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Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (Thinking Literature)
by Jennifer SoongAn audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting. In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.
Sloan-Kettering
by Abba KovnerIn his final collection of poems, Abba Kovner -- the famed Jewish resistance fighter who led the Vilna ghetto uprising during World War II -- records his battle with cancer and his deep engagement with life up to his last days. A beloved master of Hebrew literature, Abba Kovner was a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has seldom appeared in English. These clear, spare, luminous verses bring his voice to us in all its fullness. Facing the one fight he knew he would lose, Kovner records in these poems his final weeks, as he was dying of cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York. Weaving together his perceptions of the present moment ("How little we need to be happy: a half kilo increase in weight, /two circuits of the corridors"), sorrow at leaving the world and at the dramatic loss of his vocal chords ("Have I no right to die/while still alive?"), and memories of his heroic comrades in the Baltic forest, Kovner emerges from these pages with yet another kind of heroism. His desire to give a complete account of the gift of life, even as that life is failing, makes these poems deeply moving and unforgettable.
Slope of the Child Everlasting (American Poets Continuum)
by Laurie KutchinsSlope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins’ previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination. Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and spends her summers along the Wyoming-Idaho border. The Night Path won the 1997 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions.
Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems
by Charles Bukowskiin this place there are the dead, the deadly and the dying. there is the cross, the builders of the cross and the burners of the cross. the pattern of my life forms like a cheap shadow on the wall before me. my love what is left of it now must crawl to wherever it can crawl. the strongest know that death is final and the happiest are those gifted with the shortest journey.
Slovenly Love
by Méira CookLonglisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards Slovenly Love is Meira Cook's third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. Slovenly Love, in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that.
Slow Moving Target
by Sue WheelerShortlisted for the 2001 Pat Lowther Award and the 2001 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes) In her second book, Slow-Moving Target, Sue Wheeler unwraps more than the Fifties. She unwraps a whole shopful of environments and events, and winds them up and sets them down to delight her readers. There is no sentimentalizing here -- either of people or of other places and times -- and yet the writing is so consistently sharp, perceptive, and clear, that the overall direction is always towards hope, towards the light.
Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories
by Reginald GibbonsFew people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience--a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more--these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg. Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city's people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.
Slow Transparency
by Rachel HadasHere is a bit of "Praise for a Patch of Quiet:" Two of the strongest silences to lean on: a white cat lying on a wooden floor waking to stretch and stretching back to sleep (cream walls, grey-painted floorboards, plain white curtains, black metronome) and out of doors where all the world's a timepiece this slope of ripening or ripened apples. Their floating tart perfumes do not insist to one whose only hunger is for quiet this afternoon; they just enrich the air, invisibly adorn one's breathing space. Spaces between first words, then conversations: the tempo slows. Rust holes at first glinted like isolate stars in the tin barn roof years have dappled since to slow transparency. I'd thought to be alone would be . . . would be . . . bees buzzed a busy swarm, each mote a menace. Would be to lose a writing hand, a face, a sounding board, a listening ear, a voice-- all lopped imaginings. WTould be and was and is this afternoon to lose the need for ticktock voicing. Silence thickens: mercury gleams afresh in the cherished tarnished mirror I tilt, across whose valuable sheen as over clean white paper half a dozen summer pencils lightly scribble: insect buzz, chainsaw, birdcall, hoot of train, pattern simple at once and multiple as are the endless changes of attention due to a single hour of cloudboats sailing across and across a shifting summer sky. ...
Slow War (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #40)
by Benjamin HertwigBenjamin Hertwig’s debut collection of poetry, Slow War, is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Kevin Powers’s “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.” A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as “Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan” and “Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Examination of Stomach Contents,” and the potential for healing in unlikely places in “A Poem Is Not Guantánamo Bay.” This collection provides no easy answers – Hertwig looks at the war in Afghanistan with the unflinching gaze of a soldier and the sustained attention of a poet. In his accounting of warfare and its difficult aftermath on the homefront, the personal becomes political. While these poems inhabit both experimental and traditional forms, the breakdown of language channels a descent into violence and an ascent into a future that no longer feels certain, where history and trauma are forever intertwined. Hertwig reminds us that remembering war is a political act and that writing about war is a way we remember.
