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The Black Bard of North Carolina
by Joan R. ShermanFor his humanistic religious verse, his poignant and deeply personal antislavery poems, and, above all, his lifelong enthusiasm for liberty, nature, and the art of poetry, George Moses Horton merits a place of distinction among nineteenth-century African American poets. Enslaved from birth until the close of the Civil War, the self-taught Horton was the first American slave to protest his bondage in published verse and the first black man to publish a book in the South. As a man and as a poet, his achievements were extraordinary. In this volume, Joan Sherman collects sixty-two of Horton's poems. Her comprehensive introduction--combining biography, history, cultural commentary, and critical insight--presents a compelling and detailed picture of this remarkable man's life and art. George Moses Horton (ca. 1797-1883) was born in Northampton County, North Carolina. A slave for sixty-eight years, Horton spent much of his life on a farm near Chapel Hill, and in time he fostered a deep connection with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of three books of poetry, Horton was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in May of 1996.
The Black Flamingo
by Dean AttaA boy comes to terms with his identity as a mixed-race gay teen - then at university he finds his wings as a drag artist, The Black Flamingo. A bold story about the power of embracing your uniqueness. Sometimes, we need to take charge, to stand up wearing pink feathers - to show ourselves to the world in bold colour. <P><P>'I masquerade in makeup and feathers and I am applauded.'
The Black Flamingo
by Dean Atta"Intensely moving and heart-warming" Cosmo"Bold" Guardian"I loved every word" Malorie Blackman This is not about being ready, it's not even about being fierce, or fearless, IT'S ABOUT BEING FREE.Michael waits in the stage wings, wearing a pink wig, pink fluffy coat and black heels. One more step will see him illuminated by spotlight. He has been on a journey of bravery to get here, and he is almost ready to show himself to the world in bold colours ... Can he emerge as The Black Flamingo? WINNER OF THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE CILIP CARNEGIE MEDALLONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK BOOK PRIZE*The paperback edition has beautiful gold foil added to the striking cover design*
The Black Flamingo (Black Stories Matter)
by Dean AttaFiercely told, this is a powerful coming-of-age story told in verse, from one of the UK's leading poets, Dean Atta. Perfect for fans of Sarah Crossan and Poet X.A boy comes to terms with his identity as a mixed-race gay teen - then at university he finds his wings as a drag artist, The Black Flamingo. A bold story about the power of embracing your uniqueness. Sometimes, we need to take charge, to stand up wearing pink feathers - to show ourselves to the world in bold colour. (P) 2019 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
The Black Riviera (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Mark JarmanYet, these are ultimately poems of survival. Jarman explores the redemptive power of the imagination and the ways in which we transform experience into stories we tell about our lives. His characters vividly express the will to cling to existence and understand it as they pursue the meaning of family, home, identity, and love. Invented memories resurrect a forgotten past, opening doors of possibility and adding a strange richness to everyday life. "Flowers of the flesh,/ Hung on the cliffs to watch and be watched./ Don't let me see reproach, don't let me see it,/ In your eyes. Let me be the only one/ Who knows and tells you."
The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery
by Matt SandlerThe prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolitionDuring the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism—lyric poetry, prophetic visions--to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and US imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.
The Black Unicorn: Poems
by Audre Lorde"Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye." -Adrienne Rich
The Black Unicorn: Poems
by Audre LordeThe Black Unicorn is a collection of poems by a woman who, Adrienne Rich writes, "for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet." Rich continues: "Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye."
The Blank Page: How a Piece of Paper Connects to Everything
by Alberto BlancoIs a blank page really blank? Beloved poet Alberto Blanco pulls back the curtain and illuminates all of the elements hidden in a single piece of paper: the tree it was made from, the rain and sun that allowed the tree to grow, and the people that created it. An enlightening read for readers young and old, it soon becomes clear that a blank page contains the whole cosmos.In The Blank Page, world-renowned Mexican poet Alberto Blanco inspires children and adults to keep looking deeper, to never take things at face value. Charming illustrations by Rob Moss Wilson portray a world that slowly comes to life in a single sheet of paper: first the tree, then the forest, then the people are discovered, revealing the whole interrelated ecosystem of our world. As Blanco says: "Where nothing happens, there is a miracle we are not seeing."
The Blessings of Friendship Treasury
by ZondervanThe Blessings of Friendship, created by New York Times bestselling author and artist Mary Engelbreit, is a playful and poignant treasury of poetry, Bible verses, and quotes that celebrate the joy of friendship. Children will learn from timeless sayings and poems what it means to be a friend—helping, encouraging, listening, sharing with, and loving one another. Colorful and whimsical illustrations bring these words to life, as children learn the value of friendship. Verses from the Bible give us instruction on putting others above ourselves, loving each other, and being kind to one another. This book will make you smile with each turn of the page, remembering old friends and new friends alike.
The Blood Poems (The Albuquerque Poet Laureate Series)
by Jessica Helen LopezThe Blood Poems is one part bloodletting, one part healing, and one part sensuous celebration as Jessica Helen Lopez lays out what it means to be a strong brown woman, a single mother, and the kickass bard that the twenty-first century needs. Lopez openly faces a damaging childhood, sex, divorce, and racial injustice in these poems. She proves that love is as complicated as lovemaking—messy and lusty, raucous and powerful, capable of amazing highs and abysmal lows. She proves that when a woman learns to love herself, she will live a fierce and full life and teach her daughters to do the same.
The Blossoming Lotus: A journey of child abuse, mental illness and recovery
by Sylvie RouhaniEmbark on a transformative voyage of self-exploration and recovery with The Blossoming Lotus. Through moments of heartache, betrayal, hope, joy, poverty, despair, self-loathing, self-love, homelessness, and friendship, the writer learns to love all aspects of herself, recognising that, much like the Lotus Flower that flourishes in murky waters, all of us have the potential to mature into beautiful and powerful beings. This collection of poems, written over the past decade, represents a powerful and inspiring message of hope. ‘I hope you enjoy reading this collection. My prayer is for my messages to reach those who need them the most.’ Sylvie
The Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems
by B. H. Fairchild<P>"[B. H. Fairchild] is the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic."--New York Times <P>Gathering works from five of B. H. Fairchild's previous volumes stretching over thirty years, and adding twenty-six brilliant new poems, The Blue Buick showcases the career of a poet who represents "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (New York Times). <P>Fairchild's poetry covers a wide range, both geographically and intellectually, though it finds its center in the rural Midwest: in oilfields and dying small towns, in taverns, baseball fields, one-screen movie theaters, and skies "vast, mysterious, and bored." Ultimately, its cultural scope--where Mozart stands beside Patsy Cline, with Grunewald, Gödel, and Rothko only a subway ride from the Hollywood films of the 1950s--transcends region and decade to explore the relationship of memory to the imagination and the mysteries of time and being. And finally there is the character of Roy Eldridge Garcia, a machinist/poet/philosopher who sees in the landscape and silence of the high plains the held breath of the earth, "as if we haven't quite begun to exist. That coming into being still going on." <P>From the machine work elevated to high art that is the subject of The Arrival of the Future (1985) to the despairing dreamers of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002) to the panoramic, voice-driven structure of Usher (2009), Fairchild's work, "meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, stakes out an American mythos" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). <P>From "The Blue Buick:" <br>A boy standing on a rig deck looks across the plains. <br>A woman walks from a trailer to watch the setting sun. <br>A man stands beside a lathe, lighting a cigar. <br>Imagined or remembered, a girl in Normandy <br>Sings across a sea, that something may remain.
The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
by Dionne Brand<P>On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard. <P>In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages. In their dialogues—which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems—the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Kiepja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges. <P>Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, language, culture, and time while intimately interrogating the act and difficulty of writing, the relationship between the poet and the world, and the link between author and art. Inviting the reader to engage with the resonant meanings of the withheld, Brand offers a profound and moving philosophy of writing and a wide-ranging analysis of the present world.
The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
by Dionne BrandDionne Brand, author of the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Ossuaries, returns with a startlingly original work about the act of writing itself.On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages--the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained. In The Blue Clerk award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages. In their dialogues--which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems--the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Keipja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges. Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, language, culture, and time, offering beautiful and jarring juxtapositions ("The Wire is the latest version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), and endlessly haunting language ("On a road like this you don't know where you are. Whether you have arrived or whether you are still on your way. Whether you are still at the beginning or at the end. You are in the middle all the time. What would be the sign?"). An essential observer and one of the most accomplished poets writing today, Dionne Brand's latest engages intimately with the act and difficulty of writing, the relationship between the author and the world, and the relationship between the author and art. Profound, moving, and wise in equal parts, The Blue Clerk is a work of staggering intellect and imagination, and a truly sublime piece of writing from one of Canada's most renowned, honoured, and bestselling poets.
The Blue Grove: The Poetry of the Uraons (Routledge Revivals)
by W. G. ArcherOriginally published in 1940, The Blue Grove is a study of the poetry of the Uraons. This unique consideration of the poetry and folk song of the Uraons presents a wide range of poems organised by theme, including dance poems, cultivation poems, and marriage poems. It also includes examples of a Uraon marriage sermon, a Uraon farewell address, and Uraon riddles. The poems are preceded by a detailed analysis of Uraon marriages and dancing, providing important contextual information. The Blue Grove will appeal to anyone with an interest in the rich history of Uraon folk songs, poetry, and dance.
The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems
by Lorna CrozierOver the course of a career spanning three decades, Lorna Crozier has become one of Canada's most beloved poets, receiving high acclaim and numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Poetry Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Award. Now, in this definitive selection of poems, which draws on her eight major collections and includes many of the poems for which she is justly celebrated, Crozier's trademark investigations of family, spirituality, love's fierce attachments, and bereavement and loss have been given a new framework. As a sapphire generates a blue light from within, The Blue Hour of the Day demonstrates Crozier's dazzling capacity to bring depths to light, unfailingly and unflinchingly. It represents the best work of an icon of Canadian poetry.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Blue Mimes: Poems
by Sara Daniele RiveraSara Daniele Rivera’s award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone—all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition.Rivera’s poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English—between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themselves as a means of survival, mimicking the stilted actions of the people they once were. Where speech is not enough, this astonishing collection finds a radical practice in continued searching, endurance without promise—the rifts in communion and incomplete pictures that afford the possibility to heal.
The Blue Split Compartments (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Andrea BradyThe Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring how the physically intimate relationships between military drone operators and their victims are mediated, not only through the technological interfaces of the screen and drone, but also through language and subjectivity. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war' conducted from remote airbases, where pilots in shipping containers surveil and destroy remote 'objects'. Brady's approach offers a sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality that generates legible currents of meaning and orientation. Entire countries have been turned into 'open air prisons', where the buzzing of drones overhead induces profound trauma and changes to social life. These poems strafe a documentary history of drone warfare with personal memory, and reflections on the myths and mechanics of prosthetic violence, voyeurism, masculinity, and desire. The Blue Split Compartments is a bitter comedy in drone erotics, a devastating reach into the twisted soul of murderous techno-surveillance regimes, a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution.
The Blue Tower
by Tomaz Salamun Michael BigginsThe work of this "eminent, still-wild spirit of Central Europe" (Publishers Weekly) continues to electrify. In The Blue Tower, language is remade with tenderness and abandon: "Rommel was kissing heaven's dainty hands and yet / from his airplane above the Sahara my uncle / Rafko Perhauc still blew him to bits." There is an effervescence and a sense of freedom to Tomaž Salamun's poetry that has made him an inspiration to successive generations of American poets, "a poetic bridge between old European roots and the American adventure" (Associated Press). Trivial and monumental, beautiful and grotesque, healing, ferocious, mad: The Blue Tower is an essential volume.
The Blue and the Gray
by Eve BuntingAs a black boy and his white friend watch the construction of a house which will make them neighbors on the site of a Civil War battlefield, they agree that their homes are monuments to that war.
The Blues Comes With Good News: The perfect gift for the poetry lover in your life
by Sonny HallSoul searching poetry for a new generation.Inspired by Diane di Prima, Rene Ricard, Henry Miller and others 'who tell it like it is', The Blues Comes with Good News is a collection of poems by prolific writer, Sonny Hall. The collection ranges from articulating addiction, self-destruction and identity, to romantic relationships, his journey to recovery and his unapologetic depiction of truth, through life and its happenings. At 18 years old Sonny entered a treatment centre for alcohol and drug addiction, after losing his biological mother - who he remained close to despite being adopted aged 4 - to a heroin overdose. Three months into his treatment, Hall started writing poems as a way of ordering 'all the madness' in his head. He has since written hundreds of poems, which all portray his newfound intimacy with life, figuring it out as he goes on, never failing to write sincerely about the sting of life, through a rare candour, explicit and seedy within the realms of his own indulgence. Illustrations by JACK LAVER
The Blues Comes With Good News: The perfect gift for the poetry lover in your life
by Sonny HallSoul searching poetry for a new generation.Inspired by Diane di Prima, Rene Ricard, Henry Miller and others 'who tell it like it is', The Blues Comes with Good News is a collection of poems by prolific writer, Sonny Hall. The collection ranges from articulating addiction, self-destruction and identity, to romantic relationships, his journey to recovery and his unapologetic depiction of truth, through life and its happenings. At 18 years old Sonny entered a treatment centre for alcohol and drug addiction, after losing his biological mother - who he remained close to despite being adopted aged 4 - to a heroin overdose. Three months into his treatment, Hall started writing poems as a way of ordering 'all the madness' in his head. He has since written hundreds of poems, which all portray his newfound intimacy with life, figuring it out as he goes on, never failing to write sincerely about the sting of life, through a rare candour, explicit and seedy within the realms of his own indulgence. Illustrations by JACK LAVER(P) 2019 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
The Body Ghost: Poems
by Joseph LeaseIn this “spare, evocative” collection of poems from the prize-winning author of Testify, “both hope and despair are evident amid [the] music” (Publishers Weekly). “Promise me the rich can’t sleep,” Joseph Lease begs in The Body Ghost, offering poems as light on the page as nursery rhymes, and as powerful as prayer. The title work, which is “broken up into three separate poems, underlines the common thread weaved throughout his collection, the search for a silver lining amongst hardships” (Fourteen Hills). “Electric and electrifying, spontaneous and illuminating,” these poems conjure up the body in pain, the body politic in collapse, and the strength of all that connect us (Tablet).
The Body of Poetry
by Annie FinchThe Body of Poetry collects essays, reviews, and memoir by Annie Finch, one of the brightest poet-critics of her generation. Finch's germinal work on the art of verse has earned her the admiration of a wide range of poets, from new formalists to hip-hop writers. And her ongoing commitment to women's poetry has brought Finch a substantial following as a "postmodern poetess" whose critical writing embraces the past while establishing bold new traditions. The Body of Poetry includes essays on metrical diversity, poetry and music, the place of women poets in the canon, and on poets Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, Sara Teasdale, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Hacker, and John Peck, among other topics. In Annie Finch's own words, these essays were all written with one aim: "to build a safe space for my own poetry. . . . [I]n the attempt, they will also have helped to nourish a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry's heart." Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, Eve, and Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.