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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.
A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015
by Wendell BerryMore than thirty-five years ago, when the weather allowed, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks arranged themselves into poems and each year since he has completed a sequence dated by the year of its composition. Last year we collected the lot into a collection, This Day, the Sabbath Poems 1979-2013. This new sequence for the following year is one of the richest yet. This group provides a virtual syllabus for all of Mr. Berry's cultural and agricultural work in concentrated form. Many of these poems are drawn from the view from a small porch in the woods, a place of stillness and reflection, a vantage point "of the one/life of the forest composed/of uncountable lives in countless/years each life coherent itself within/ the coherence, the great composure,/of all." A new collection of Wendell Berry poems is always an occasion of joyful celebration and this one is especially so.
So Much Synth
by Brenda Shaughnessy"Shaughnessy's particular genius . . . is utterly poetic, but essayistic in scope."-The New Yorker"Brenda Shaughnessy's work is a good place to start for any passionate woman feeling daunted by poetry." -Cosmopolitan"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."-Harvard ReviewSubversions of idiom and cliché punctuate Shaughnessy's fourth collection as she approaches middle age and revisits the memories, romances, and music of adolescence. So Much Synth is a brave and ferocious collection composed of equal parts femininity, pain, pleasure, and synthesizer. While Shaughnessy tenderly winces at her youthful excesses, we humbly catch glimpses of our own.From "Never Ever":Late is a synonym for dead which is a euphemismfor ever. Ever is a double-edged word,at once itself and its own opposite: alwaysand always some other time. In the category of cleave, then. To cut and to cling to,somewhat mournfully...Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of three books of poetry, including Human Dark with Sugar, winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of 2013." She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Sobbing School (Penguin Poets)
by Eugene Gloria Joshua BennettSelected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the National Poetry Series The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett's mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett's own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Social History: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)
by Bobby C. RogersBobby C. Rogers's second collection, Social History, listens hard to the voices of American characters and celebrates the gestures of ordinary life. The long lines of his narrative poems trace the undulations of southern speech, and his careful eye for detail reflects the influence of generations of storytellers, from authors like Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty to Rogers's own distant family members, living in "decrepit houses where the floors sagged and the front rooms reeked/of snuff, bitter as the smell off a pile of clods beside an open grave, the scent of time that hadn't succeeded in passing. " In his beguiling evocations of the past, Rogers looks back with affection to the rhythms and rituals of growing up in small-town Tennessee. While his poems speak of a living connection to community and to the earth, they also acknowledge the growing need to question what we have been taught and to break free and make our own way in this world. Graceful and plainspoken, the poems of Social History bear witness to ways of living that, though past, are never truly lost.
Sock It to You
by Ann Mulloy AshmoreLearn the steps to put on your socks. This poem makes putting on your socks as easy as one, two, three!
Socks On Rocks: These silly sheep knit silly socks (Alaska Tales)
by Mike SpindleDall sheep, of ALL sheep,are sheep that climb on rocks.They like to eat,but hurt their feetuntil they put on socks.Where do they reallyget socks so silly?Meet silly Dall sheep who knit socks and ties. Is it to protect their feet,or do the sheep just want to wear the latest fashions?This charming story was created by noted illustrator and toy designer Mike Spindle, who has illustrated and sculpted such characters as Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Care Bears, and the Muppets. The call of the wild brought Mike to Alaska. It was only natural that meet Miles, the Dall Sheep, and the little bear Alaska. These are the beginnings of the Alaska Tales.
Solarium
by Jordan Zandi Henri Cole"Solarium is a completely original gem of a book."--Henri Cole, from the forewordBowl of the lake. Bowl of the sky.Bowl of the lake with the sky in it. You looked at you in the water. The blizzard is cold.And the boy in the blizzard is blue. Jordan Zandi grew up in the rural Midwest, and in 2011 graduated with an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where he was the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship to Bolivia. His poetry has appeared in the New Republic and Little Star.
