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How to Read a Poem: Seven Steps
by Thomas H. FordHow to Read a Poem is an introduction to creative reading, the art of coming up with something to say about a text. It presents a new method for learning and teaching the skills of poetic interpretation, providing its readers with practical steps they can use to construct perceptive, inventive readings of any poem they might read. The Introduction sets out the aims of the book and provides some basic operating principles for applying the seven steps. In each subsequent chapter, the step is introduced and explained, relevant points of interpretative theory and methodology are discussed and illustrated with multiple examples, and the step is put into practice in a final section. Through these final sections, step by step, the book develops an extended reading of a single poem, Letitia Landon’s "Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter" from 1822. That reading is sustained across the whole arc of the book, providing a detailed worked example of how to read a poem. This accessible and enjoyable guide is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching the detailed study of poetry for the first time and offers valuable theoretical insights for those more experienced in the area.
How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers
by Wislawa SzymborskaAt once kind and hilarious, this compilation of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s advice to writers is illustrated with her own marvelous collages In this witty “how-to” guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories,” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave—anonymously—for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. “I sigh to be a poet,” Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. “I groan to be an editor,” Szymborska responds. Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry’s “prosaic side”: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?” This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike. Perhaps you could learn to love in prose.
How to Stay Bitter Through the Happiest Times of Your Life
by Anita Liberty"I had a lot of bad dates. But I wrote a lot of good poems."So maintains Anita Liberty, the caustically funny New York City performance artist who was going along happily healing her hurt by hating and humiliating her detestable ex-boyfriend on stage and in print until the unthinkable happened: she had a good date. And one good date deserves another. And another. And another. And, all of the sudden, Anita Liberty finds herself in a predicament. Getting dumped launched Anita's career-Will falling in love finish it? Who's more important: her devoted audience or her newly devoted boyfriend? And on top of everything, Hollywood won't stop calling and Anita can't figure out if It wants a serious commitment or just a little bit of no-strings-attached fun. From digging mercilessly into the minutiae of her new relationship to dramatically torching every professional bridge she crosses in L.A., Anita refuses to let a big load of bliss get dumped right in the middle of her career path."He said that my work was amazing and hilarious and smart and that he can't wait to see me perform.So I had sex with him.""My boyfriend asked me to change my look.To something other than contemptuous."{BARGAIN} Whatever Hollywood ends up paying me for the rights to the story of my life."It's easier to go back to fantasizing about perfection . . .than to accept that perfection is just a fantasy.""Boyfriend thinks I'd rather be right than happy.Boyfriend's right.But I'm not telling him that."Through blog entries, film scenes, poems, and to-do lists, Anita Liberty documents the perils and pitfalls of dating, sex, relationships, artistic success, and the kind of true love that sucks the creative life out of you to the point where you just end up staring at a blank computer screen and thinking gooey thoughts about your new boyfriend even though you should be writing.From the Trade Paperback edition.
How to Survive the Loss of a Love: 58 Things to do When There is Nothing to be Done
by Harold Bloomfield Melba Colgrove Peter McWilliams"This remarkable book deals in a warm, informative and directly helpful way with one of the most common (and certainly most painful) of human experiences--loss. Written by a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a poet, this kindly, witty and companionable book is a unique guide to overcoming grief and unhappiness--a practical manual for emotional survival. Divided into fifty-eight sections, HOW TO SURVIVE THE LOSS OF A LOVE offers a gathering of things the reader can do, things that comfort and help in a real and natural way."
