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Which Seeds Will Grow?: Poems
by Andrew CalisA new collection of poems by Palestinian-American Catholic poet Andrew Calis, Which Seeds Will Grow? finds hope in the Holy Land. Grappling with his identity as a Christian Palestinian American, Andrew Calis recalls his father who saw Israeli jets swoop over his house in Jerusalem and a military helicopter fire bullets into his front yard. The same father who wouldn't teach his children Arabic, for fear that they would have accented English, who kept his past close to his chest—unknown to his son. He recounts the death of his grandfather, a grandfather who would beat his father, and for whom he could not fully mourn because Arab men don't cry. Andrew Calis digs through the pain of his family and of his homeland to find the fragile seed of contained life and delicate hope for the Holy Land—and reflects on how tenderly that seed must be nurtured. Steeped in wonder, Which Seeds Will Grow? explores the past and the present, from ancient Jerusalem to Baltimore's gardens and alleys through the lens of a Palestinian American. The poems are patient, waiting for seasons to end, waiting for space to expand outward, and waiting for light to touch the earth. Despite the difficulty of waiting, readers will find hope in hopelessness and comfort in the contemplation of the world and its sacred mysteries. From Which Seeds Will Grow? Planting a Garden Stealing clippings from neighbors' yards And smiling as they grew their own blooms In the safe and hidden rooms where we Keep watch on them like they are our children. *** Nothing grew. We knew this was A possibility, had read It sometimes takes two years, And we hoped in spite of only dirt For the green that could be anything. Perhaps we dug too shallow or too close To the shade, or stepped where we had already planted, Either crushing roots or breaking their curled First shoots before they broke the surface. *** So when one survived, wove a green line Of its own, thinly sprouting something unknowable, I ran Inside and for a moment felt What John must have felt Leaving Peter, old and unsteadily running, And running breathlessly To tell everyone — Everyone What had happened And how you wouldn't believe your eyes.
Which Way Was North: Poems
by Anne Pierson WieseIn Which Way Was North, Anne Pierson Wiese juxtaposes poems from her years living in New York City with work written after her relocation to South Dakota. By exploring local, historical, and personal sources, she invites readers to see an unmapped territory of the mind informed by these distinct regions of the United States.Suggesting that mundane physical places and daily routines can possess significance beyond the immediate, Which Way Was North offers elements such as wild grapevines and country cemeteries, along with subway preachers and weeds emerging from sidewalk cracks, as vital starting points for reflection. Fundamentally, Wiese’s poems show that our individual powers of observation remain the most life-affirming response to the existential questions posed by our surroundings, regardless of where we happen to call home.
Which Way to the Dragon! Poems for the Coming-On-Strong
by Sara Holbrook34 poems about topics important to young children like playing soccer, going to the porta-potty, moving, annoying things about going to the zoo, different kinds of love, wanting to be a dancer, silly babies, and hard things about saying good-bye. Most of the poems are short and many rhyme. They are great for young readers to read to themselves or to be read aloud to and discussed with children at home or at school. They are the right length for children to memorize. Children might also enjoy acting them out. They are silly and lovely, happy and sad. They are a friendly, uncomplicated, collection to introduce children to the pleasure of poetry.
While We've Still Got Feet
by David BudbillFamiliar to listeners of National Public Radio, David Budbill is beloved by legions for straightforward poems dispatched from his hermitage on Judevine Mountain. Inspired by classical Chinese hermit poets, he follows tradition but cannot escape the complications and struggles of a modern solitary existence. Loneliness, aging and political outrage are addressed in poems that value honesty and simplicity and deplore pretension.For more than three decades, David Budbill has lived on a remote mountain in northern Vermont writing poems, reading Chinese classics, tending to his garden and, of course, working on his website. Budbill has been featured more than any other author on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.
While the Earth Sleeps We Travel: Stories, Poetry, and Art from Young Refugees Around the World
by Ahmed M. BadrBeginning in 2018, Ahmed M. Badr—an Iraqi-American poet and former refugee—traveled to Greece, Trinidad & Tobago, and Syracuse, New York, holding storytelling workshops with hundreds of displaced youth: those living in and outside of camps, as well as those adjusting to life after resettlement.Combining Badr&’s own poetry with the personal narratives and creative contributions of dozens of young refugees, While the Earth Sleeps We Travel seeks to center and amplify the often unheard perspectives of those navigating through and beyond the complexities of displacement. The result is a diverse and moving collection—a meditation on the concept of "home" and a testament to the power of storytelling.
Whiny Baby (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
by Julie PaulChomping / champing / championing / churlish / … / There’s a wolf at the door / that looks exactly like meWho is the “whiny baby” in this book? Rather than calling names or hurling insults, the candid poems in this collection most often implicate the poet herself.Expansive in form and voice, the poems in Julie Paul’s second collection offer both love letters and laments. They take us to construction sites, meadows, waiting rooms, beaches, alleys, gardens, and frozen rivers, from Montreal to Hornby Island. They ask us to live in the moment, despite the moment. Including a spirited long poem that riffs on the fairy tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” these poems are like old friends that at once console and confess. They blow kisses, they remember, and they celebrate the broken and the lost alongside the beautiful.At turns frank, peevish, introspective, and mischievous, the poems share sincere and intimate perspectives on the changing female body, our natural and built landscapes, and the idiosyncrasies of modern life. Whiny Baby calls on us to simultaneously examine and exult in our brief time on earth.
Whiskey Words And A Shovel I
by R. H. Sin<P>Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel, Vol. 1, is about reclaiming your power on the path to a healthy relationship.<P> It is a testament to choosing to love yourself, even if it means heartbreak.<P> Originally released in 2015, this re-rerelease packs the same punch as the first version, but makes an even greater connection with the soul of the reader.<P> Each piece has been re-seen and revamped to reflect the author's continuing journey with his partner, Samantha King, without whom this book would not exist.<P> Samantha is the muse, the "she" the writer speaks of; she is every woman who has felt like she wasn't good enough, and every woman who struggles to find love.
White Apples And The Taste Of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006
by Donald HallThroughout his writing life Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, culminating in 2006 with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, and includes poems recently published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. It is Hall’s first selected volume in fifteen years, and the first to include poems from his seminal bestseller Without. Those who have come to love Donald Hall's poetry will welcome this vital and important addition to his body of work. For the uninitiated it is a spectacular introduction to this critically acclaimed and admired poet.
White Center: Poems
by Richard HugoRichard Hugo has been described by Carolyn Kizer as "one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets now living." Nowhere has that passion, energy, and honesty been more evident than in ?White Center, his newest volume of poems. "That Richard Hugo's poetry creates in his readers an almost indistinguishable desire for more," writes the critic and poet Dave Smith, "is the mark of his ability to reach those deep pools in us where we wait for passionate engagement. What Hugo gives us is the chance to begin again and a world where that beginning is ever possible." Here, for his ever-growing body of readers, are more of those opportunities.
White Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco (Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory)
by Ronald J. FriisWhite Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco examines the interplay of complementary images and concepts in the award-winning Mexican writer's cycle of poems from 1979 to 2018. Blanco’s poetic trilogy A la luz de siempre is characterized by its broad range of form and subject and by the poet's own eclectic background as a chemist, maker of collages, and musician. Blanco speaks the language of the visual arts, science, mathematics, music, and philosophy, and creates work with deep interdisciplinary roots. This book explores how polarities such as space and place, reading and writing, sound and silence, visual and verbal representation, and faith and doubt are woven through A la luz de siempre. These complements reveal how Blanco’s poetry, like the phenomenon of white light, embraces paradox and transforms into something more than the sum of its disparate and polychromatic parts.
White Lily (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
by John Emil VincentWhy are my problems / always the worst? // And why / because I wrote that / do you think I don’t believe it?White Lily is John Emil Vincent’s love note to Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies.Under their spell the poet dives into parable, fable, received wisdom, compact discs, and ruined utopias like a gleeful truant child. The white lily is ever present - its meanings, messages, and seductive scent. The collection begins with a meditation on Anderson’s song “White Lily” and its treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. It goes on to ponder whether, if we take them in earnest, our mistakes come to serve as the surest sign of seriousness.Throughout, Vincent’s poems trouble what’s exact and exacting, always with the white lily as companion, a promise of rebirth delivered in funeral tones.
