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Rarity and the Poetic: The Gesture of Small Flowers
by Harold SchweizerRarity is a quality by which things flowers, leaves, light, sound fleetingly appear and disappear, leaving in their wake a resonance of something we just thought we had glimpsed. Each of the nine chapters in this book pursues such intimations of rarity in poetic ideas, images, and silences.
A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought)
by Sheldon PollockFrom the early years of the Common Era to 1700, Indian intellectuals explored with unparalleled subtlety the place of emotion in art. Their investigations led to the deconstruction of art's formal structures and broader inquiries into the pleasure of tragic tales. Rasa, or taste, was the word they chose to describe art's aesthetics, and their passionate effort to pin down these phenomena became its own remarkable act of creation.This book is the first in any language to follow the evolution of rasa from its origins in dramaturgical thought—a concept for the stage—to its flourishing in literary thought—a concept for the page. A Rasa Reader incorporates primary texts by every significant thinker on classical Indian aesthetics, many never translated before. The arrangement of the selections captures the intellectual dynamism that has powered this debate for centuries. Headnotes explain the meaning and significance of each text, a comprehensive introduction summarizes major threads in intellectual-historical terms, and critical endnotes and an extensive bibliography add further depth to the selections. The Sanskrit theory of emotion in art is one of the most sophisticated in the ancient world, a precursor of the work being done today by critics and philosophers of aesthetics. A Rasa Reader's conceptual detail, historical precision, and clarity will appeal to any scholar interested in a full portrait of global intellectual development. A Rasa Reader is the inaugural book in the Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought series, edited by Sheldon Pollock. These text-based books guide readers through the most important forms of classical Indian thought, from epistemology, rhetoric, and hermeneutics to astral science, yoga, and medicine. Each volume provides fresh translations of key works, headnotes to contextualize selections, a comprehensive analysis of major lines of development within the discipline, and exegetical and text-critical endnotes, as well as a bibliography. Designed for comparativists and interested general readers, Historical Sourcebooks is also a great resource for advanced scholars seeking authoritative commentary on challenging works.
Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint
by Mary JacobusMany of Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings include handwritten words and phrases--naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarmé, Rilke, and Cavafy. Enigmatic and sometimes hard to decipher, these inscriptions are a distinctive feature of his work. Reading Cy Twombly poses both literary and art historical questions. How does poetic reference in largely abstract works affect their interpretation?Reading Cy Twombly is the first book to focus specifically on the artist's use of poetry. Twombly's library formed an extension of his studio and he sometimes painted with a book open in front of him. Drawing on original research in an archive that includes his paint-stained and annotated books, Mary Jacobus's account--richly illustrated with more than 125 color and black-and-white images--unlocks an important aspect of Twombly's practice.Jacobus shows that poetry was an indispensable source of reference throughout Twombly's career; as he said, he "never really separated painting and literature." Among much else, she explores the influence of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson; Twombly's fondness for Greek pastoral poetry and Virgil's Eclogues; the inspiration of the Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Twombly's love of Keats and his collaboration with Octavio Paz.Twombly's art reveals both his distinctive relationship to poetry and his use of quotation to solve formal problems. A modern painter, he belongs in a critical tradition that goes back, by way of Roland Barthes, to Baudelaire. Reading Cy Twombly opens up fascinating new readings of some of the most important paintings and drawings of the twentieth century.
Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism
by Sara GuyerReading with John Clare argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which biopolitics is said to emerge simultaneously with romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics and its relation to aesthetics across two centuries. Guyer focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864). Reading Clare in combination with contemporary theories of biopolitics, Guyer reinterprets romanticism’s political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Guyer offers an alternative account of many of romanticism’s foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism. She shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism they denounce. The book thus compels a rethinking of the biopolitical critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.
Real Cowboys
by Jonathan Bean Kate HoeflerIn Kate Hoefler’s realistic and poetic picture book debut about the wide open West, the myth of rowdy, rough-riding cowboys and cowgirls is remade. A timely and multifaceted portrayal reveals a lifestyle that is as diverse as it contrary to what we've come to expect.
