds the beautiful and the true, the little epiphanies that give our lives meaning no matter how ephemeral they might be.The author of ten previous poetry collections, Sean Thomas Dougherty teaches poetry at Case Western University and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio.
Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (American Poets Continuum)
by Matthew ShenodaWeaving narratives of ancient and contemporary Egypt while exploring ecological shifts of the Nile Valley, Matthew Shenoda is a voice at the crossroads of the African continent and its diasporas. Amiri Baraka says, "Matthew Shenoda’s poetry will open your mind to another world that exists inside and outside of your own." Winner of the 2006 American Book Award for his debut collection, Somewhere Else, Shenoda is a younger poet with his eyes set on the larger issues of history, politics, and culture.Matthew Shenoda lives in Los Angeles, California. He is on the faculty of the MFA program at Goddard College.
Second Nature
by Chaun BallardWinner of the 23rd annual Poulin Prize Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences, historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban. Riddled with the ghostly voices of family and friends, Second Nature is fearless in its wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In these poems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglass have a conversation, Michael Brown meditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings in sonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a new generation. Through innovative re-imaginings of the sonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popular culture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form and content, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife, and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintain structures of oppression. Interspersed with quotations and inspired by the rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenoda who provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature is a testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we come from, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped by community and country.
Seed in Snow
by Knuts SkujenieksThis first U.S. publication of Knuts Skujenieks-one of Latvia’s foremost poets-is the author’s most important and widely-translated body of work. Convicted in 1962 of anti-Soviet sentiment, Skujenieks wrote these poems during seven years of imprisonment at a labor camp in Mordovia. Vivid and expressive, this collection overcomes the physical experience of confinement in order to assert a limitless creative freedom.
Shame / Shame
by Devin Becker"Devin Becker's Shame | Shame is a brilliant debut collection. Here, the prose poem has been re-imagined as a cinematic vignette, yet rooted as deeply in the American Northwest as anything in Richard Hugo and David Lynch. Raw, intimate, and elliptical in its metaphysics, Devin Becker's poetry captures an idiomatic recklessness while navigating those angular narratives of our contemporary lives."—David St. John Devin Becker grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and lives in Moscow, Idaho, where he works as digital initiatives librarian at the University of Idaho Library. He was named a 2014 "Mover and Shaker" by Library Journal.
Sharp Stars (American Poets Continuum #119.00)
by Sharon BryanSharon Bryan’s fourth poetry collection blends such disparate subjects as biology, astronomy, sports, philosophy, and music to probe humankind’s desire for spiritual, even physical, transcendence. From Charles Mingus to Charles Barkley, from Buddy Holly to Bishop Berkeley, no reference is squandered in Bryan’s prodigious imagination.Sharon Bryan’s awards include the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Prize from The Nation, and two NEA fellowships. She has published three poetry collections and edited Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life and Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition. She is a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
Sky Country (American Poets Continuum)
by Christine KitanoChristine Kitano's second poetry collection elicits a sense of hunger-an intense longing for home and an ache for human connection. Channeling both real and imagined immigration experiences of her own family-her grandmothers, who fled Korea and Japan; and her father, a Japanese American who was incarcerated during WWII-Kitano's ambitious poetry speaks for those who have been historically silenced and displaced.Christine Kitano's first collection of poetry, Birds of Paradise, was published by Lynx House Press. She lives in Ithaca, NY, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing, poetry, and Asian American literature at Ithaca College.
Slope of the Child Everlasting (American Poets Continuum)
by Laurie KutchinsSlope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins’ previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination. Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and spends her summers along the Wyoming-Idaho border. The Night Path won the 1997 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions.