How to Trick a Christmas Elf (Magical Creatures and Crafts #3)
by Sue FliessTo find out whether Santa thinks you&’re naughty or nice, you&’ll need to trick an elf into letting you see the list! Legend has it that the only way to find out if you&’re on Santa&’s naughty or nice list is to trick an elf into letting you sneak a peek! But be careful: elves are tricky themselves! To get a look at the list, you&’ll need to be clever in crafting a distracting craft to catch the elf&’s attention. So, grab some Christmas supplies like ribbons, twinkle lights, bows, and candy canes, and get prepared for your sly holiday visitor! On the nights leading up to Christmas, one of Santa&’s elves will show up to keep watch on kids and to report on their naughty or nice behavior! However, if you&’re careful and clever and quick, you can set up a beautiful little sleigh that will distract your elf, and then you&’ll be sure to get a glimpse at Santa&’s list! Sue Fliess&’s poetic read-aloud text and Simona Sanfilippo&’s vibrant, whimsical illustrations will provide much fun for young readers eager to trick their own Christmas elf and find which list they&’re on! Also included are guides for teachers and parents about how to engage children in building an elf sleigh themselves and how to interest them in the history of the holiday and the many cultures that celebrate Santa&’s tiny helpers.
How to Write Poetry
by Paul B. JaneczkoFrom getting started to the finished product, How to Write Poetry is an essential book for every young poet to own. Paul B. Janeczko, an award-winning poet and compiler of best-selling poetry anthologies for young people, shares his very thorough tips on the art of writing poetry. Where do you get ideas? What are simple poems to write? How do you find just the right word? What pitfalls should you watch out for? These and many other questions are answered by the author, in example poems, and through quotes from other famous poets.
How to Write a Poem
by Kwame Alexander Deanna NikaidoIn this evocative and playful companion to their New York Times bestselling picture book How to Read a Book, Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander teams up with poet Deanna Nikaido and Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet to celebrate the magic of discovering your very own poetry in the world around you. <P><P> Begin <P> with a question <P> like an acorn <P> waiting for spring. <P><P> From this first stanza, readers are invited to pay attention—and to see that paying attention itself is poetry. Kwame Alexander and Deanna Nikaido’s playful text and Melissa Sweet’s dynamic, inventive artwork are paired together to encourage readers to listen, feel, and discover the words that dance in the world around them—poems just waiting to be written down. <P><P><i>Advisory: Bookshare has learned that this book offers only partial accessibility. We have kept it in the collection because it is useful for some of our members. Benetech is actively working on projects to improve accessibility issues such as these.</i>
How to Write a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem "Introduction to Poetry"
by Tania RunyanIs it possible to teach someone how to write a poem? Or does poetry simply "come from the heart" or from a special talent only some can ever hope to have? Of course there's no formula for writing an amazing poem. If poems came with instructions like IKEA(R) coffee tables, we'd all be missing the point. But this book will give you some strategies-some tools, if you will-to assemble your personal, imaginative raw materials into poems that will surprise and intrigue. These strategies are focused primarily on free verse, yet many of the concepts can also be applied to form poetry, at both the inception and revision stages.
How to be Happy: Not A Self-help Book. Seriously
by Iain S. ThomasCentral Avenue Publishing is proud to publish another book by the widely acclaimed poet Iain S. Thomas. As many have noted on various social media platforms, there have been some issues that have led to the delayed release of this book. For this, we apologise and hopefully the content of the book will clarify the circumstances surrounding this delay. We feel we should also point out that this is not technically a self-help book, but it does contain some poignant prose, poetry and stories which may or may not lead you to happiness.Mostly, it is the rather unfortunate chronicle of a man's attempt to write the book he&’s promised his publisher, no matter the cost to his sanity.
Howdie-Skelp: Poems
by Paul MuldoonThe Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection.A “howdie-skelp” is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an “affront” to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.
Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg William Crarlos WilliamsPoems by the voice of the Beat Generation. Introduction by William Carlos Williams.
Hsin
by Nanci LeeNanci Lee’s debut explores 4th Century Su Hui’s palindrome of longing. Hsin arises from an ancient Chinese ethical philosophy, less a set of moral standards than an appeal to tune. Heart-mind and nothingness are fair English translations of Hsin, but their tidiness risks losing some of the sharper, wider sides of absence and appetite. As a historical process, according to Hang Thaddeus T’ui-Chieh, Hsin frustrates, “the psychological fragmentation and compartmentalization of the West.” Born to a Syrian father and a Chinese mother, who gave her up for adoption, Lee explores her origins in a compendium of poem fragments where form embraces the process of its unfolding. These are Koan-like poems, resonant with tones at turns ageless and contemporary; Hsin holds silence in ways that both claim and keep at bay.
