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Come Shining: Essays and Poems on Writing in a Dark Time
by David Oates Jill Elliott Alison Towle MooreWriting in a Dark Time was a writing group created in response to the 2016 election in the United States. .As group leader David Oates explains, "We aimed to write short, to cut deep and speak plain. We explored difficulty and struggle in many forms: electoral, racial, familial, personal. We began to see that the angry dysfunction of our political moment had its roots in isolation, what Arendt had called simply loneliness." The short essays and poems in this anthology were contributed by Bess Bacall, Heidi Beierle, Eleanor Berry, John Brantingham, Kamala Bremer, Jeremy Cantor, Rachael Duke, Jill Elliott, Mare Hake, Suzy Harris, Sonya Huber, Maria James-Thiaw, Marilyn Johnston, Diane Josefowicz, Kali Lightfoot, Annie Lighthart, Lois Ruskai Melina, Alison Towle Moore, David Oates, Paulann Petersen, Andy Smart, Leah Stensen Tina Tau, Seth Michael White, and Edward Wolf. The volume was edited by Jill Elliott and Alison Towle Moore with general editor David Oates.
Come on All You Ghosts
by Matthew Zapruder"Charming, melancholy, hip."-Publishers Weekly, starred review"Zapruder's innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."-Library JournalMatthew Zapruder's third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet's life-from David Foster Wallace to the poet's father. Zapruder's poems are direct and surprising, and throughout the book he wrestles with the desire to do well, to make art, and to face the vast events of the day.Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rateis 9.4 percent. I have no idea what that means. I triedto think about it harder for a while. Thentried standing in an actual stance of mysteryand not knowing towards the world.Which is my job. As is staring at the back yardand for one second believing I am actuallyrising away from myself. Which is maybewhat I have in common right now with you . . . Matthew Zapruder holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of two previous books, including The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was honored by Library Journal with a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" listing. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Wave Books.
Come, Thief
by Jane HirshfieldA revelatory, indispensable collection of poems from Jane Hirshfield that centers on beauty, time, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms. Hirshfield is unsurpassed in her ability to sink into a moment's essence and exchange something of herself with its finite music--and then, in seemingly simple, inevitable words, to deliver that exchange to us in poems that vibrate with form and expression perfectly united. Hirshfield's poems of discovery, acknowledgment of the difficult, and praise turn always toward deepening comprehension. Here we encounter the stealth of feeling's arrival ("as some strings, untouched, / sound when a near one is speaking. / So it was when love slipped inside us"), an anatomy of solitude ("wrong solitude vinegars the soul, / right solitude oils it"), a reflection on perishability and the sweetness its acceptance invites into our midst ("How suddenly then / the strange happiness took me, / like a man with strong hands and strong mouth"), and a muscular, unblindfolded awareness of our shared political and planetary fate. To read these startlingly true poems is to find our own feelings eloquently ensnared. Whether delving into intimately familiar moments or bringing forward some experience until now outside words, Hirshfield finds for each face of our lives its metamorphosing portrait, its particular, memorable, singing and singular name. Love in AugustWhite mothsagainst the screenin August darkness.Some clamor in envy.Some spread largeas two handsof a thiefwho wants to put back in your cupboardthe long-taken silver.From the Hardcover edition.
Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars
by Douglas FlorianBlast off with Douglas Florian's new high-flying compendium, which features twenty whimsical poems about space. From the moon to the stars, from the Earth to Mars, here is an exuberant celebration of our celestial surroundings that's certain to become a universal favorite among aspiring astronomers everywhere. Includes die-cut pages and a glossary of space terms.
Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994–2016
by Rafael CampoIn Comfort Measures Only, Rafael Campo bears witness to the unspeakable beauty bound up with human suffering. Gathered from his over twenty-year career as a poet-physician, these eighty-nine poems—thirty-one of which have never been previously published in a collection—pull back the curtain in the ER, laying bare our pain and joining us all in spellbinding moments of pathos. The poet, who is also truly a healer, revives language itself—its sounds channeled through our hearts and lungs, its rhythms amplified through the stethoscope—to make meaning of our bewilderment when our bodies so eloquently and yet wordlessly fail us. Campo’s transcendent poems, in all their modernity amidst the bleep of heart monitors and the wail of ambulance sirens, remind us of what the ancients understood: that poetry sustains us, and whether we live or die, through what we can imagine and create in our shared voices we may yet achieve immortality.
Comic Transformations in Shakespeare
by Ruth NevoFirst published in 1980. In this study of Shakespeare's ten early comedies, from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night, the concept of a dynamic of comic form is developed; the Falstaff plays are seen as a watershed, and the emergence of new comic protagonists - the resourceful, anti-romantic romantic heroine and the Fool - as the summit of the achievement. The plays are explored from three complementary perspectives - theoretical, developmental and interpretative which lead to a further understanding of the powerful relation between the plays' formal complexity and their naturalistic verisimilitude.
Coming After: Essays on Poetry
by Alice NotleyComing After gathers critical pieces by acclaimed poet Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small Houses and Disobedience. Notley explores the work of second-generation New York School poets and their allies: Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, Ron Padgett, Lorenzo Thomas, and others. These essays and reviews are among the first to deal with a generation of poets notorious for their refusal to criticize and theorize, assuming the stance that "only the poems matter." The essays are characterized by Notley's strong, compelling voice, which transfixes the reader even in the midst of professional detail. Coming After revives the possibility of the readable book of criticism.
Coming In: A Collection of Poetry
by Steve GarrettSteve Garrett is a Cardiff-based social entrepreneur, writer, poet and musician. Originally from Wrexham, Steve spent many years living in Canada trying out a lot of different occupations before returning to settle in Wales, where, amongst other things, he has set up and run farmers markets.Steve insists that writing poetry helps him respond to experiences (often, inevitably, affairs of the heart) that have amused, inspired, or annoyed him. With these verbal outbursts he shares observations and insights, inspired by the belief that words can help us know and appreciate each other more. And to smile at life.Writing from a male perspective, Steve hopes his work can speak to everyone, and especially to men who haven’t read much poetry before.
Coming In: A Collection of Poetry
by Steve GarrettSteve Garrett is a Cardiff-based social entrepreneur, writer, poet and musician. Originally from Wrexham, Steve spent many years living in Canada trying out a lot of different occupations before returning to settle in Wales, where, amongst other things, he has set up and run farmers markets.Steve insists that writing poetry helps him respond to experiences (often, inevitably, affairs of the heart) that have amused, inspired, or annoyed him. With these verbal outbursts he shares observations and insights, inspired by the belief that words can help us know and appreciate each other more. And to smile at life.Writing from a male perspective, Steve hopes his work can speak to everyone, and especially to men who haven’t read much poetry before.
Coming Into 80: Poems
by May SartonIn this collection, May Sarton takes on the subject of herself in old age. Here are her observations and reflections both on daily events and on the larger questions of life and death, the difficulties and rewards of living alone. Her many fans will find Sarton as celebratory and fresh as ever.
Coming Out of Nowhere: Alaska Homestead Poems
by Linda Schandelmeier“The earth near our place/ was cradle, / it rocked us— / became our skin. / House doors opened, / spilled us out, / we disappeared into trees— / they clothed us in delirious green. /. . . We knew the song / of this place, made it up, / sang it—” Homestead life is often romanticized as a valiant, resilient family persisting in the clean isolation of pristine wilderness, living off the land and depending only on each other. But there can be a darker side to this existence. Linda Schandelmeier was raised on a family homestead six miles south of the fledgling town of Anchorage, Alaska in the 1950s and ’60s. But hers is not a typical homestead story. In this book, part poetic memoir and part historical document, a young girl comes of age in a family fractured by divorce and abuse. Schandelmeier does not shy away from these details of her family history, but she also recognizes her childhood as one that was unique and nurturing, and many of her poems celebrate homestead life. Her words hint at her way of surviving and even transcending the remoteness by suggesting a deeper level of human experience beyond the daily grind of homestead life; a place in which the trees and mountains are almost members of the family. These are poems grounded in the wilds that shimmer with a mythic quality. Schandelmeier’s vivid descriptions of homesteading will draw in readers from all types of lives.
Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England
by Timothy M. HarrisonIn Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison uncovers the forgotten role of poetry in the history of the idea of consciousness. Drawing our attention to a sea change in the English seventeenth century, when, over the course of a half century, “conscience” made a sudden shift to “consciousness,” he traces a line that leads from the philosophy of René Descartes to the poetry of John Milton, from the prenatal memories of theologian Thomas Traherne to the unresolved perspective on natality, consciousness, and ethics in the philosophy of John Locke. Each of these figures responded to the first-person perspective by turning to the origins of how human thought began. Taken together, as Harrison shows, this unlikely group of thinkers sheds new light on the emergence of the concept of consciousness and the significance of human natality to central questions in the fields of literature, philosophy, and the history of science.
Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from the Caribbean
by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné Danielle Jennings Ruel Johnson Monica MinottEight talented Caribbean poets are featured in this second publication from Peekash Press.Featuring a preface by Kwame Dawes.Featuring poems from: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, Danielle Jennings, Ruel Johnson, Monica Minott, Debra Providence, Shivanee Ramlochan, Colin Robinson, and Sassy Ross. With a preface by Kwame Dawes. With a generous sample from each poet, this anthology is an opportunity to discover some of the best, new, previously unpublished voices from the Caribbean. This is a generation that has absorbed Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Martin Carter, and Lorna Goodison, while finding its own distinctive voice. Peekash Press is a collaboration between Akashic and UK-based publisher Peepal Tree Press, with a focus on publishing writers from and still living in the Caribbean. The debut title from Peekash, Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean, was published in 2014.
Coming in to Land: Selected Poems 1975-2015
by Andrew MotionFrom England’s former Poet Laureate, a collection of selected poetry spanning his celebrated career, presented for the first time by an American publisher Andrew Motion has said, “I want my writing to be as clear as water. I want readers to see all the way through its surfaces into the swamp." Though the territory of his exploration may be murky and mired—the front lines of war, political entanglements, romantic longing, and human suffering—Motion’s conversational tone and lyrical style make for clear, bold poems that speak to contradictions at the heart of the human condition. Whether underground in an urban metro, in the poet’s home, on the steps leading up to Anne Frank’s annex, or wading in the Norfolk broads, Motion’s richly imagined landscapes contain unspoken mysteries underneath the poet’s candor. In the tradition of English pastoral poetry that includes Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and William Wordsworth, these poems skate over sweeping empires and plumb emotional depths, settling in a meditative, understated register. As an introduction to one of England’s most lauded living poets, English Elegies offers a moving depiction of this writer’s career as a chronicler of modernity’s pitfalls and triumphs.
Coming into Eighty: Poems
by May SartonIn May Sarton&’s seventeenth and final collection of poetry, the writer reflects on life, aging, and mortalityComing into Eighty presents a poet&’s look at age. Herein, Sarton gives readers a glimpse into her quotidian tasks, her memories, her losses, and her triumphs. The volume explores topics ranging from the war in Iraq to the struggle of taking a cat to the vet. Dark and immediate, this work catalogues both the tedium and the splendor of life with equal wit and beauty. Winner of the Levinson Prize.
