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Nature Poem
by Tommy PicoA book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Nature Trail: A joyful rhyming celebration of the natural wonders on our doorstep
by Benjamin ZephaniahA joyful celebration of nature and the wonder of the world around us by legendary poet and performer Benjamin Zephaniah, one of The Times' top 50 British post-war writers.At the bottom of my garden, there's a hedgehog and a frog,And a lot of creepy-crawlies living underneath a log . . .All around us, from parks to gardens and flowerpots to pavements, there's a world of wonder just waiting to be discovered. Why not look a little closer and see what you find?This joyful celebration of nature reminds us all to take a closer look at the world around us, and enjoy the wonder of nature wherever we find it. Packed with animals and minibeasts galore, this imaginative rhyming text is perfect for reading aloud.
Nature's Treasures
by Jane Morris UdovicA young girl learns about the wonders of nature in this rhyming poem.
Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (Routledge Environmental Humanities)
by Susanna LidströmThe environmental challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century are not only acute and grave, they are also unprecedented in kind, complexity and scope. Nonetheless, or therefore, the political response to problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and widespread pollution continues to fall short. To address these challenges it seems clear that we need new ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, local and global, and past, present and future. One place to look for such new ideas is in poetry, designed to contain multiple levels of meaning at once, challenge the imagination, and evoke responses that are based on something more than scientific consensus and rationale. <P><P> This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes's and Heaney's respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics, and globalisation. <P><P> This book is aimed at students of literature and environment, the relationship between poetry and environmental humanities, and the poetry of Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney
Navigating Voices of Higher Education: A Poetic Ethnography of a University (Routledge Research in Higher Education)
by Justin NicholesThis fascinating book comprises a poetic ethnography, featuring poems that capture the experiences of students, professors, administrators, custodians, a chancellor, and other people who work in institutions of US higher education.Using established poetic research methods, it invites readers to consider various points of view, while providing granular, concrete insight into working life at a US university. Across the volume, participants’ interviews are analyzed through a lens of embodied cognition to explore the physical experiences and metaphors that university workers use when discussing their roles and lives. The result is a truly innovative and multilayered look at the lived experiences and emotions of individuals within the university setting, as well as the sense of community that comes from inhabiting the same social and physical spaces.A vivid ethnographic picture of academic culture, this volume will appeal to qualitative and arts-based researchers, students, academic staff, as well as anyone interested in understanding more about the university experience through poetic ethnography.
Navigating the Divide: Poetry & Prose (Legacy Series)
by Linda Watanabe McFerrinNavigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose is a career-spanning, multi-genre collection from the award-winning Asian-American writer and indie lit legend Linda Watanabe McFerrin. In poetry and prose that is sometimes profoundly personal, sometimes astoundingly surreal, this world traveler and devoted literary explorer breaks down walls, bridges, cultures, and genres, delighting and instructing the reader. This rich, multi-faceted collection really does "navigate the divide" between spiritual and physical, between thought and desire, between identity and others.
Ndakinna -- Our Land: New and Selected Poems
by Joseph BruchacWritten over a period of twelve years and published in magazines and anthologies, these beautiful poems of place and Abenaki Indian heritage are addressed to the land, to the poet's two sons James and Jesse, to his wife Carol, and to himself.
Near Relations: Poems
by John ReibetanzIn John Reibetanz’s tightly crafted new collection of poems, poetry and narrative are united with astonishing power and beauty. The collection first probes pivotal moments in the lives of his family, leading to a haunting prose memoir of the journey to his dying mother that recalls a “nomadic childhood” in flight from his mother’s withdrawal into illness, his adult secession from an America bent on war, then emigration to a more accommodating country. Following the same creative urge celebrated in his father-in-law’s cooking and the blues of Louis Armstrong, the poems then move into a world of intersecting fictional relations, unfolding an extraordinary range of characters. Their dilemmas are not solved but contained in luminous poems, at once spare and ample, whose clarity is born of precision. In these poem-stories of love, loss, and recovery, darkness often serves to intensify the light. Near Relations is the work of a poet compassionately engaged with the world, and one of our most accomplished lyric voices.