Huellas de agua
by Milagrosa Díaz Gálvez¿Puede el recuerdo del agua marcar una vida y modificar su fluir? «Si hay magia en este planeta, está contenida en el agua». Esta frase de Loran Eisely refleja fielmente el sentir de este poemario. Es una huida hacia delante de la autora de Huellas de agua, que sintió desde su niñez esa magia casi mística, hasta el punto de dejarle marcas reales que se disfrazan de poemas intimistas, cuyo protagonista es el agua en todas sus formas; poemas que quieren hablar de vida, belleza, incluso de lágrimas. Huellas de Agua es un poemario cargado de simbolismos, imágenes y metáforas que tratan de revelar la verdadera percepción de una serie de cosas intangibles y nace como un homenaje a la más importante fuerza motora de la naturaleza, elemento constante generador de vida.
Hum
by Ann LauterbachFrom Hum: Things are incidental Someone is weeping I weep for the incidental The days are beautiful Tomorrow was yesterday The days are beautiful Since the mid-1970s, Ann Lauterbach has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. In Hum, her seventh collection of poetry, loss and the unexpected (the title poem was written directly in response to witnessing the events of 9/11) play against the reassurances of repetition and narrative story. By turns elegant, fierce, and sensuous, her musically charged poems move from the pictorial or imagistic to a heightened sense of the aural or musical in order to depict the world humming with vibrations of every kind from every source--the world as a form of life.
Hum
by Jamaal MayIn May's debut collection, poems buzz and purr like a well-oiled chassis. Grit, trial, and song thrum through tight syntax and deft prosody. From the resilient pulse of an abandoned machine to the sinuous lament of origami animals, here is the ever-changing hum that vibrates through us all, connecting one mind to the next."Linguistically acrobatic [and] beautifully crafted. . . [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel." -Publishers Weekly"The elegant and laconic intelligence in these poems, their skepticism and bent humor and deliberately anti-Romantic stance toward experience are completely refreshing. After so much contemporary writing that seems all flash, no mind and no heart, these poems show how close observation of the world and a gift for plain-spoken, but eloquent speech, can give to poetry both dignity and largeness of purpose, and do it in an idiom that is pitch perfect to emotional nuance and fine intellectual distinctions. Hard-headed and tough-minded, Hum is the epitome of what Frost meant by 'a fresh look and a fresh listen.'" -Tom Sleigh"Jamaal May's debut collection, Hum, is concerned with what's beneath the surfaces of things-the unseen that eats away at us or does the work of sustaining us. Reading these poems, I was reminded of Ellison's 'lower frequencies,' a voice speaking for us all. May has a fine ear, acutely attuned to the sonic textures of everyday experience. And Hum-a meditation on the machinery of living, an extended ode to sound and silence-is a compelling debut." -Natasha Trethewey"In his percussive debut collection Hum, Jamaal May offers a salve for our phobias and restores the sublime to the urban landscape. Whether you need a friend to confide in, a healer to go to, or a tour guide to take you there, look no further. That low hum you hear are these poems, emanating both wisdom and swagger." -A. Van JordanFrom "Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines":There is no work left for the husks.Automated welders like us,your line replacements, can't expectsympathy after our brightarms of cable rust over. So comecollect us for scrap, grind us upin the mouth of one of us.Let your hand pry at the accesspanel with the edge of a knife,silencing the motor and thrum.Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Believer, NER, and The Kenyon Review. Jamaal has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.