Coming to Age: Growing Older with Poetry
by Mary Ann Hoberman Carolyn HopleyThis exquisitely giftable anthology of poems about age and aging reveals the wisdom of trailblazing writers who found power and growth later in life.At eighty-two, the novelist Penelope Lively wrote: "Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers." Coming to Age is a collection of dispatches from the great poet-pioneers who have been fortunate enough to live into their later years.Those later years can be many things: a time of harvesting, of gathering together the various strands of the past and weaving them into a rich fabric. They can also be a new beginning, an exploration of the unknown. We speak of "growing old." And indeed, as we too often forget, aging is growing, growing into a new stage of life, one that can be a fulfillment of all that has come before.To everything there is a season. Poetry speaks to them all. Just as we read newspapers for news of the world, we read poetry for news of ourselves. Poets, particularly those who have lived and written into old age, have much to tell us. Bringing together a range of voices both present and past, from Emily Dickinson and W. H. Auden to Louise Gluck and Li-Young Lee, Coming to Age reveals new truths, offers spiritual sustenance, and reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten, illuminating the profound beauty and significance of commonplace moments that become more precious and radiant as we grow older.
Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror
by Peter Dale Scott"Not since Robert Duncan's Ground Work and before that William Carlos Williams' Paterson has New Directions published a long poem as important as Coming to Jakarta!" —James Laughlin A devastating revelation of violence, exploitation, and corrupt politics, Coming to Jakarta derives its title from the role played by the CIA, banks, and oil companies in the 1965 slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians. A former Canadian diplomat and now a scholar at the University of California, Peter Dale Scott has said that the poem "is triggered by what we know of the bloody Indonesian massacre… However it is not so much a narrative of exotic foreign murder as one person’s account of what it is like to live in the 20th century, possessing enough access to information and power to feel guilty about global human oppression, but not enough to deal with it. The usual result is a kind of daily schizophrenia by which we desensitize ourselves to our own responses to what we read in the newspapers. The psychic self-alienation which ensues makes integrative poetry difficult but necessary." With a brilliant use of collage, placing the political against the personal––childhood acquaintances are among the darkly powerful figures––Scott works in the tradition of Pound’s Cantos, but his substance is completely his own.
Comma
by Jennifer StillIt was a long silence that brought me to the erasure poem. Not mine, but my brother's, during his many months in a coma. I came across a notebook of his—a pocketsized, handwritten field guide of prairie grasses. I read it for companionship, signs of consciousness, attention. I read it for the rhythms of his still and distant hand…. I was reading a taxonomy of grief: silique drifted into soliloquy.> Between 2008 and 2014, while her brother was in a lengthy coma, award-winning poet Jennifer Still engaged in a private collaboration with the art and wonder that was his handwritten field guide of prairie grasses. The result: the stunning works of poetry and imagery encapsulated in Comma. Still was moved by an overarching impulse of grief to create these poems. In the brittle lexicon of botany, and in the hum of the machines keeping her brother alive, she developed a hands-on method of composition that plays with the possibilities of what can be 'read' on a page. Comma enacts a state of transformation and flux, all in an effort to portray the embodiment of grief and regeneration that can be achieved in the physical breakdown and reassembly of lyric poetic forms.
Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance
by Deborah ParkerDante's Divine Comedy played a dual role in its relation to Italian Renaissance culture, actively shaping the fabric of that culture and, at the same time, being shaped by it. This productive relationship is examined in Commentary and Ideology, Deborah Parker's thorough compendium on the reception of Dante's chief work. By studying the social and historical circumstances under which commentaries on Dante were produced, the author clarifies the critical tradition of commentary and explains the ways in which this important body of material can be used in interpreting Dante's poem.Parker begins by tracing the criticism of Dante commentaries from the nineteenth century to the present and then examines the tradition of commentary from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. She shows how the civic, institutional, and social commitments of commentators shaped their response to the Comedy, and how commentators tried to use the poem as an authoritative source for various kinds of social legitimation. Parker discusses how different commentators dealt with a deeply political section of the poem: the damnation of Brutus and Cassius. The scope and importance of Commentary and Ideology will command the attention of a broad group of scholars, including Italian specialists on Dante, late medievalists, students and professionals in early modern European literature, bibliographers, critical theorists, historians of literary criticism and theory, and cultural and intellectual historians.
Commentary on Shakespeare's Richard III
by Wolfgang ClemenFirst published in 1968. Providing a detailed and rigorous analysis of Richard III, this Commentary reveals every nuance of meaning whilst maintaining a firm grasp on the structure of the play. The result is an outstanding lesson in the methodology of Shakespearian criticism as well as an essential study for students of the early plays of Shakespeare.