Smoke (American Poets Continuum #Vol. 62)
by Dorianne LauxDorianne Laux’s long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted-poetry that "gets hard in the face of aloofness," in the words of one reviewer. In Smoke, as in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In "The Shipfitter’s Wife," a woman recalls her husband’s homecoming at the end of his work day:Then I’d open his clothes and takethe whole day inside me-the ship’sgray sides, the miles of copper pipe,the voice of the foreman clangingoff the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of leadkissing metal. The clamp, the winch,the white fire of the torch, the whistle,and the long drive home.And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures:Who would want to give it up, the coala cat’s eye in the dark room, no one therebut you and your smoke, the windowcracked to street sounds, the distant criesof living things. Alone, you are almostsafe . . .With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. Laux was the judge for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Contest, and is a tenured professor in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Smugglers
by Ales DebeljakThe poems in Smugglers move through rapid historical shifts and meditations on personal experience, exploring the depths and limits of comprehension through the people and geography of the Balkans. Ultimately, Aleš Debeljak's urban imagination creates a mosaic—intimate and historical—of a vanished people and their country. Every poem in Smugglers is sixteen lines long—four quatrains, a common form for Debeljak. This structural regularity is reinforced by a commitment to visual balance, with each poem working as a kind of grid into which the poet pours memories and associative riffs.From "Bookstore":At least you are blessed. Winter's here. In darkness, awakesince yesterday, I came to browse again through the titles of oldbooks, wobbly skyscrapers, writers of my youth and stiffened honey.No opening hours on the door, a minor poet with no womansits behind files in the front. I know him from whenwe all shouted in one loyal voice, collected works on salefor a handful of cents, read the holy Kapitallike zealots. Well, okay: not exactly all. Some of us tookanother road . . .Aleš Debeljak's books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Slovak, Finnish, Lithuanian, and Italian translations. He teaches in the department of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.Brian Henry is the author of ten books of poetry and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award. He teaches at University of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia.
Sons of Salt
by Yaccaira SalvatierraVolcanic eruptions and waves collide in Yaccaira Salvatierra’s explosive debut collection Sons of Salt, which explores the duality of personal and political landscapes as well as legacies of violence within Mexican-American communities.Sons of Salt poignantly captures the experiences of mothers who battle for their sons’ wellbeing, particularly when fathers are absent due to systemic oppressions.Salvatierra’s verse breaks the bones of poetic form to bring attention to the failures of a conceptually western God who has categorically failed to protect His children, and gives birth instead to a god of nature.Weaving self-made mythology, mourning, and maternal fear into visual and narrative poems, Salvatierra creates a collection that probes the deepest hurt to ensure the holiest redemption.
Struggling Times (American Poets Continuum)
by Louis SimpsonPulitzer Prize–winning poet Louis Simpson has been a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in the West Indies, Simpson immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. He studied at Columbia University, then served the US Army in active duty in Europe during World War II. After the war he continued his studies at Columbia and at the University of Paris. While living in France, he published his first book of poems, The Arrivistes (1949).The poems in Struggling Times find Simpson’s distinct imaginative voice working at its full poetic power. Both timely and personal, the poems reveal Simpson’s ongoing quarrel with suburban America, as well as the American government’s struggle to retain its integrity and honor in the midst of its own aggression and worldwide strife.You have to be carefulwhat you hear or see.In Afghanistan I sawthe man and the womanwho were caught in adulteryburied up to their heads.Their children were broughtand told to throw stones.I can still see the headstwisting on the ground.The poor devil in Papillonwith his head in the guillotine . . .but Goya’s half-buried doglooking up at the skyI think was the worst of all."This is the Jamaican-born Simpson's 18th collection; its dry trimeters and tragic resignations should certainly please the faithful fans... Yet the new poems, as much as any in his oeuvre, leave room for unexpected happiness...Simpson believes in endurance and the rewards of the ordinary. He can, at his best, make his readers believe in those things too." --Publishers WeeklyLouis Simpson’s last book, The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001, (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003) was finalist for the National Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His other honors include the Prix de Rome, Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and the Columbia Medal for Excellence.
Tell Me (American Poets Continuum)
by Kim AddonizioIn this new collection by the author of the award-winning The Philosopher's Club, Kim Addonizio takes the grist of the world and transforms it into poems of transcendent beauty. The dual themes of love and loss are pervasive in Addonizio's poems, made poignant by her keen eye and wise observations.