Slows: Twice
by T. LiemCBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.This is a book of slow hours, days, and years—how they can collapse into one another, how it can feel like we are living one day repeating itself. From within this collapse, the speaker seeks connection everywhere. They visit their father’s birthplace, Jogjakarta; they listen to a stranger’s phone call at the Motel 6 in Alberta; they linger in the so-called ethnic aisle of the grocery store. From all of these places the speaker is discouraged but tries to imagine a future joyously incomprehensible to the present.Slows: Twice is a collection of revisions and repetitions. Every poem in one half of the book has an alternate version, or a mirror poem, in the other half. Lines, words, images, and forms are reused and reflected in a kind of palindrome, so the book can be read from front cover to back cover, or vice versa. In this way, Liem considers how language shapes identity over time and how the speaker’s position in relation to language might be revised. The poems are tied to themes of work and labor, consumption and waste, family and home, as other shapers of identity and relationships. The act of revising and repeating – slowly – is meant to be a resistance to efficiency, a resistance to being an always-productive body under capitalism."The poems of Slows: Twice collect in resonance, contemplate the construction of selves, with modes of repetition, sequencing, and mirroring, the way language assembles an identity or points to itself as it points away. 'The clouds // disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it.' Storied and cubistic, palindromic and cleaved, Liem’s poems reveal relationships to time, noise, and duration, and the possibility of joy given painful pasts." – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure"T. Liem is one of my favorite poets working in Canada. I welcomed this book into my life like sudden sunlight. Slows: Twice is a book about how urgently we need to read differently. I loved its mischievous relation to form and expectation as well as its burning intelligence. I once described T. as an inheritor of the tradition of language poetry, but what Slows: Twice proves is that T. is less an inheritor and more so an innovator, an inventor in their own right. I read it in one frenzied sitting." – Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus"It’s breathtaking to watch words drip from a page into a silver river cutting through a canyon of time. T. Liem sculpts poetry with steady, curious fingers, pushing against the filaments we think hold us together that have been quietly collecting cracks, from buried violence and whispered histories to the fragile connections tying us together. Obits. captured my heart; Slows: Twice now affirms it." – Teta, founder of diasporic Indonesian publication Buah zine"'For everything I was, I am now something else.' Revision of self and world are core to this innovative, unruly book that manages somehow to be at once formally wacky and emotionally clear. These poems seem to ask: if language is a box heavy with histories and inadequacies and which we nevertheless must carry, can language also carry us somewhere, elsewhere, strangely? Rarely have I encountered a book so at home in the unresolved, in the tension between a longing for declaration and a commitment to questions. T. Liem’s work conjures the figure of Janus: god of duality and gates, one face facing an end, the other looking through a new door, right in the eye of a dream." – Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"\"t. liem's SLOWS: TWICE is a fascinating exercise in re
Slug: The Sunday Times Bestseller
by Hollie McNishTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'An intoxicating mixture of poetry and prose, Slug is a taboo-busting delight' SCOTSMAN 'One of the best poets we have' MATT HAIG 'She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love' KAE TEMPESTThe new collection of poetry and prose from the Ted Hughes Award-winning author of Nobody Told MeFrom Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.'The inimitable words of poet/goddess Hollie McNish once again hold up honest, damn funny and refreshing takes on the everydayness of our lives . . . Never have we needed her more' STYLIST'Hollie always articulates exactly how I feel' CHARLY COX'A tribute to life itself' RED
Slug: The Sunday Times Bestseller
by Hollie McNishTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'An intoxicating mixture of poetry and prose, Slug is a taboo-busting delight' SCOTSMAN 'One of the best poets we have' MATT HAIG 'She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love' KAE TEMPESTThe new collection of poetry and prose from the Ted Hughes Award-winning author of Nobody Told MeFrom Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.'The inimitable words of poet/goddess Hollie McNish once again hold up honest, damn funny and refreshing takes on the everydayness of our lives . . . Never have we needed her more' STYLIST'Hollie always articulates exactly how I feel' CHARLY COX'A tribute to life itself' RED
Slug: The Sunday Times Bestseller
by Hollie McNishListen to the audiobook for an exclusive interview with Hollie and her good friend, radio presenter Gemma Cairney. Hollie has also included a special poetry reading in memory of her grandmother, as well as an exclusive preview of poems from her next book.'One of the best poets we have' MATT HAIG'She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love' KAE TEMPEST 'Hollie always articulates exactly how I feel' CHARLY COX The new collection of poetry and prose from the Ted Hughes Award-winning author of Nobody Told MeFrom Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.'The inimitable words of poet/goddess Hollie McNish once again hold up honest, damn funny and refreshing takes on the everydayness of our lives . . . Never have we needed her more' STYLIST
Small Arguments: Poems
by Souvankham ThammavongsaA beautiful re-issued edition of poetry from the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of How To Pronounce Knife FEATURING A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHORThe language of Small Arguments is simple, yet there is nothing simple in its ideas. Reminiscent of Pablo Neruda&’s Elemental Odes, these poems explore the structures of argument, orchestrating material around repetition, variation, and contrast. Thammavongsa&’s approach is like that of a scientist or philosopher, delicately probing material for meaning and understanding. The poet collects small lives and argues for a larger belonging: a grain of dirt, a crushed cockroach, the eyes of a dead dragonfly. It is a work that suggests we can create with what we know and with that alone.First published in 2003, Small Arguments announced the arrival of a distinct and utterly original new voice.