Commissions y Corridos: Poems (The Albuquerque Poet Laureate Series)
by Hakim BellamyHakim Bellamy&’s latest collection rings with the same power and grace as the people he lauds within its pages, including Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King Jr. He celebrates Albuquerque and New Mexico, taking the good with the bad, and reminds Burqueños that any day when you wake up along the Río Grande is a good day. As Bellamy celebrates the power of creativity and community within the city and the nation, he also demands that we face our society&’s faults, especially those of racism, racial profiling, and law-enforcement violence. The poems collected here insist that with the power to do right, people also have a responsibility to themselves, their loved ones, and complete strangers to be better and strive harder. Undoubtedly Bellamy is leading this charge, lighting the way for anyone ready to listen.
Common Grace: Poems (Raised Voices)
by Aaron Caycedo-KimuraThe first major poetry collection from an award-winning student of Robert Pinsky, exploring the inherited trauma within his Japanese American family, his life as an artist, and his bond with his wifeIn 65 lyric poems organized into a triptych, Common Grace offers an important new lens into Asian American life, art, and love.Part 1, &“Soul Sauce,&” describes the poet&’s life as a practicing visual artist, taking us from an early encounter with an inkwell at Roseland Elementary in 1969 to his professional outdoor easel perched on Long Island Sound.Part 2, &“Ubasute,&” is named after the mythical Japanese practice wherein &“a grown son lifts / his aged mother on his back, / delivers her to a mountain, / leaves her to die.&” This concept frames a wrenching portrayal of his parents&’ decline and death, reaching back to his father&’s time in the American internment camps of WWII and his mother&’s memories of the firebombing of Tokyo. It also anchors the two outer parts in the racial trauma and joys passed down from his parents.Part 3, &“Gutter Trees,&” gives us affecting love poems to his wife and the creative lives they&’ve built together.Ranging in scope from private moments to the sweep of familial heritage, Caycedo-Kimura&’s poems are artful, subtle, but never quiet.
Common Place
by Sarah PinderCommon Place explores the stories of shifting, resilient bodies and landscapes bound by systems of capital and power. From thin threads of text messages across borders to encounters with strangers in the crush of rush-hour transit, Sarah Pinder names our most private and public moments of seeing and being seen. With considered, quiet urgency, this poem witnesses our ambiguous, aching present and looks towards what comes next. ‘Watch for the places where Pinder goes for the imperative: like the book as a whole, these commands are generous, beautiful, and difficult lifelines thrown from a fellow survivor of the present.’ – Jennifer Nelson, author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife ‘Common Place feels like the logbook of a survivor, one that shows how the intimate and the idiosyncratic persist within the post-capitalist technosphere. A tattered record keeping, Common Place is friend of the abject landscape, “home of the lesser, lowercase subject.” Grasp its compassionate disposition, and this fragmentary poem reveals the affective centre of its ingeniously dissociative fabric.’ – Sue Sinclair, author of Heaven’s Thieves
Common Sense (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Ted GreenwaldFirst published in 1979, Common Sense evinces a spare street-wise style rooted in the vernacular of the city. Now something of a cult classic, the book is recognized as an understated masterpiece, pushing at the edges of spoken word. This is the language of everyday, brought onto the page in such a way that we never lose the flow of speech and at the same time we become attuned to its many registers—musical, emotional, ironic. Ted Greenwald's work has been associated with several major veins of American poetry, including the Language movement and the New York School, but it remains unclassifiable. An online reader's companion will be available at tedgreenwald.site.wesleyan.edu.
Commons
by Myung Mi KimMyung Mi Kim's Commons weighs on the most sensitive of scales the minute grains of daily life in both peace and war, registering as very few works of literature have done our common burden of being subject to history. Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history. Kim's blank spaces are loaded silences: openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind does: an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure. Commons's fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.