Solo para todos
by Rafael Solís Bolaños"...en sus trincheras,incapaces de verse como Humanidad..." <P><P>Dentro de nuestra vulnerabilidad soy; eres, el centro del universo por cuanto conciencia de sí; soy referente del ser y estar en percepción-interpretación sostenida del entorno y de mi mismo, atrapado en mi totalidad brotada de factores innumerables; turbulentos y frecuentemente ocultos y sin más alternativa existencial que la continua; obligada toma de decisiones y sus probabilísticas consecuencias. <P><P>La gran porción de mi poesía la he nacido sobre el camino de vida; a modo de estrangulamiento vital y caótico: en permanente deslumbramiento creación-destrucción-recreación, y lúcido de mi cuenta regresiva que no admite indiferencias. Entre euforias, apatías, palizas y en un contexto de grandes urbes y selvas barrocas; inmensidades y mínimos detalles, han germinado con esfuerzo y esperanza mis criaturas, que sabedoras de lo inefable, apelan a los recónditos del alma de un lector que las recomponga y les dé destino.
Somewhere Among
by Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu Sonia ChaghatzbanianA beautiful and haunting debut novel in verse about an American-Japanese girl struggling with the loneliness of being caught between two worlds when the tragedy of 9/11 strikes an ocean away. <P><P>Eleven-year-old Ema has always been of two worlds--her father's Japanese heritage and her mother's life in America. She's spent summers in California for as long as she can remember, but this year she and her mother are staying with her grandparents in Japan as they await the arrival of Ema's baby sibling. <P><P>Her mother's pregnancy has been tricky, putting everyone on edge, but Ema's heart is singing--finally, there will be someone else who will understand what it's like to belong and not belong at the same time. But Ema's good spirits are muffled by her grandmother who is cold, tightfisted, and quick to reprimand her for the slightest infraction. <P><P> Then, when their stay is extended and Ema must go to a new school, her worries of not belonging grow. And when the tragedy of 9/11 strikes, Ema, her parents, and the world watch as the twin towers fall... <P><P>As Ema watches her mother grieve for her country across the ocean--threatening the safety of her pregnancy--and her beloved grandfather falls ill, she feels more helpless and hopeless than ever. <P><P>And yet, surrounded by tragedy, Ema sees for the first time the tender side of her grandmother, and the reason for the penny-pinching and sternness make sense--her grandmother has been preparing so they could all survive the worst. <LP><P>Dipping and soaring, Somewhere Among is the story of one girl's search for identity, inner peace, and how she discovers that hope can indeed rise from the ashes of disaster.
Songs from a Mountain
by Amanda Nadelberg"Amanda Nadelberg's poems . . . are jumping, funny, romantic, and frequently lyrical....which in the immediate reading is almost pure music."--Ken Tucker, Entertainment WeeklyFrom "Matson":So what patent reason is there to doubtthe color of a person's hair, there is sunand timpani. Rubber wood bone silkhemp or ivory I will cut my own in Junebut in May endured the next yesterdayI've already now forgotten what all themen I'll ever know smelled like. Maybedevotion on the beach in the middle ofthe week which is dumbed down withplanets imagining song.
Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
by Alexis Pauline GumbsIn Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.
The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat
by Amelia MartensAmelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations.<P><P> Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange, darkly funny, and utterly beguiling.Amelia Martens is the author of the chapbooks Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and lives in Paducah, Kentucky, where she teaches at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.
Stairway to Heaven: Poems
by Alison DemingA new collection from a poet who "writes with scrupulous and merciful passion about every kind of relatedness--family, place, politics, and wildlife" (W. S. Piero)In her fifth book of poems, Stairway to Heaven, Alison Hawthorne Deming explores dimensions of grief and renewal after losing her brother and mother. Grounded in her communion with nature and place, she finds even in Death Valley, that most stark of landscapes, a spirit of inventiveness that animates the ground we walk on. From the cave art of Chauvet to the futuristic habitat of Biosphere 2, that inventiveness becomes consolation for losses in family and nature, a means to build again a sense of self and world in the face of devastating loss.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Stand By Me RP
by Dave SteeleRetinitis Pigmentosa can be a blessing and a curse. Since losing the majority of my sight in the last 2 years I have and still continue to battle everyday with anxiety, fears for my future and the future of my children, acceptance from a world full of misconceptions and constantly having to adjust as my tunnel of sight continues to shrink. Although RP has also blessed me with the ability to realise the important things in life. I know I am never alone with this and have met the most amazing people within the RP and Usher community. Through my blindness I have discovered a new found gift for talking about the things that a lot of us go through when faced with going blind. I have always believed that music and poetry can make an impact, touch the heart and heal the soul in a way like nothing else. I hope this collection of poems can reach those who struggle sometimes with going blind. Help friends and family understand how it can be for us. I hope my poems can help raise awareness so one day the world understands that there are many different shades of blind.
Standoff: Poems
by David RivardI often feel as though I've entered a standoff between whathappens around me & what's going on inside--& this lifethat goes on & on inside my head goes on & on & on it seemsalmost without me, as it has since childhood . . . --from "Standoff"For three decades, David Rivard has written from deep within the skin of our times. With Standoff, he asks an essential question: In a world of noise, of global anxiety and media distraction, how can we speak to each other with honesty? These poems scan the shifting horizons of our world, all the while swerving elastically through the multitude of selves that live inside our memories and longings--"all those me's that wish to be set free at dawn." The work of these poems is a counterweight to the work of the world. It wants to deepen the mystery we are to ourselves, stretching toward acceptance and tenderness in ways that are hard-won and true, even if fleeting.
Stranger: Poems
by Adam Clay“A heartbreakingly stunning collection dedicated to the unsung suspension of time that occurs when life suddenly goes awry.” —Ada LimónStranger is a book of both great change and deep roots, of the richest elements of the earth and the instability of a darkening sky. The third collection by Adam Clay dives into a dynamic world where the only map available is “not of the world / but of the path I took to arrive in this place, / a map with no real definable future purpose.” Tracing a period of great change in his life—a move, a new job, the birth of his first child—Clay navigates the world with elegance and wonder, staring into the heart of transition and finding in it the wisdom that “Despite our best efforts to will it shut, / the proof of the world’s existence / can best be seen in its insistence, / in its opening up.” By firmly grasping on to the present, the past and the future collapse into the lived moment, allowing for an unclouded view of a way forward.“In language that is circular, stoic, and almost Zen-like, Clay attempts to remain himself in the face of life shifting underneath him.” —Publishers Weekly“In those moments when one rearranges the furniture in a room or leaves the cast-iron skillet in the oven or contemplates an ink stain on the wall, Clay finds a space for deep inquiry.” —Kazim Ali
Streams in the Desert Morning and Evening: 365 Devotions
by L. B. CowmanStreams in the Desert is one of the most popular daily devotionals of all time. Now combined with Cowman's follow-up Springs in the Valley is an everyday morning and evening devotional. Readers will be encouraged by these short devotions that speak to the soul with the ageless truth of the Word of God.Streams in the Desert Morning and Evening includes:More than 900 pages of short, daily devotionsGuidance and hope that encourage a deeper faith walkWisdom and insight into God's characterScripture verses to strengthen the daily messagesBeautiful cover with foil and a ribbon markerStreams in the Desert Morning and Evening is a beautiful gift for readers who want to start their mornings and wind down during their evenings by connecting their hearts to the One who knows it best.
