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The Metaphor of Celebrity
by Joel DeshayeThe Metaphor of Celebrity is an exploration of the significance of literary celebrity in Canadian poetry. It focuses on the lives and writing of four widely recognized authors who wrote about stardom - Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Irving Layton, and Gwendolyn MacEwen - and the specific moments in Canadian history that affected the ways in which they were received by the broader public.Joel Deshaye elucidates the relationship between literary celebrity and metaphor in the identity crises of celebrities, who must try to balance their public and private selves in the face of considerable publicity. He also examines the ways in which celebrity in Canadian poetry developed in a unique way in light of the significant cultural events of the decades between 1950 and 1980, including the Massey Commission, the flourishing of Canadian publishing, and the considerable interest in poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, which was followed by a rapid fall from public grace, as poetry was overwhelmed by greater popular interest in Canadian novels.
The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers)
by Gilbert M. Joseph Timothy J. HendersonThe Mexico Reader is a vivid introduction to muchos Méxicos—the many Mexicos, or the many varied histories and cultures that comprise contemporary Mexico. Unparalleled in scope and written for the traveler, student, and expert alike, the collection offers a comprehensive guide to the history and culture of Mexico—including its difficult, uneven modernization; the ways the country has been profoundly shaped not only by Mexicans but also by those outside its borders; and the extraordinary economic, political, and ideological power of the Roman Catholic Church. The book looks at what underlies the chronic instability, violence, and economic turmoil that have characterized periods of Mexico’s history while it also celebrates the country’s rich cultural heritage. A diverse collection of more than eighty selections, The Mexico Reader brings together poetry, folklore, fiction, polemics, photoessays, songs, political cartoons, memoirs, satire, and scholarly writing. Many pieces are by Mexicans, and a substantial number appear for the first time in English. The Mexico Reader explores what it means to be Mexican, tracing the history of Mexico from pre-Columbian times through the country’s epic revolution (1910–17) to the present day. The materials relating to the latter half of the twentieth century focus on the contradictions and costs of postrevolutionary modernization, the rise of civil society, and the dynamic cross-cultural zone marked by the two thousand-mile Mexico-U.S. border. The editors have divided the book into several sections organized roughly in chronological order and have provided brief historical contexts for each section. They have also furnished a lengthy list of resources about Mexico, including websites and suggestions for further reading.
The Middle Ages
by Roger FanningA new collection from a Whiting award and National Poetry Series winner. Thomas Lux has called Roger Fanning "an American original...[whose] poems are so pure, so piercing, so simple, so distilled that reading him is like taking a drunk-with-language dive into a moonlit lake on a night you believe you will live forever!" Fanning writes surprising and evocative poems that are filled with humor and ingenuity; Mary Karr says he "tunes us in to those minuscule instants of revelation that can keep life from being a long zombie convention." This new collection of poems, Fanning's first in more than ten years, in part chronicles a period of time when he suffered a break with reality, and continues his investigations into the drudgeries, the disappointments, and the joy of our daily lives.
The Middle English Breton Lays
by Eve Salisbury Anne LaskayaThis volume is the first to make the Middle English Breton lays available to teachers and students of the Middle Ages. Breton lays were produced by or after the fashion of Marie de France in the twelfth century and claim to be literary versions of lays sung by ancient Bretons to the accompaniment of the harp. The poems edited in this volume are considered distinctly English Breton lays because of their focus on the family values of late medieval England. With the volume's helpful glosses, notes, introductions, and appendices, the door is opened for students to study Middle English poetry and the medieval family alike.
The Midnight Court and Other Poems: And Other Poems
by Frank O'ConnorA bawdy and boisterous poem of Ireland, translated by one of its most distinguished literary sons. As a teacher and translator of Irish verse, Frank O’Connor brought to the world’s attention many fine poems from his native land, few as enduring—and none as controversial—as Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court.An eighteenth-century masterpiece widely recognized as the greatest comic poem in Irish literature, The Midnight Court is a hilarious and insightful take on the battle of the sexes. In the court of a fairy queen, the men and women of Ireland air their grievances with one another. The competing lists of complaints are as long as they are uproarious, and when the queen rules in favor of the women, all young Irish bachelors are doomed to a terrible fate: marriage.The Midnight Court has now taken its rightful place in the Irish literary canon, but when O’Connor’s English translation was first published in 1945, the Irish government banned it as obscene. In a delicious irony that might have been lifted from one of O’Connor’s short stories, the Gaelic original met with no censure. Here, as it first appeared, is Frank O’Connor’s faithful, funny, and eloquent translation of one of the most important works in Irish literature.
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
by Christopher Bing Henry LongfellowIn his magnificent interpretation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellows poem, Christopher Bing seamlessly weaves history and imagination into a rich portrait of an American hero. A meticulous researcher, Bing includes material that provides texture to history, maps that follow the British campaign to quell the rebellious citizenry, as well as the patriots ride into the Massachusetts night of April, 1775. Documents firmly affixed into the book, including the British generals orders to his troops and Reveres own deposition relating the events, give the reader not only a visual experience but a tactile one as well. Far more than a brilliantly presented history lesson, this book represents a tour de force of coherent artistic vision. In an extraordinary series of rich and moody engravings, from the mysteriously shimmering rigging of the British sloop, The Somerset, looming in a moonlit Boston harbor to the taut urgency of a man and his horse galloping at a combustible moment in the American experience, this book illuminates our country's past unlike any other.
The Mighty Slide
by Allan Ahlberg‘This is the storyOf Alison Hubble,Who went to bed single,And woke up double.’Here, in verse, are the hilariously original stories of a mighty slide, a man who fought crocodiles, a girl who doubled, a couple of baby skinners and a thing that lived under a school. A wonderful collection from Allan Ahlberg, author of ‘Please Mrs Butler, Woof!’ and ‘Happy Families’, illustrated throughout with delightful drawings by Charlotte Voake.
The Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings
by Mary Ann CawsAn exciting new collection of the essential writings of surrealism, the European avant-garde movement of the mind’s deepest powers Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the powers of the creative act without thinking. Max Ernst, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon created a movement that spread wildly to all corners of the globe, inspiring not only poetry but also artists like Joan Miro and René Magritte and cinematic works by Antonin Artaud, Luis Bunuel, and Salvador Dalí. As the editor, Mary Ann Caws, says, “Essential to surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever marvelous object we might come across, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived.” Here are the gems of this major, mind-bending aesthetic, political, and humane movement: writers as diverse as Aragon, Breton, Dalí, René Char, Robert Desnos, Mina Loy, Paul Magritte, Alice Paalen, Gisele Prassinos, Man Ray, Kay Sage, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven are included here, providing a grand picture of this revolutionary movement that shocked the world.
The Milk Hours: Poems
by John JamesWinner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize: A &“luminous [and] memorable&” debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss (Publishers Weekly). &“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.&” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations. While John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: What is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse? &“A poet of staggering lyricism, intricate without ever obscuring his intent. Quite simply, The Milk Hours announces the arrival of a great new talent in American poetry.&” —Shelf Awareness
The Milk of Amnesia (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #55)
by Danielle Janessfire / and water surging on the screen - / since children, metros, planets, beds, and lovers are / so lightly swept away - I must not even breathe. Danielle Janess's debut poetry collection resists the erasing effects of war, nationalism, and forced migration. Following the speaker's arduous relocation to a twenty-first-century Europe still etched with the wounds of the past, the poems take on daring forms and language, becoming theatre, film clips, photographs, and dance, all embodied by a cast of characters marked by the violence of the last century. Arrested in Warsaw within the first twenty days of the Second World War, Janess's maternal grandfather was sent to a Soviet gulag where he survived for three years before joining the Free Polish Army in Russia and later the battle of Monte Cassino in the Italian Campaign. Many of the poems in The Milk of Amnesia grow from the soil of Warsaw and Berlin, where the poet-speaker catapults herself and her young child in an effort to locate and unearth their family inheritance. Drawing from the tradition of poetry of witness, The Milk of Amnesia performs a visionary resistance, lit with signposts in a charged atmosphere. An address to our ongoing struggles with historical memory, these poems act as both artifact of and antidote to our time.
The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Mark RudmanIn this captivating sequel to his award-winning Rider, Mark Rudman reclaims a sacred space for poetry. The Millennium Hotel is a world of dazzling imitations, a vast casino where personal narrative is recognized as a fiction and death always holds the winning hand. Rudman asks, "How not to be seduced by the new?" as he illustrates the intimate ways in which facade, gender, and memory inform both our private and public realms.Here the interlocutor's voice shifts and freely crosses gender lines, especially in poems about early erotic experience. Mothers, daughters, lovers, and wives are passionately engaged. Its inclusiveness and wide range of tonal registers enable The Millennium Hotel to blend seamlessly the intimate, the social, the comic, and the apocalyptic. The book moves like a series of sonatas, melding childhood, the diaspora, and eros.
The Milwaukee Anthology (Belt City Anthologies)
by Justin KernA collection of essays, art, stories, and poetry that offer a nuanced portrait of Milwaukee in all its hope and hurt, weirdness and wonder.The Milwaukee Anthology presents a rich mosaic of one of America&’s toughest zip codes. With a diverse range of perspectives, authors and artists share honest first-hand stories about Riverwest, Sherman Park, Hmong New Year&’s shows, 7 Mile Fair, the Rolling Mill commemoration, and much more. Edited by Justin Kern, and with more than fifty contributors including Dasha Kelly, Pardeep Kaleka, and Michael Perry, this collection includes stories about: Redlining in the city Painting a community mural in Sherman Park Reflections after the Oak Creek Sikh Temple Shooting The city&’s upstart microbrewing industry The rise of Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks
The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poetry At The Extremes Of Feeling
by Robert PinskyA bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall—its title inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem—acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound. With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry. Guided by “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.
The Mind-Body Problem: Poems
by Katha PollittPollitt now enjoys national fame for her political columns and her personal essays; she gained attention earlier, though, as a poetAntarctic Traveller (1982) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Twenty-seven years later, this second collection shows her fine ear and eye, urbane tones, attention to the ups and downs of middle age and motherhood, and her debts to Elizabeth Bishop, whose most ardent fans will find Pollitt at her worst derivative, but at her best a wise and worthy heir. Shore Road just rewrites Bishop's Filling Station (somebody/ crew-cuts the crab-grass. . . puts out the plastic lawn chairs). Poems about biblical scenes and characters seem thin compared to Bishop's prodigal son. Yet when Pollitt uses Bishop's careful and careworn tones for autobiography, she achieves wry, urbane retrospect and a power all her own: Old Sonnets, for example, recalls Pollitt's undergraduate poetic ambitions; Always Already considers how the adult writer loses herself in the forest of other works, where culture is a kind of nature,/ a library of oak leaves,/ muttering their foregone oracles. No one is likely to call Pollitt's verse radically new. Yet these poems can rise far above their promptings, as fleeting verse about an urban scene can rise to representative powers: often enough, Pollitt does. (June) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays
by Garrett HongoA volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. The Mirror Diary tracks the emergence of an original poetic voice and a learned consciousness amid multiple and sometimes competing influences of complex literary traditions and regional and ethnic histories. Beginning with a literary inquiry into the history of Japanese Americans in Hawai`i and California, Garrett Hongo draws on his own history to consider the mosaic of American identities—personal, cultural, and poetic—in the context of a postmodern diaspora. Hongo’s essays attest to the breadth of what he considers his cultural inheritance and literary antecedents, ranging from the poets of China’s T’ang Dynasty to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Charles Olson. He explains free-verse prosody by way of John Coltrane’s jazz; praises his contemporaries, poets David Mura, Edward Hirsch, and Mark Jarman; and acknowledges his mentors, Bert Meyers and Charles Wright. In other pieces he engages with controversies and contestations in contemporary Asian American literature, confronts the politics of race and the legacy of Japanese American internment during World War II, offers paeans to the Hawaiian landscape, and addresses immigrants newly arrived in America with a warm welcome. The Mirror Diary is the work of a poet fully engaged with contemporary politics and poetics and committed to the study and celebration of diverse traditions.
The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women
by Dick DavisAn anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before, from acclaimed scholar and translator Dick Davis.A Penguin ClassicThe Mirror of My Heart is a unique and captivating collection of eighty-three Persian women poets, many of whom wrote anonymously or were punished for their outspokenness. One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe'eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society's social extremes--many were princesses, some were entertainers, but many were wives and daughters who wrote simply for their own entertainment, and they were active in many different countries - Iran, India, Afghanistan, and areas of central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. From Rabe'eh in the tenth century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the twenty-first, the women poets found in The Mirror of My Heart write across the millennium on such universal topics as marriage, children, political climate, death, and emancipation, recreating life from hundreds of years ago that is strikingly similar to our own today and giving insight into their experiences as women throughout different points of Persian history. The volume is introduced and translated by Dick Davis, a scholar and translator of Persian literature as well as a gifted poet in his own right.
The Mirrormaker: Poems
by Brian LaidlawThe author of The Stuntman melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota&’s Iron Range. Songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw follows up The Stuntman with another collection that fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song &“Girl from the North Country.&” But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction. In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession—&”The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea&” —and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download. Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love. &“Laidlaw is a futuristic country poet-singer in the other side of the century&’s mirror, where consumption, celebritifying, and commodification rule as the earth rots from the inside out . . . living proof that the bard is still with us.&” —Gillian Conoley
The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems (Phoenix Poets)
by Michael CollierA collection of poetry spanning the career of distinguished poet Michael Collier. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, a friendship with a disgraced Catholic bishop, his father’s encounter with Charles Lindbergh, Lebanese beekeepers, a mother’s sewing machine, or a piano in the woods, he does so with the syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and a flawless ear that has made him one of America’s most distinguished poets. These poems cross expanses, connecting the fear of missing love and the bliss of holding it, the ways we speak to ourselves and language we use with others, and deep personal grief and shadows of world history. The Missing Mountain brings together a lifetime of work, chronicling Collier’s long and distinguished career as a poet and teacher. These selections, both of previously published and new poems, chart the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of is passions and concerns.
The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems (Phoenix Poets)
by Michael CollierA collection of poetry spanning the career of distinguished poet Michael Collier. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, a friendship with a disgraced Catholic bishop, his father’s encounter with Charles Lindbergh, Lebanese beekeepers, a mother’s sewing machine, or a piano in the woods, he does so with the syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and a flawless ear that has made him one of America’s most distinguished poets. These poems cross expanses, connecting the fear of missing love and the bliss of holding it, the ways we speak to ourselves and language we use with others, and deep personal grief and shadows of world history. The Missing Mountain brings together a lifetime of work, chronicling Collier’s long and distinguished career as a poet and teacher. These selections, both of previously published and new poems, chart the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of is passions and concerns.
The Mobius Strip Club of Grief
by Bianca Stone"Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation's emerging pathology and sensibility." —John Ashbery A Paris Review Staff Pick and Most Anticipated Book of 2018 at NYLON, Bustle, Autostraddle, and more. The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that take place in a burlesque purgatory where the living pay—dearly, with both money and conscience—to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: “$20 for five minutes. I’ll hold your hand in my own,” one ghost says. “I’ll tell you you were good to me.” Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She imagines a feminist Limbo where women run the show and create a space to navigate the difficulties endured in life. With a nod to her grandmother Ruth Stone’s poem “The Mobius Strip of Grief,” Stone creates a labyrinthine underworld as a way to confront and investigate complicated family relationships in the hopes of breaking the never-ending cycle of grief.
The Model of Poesy
by William Scott Gavin AlexanderThe Model of Poesy is one of the most exciting literary discoveries of recent years. A manuscript treatise on poetics written by William Scott in 1599, at the end of the most revolutionary decade in English literary history, it includes rich discussions of the works of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and their contemporaries. Scott's work presents a powerful and coherent theoretical account of all aspects of poetics, from the nature of representation to the rules of versification, with a commitment to relating theory to contemporary practice. For Scott, any theory of literature must make sense not of the classics but of what English writers are doing now: Scott is at the same time the most scholarly and the most relevant of English Renaissance critics. In this groundbreaking edition, Gavin Alexander presents a text of The Model of Poesy framed by a detailed introduction and an extensive commentary, which together demonstrate the range and value of Scott's thought.
The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry
by Adam KirschA collection of bold, insightful, and controversial essays by "a poetry critic of the very first order" (New York Times). Over the last ten years, through essays in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other magazines, Adam Kirsch--"one of the most promising young poet-critics in America" (Los Angeles Times)--has established himself among the most controversial and fearless critics writing today. Sure to cause heated debate, this collection of essays surveys the world of contemporary poetry with boldness and insight, whether Kirsch is scrutinizing the reputation of popular poets such as Billy Collins and Sharon Olds or admiring the achievement of writers as different as Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, and Frederick Seidel. For readers who want an introduction to the complex world of contemporary American poetry, from major figures like Jorie Graham to the most promising poets of the younger generation, Kirsch offers close readings and bold judgments. For readers who already know that world, The Modern Element will offer a surprising and thought-provoking new perspective.
The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Tara Guissin-StubbsThe Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry, and shows how the Irish sonnet has become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion. The text reshapes the poetic and critical field, exploring canonical and non-canonical poems by male and female poets so as to challenge outmoded views of the thematic and formal limitations of the sonnet.
The Monsters' Guide to Choosing a Pet
by Roger McGough Brian PattenRoger McGough and Brian Patten have selected the very best of their animal poems in order to help two loveable monsters from outer space who visit Earth in search of a pet and need a bit of guidance...Split into sections, the monsters are introduced to animals that fly, swim, crawl and purr by two of our greatest childrens poets. Illustrated in Guy Parker-Rees' lively and intimitable style.
The Moon Reflected Fire
by Doug AndersonOf The Moon Reflected Fire and its subject, the Vietnam War, poet James Tate writes: "These are trenchant, wrenching poems. With artistry and honesty they perform an inquest into war and its corrosive after effects."