Small Beginnings: Things People Say About Babies
by Nanette NewmanA collection of quotes, poems and excerpts reflecting with humor, heart and cynicism, the emotions and activities surrounding the birth of babies. Read about the pitfalls of a baby's first bath, the praise expected by new mothers, blessings, lullabies, birth announcements, advice and much more. recognizable authors represented include Dylan Thomas, George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Robert Burns, H. G. Wells, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Hardy, Ogden Nash, Mark Twain, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and many others.
Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight: Poems (Barataria Poetry)
by Julia B. Levine"A polished poet of extraordinary skill.... Levine is caught between wholehearted love of the world's beauty and sorrow at its unavoidable misery and suffering." -- Library JournalWith an astonishing grasp of language and detail, Julia Levine enacts a visceral, lyric experience that slips wildly between and within tragedy and grace. In Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, her fourth collection, Levine offers far-ranging subjects, including poems about a friend's suicide and the poet's own interactions with traumatized children, as well as a series of revision poems that question the imagination's infinite possibilities for creation. In "Strolling in Late April," a woman with dementia wanders in a park filled with springtime beauty, while in "Tahoe Wetlands," the speaker recalls a rape at gunpoint through the merciful distance of time. At times humorous, ironic, and even redemptive, these poems are infused with lush images of the natural and physical world. Levine's work pries apart small places that exist within the spaces between beauty and trauma in an ordinary life. Ultimately, the poems affirm our human resilience, made possible by the presence and help of others: "carrying something of the unbearable / between us until it could be borne."
Small Fires
by Kelly Norah DrukkerWe come / to kneel at the doorway, / to peer into that kind of / dark. To think our way / backwards, listening. Tracing a series of journeys, real and imagined, Kelly Norah Drukker's Small Fires opens with a section of poems set on Inis Mór, a remote, Irish-speaking island off the west coast of County Galway, where the poet-as-speaker discovers the ways in which remnants of the island's early Christian monastic culture brush up against island life in the twenty-first century. Also present is a series of poems set in the Midi-Pyrénées and in the countryside around Lyon. Linked to the shorter poems in the collection by landscape, theme, and tone is a set of longer narrative poems that give voice to imagined speakers who are, each in a different way, living on the margins. The first describes a young emigrant woman's crossing from Ireland to Canada in the early twentieth century, where she must sacrifice her tie to the land for the uncertain freedom of a journey by sea, while a second depicts the lives of silk workers living under oppressive conditions in Lyon in the 1830s. In detailed and musical language, the poems in Small Fires highlight aspects of landscape and culture in regions that are haunted by marginal and silenced histories. The collection concludes with a long poem written as a response to American writer Paul Monette's autobiographical work Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.
Small Fires (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #36)
by Kelly Norah DrukkerWe come / to kneel at the doorway, / to peer into that kind of / dark. To think our way / backwards, listening. Tracing a series of journeys, real and imagined, Kelly Norah Drukker’s Small Fires opens with a section of poems set on Inis Mór, a remote, Irish-speaking island off the west coast of County Galway, where the poet-as-speaker discovers the ways in which remnants of the island’s early Christian monastic culture brush up against island life in the twenty-first century. Also present is a series of poems set in the Midi-Pyrénées and in the countryside around Lyon. Linked to the shorter poems in the collection by landscape, theme, and tone is a set of longer narrative poems that give voice to imagined speakers who are, each in a different way, living on the margins. The first describes a young emigrant woman’s crossing from Ireland to Canada in the early twentieth century, where she must sacrifice her tie to the land for the uncertain freedom of a journey by sea, while a second depicts the lives of silk workers living under oppressive conditions in Lyon in the 1830s. In detailed and musical language, the poems in Small Fires highlight aspects of landscape and culture in regions that are haunted by marginal and silenced histories. The collection concludes with a long poem written as a response to American writer Paul Monette’s autobiographical work Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.