White Papers (Pitt Poetry)
by Martha CollinsThis book contains a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Expanding the territory of the author’s 2006 book Blue Front, which focused on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, this book turns, among other things, to the author's childhood. Throughout, it explores questions about what it means to be white, not only in the poetÆs life, but also in our culture and history, even our pre-history. The styles and forms are varied, as are the approaches; some of the poems address race only implicitly, and the book, like Blue Front, includes some documentary and \u201cfound\u201d material. But the focus is always on getting at what it has meant and what it means to be white―to have a race and racial history, much of which one would prefer to forget, if one is white, but all of which is essential to remember and to acknowledge in a multi-racial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past.
White Piano
by Nicole Brossard Robert Majzels Erin MoureBetween the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. A play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, White Piano offers readers a 'language that cultivates its own craters of ?re and savoir-vie.'
White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems
by Mary OliverFrom the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, a collection of evocative and haunting poetry and prose“Oliver’s poems are...as genuine, moving and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.” —New York TimesIn her first collection since winning the National Book Award, Mary Oliver writes of the silky bonds between every person and the natural world, of the delight of writing, of the value of silence. The collection features the fourteen-part poem “In the Blackwater Woods,” as well as “At the Lake” and the prose poem “Snail.”
White Shroud (Poems 1980-1985)
by Allen GinsbergWhite Shroud is a poetry book by Allen Ginsberg. "Old lovers yet may have All that Time denied-- Grave is heaped on grave, That they be satisfied--"
White Spaces: Selected Poems And Early Prose
by Paul Auster“Magnificent poetry; dark, severe, even harsh—yet pulsating with life.” —John Ashbery White Spaces gathers the poetry and prose of Paul Auster from various small-press books issued throughout the seventies. These early poetic works are crucial for understanding the evolution of Auster’s writing. Taut, lyrical, and always informed by a powerful and subtle music, his poems begin with basics—a swallow’s egg, stones, roots, thistle, “the glacial rose”—and push language to the breaking point. As Robert Creeley wrote, “The enduring power of these early poems is their moving address to a world all too elusive, too fragmented, and too bitterly transient.” Auster’s poems are grounded in a physical utterance that is at once an exploration of the mind and of the world. This collection begins with compact verse fragments from Spokes (originally published in Poetry, 1971) and goes through Auster’s marvelous later collections including Wall Writing (The Figures, 1976), Facing the Music (Parenthese, 1979), and White Spaces (Station Hill, 1980).
White Whispers: Selected Poems of Salabega
by Niranjan MohantyThe Book Is An Attempt To Bring To Limelight The Hidden, Unexplored Richness And Sophistication Of A 17Th Century Oriya Devotional Poet Whose Intense Piety Coupled With The Metaphoric Interiority Of The Medium Creates A Unique Kind Of Poetic Art.
Whiteout (The Alaska Literary Series)
by Jessica GoodfellowWhen she was a toddler, Jessica Goodfellow’s twenty-two-year-old uncle, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox Expedition to Denali, was lost in an unprecedented ten-day storm blasting winds of up to three-hundred miles per hour. Just as North America’s highest peak is so massive that it has its own distinct weather system—changeable and perilous, subject to sudden whiteout conditions—a family whose loved one is irretrievably lost has a grief so blinding and vast that it also creates its own capricious internal weather, one that lasts for generations. Whiteout is Goodfellow’s account of growing up in this unnavigable and often unspoken-of climate of bereavement. Although her poems begin with a missing body, they are not an elegy. Instead, Goodfellow struggles with the absence of cultural ritual for the uncontainable loss of a beloved one whose body is never recovered and whose final story is unknowable. There is no solace here, no possible reconciliation. Instead, Whiteout is a defiant gaze into a storm that engulfs both the wildness of Alaska and of familial mourning.
Whitethorn: Poems (A History of the South)
by Jacqueline OsherowIn "Poem for Jenne," which opens Jacqueline Osherow's ambitious and challenging newcollection, a neighbor has planted larkspur and delphinium in the poet's yard and is tending them hoping to bring color and light into a household stricken by personal tragedy. As the bright blue, star-shaped flowers bloom for a second time, the poet writes, "earth's reaching for her heavens, I for words / or any chink of rapture I can claim." The pervasive theme, in this poem and throughout Whitethorn, is that human suffering may be irremediable, yet in nature and language one may find a key to unlock the mysteries of sorrow.Osherow searches for that cipher by exploring a range of suffering, from the personal to the historical and cultural. In the poem "Orders of Infinity" she visits Treblinka and, in her inability to count the stones or quantify the real loss of the Holocaust, ponders the impossibility of imagining the unborn generations of the victims' descendants, an infinity of lives not lived, "undreamed daydreams, mute conversations, ungratified indulgences, failed hints..."In Whitethorn, a book of enormous scope and emotional intelligence, Osherow unflinchingly examines the pain of her own personal history and courageously probes the greater mystery of evil and suffering in the world.
Whitman's Ecstatic Union: Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass (Studies in Major Literary Authors #38)
by Michael SowderFirst Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Whitman: Poems
by Walt WhitmanThe Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Whitman contains forty-two of the American master's poems, including "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Song of Myself," "I Hear America Singing," "Halcyon Days," and an index of first lines.
Who Is Ozymandias?: And other Puzzles in Poetry
by John FullerPart of the pleasure of poetry is unravelling the mysteries and difficulties it contains and solving the puzzles that lie within. Who, for instance, is Ozymandias? What is the Snark? Who is the Emperor of Ice-Cream? Or indeed, who is 'you' in a poem? In this perceptive and playful new book, acclaimed poet John Fuller looks at some of our greatest poems and considers the number of individual puzzles at their heart, casting light on how we should approach these conundrums as readers. From riddling to double entendres, mysterious titles to red herrings, Fuller unpicks the puzzles in works that range from Browning to Bishop, Empson to Eliot, Shelley to Stevens, to help us reach the rewards and revelations that lie at the centre of some of our best-loved poems.
Who Killed American Poetry?: From National Obsession to Elite Possession
by Karen L. KilcupThroughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\ Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.
Who Killed Cock Robin?
by Etienne DelessertAn illustrated version of the English ballad relating the murder and funeral of Cock Robin.
Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from “Poetry” Magazine
by Don Share Fred SasakiWho reads poetry? We know that poets do, but what about the rest of us? When and why do we turn to verse? Seeking the answer, Poetry magazine since 2005 has published a column called “The View From Here,” which has invited readers “from outside the world of poetry” to describe what has drawn them to poetry. Over the years, the incredibly diverse set of contributors have included philosophers, journalists, musicians, and artists, as well as doctors and soldiers, an iron-worker, an anthropologist, and an economist. This collection brings together fifty compelling pieces, which are in turns surprising, provocative, touching, and funny. In one essay, musician Neko Case calls poetry “a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress.” In another, anthropologist Helen Fisher turns to poetry while researching the effects of love on the brain, “As other anthropologists have studied fossils, arrowheads, or pot shards to understand human thought, I studied poetry. . . . I wasn’t disappointed: everywhere poets have described the emotional fallout produced by the brain’s eruptions.” Even film critic Roger Ebert memorized the poetry of e. e. cummings, and the rapper Rhymefest attests here to the self-actualizing power of poems: “Words can create worlds, and I’ve discovered that poetry can not only be read but also lived out. My life is a poem.” Music critic Alex Ross tells us that he keeps a paperback of The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens on his desk next to other, more utilitarian books like a German dictionary, a King James Bible, and a Macintosh troubleshooting manual. Who Reads Poetry offers a truly unique and broad selection of perspectives and reflections, proving that poetry can be read by everyone. No matter what you’re seeking, you can find it within the lines of a poem.