A Really Good Brown Girl: Brick Books Classics 4
by Marilyn DumontOn the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. First published in 1996, A Really Good Brown Girl is a fierce, honest and courageous account of what it takes to grow into one’s self and one’s Metis heritage in the face of myriad institutional and cultural obstacles. It is an indispensable contribution to Canadian literature.
Receipt: Poems
by Karen Leona AndersonIn her second collection, Karen Leona Anderson transforms apparently prosaic documents — recipes and receipts — into expressions of human identity. <P><P>From eighteenth-century cookbooks to the Food Network, the recipe becomes a site for definition and disclosure. Like a theatrical script, the recipe directs action and conjures characters. Grace Kelly at a party. In these poems, the pie is a cultural artifact and Betty Crocker, icon of domesticity, looms large. From the little black dress ($49.99 Nordstroms) to an epidural ($25.00 co-pay), Anderson reveals life in the twenty-first century to be equally hampered and enabled by expenditures. Amidst personal and domestic economies, wildness proliferates — bats, deer, ocelots, and fungus — reminding the reader that not all can be assimilated, eaten, or spent.
The Red Files
by Lisa Bird-WilsonThis debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations.Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name from the federal government's complex organizational structure of residential schools archives, which are divided into "black files" and "red files." In vignettes as clear as glass beads, her poems offer affection to generations of children whose presence within the historic record is ghostlike, anonymous and ephemeral.The collection also explores the larger political context driving the mechanisms that tore apart families and cultures, including the Sixties Scoop. It depicts moments of resistance, both personal and political, as well as official attempts at reconciliation: "I can hold in the palm of my right hand / all that I have left: one story-gift from an uncle, / a father's surname, treaty card, Cree accent echo, metal bits, grit- / and I will still have room to cock a fist."The Red Files concludes with a fierce hopefulness, embracing the various types of love that can begin to heal the traumas inflicted by a legacy of violence.
Red Walls Redux
by Mark EsterRed Walls is a collection of twenty-seven poems that look at life's more serious side. The poems delve into death, depression, paranoia, banality...but one also finds melancholic but uplifting musings, such as the wisdom of elders and the merits of fatherhood. Whether the poems are inspired by the author's experiences or imaginary, they echo sincerity and believable accounts. One can feel the emotions flowing through the verses.
Regina and Eddie
by Charlotte GunnufsonRegina Giraffe and Eddie Elephant have to improvise in order to make their raft seaworthy.
La respuesta de la musa
by Michael La Ronn Rocío García RomeroEn esta imaginativa colección de poemas, Michael La Ronn obedece a su musa y crea coloridas experiencias de asombrosa delicadeza. En ellas no hay miedo, nada queda sin explorar, no hay palabras en vano. Esta diversa colección está al nivel de las obras en prosa de La Ronn y lo distingue como uno de los poetas más importantes de la generación del milenio.
Ritual and Bit
by Robert OstromWinner of the 2015 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by Mary Ruefle! The landscape of Ritual and Bit is littered with the speaker's past: empty 40s, old posters, family lies, and fragmented missives. Internal struggles play out in the detritus of long-ago. Yet even as the speaker attempts to cautiously map his movements, effect a survival, and navigate beyond his past, he faces emotional fissures wrought by the present. Throughout the book, he restlessly searches for ways to regain control of his life, partly through ceremonies, prayers, and devotions, and partly through lyrical force. The danger is palpable among wolves and claws, boxcutter and jackknife. There's both caution here and a willingness to abandon caution if anything or anyone could be reached. The poems ask, what makes a home? What should we expect when we are so determined to live in a world where everything is disappearing? "Trust me, says what you are about to read to your beautiful ear." And I do, I trust these quiet poems of deep loss as they spiral their way in and hold my attention, as they meander the strange stream of their own making, and arrive at that wonderful old unnameable place, poetry's heart. --Mary Ruefle, judge
Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems (Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry)
by Connie Wanek Ted KooserFor decades a restorer of old homes, Connie Wanek shows us that poetry is everywhere, encountered as easily in the waterways, landscapes, and winters of Minnesota, as in the old roofs and darkened drawers of a home long uninhabited. Rival Gardens includes more than thirty unpublished poems, along with poems selected from three previous books—all in Wanek’s unmistakable voice: plainspoken and elegant, unassuming and wise, observant and original. Many of her new poems focus on the garden, beginning with the Garden of Eden. A deep feeling for family and for the losses and gains of growing into maturity mark the tone of Rival Gardens, with Wanek always attending to the telling detail and the natural world.
Rock-a-Bye Romp
by Linda AshmanTurning a beloved lullaby on its head, this wonderful read-aloud pairs playful text and enchanting paintings to create a rollicking escapade with a clever premise and a cozy conclusion. &“Rock-a-bye, Baby, in the treetop. How did you ever get so high up?&” That&’s a good question—and this delightful book weaves a gentle fantasy around the baby who finds himself in that very predicament! A marvelous adventure ensues, taking Baby from the tree branches to a farm full of animals to a ride down the river, and finally on a flight through the night sky into the safety of Mama&’s arms.
A Romantics Chronology, 1780-1832 (Author Chronologies Series)
by Martin GarrettThis book covers the life and work of a wide range of writers from Coleridge to Wollstonecraft, Hemans, Beckford and their contemporaries. Also encompassing a wealth of material on contexts from the treason trials of 1794 to the coming of gas-light to the London stage in 1817, it provides a panorama of one of the richest periods in British culture.
Rubén Darío, del símbolo a la realidad (Edición conmemorativa de la RAE y la ASALE)
by Rubén DaríoNueva edición conmemorativa de la Real Academia Española y la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española para celebrar el centenario del fallecimiento de Rubén Darío, uno de los escritores hispanohablantes más importantes del siglo XX. Publicada con ocasión de la celebración del VII Congreso de la Lengua Española en Puerto Rico. Rubén Darío es uno de los escritores en lengua española más populares a ambos lados del océano Atlántico. Su poesía y su narrativa constituyen uno de los principales exponentes del movimiento modernista. Sin embargo, la dimensión literaria de Rubén Darío desborda el ámbito de la ficción. Su labor como corresponsal, llevada a cabo durante gran parte de su vida, propició la escritura de interesantes crónicas en las que el autor ofrece una inteligente visión de su realidad. La presente antología incluye los textos íntegros de los poemarios Prosas profanas y otros poemas y Cantos de vida y esperanza. Los cisnes y otros poemas, y el libro de crónicas Tierras solares, que recoge las publicadas para el diario argentino La Nación sobre su tercera visita a España (1904) y las escritas durante su viaje por Bélgica, Alemania, Austria-Hungría e Italia en el mismo año. La edición presenta estudios complementarios escritos por algunos de los principales críticos, escritores y académicos españoles e hispanoamericanos, además de un glosario, un índice de nombres propios y una bibliografía selecta sobre la obra de Darío. ------------ Ediciones conmemorativas de la Real Academia Española y la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española En 2004 y coincidiendo con la celebración del IV Centenario de la publicación de la primera parte de Don Quijote de la Mancha, la Real Academia Española y la Asociación de Academias de laLengua Española dieron inicio a un proyecto de edición de grandes obras de la literatura en español. Concebida como una línea de ediciones conmemorativas ocasionales y de circulación limitada de los grandes clásicos hispanos de todos los tiempos, dichas obras son publicadas y distribuidas en todo el mundo de habla hispana. Rubén Darío. Del símbolo a la realidad se une ahora a esta colección de la que ya forman parte Don Quijote de la Macha, de Miguel de Cervantes, reeditada en 2015 con ocasión del IV centenario de Cervantes; Cien años de soledad de Gabriel García Márquez; La región más transparente, de Carlos Fuentes; Antología general , de Pablo Neruda; Gabriela Mistral en verso y prosa, una antología de la autora; La ciudad y los perros de Mario Vargas Llosa y La colmena, de Camilo José Cela. ------------
The Ruined Elegance: Poems
by Fiona Sze-LorrainIn her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertész, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment.
S O S: Poems 1961–2013
by Amiri BarakaA New York Times Editors' Choice Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others (New York Times) was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka's rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.