Human Dark with Sugar
by Brenda Shaughnessy"Brenda Shaughnessy's poems bristle with imperatives: 'confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.' There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy's kidding. Or she is and she isn't. If you just want to boss people around, you're a control freak, but if you can joke about it, then your bossiness is leavened by a yeast that's all too infrequent in contemporary poetry, that of humor."--New York Times"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."--Harvard Review"Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O'Hara."--Exquisite Corpse"In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time's 'scarce infinity,' this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition." --Publishers Weekly, starred review"Human Dark with Sugar is both wonderfully inventive (studded with the strangenesses of 'snownovas' and 'flukeprints') and emotionally precise. Her 'I' is madly multidexterous--urgent, comic, mischievous--and the result is a new topography of the debates between heart and head."--Matthea Harvey, a judge for the Laughlin Award"Seriously playful, sexy, sharp-edged, and absolutely commanding throughout....Here you'll meet an 'I' boldly ready to take on the world and just itching to give 'You' some smart directives. So listen up."--Library JournalIn her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. "You're a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There's a hero."Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance--anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin--then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. "I'll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me." In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet's ease in a variety of genres, from "Three Sorries" (in which the speaker concludes, "I'm not sorry. Not sorry at all"), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover's body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images --not the least of which is human dark with sugar.Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.
Human Emotions
by Zaighum SharifEach and everyone of us has our own human emotions. Days can be filled with happiness whereas other days can be full of sadness. The uniqueness of one’s emotions can very rarely be understood by others. It is really difficult if not impossible to tell others how you feel or for them to understand how you are feeling. I have tried in this book to cover the inner most boundaries of human emotions splitting my poems into different realms of human thought. Hope, fate and destiny, joy, life, the world, loneliness, love, regrets, religion and the future are all covered in this book. I hope the reader can relate to and understand my poems and bring some perspective and reasoning towards their life. We are all not the same and never can be but we all have a heart and soul. By identifying these moments of thought I hope I can bring perspective and understanding to the reader. I hope you enjoy my book.
Human Hours: Poems
by Catherine BarnettWinner of the Believer Book AwardThe triumphant follow-up collection to The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin AwardCatherine Barnett’s tragicomic third collection, Human Hours, shuttles between a Whitmanian embrace of others and a kind of rapacious solitude. Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited—and unanswered—by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow—or at least measure—time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.
Human Nature
by Alice AndersonHuman Nature explores, both seductively and horrificly, the redemptive possibilities found in an American girlhood gone wrong. Every one of Anderson's poems tells a story-dangerous, sensuous, sometimes crazy, sometimes sacred tales that take us into the heartbreaking reality and strangeness of a little girl who grew up the woman of the house; at once drink-maker, showpiece, secret-keeper, and object of lust. The terrain of incest and violence sets itself out on the page so subtely and plainly that the poems become mere containers for these extremes, a kind of prayer. Where formal grace might seem impossible, Anderson sings. And this is why the book -with all its darkness and danger-is, in the end, an affirmative one. The poems rise out of childhood's sorrows into a womanhood filled with the past, hell-bent on the future, and ready for a fight. In haunting, elegant verse, Anderson enters into the truth of experience. Through it all, the poems come to embrace those universal illuminations that arise out of--or even because of--suffering.
Human Nature: Poems
by Toby OlsonOlson's first book of new poetry in sixteen years. Human Nature is the poet and novelist Toby Olson's first book of new poetry since We Are the Fire (New Directions, 1984). The intervening years saw five of his novels published to strong critical acclaim. "But," says Olson, "one day I woke from fiction to discover I'd not written a poem in close to ten years. How to return to poetry after being away from it so long?" Certainly not in repetition of things done before. In Human Nature, Olson joins the novelist's art to the poet's reflections of friends and events and times gone by. When memory fades, replaced by story, the reader of these remarkable narrative meditations begins to realize the ways in which poetry might disclose different truths, born of the reinvention of experience. "In Human Nature," says Olson, "even the most autobiographical poems let fiction in."
Human Resources
by Rachel ZolfWinner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry!Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go.Poetry and 'plain language' collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption. Deeply inflected by the polyvocality and encoded rhetorics of the screen, Human Resources is perched at the limits of language, irreverently making and breaking meaning. Navigating the crumbling boundaries among page, screen, reader, engine, writer and database, Human Resources investigates wasting words and words as waste and the creative potential of salvage. 'In this bad-mouthing and incandescent burlesque, Rachel Zolf transforms a necessary social anger into the pure fuel that takes us to "the beautiful excess of the unshackled referent." We learn something new about guts, and about how dictions slip across one another, entwining, shimmering, wisecracking. For Zolf, political invention takes precedent, works the search engine.' - Lisa Robertson
Human Resources
by Ryann StevensonWinner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize: A “darkly comic and unsettling” portrait of a woman working in AI, and technology’s impact on connection and power (NPR, “Books We Love”).Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don’t exist. She workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named “Nia,” whom her boss calls “his type”; she loses hours researching “June,” an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day “trying to break” a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of these poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams “about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints.” Chilling, lucid, sharply intelligent, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: “I want to say better.”“Human Resources captures the eerie, ‘Black Mirror’ feeling that we’ve already crossed some A.I. event horizon . . . ‘I want to go back and change my answer,’ Stevenson writes—too late for that! Or, to paraphrase Kafka: Plenty of hope, but not for us.” —The New York Times“In a time of cold virtual ecosystems and lightweight psychological theories and remedies, Human Resources speaks for mystery and vulnerability.” —Sandra Lim“We live in an era when our humanness is worn down—by virtual beings, bots, synced devices, battery life, data, radiation, sulfates, and lead—so we must practice mindfulness to keep from losing track of who we are. This brave, tough book suggests that flowering maples, yoga, orcas, and the hands of our mothers might help us preserve our innocence.” —Henri Cole
Humana
by Mela PutosudaSufre, ama y lucha porque eres humana. Si alguna vez has vivido sin armadura, valientemente vulnerable;si alguna vez te has sentido una hada alada con plumas de plomo;si tus refugios algún día se llenaron de fantasmas que arrastran cadenas;si alguna vez has estado tan triste que te ha molestado hasta el ruido de las estrellas;si alguna vez las promesas eternas han tenido fecha de caducidad;si alguna vez te has sentido Wonder Woman, pero la capa te quedaba grande;si alguna vez un amor ha sido la pluma que te faltaba;si alguna vez un amor ha coloreado tus cuerdas vocales al pronunciar su nombre;si ha sido tu chaleco antibalas, tu Excalibur encantada,tu descanso del guerrero;si alguna vez te has sentido Eva al morder la mano que te prohíbe;si alguna vez te has sentido Pandora al abrir la caja y descubrir la opresión;si alguna vez te has sentido Medusa al ver lo poco escuchada que es la palabra «no»;si alguna vez te has sentido Afrodita al declarar amor eterno y paz a tu cuerpo;si alguna vez te has sentido amazona y dragona al luchar en primera fila;si alguna vez te has sentido humana, este es tu barco. Te invito a subir y a explorar junto a mí los tres océanos en los que sufrí, amé y luché.
Humoradas, cantares y fábulas
by Ramón De CampoamorHumoradas, cantares y fábulas Ramón de Campoamor Ramón María de las Mercedes de Campoamor y Campoosorio trascendió en la poesía del Siglo XIX, afortunadamente, con un nombre menos ampuloso aunque siempre aristocrático: Ramón de Campoamor. Creó las doloras y las humoradas. Las primeras son poemas dramáticos breves, envueltos en cierta ironía ante los reveses de la vida. Las Humoradas son casi lo mismo, pero dotadas de buen humor no exento de sentimentalismo. Es un lenguaje coloquial, completamente exento de imágenes, que es el segundo e insoslayable requerimiento en Poesía, después del ritmo, que es el primero. Por eso puede decirse que las de Campoamor son poesías... sin poesía. Lo son por su molde cadencioso y dejan de serlo por su lenguaje prosaicamente directo.