The Sublime in Antiquity
by James I. PorterCurrent understandings of the sublime are focused by a single word ('sublimity') and by a single author ('Longinus'). The sublime is not a word: it is a concept and an experience, or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns. Once we train our sights on these patterns a radically different prospect on the sublime in antiquity comes to light, one that touches everything from its range of expressions to its dates of emergence, evolution, role in the cultures of antiquity as a whole, and later reception. This book is the first to outline an alternative account of the sublime in Greek and Roman poetry, philosophy, and the sciences, in addition to rhetoric and literary criticism. It offers new readings of Longinus without privileging him, but instead situates him within a much larger context of reflection on the sublime in antiquity.
The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History
by John Hollander Kenneth GrossJohn Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts--from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens--Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self. An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander's account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.
Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s
by translated by Lisa Katz Hannan HeverSuddenly, the Sight of War is a genealogy of Hebrew poetry written in Israel between the beginning of World War II and the War of Independence in 1948. In it, renowned literary scholar Hannan Hever sheds light on how the views and poetic practices of poets changed as they became aware of the extreme violence in Europe toward the Jews. In dealing with the difficult topics of the Shoah, Natan Alterman's 1944 publication of The Poems of the Ten Plagues proved pivotal. His work inspired the next generation of poets like Haim Guri, as well as detractors like Amir Gilboa. Suddenly, the Sight of War also explores the relations between the poetry of the struggle for national independence and the genre of war-reportage, uniquely prevalent at the time. Hever concludes his genealogy with a focus on the feminine reaction to the War of Independence showing how women writers such as Lea Goldberg and Yocheved Bat-Miryam subverted war poetry at the end of the 1940s. Through the work of these remarkable poets, we learn how a culture transcended seemingly unspeakable violence.
Survival Media: The Politics and Poetics of Mobility and the War in Sri Lanka (Mobility & Politics)
by S. PereraThrough the narratives and movements of survivors of the war in Lanka these interconnected essays develop the concept of 'survival media' as embodied and expressive forms of mobility across borders.
Swallows and Waves
by Paula BohinceSeated one, loved by the lavishing comband fingers of another woman demon-strating how attention and technique coalesceinto art. Where to gowhen the mother is gone.All occupations form to replace her.What relief to be a girl again for an hour,beneath the practiced wrists of her avatar.Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere.
Syllabus of Errors: Poems
by Troy Jollimore. . . we are fixed to perpetrate the species-- I meant perpetuate--as if our duty were coupled with our terror. As if beauty itself were but a syllabus of errors.Troy Jollimore's first collection of poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was hailed by the New York Times as "a snappy, entertaining book," and led the San Francisco Chronicle to call him "a new and exciting voice in American poetry." And his critically acclaimed second collection expanded his reputation for poems that often take a playful approach to philosophical issues. While the poems in Syllabus of Errors share recognizable concerns with those of Jollimore's first two books, readers will also find a voice that has grown more urgent, more vulnerable, and more sensitive to both the inevitability of tragedy and the possibility of renewal. Poems such as "Ache and Echo," "The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard," and "When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth" explore loss, regret, and the nature of beauty, while the culminating long poem, "Vertigo," is an elegy for a lost friend as well as a fantasia on death, repetition, and transcendence (not to mention the poet's favorite Hitchcock film). Ingeniously organized into sections that act as reflections on six quotations about birdsong, these poems are themselves an answer to the question the poet asks in "On Birdsong": "What would we say to the cardinal or jay, / given wings that could mimic their velocities?"
T. S. Eliot: A Friendship (Routledge Library Editions: T. S. Eliot)
by Frederick TomlinFirst published in 1988. Fredrick Tomlin and T. S. Eliot were friends for almost thirty-four years. What emerges from Fredrick Tomlin’s memories and the many letters which passed between them is a private Eliot, seen only by his closest family and a trusted few. Tomlin evokes the man as he was – quite different in his humanity and in his humour from the public image of the ‘great poet’ and the austere sage. With fresh insights and personal testimony, Tomlin directs light onto aspects of Eliot’s character and personality of which the public has been unaware, thereby enhancing the reader’s appreciation of Eliot’s work as a whole. This title will be of interest to students of literature.