Scarecrow (Wesleyan Poetry Ser.)
by Robert FernandezTaking Dante and other catalogers of failure and ruin (Baudelaire, Trakl, Rimbaud) as its guiding lights, Scarecrow charts situations of extremity and madness: "Are you / insistent? Are you dead? / Are you guilty? Has your / name been lifted, a vein / of earth from earth?" It also charts the insistence of time's passing and with it the awakening to both new and foreclosed possibilities. What will remain for us after the disaster? How will we rebuild? To whom will we address ourselves and with what voice? Also a love poem, one of desire and hope, Scarecrow aligns a tragic sensibility with a faith in the other and in the redemptive power of forgiveness. Within the beauty and strangeness of this work rests an imperative that captures the directive of poetry at its best: "Present yourself / in the full radiance of captivation." In its mystery and defiance, Robert Fernandez's collection does precisely this. An online reader's companion will be available at robertfernandezsite.wesleyan.edu.
The Scent of Eucalyptus: Precious Poems
by Sophie ChenowethThis book is an ode to the fragrant, yet rough-hewn Australian bush. By delving into its pages, you will be transported to a parallel realm where flannel flowers sing, cockatoos choreograph and paperbark trees seduce. A memoir of sorts, this poignant and ethereal collection of poems celebrates the beauty, the harshness and the resilience of this ancient land and its unforgettable inhabitants. In addition, you'll be serenaded by harps and fairies, meander through time in a yellow dinghy and stand in quiet awe as a ballerina beguiles. Refreshingly honest, this waltz down memory lane is intensely emotional but has a lightness that will soothe even on the blusteriest of days. Illustrated with sensitively taken photographs, it is a keepsake you will cherish for many years to come.
Scriptorium: Poems
by Melissa RangeA collection of poems exploring questions of religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary AppalachiaA National Poetry Series winner, selected and with a foreword by Tracy K. SmithThe poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences. In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author's East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal: poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.
The Sea In You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love
by David WhyteRequited or unrequited, to love is to move between homecoming and exile, between the presence and absence of our beloved as well as ourselves. In this collection, human desire pulls with the force and rhythm of a sea tide, emerging from and receding into mysteries larger than any individual life. <P><P>The book begins with the reverential title poem and concludes with four works that reflect the power of place to shape revelation; the way stone and sky and birdsong can point the way home. Whether tracing the sensual devotion of bodily presence or the painful heartbreak of impermanence, the poems keep faith with love's appearances and disappearances, and the promises we make and break on its behalf.
Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet
by Philip FreemanAn exploration of the fascinating poetry, life, and world of Sappho, including a complete translation of all her poems. For more than twenty-five centuries, all that the world knew of the poems of Sappho—the first woman writer in literary history—were a few brief quotations preserved by ancient male authors. Yet those meager remains showed such power and genius that they captured the imagination of readers through the ages. But within the last century, dozens of new pieces of her poetry have been found written on crumbling papyrus or carved on broken pottery buried in the sands of Egypt. As recently as 2014, yet another discovery of a missing poem created a media stir around the world. The poems of Sappho reveal a remarkable woman who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos during the vibrant age of the birth of western science, art, and philosophy. Sappho was the daughter of an aristocratic family, a wife, a devoted mother, a lover of women, and one of the greatest writers of her own or any age. Nonetheless, although most people have heard of Sappho, the story of her lost poems and the lives of the ancient women they celebrate has never been told for a general audience. Searching for Sappho is the exciting tale of the rediscovery of Sappho’s poetry and of the woman and world they reveal.
Selah
by Nora GouldA long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia. Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk -- to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould's second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the heart of a shared house and a shared life. Selah is about living with a husband recently diagnosed with dementia; it's about the looking back and the imagining forward, about saying what cannot be said -- the wayfaring bush and its shadow. It's about finding a way through all this: "The palette darker than I’d planned," yes, but also shot through with humour and care, crafted with both frankness and decorum.
Selected Poems 1968-2014
by Paul Muldoon"The most significant English-Language poet born since the second world war." --The Times Literary SupplementSelected Poems 1968-2014 offers forty-six years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who "began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso" (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as "one of the era's true originals," Paul Muldoon seems determined to escape definition, yet this volume, compiled by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual hijinks and emotional honesty. Among his many honors are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize "for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.""Among contemporaries, Paul Muldoon, one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems--word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury." --Roger Rosenblatt, The New York Times