Small Ghost
by Trista MateerA delicate blend of melancholy reflections and absurd hopefulness, Small Ghost explores the exhausting reality of struggling with mental health. Mateerís conversational style, infused with vulnerability and thoughtfulness, transforms mundane experiences into wistful musings. Panic attacks at the grocery store and days spent wasting away in bed are met with humor and care. Lauren Zaknounís evocative photography and the poetís own illustrations add a whimsical, irreverent touch to the collection. With Small Ghost, Trista Mateer holds out a hand and offers solace to those who may feel otherwise isolated in their peculiarities.
Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton
by Roque DaltonEnglish-only edition of poems written from exile, prison, and on the run by the Salvadoran revolutionary whose life and word urged love as well as change. Selected from 10 of his collections including two posthumous manuscripts, but none are from Poemasc. Chosen by Hardie St. Martin, and including translations by Claribel Alegría, Hardie St. Martin, Jonathan Cohen, and Ernesto Cardenal
Small Mothers of Fright: Poems (Goat Island Poetry)
by Tara BrayIn Small Mothers of Fright, Tara Bray draws on her experiences as a mother struggling to strike a balance between protecting her daughter from the world's perils and dazzling her with its many wonders. The birds that fill these pages convey a sense of fragility and uncertainty, while the rhythm of the seasons provides a comfort that promises the old will be made new again. In a precise yet accessible style, Bray writes about fleeting actions and thoughts that, in sum, create the memorable, lasting moments of life. In one poem, a woman reflects on "the way the young self rushes in" as she blasts music from her past on the car radio, deliberately calling forth the contrast between past pain and present satisfactions. It is the world of the simple and overlooked--crows, wrens, food, tea, sermons, ragged coyotes, runners, yogis, poppies-- that serves as something to hold to in spite of loss, human frailty, and unease.
Smash Poetry Journal: 125 Writing Ideas for Inspiration and Self Exploration
by Robert Lee BrewerA Poetry Journal to Poem Your Days Away! Don't wait for inspiration to strike! Whether you're an aspiring or published poet, this book will help you get in a frame of mind to make creative writing a consistent part of your life. With prompts from Robert Lee Brewer's popular Writer's Digest blog, Poetic Asides, you'll find 125 ideas for writing poems along with the journaling space you need to respond to the prompt.125 unexpected poetry prompts such as from the perspective of an insect, about a struggle, or including the word changePlenty of blank space to compose your own poemsTips on unique poetic forms and other poetry resourcesPerfectly sized to carry in a backpack or purse, you can jot down ideas for poems as you're waiting in line for a morning coffee or take it to the park for a breezy afternoon writing session. Wherever you are, your next poem is never more than a page-turn away.
Smog Baby
by David DennyDavid Denny brings his life growing up in the shadow of disneyland to life through his poems in Smog Baby.
Smoke
by Dorianne LauxDorianne Laux's long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted-poetry that "gets hard in the face of aloofness," in the words of one reviewer. In Smoke, as in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In "The Shipfitter's Wife," a woman recalls her husband's homecoming at the end of his work day:Then I'd open his clothes and takethe whole day inside me-the ship'sgray sides, the miles of copper pipe,the voice of the foreman clangingoff the hull's silver ribs. Spark of leadkissing metal. The clamp, the winch,the white fire of the torch, the whistle,and the long drive home.And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures:Who would want to give it up, the coala cat's eye in the dark room, no one therebut you and your smoke, the windowcracked to street sounds, the distant criesof living things. Alone, you are almostsafe . . .With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. Laux was the judge for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Contest, and is a tenured professor in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Smoke (American Poets Continuum #Vol. 62)
by Dorianne LauxDorianne Laux’s long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted-poetry that "gets hard in the face of aloofness," in the words of one reviewer. In Smoke, as in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In "The Shipfitter’s Wife," a woman recalls her husband’s homecoming at the end of his work day:Then I’d open his clothes and takethe whole day inside me-the ship’sgray sides, the miles of copper pipe,the voice of the foreman clangingoff the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of leadkissing metal. The clamp, the winch,the white fire of the torch, the whistle,and the long drive home.And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures:Who would want to give it up, the coala cat’s eye in the dark room, no one therebut you and your smoke, the windowcracked to street sounds, the distant criesof living things. Alone, you are almostsafe . . .With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. Laux was the judge for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Contest, and is a tenured professor in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon.