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Sailing through Cassiopeia
by Dan Gerber"Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise-sometimes all at the same time."-Library Journal"The thing itself carries the weight of [Gerber's] poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda, and Wright."-Rain TaxiDan Gerber's mastery of layered imagery and crystalline vision marry European Romanticism with American Zen. These meditative poems engage the natural landscape of California's oak savannas and memories of childhood, while calling upon an array of literary progenitors-from Robinson Jeffers and Rainer Maria Rilke to the classics of the Chinese canon-exploring what it means to be linguistically alive in an animal world. As ForeWord magazine wrote, "Dan Gerber's poems are quick, graceful, alert to their surroundings, and rarely wasting a motion.""The Word is the Picture of Things"Looking down at the lights of Earth,its constellations of lives,however unaware,signal back to the watching galaxiesthat have their seeing inside us.I praised flight and got stuck.I praised gravity and got lost.Along the way my lifedecays, and ripens . . . Dan Gerber is the author of seven collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former racecar driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. His books have earned a Michigan Author Award and the Mark Twain Award. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.
Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels
by Steve MentzJourney through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville’s epic in bold new lightCome sail with I.We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.
Saint Agnostica: Poems
by Anya Krugovoy SilverSaint Agnostica is the final work of Anya Krugovoy Silver, a poet celebrated for her incisive writing about illness, motherhood, and Christian faith. The poems in this collection dance between opposite poles of joy and grief, community and isolation, humor and anger, belief and doubt, in moving and devastating witness to a life lived with strength and resolve.
Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
by Jack RidlJack Ridl returns with a collection of poems that mix deft artistic skill with intimate meditations on everyday life, whether that be curiosity, loss, discovery, joy, or the passing of the seasons. An early reader of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch said it best: "Ridl’s books are all treasures, as is he, and his poetry has always been trout-quick, alternately funny and wondrous, instantly intimate, and free of pretense. All these characteristics can be found in this book, and there is something else, something extraordinary: at an age where most poets are content to roll out an imagined posterity, he’s decided to push and refine the art, to see out the day and live it fully, because art and life settle for no less." The first section of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch reflects on the author’s personal history, with poems like "Feeding the Pup in the Early Morning" and "Some of What Was Left After Therapy." The second section continues with meditations on varied events and persons and includes poems such as "The Last Days of Sam Snead" and "Coffee Talks with Con Hilberry." The third attends primarily to the mystery of love and what one loves and contains the poems "The Inevitable Sorrow of Potatoes" and "Suite for the Long Married." The fourth and final section meditates primarily on the imagined in poems like "Over in That Corner, the Puppets" and "Meditation on a Photograph of a Man Jumping a Puddle in the Rain." Saint Peter and the Goldfinch is the work of a talented and seasoned poet, one whose work comes out of the "plainspoken" tradition—the kind of poetry that, as Thomas Lynch puts it, "has to deliver the goods, has to say something about life, something clear and discernible, or it has little to offer." Readers of poetry who enjoy wrestling with life’s big questions will appreciate the space that Ridl allows for these ruminations.
Salad Anniversary
by Julie Winters Carpenter Machi TawaraMachi Tawara's first book of poems, The Anniversary of the Salad combines the classical 'tanka' form with the subject of a modern love affair. It became a sensation, selling over 2 million copies - and the 'salad phenomenon' in Japanese culture was comparable to the 'bananamania' that followed publication of the first novel by Tawara's contemporary Banana Yoshimoto. Contains 15 poems:'August Morning' 'Baseball Game' 'Morning Necktie' 'I Am the Wind' 'Summertime Ship' 'Wake-up Call' 'Hashimoto High School' 'Pretending to Wait for Someone' 'Salad Anniversary' 'Twilight Alley' 'My Bisymmetrical Self' 'So, Good Luck' 'Jazz Concert' 'Backstreet Cat' 'Always American'
Salient
by Elizabeth T. Gray JrA riveting lyrical constellation centered on the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders Fields and tibetan protective magic <p><p> In the foreword to her book-length poem, Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.” <p> Over the course of several decades, Gray tracked the contours and traces of the Ypres Salient, walking the haunted battlefield ground of the contemporary landscape with campaign maps in hand, reading “not only history, poetry, and fiction, but also unit diaries; contemporary reports and individual accounts; survey information and maps of all kinds; treatises on aerial photography and artillery tactics; and manuals on field engineering and tactical planning.” <p> Out of this material, through a process of collage, convergence, and ritual chöd visualization, Gray has composed a spare, fascinating lyrical engagement with The Missing, in shell hole and curved trench, by way of amulets and obstacles. What is salient rises from the secret signs in song, like a blessing, protected from harm.
Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2016
by August KleinzahlerSixteen years’ worth of incisive essays by the great poet and memoirist“Witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler” (Publishers Weekly) has gathered the best of sixteen years’ worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection, setting down his thoughts about great poets and bad poets, about kvetching fiction writers and homicidal musicians, about eccentric critics and discerning nobodies, always with insight and humor, and never suffering fools gladly.Here, in Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs, August Kleinzahler eulogizes famous friends, warts and all (Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton, Leonard Michaels); leads the charge in carving up a few bloated reputations (E. E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan); and sings the praises of unjustly neglected masters (Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Cox). He also turns the spotlight on himself in several short, delightful memoirs, covering such subjects as his obsessive CD collecting, the eerie effects of San Francisco fog, and the terrible duty of selling of his childhood home.
Sally's Hair
by John KoetheLet me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills. There's something in the air, something I can't quite see, Hiding behind this stock of images, this language Culled from all the poems I've ever loved. John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death." Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."
Salsa
by Adrià SalasSalsa estrena Contraveu, la col·lecció de poesia i textos breus de Rosa dels Vents que arrenca aquest any. No remenis tant. I la resposta és: «sí, trobaràs el temps». Sempre val la pena una immersió guiada al fons de les qüestions. Així com els instruments musicals moren quan no els toquem, també la reflexió va perdent la seva efectivitat quan no la sovintegem. He sabut trobar una part de casa meva a l'horitzó, i us l'apropo a tota vela. No l'he embolicada perquè no pensava regalar-la, però serà l'inici d'una inesperada complicitat. Passa't per aquí quan vulguis. El que et diré no alliçona, però ressona. No soc l'Adrià que havies vist abans i no me n'amago. He recuperat velles cantarelles i les faig parlar, ara que els ha arribat el moment. He preparat per a tu moltes propostes indecents. Adrià Salas
Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War
by Helen FrostAnikwa and James, twelve years old in 1812, spend their days fishing, trapping, and exploring together in the forests of the Indiana Territory. To Anikwa and his family, members of the Miami tribe, this land has been home for centuries. As traders, James's family has ties to the Miami community as well as to the American soldiers in the fort. Now tensions are rising—the British and American armies prepare to meet at Fort Wayne for a crucial battle, and Native Americans from surrounding tribes gather in Kekionga to protect their homeland. After trading stops and precious commodities, like salt, are withheld, the fort comes under siege, and war ravages the land. James and Anikwa, like everyone around them, must decide where their deepest loyalties lie. Can their families—and their friendship—survive? In Salt, Printz Honor author Helen Frost offers a compelling look at a difficult time in history.A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013A Frances Foster Book
Saltwater Demands a Psalm: Poems
by Kweku AbimbolaIn Ghana’s Akan tradition, on the eighth day of life a child is named according to the day of the week on which they were born. This marks their true birth. In Kweku Abimbola’s rhapsodic debut, the intimacy of this practice yields an intricately layered poetics of time and body based in Black possibility, ancestry, and joy. While odes and praise songs celebrate rituals of self- and collective-care—of durags, stank faces, and dance—Abimbola’s elegies imagine alternate lives and afterlives for those slain by police, returning to naming as a means of rebirth and reconnection following the lost understanding of time and space that accompanies Black death.Saltwater Demands a Psalm creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols—pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings—and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.These poems groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberation’s struggles and triumphs. Abimbola’s poetry invokes the ecstasy and sorrow of saying the names of the departed, of seeing and being seen, of being called and calling back.
Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985–2005
by Rodney JonesRodney Jones has been called "the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry" (Southern Review) and one of the nation's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four bold new pieces.
Salvation Collection: One Man's Journey from a Wretched Soul to the Gates of Heaven and Salvation
by Bill StokesI am documenting my journey, an inspired poem at a time, from baby steps to a wonderous understanding of the precepts of my salvation. I truly pray that the poetry will guide your understanding of God's grace and promise of eternal salvation. The miracle of knowing that this journey is with your family for all time brings joy beyond description. The poems are not scripture but a documentation of the truth surrounding my soul with grace and love. Using my poetry as a path by following my footsteps will help you to your salvation. My environmental work has spanned the globe and has saved and enhanced many thousands of lives, which uniquely prepared me to convey my journey in a way for you to understand and hopefully emulate.
Salvo el crepúsculo
by Julio CortázarSalvo el crepúsculo (1984), último libro publicado en vida por Cortázar, es una memorable antología personal de poemas del gran escritor argentino. Claro que, tratándose de Cortázar, no puede esperarse una tranquila sucesión de versos escritos en distintas épocas y situaciones. Multifacético, el contenido de este libro se despliega como un collage inagotable. Su autor homenajea a los poetas y a la poesía, avanza y retrocede en el tiempo, deja hablar a esos deliciosos charlatanes de Calac y Polanco, se entrega al tango y al jazz, a la pintura y al amor, a París y a Buenos Aires, a la ingenuidad y a la melancolía. Una colección de gustos, de recuerdos y opiniones exquisitas. El diario implícito e inestimable de un artista extraordinario.
Salvo el crepúsculo
by Julio CortázarToda la poesía de Julio Cortázar en un único volumen que ofrece perspectivas novedosas sobre la obra de uno de los escritores más emblemáticos de nuestro país. Salvo el crepúsculo se despliega como un collage inagotable que ofrece los temas recurrentes de la obra de Cortázar aunque con novedosas modalidades: el autor homenajea a poetas de distinta estética y nacionalidad, retoma a los fascinantes Polanco y Calac de 62/Modelo para armar, se entrega al tango y al jazz, a la pintura y al amor, a París y a Buenos Aires. Una exquisita colección de gustos, recuerdos y opiniones de un artista extraordinario. Cortázar no llegó a corregir las pruebas de imprenta de Salvo el crepúsculo, que se publicó por primera vez en 1984, pocos meses después de su muerte, pero contiene las correcciones manuscritas que el autor incluyó a última hora. En una obra tan vasta como excepcional, Salvo el crepúsculo es una interesante puerta de acceso a la obra de un escritor que, tal como dijo alguna vez Mario Vargas Llosa, "dio al juego dignidad literaria e hizo del juego un instrumento de creación y exploración artística tan dúctil como provechoso. La obra de Cortázar abrió puertas inéditas".
Sam's Book (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by David RayWhen Sam Ray was killed at nineteen in an accident, his father began writing poetry dedicated to his memory. Sam's Book is a collection of these elegies and other poems written during Sam's lifetime. "How should I mourn?" David Ray asks. By recalling poignant events from the past he transcends his grief. He remembers Sam's first bath, a "holy/Rite"; tying the shoelaces of the "little man"; traveling to Greece, where Sam is "the first.../to see the holy moon." With painful wit and regret he summons up the image of his son's blue Toyota, fastidiously transformed by Sam and his girlfriend into a "love nest." Ray muses on what he taught Sam and what Sam taught him. Originally published in 1987, Sam's Book won the 1988 Maurice English Poetry Award.
Samira Surfs
by Rukhsanna GuidrozA middle grade novel in verse about Samira, an eleven-year-old Rohingya refugee living in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, who finds strength and sisterhood in a local surf club for girls.Samira thinks of her life as before and after: before the burning and violence in her village in Burma, when she and her best friend would play in the fields, and after, when her family was forced to flee. There's before the uncertain journey to Bangladesh by river, and after, when the river swallowed her nana and nani whole. And now, months after rebuilding a life in Bangladesh with her mama, baba, and brother, there's before Samira saw the Bengali surfer girls of Cox's Bazar, and after, when she decides she'll become one.Samira Surfs, written by Rukhsanna Guidroz with illustrations by Fahmida Azim, is a tender novel in verse about a young Rohingya girl's journey from isolation and persecution to sisterhood, and from fear to power.
Samuel Johnson and the Powers of Friendship (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature)
by A.D. Cousins, Daniel Derrin, and Dani NaptonThis book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship—that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it—over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres—in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth-century British culture.
Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose
by Frank Brady W. K. WimsattThis extensive anthology of Johnson's writings comprises a selection of his letters, his poems, Rasselas, twenty-one Rambler, nineteen Idlers, the Prefaces to the Dictionary and to the edition of Shakespeare, and the following Lives of the Poets: Cowley, Milton, Swift, Pope, Savage, Collins, and Gray.
Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems
by Christopher Ricks Samuel MenasheIntensely musical and rigorously constructed Samuel Menashe's everyday poetry stands apart in its meditative power. This anthology collects the full range of his work, from the early workings to his most recent poems.
San Francisco, Baby!
by Ward JenkinsTwo babies go on two big-city adventures, and there are so many exciting sights to see! In New York, Baby!, Times Square, Broadway, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art number among the top destinations; while in San Francisco, Baby!, the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman's Wharf, and Alcatraz are some of the main attractions. Rhyming text and charming illustrations make these picture books perfect for babies—and parents—who are always on the go, or who have big-city dreams!
Sanctificum
by Chris Abani"Abani . . . explores place and humor, exile and freedom with poems of experience and imagination . . . [he] enters the wound with a boldness that avoids nothing. Highly recommended." --Library Journal"Stunning poems." --New HumanistA self-described "zealot of optimism," poet and novelist Chris Abani bravely travels into the charged intersections of atrocity and love, politics and religion, loss and renewal. In poems of devastating beauty, he investigates complex personal history, family, and romantic love.Sanctificum, Abani's fifth collection of poetry, is his most personal and ambitious book. Utilizing religious ritual, the Nigerian Igbo language, and reggae rhythms, Abani creates a post-racial, liturgical love song that covers the globe from Abuja to Los Angeles.I say hibiscus and mean innocence.I say guava and mean childhood.I say mosquito netting and mean loss.I say father and it means only that.Happen that we all dream, but the sea is only sea.Happen that we call upon God but it is only a breezeruffling a prayer book in a small churchwhere benches groan in the heat . . . Chris Abani was born in Nigeria in 1966 and published his first novel at sixteen. He was imprisoned for his writings, and after his release he eventually moved to the United States. He is the author of ten books of poetry and fiction, including the best-selling novel GraceLand. He teaches at the University of California-Riverside and lives in Los Angeles.
Sanctuary
by Matthew SweeneyIn this, Matthew Sweeney's eighth full-length collection, the disarming fabulist and mythmaker steps out on his own into fresh territory. These are poems from a mapless journey through the backwaters of Europe and the New World - imbued, as always, with the strange, unerring logic of dream, but carrying now a new, fugitive, lyrical note. The sanctuary of the title is fragile and hard-won, and the complexities of the emotional life are written into the architecture of the physical, making for a poetry that is both vulnerable and disturbing. Celebrated for his ability to blend the simple terror of folklore with the more sophisticated anxieties of Kafka and the contemporary, Sweeney moves through this book like a revenant - past monkeys dressed as doormen, through ice-hotels and showers of human hair, towards a scaffold or a lover. Obliquely sinister and wryly engaging, full of fright and grim hilarity, these are rootless poems - unsettled and unsettling, and very far from home.A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Sanctuary in the Wilderness
by Alan MintzThe effort to create a serious Hebrew literature in the United States in the years around World War I is one of the best kept secrets of American Jewish history. Hebrew had been revived as a modern literary language in nineteenth-century Russia and then taken to Palestine as part of the Zionist revolution. But the overwhelming majority of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe settled in America, and a passionate kernel among them believed that Hebrew provided the vehicle for modernizing the Jewish people while maintaining their connection to Zion. These American Hebraists created schools, journals, newspapers, and, most of all, a high literary culture focused on producing poetry. Sanctuary in the Wilderness is a critical introduction to American Hebrew poetry, focusing on a dozen key poets. This secular poetry began with a preoccupation with the situation of the individual in a disenchanted world and then moved outward to engage American vistas and Jewish fate and hope in midcentury. American Hebrew poets hoped to be read in both Palestine and America, but were disappointed on both scores. Several moved to Israel and connected with the vital literary scene there, but most stayed and persisted in the cause of American Hebraism