Near/Miss
by Charles BernsteinPraised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry—proudly declaring itself “a totally inaccessible poem”—and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism—full of malaprops, mondegreens, nonsequiturs, translations of translations, sardonically vandalized signs, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. At the same time, political protest also rubs up against epic collage, through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of “our united fates.” These poems engage with works by contemporary painters—including Amy Sillman, Rackstraw Downes, and Etel Adnan—and echo translations of poets ranging from Catullus and Virgil to Goethe, Cruz e Souza, and Kandinsky. Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent, and replete with both sharp edges and subtle intimacies, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.
Near: Psalm 139
by Sally Lloyd-JonesFrom the author of the bestselling The Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones, comes an uplifting new message for children. Inspired by Psalm 139—which begins, &“O Lord, you have searched me and you know me&”—the lyrical text reminds little ones that God is with them anywhere they go in God&’s wide world.God is my Father who made everything.And I am a little explorer of the wide world.He is near meAnd he protects me.He sees meAnd he knows me.He is strongAnd he looks after me. He is with me—always!An inspirational, Bible-based board book, Near:is written by Sally Lloyd-Jones, the bestselling author of The Jesus Storybook Biblepresents lyrical text inspired by Psalm 139delivers a reassuring message that calms kids&’ nerves, soothes their anxieties, and eases their fearsfeatures a soft padded format that is a perfect fit for little handsis a great gift for a new baby, First Communion, Christmas or birthdayThe board book offers a soft, padded format, a perfect fit for little hands.Look for additional inspirational children&’s picture books in the series inspired by The Jesus Storybook Bible:Loved: The Lord&’s PrayerFound: Psalm 23Near is another resource to invite children to experience God&’s Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.
Nearer My Freedom: The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself
by Monica Edinger Lesley YoungeMillions of Africans were enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade, but few recorded their personal experiences. Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is perhaps the most well known of the autobiographies that exist. Using this narrative as a primary source text, authors Monica Edinger and Lesley Younge share Equiano's life story in "found verse," supplemented with annotations to give readers historical context. This poetic approach provides interesting analysis and synthesis, helping readers to better understand the original text. Follow Equiano from his life in Africa as a child to his enslavement at a young age, his travels across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, his liberation, and his life as a free man.
Nearing Ninety: And Other Comedies of Late Life (Judith Viorst's Decades)
by Judith ViorstThe newest illustrated poetry collection in beloved author Judith Viorst’s “decade” series (from It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty to Unexpectedly Eighty), exploring, with her signature savvy and humor, what it means to be an impending nonagenarian.In Nearing Ninety, bestselling author Judith Viorst candidly shares the complicated joys and everyday tribulations that await us at the age of ninety, all with a large dose of humor and an understanding that nothing—well, almost nothing—in life should be taken too seriously. While she struggles to make it to midnight on New Year's Eve, while she’s starting to hear more eulogies than symphonies, while she’ll forever be disheartened by what she weighs (and forever unable to stop weighing herself), there is plenty to cherish at ninety: hanging out with the people she loves. Playing a relentless game of Scrabble. And still sleeping tush-to-tush with the same man to whom she’s been married for sixty years. Accompanied by Laura Gibson’s whimsical illustrations, Nearing Ninety’s amusing and touching reflections make this collection relatable to readers of all ages. With the wisdom and spunk of someone who’s seen it all, Viorst gently reminds us that everybody gets old, and that the best medicine at any age is laughter.
Nebraska: Poems
by Kwame DawesKwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work—the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.
Neck of the World (Swenson Poetry Award #11)
by F. Daniel RzicznekNeck of the World is the eleventh volume in the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award series. In it, Daniel Rzicznek offers poems that, in quick angular language, capture the natural world and at the same time extend it into a surreal vision, sometimes dream-like, sometimes dark. Alice Quinn, judge for the 2007 Swenson Award, says this of Rzicznek’s work: “Throughout, the language pulsates, always vigorous, by turns knotty and crystalline. . . . In Neck of the World, we have a poet with a striking new vision--challenging, rewarding, and bold."
Need Machine
by Andrew FaulknerNeed Machine clamours through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumour. Honest, irreverent and sharply indifferent, this book will hogtie you with awe.
Needs Improvement
by Jon Paul FiorentinoWhether misreading sixth-grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino's sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information -- but does so with a wink during detention.
Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems
by Clive James"Clive James is more or less the only living poet who manages to be both entertaining and moving."--Edward Mendelson Clive James's renown as an internationally celebrated poet continues to expand, and there is no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, a collection "steeped in the lessons of Philip Larkin and W.B. Yeats" (London Times). Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks, knowing they are in the presence of a master. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book's breathtaking range of theme: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, and odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters, and sharks--as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. Despite the dizzying variety, James's poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this new collection is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as a self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in "Numismatics") to striking new coin, and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is a treasure chest of one-off marvels, with each poem a twin-sided, perfect human balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, "whose play of light pays tribute to the dark."
Negative Money
by Lillian-Yvonne BertramFrom a National Book Award nominated poet, this collection is about a life lived in the red, on the edges of great lack and great abundance, of financial and emotional marginsNegative Money follows a speaker continually coming of age while probing the binary thresholds of racial and gender identity, violence and safety, security and precarity, love and loneliness.For readers of Readers Claudia Rankine, Torrey Peters, Ocean Vuong, and Jericho Brown, NBA nominated Lillian-Yvonne Bertrams&’s poems are innovative, conceptually thoughtful work. Through experimentation and muscular lyricism, Bertram maintains a style that observes a speaker&’s attempt to understand and exert multiple identities within the binary confines of race and gender.Playing and gliding from acrostics to sonnets to maps, these compassionate, cerebral, and irreverent poems plainly recognize the larger and potentially escapable oppressive systems that dominate all of our lives by narrating the exhaustion that comes from living under constraining systems of relentless extraction, systems whose powers fracture all attempts at genuine love and intimacy.
Negative Space
by Luljeta Lleshanaku Ani GjikaLleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor” (Sasha Dugdale, Poetry Nation Review) “Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman—the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl on top of a shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, as a child discovering a world in a grain of sand.
Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry
by Jason LagapaThis book explores the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and the ways in which experimental poets formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology, which proposes using negative statements as a means of attesting to the superior, unrepresentable being of God. With individual chapters on works by such poets as Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Charles Bernstein, and Alice Notley, this book illustrates how a strategy of negation similarly proves optimal for depicting the subject of utopia in literary works. Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations contends that negative statements in experimental poetry illustrate the potential for utopian social change, not by portraying an ideal world itself but by revealing the very challenge of representing utopia directly.
Negotiations
by Destiny O. BirdsongWhat makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body—a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity—both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.
Negro Mountain (Phoenix Poets)
by C. S. GiscombeA cross-genre poetry collection that troubles the idea of poetic voice while considering history, biology, the shamanistic, and the shapes of racial memory. In the final section of Negro Mountain, C. S. Giscombe writes, “Negro Mountain—the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania—is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth.” Named for an “incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the “natural” world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe—who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania—understands location to be a practice, the continual “action of situating.” The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages “count” or “don’t count” as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.
Neighborhood Odes: Poems
by Gary Soto David DiazFrom family pictures to pinatas, from the gato with a meow like a rusty latch to Fourth of July fireworks, the poet celebrates the startling and often overlooked moments that define childhood. Affectionate without being overly sentimental, the collection provides a good introduction to contemporary poetry as well as a fine homage to a Chicano community. --Publishers Weekly
Neighborhood Register: Poems
by Marcus Jackson"A poet whose voice and message we trust. . . a singular and significant voice. You will not forget this neighborhood, or this poet. " from the foreword by Toi Derricotte From the twilight towns of the Rust Belt to the vivid inlets of New York City, Neighborhood Register is a ledger of the people, scenes, and sectors from which hidden music and meaning unearth. The collection evokes the beauties and difficulties within multi-racial families, the value of vernacular, and the unexpected resonances of common objects. "In his fine first collection, Jackson lyrically knits together time, memory, human desires and obligations and invites the kind reader to dance along to his bright measures, which sometimes resemble the life of a young poet, deeply enmeshed in the world, and sometimes reflect like a mirror. " - Cornelius Eady
Neighbors
by Jay NebelNeighbors is a book of lyric narratives about the men and women who live and work next to us, the people standing in line at the DMV or buying milk and bread at the grocery store. Jay Nebel gives voice to an America lost in the graffiti of park benches and 24-hour diner parking lots, where men attempt CPR on gorillas and beat each other in back alleys with baseball bats, as well as revere their mothers. These are poems that look through the windows at the secret lives of our neighbors, their affairs and addictions, their curses and loves.