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Kill-site
by Tim LilburnBy the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best Book of the YearTo his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.
Killarnoe
by Sonnet L'AbbeWith its razzle-dazzle wordplay and kaleidoscope of subjects, Sonnet L’Abbé’s second collection of poems is a tour-de-force. L’Abbé invents her own unique poetics, coupling a glittering variety of patterns with tumbling rhythms and rhymes. And with this refreshed language, she reconsiders all the rules for twenty-first-century life. The poems work like a whirlwind, ranging from the intimacy of infancy to the shock of whole civilizations razed by war, and are infused with a political undertone that reveals a child’s emerging understanding of identity, of specific citizenship, of bodies physical and psychological, of language, imagination, and dream. Whether funny or funky, candid or subtle, amused and ironic or stunned in fright, the poems are guided by a fierce intelligence that never oversimplifies the world. Killarnoe, the poet tells us, “is a place I invented right now. I just built it from my head.” And in its reconsideration of what it means to be, Killarnoe is fascinating, charged, and inspired.
Killdeer: essay-poems (Department of Critical Thought #4)
by Phil HallWINNER OF THE 75th GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR POETRYWINNER OF THE 25th TRILLIUM BOOK PRIZEWINNER OF AN ALCUIN AWARD FOR DESIGNSHORTLISTED FOR THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZEThese are poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes. These are essays that are not out to persuade so much as ruminate, invite, accrue.Hall is a surruralist (rural & surreal), and a terroir-ist (township-specific regionalist). He offers memories of, and homages to -- Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace, Libby Scheier, and Daniel Jones, among others. He writes of the embarrassing process of becoming a poet, and of his push-pull relationship with the whole concept of home. His notorious 2004 chapbook essay The Bad Sequence is also included here, for a wider readership, at last. It has been revised. (It's teeth have been sharpened.)In this book, the line is the unit of composition; the reading is wide; the perspective personal: each take a give, and logic a drawback.Language is not a smart-aleck; it's a sacred tinkerer.Readers are invited to watch awe become a we.In Fred Wah's phrase, what is offered here is "the music at the heart of thinking."
Kin: Rooted in Hope
by Carole Boston WeatherfordA Coretta Scott King Honor Book An &“imaginative and moving&” (The Horn Book, starred review) portrait of a Black family tree shaped by enslavement and freedom, rendered in searing poems by acclaimed author Carole Boston Weatherford and stunning art by her son Jeffery Boston Weatherford.I call their names: Abram Alice Amey Arianna Antiqua I call their names: Isaac Jake James Jenny Jim Every last one, property of the Lloyds, the state&’s preeminent enslavers. Every last one, with a mind of their own and a story that ain&’t yet been told. Till now. Carole and Jeffery Boston Weatherford&’s ancestors are among the founders of Maryland. Their family history there extends more than three hundred years, but as with the genealogical searches of many African Americans with roots in slavery, their family tree can only be traced back five generations before going dark. And so from scraps of history, Carole and Jeffery have conjured the voices of their kin, creating an often painful but ultimately empowering story of who their people were in a breathtaking book that is at once deeply personal yet all too universal. Carole&’s poems capture voices ranging from her ancestors to Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman to the plantation house and land itself that connects them all, and Jeffery&’s evocative illustrations help carry the story from the first mention of a forebear listed as property in a 1781 ledger to he and his mother&’s homegoing trip to Africa in 2016. Shaped by loss, erasure, and ultimate reclamation, this is the story of not only Carole and Jeffery&’s family, but of countless other Black families in America.
Kindergarten Kids: Riddles, Rebuses, Wiggles, Giggles, And More! (Into Reading, Read Aloud #Module 1, Book 3)
by Stephanie Calmenson Melissa SweetNIMAC-sourced textbook
Kindertotenwald
by Franz WrightA genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize-winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright's most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet. In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured "yes" of creation--"it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last," Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet--"a fairly good egg in hot water," as he describes himself--who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. "Take everything," Wright suggests, "you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting." With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.From the Hardcover edition.
The Kindness Colder Than the Elements
by Charles NobleWith wit and cunning, Noble's poems insinuate themselves into the mediations of "we use language" / "language uses us," into the objectification of "mind," into the struggles and cracking of systems. Cuing on Hegel's epochal revitalization of the syllogism, they begin with sentences-cum-arguments that issue from an everyman's intentions and insights, playing into and baiting the "sociality of reason." In the cut-up sentences then come the restless, accelerated themes—themes that exist only in their variations, ghosting into one another like the dusk and the dawn in a winging, distended now.
Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia
by Michael PiferThe fascinating story of how premodern Anatolia&’s multireligious intersection of cultures shaped its literary languages and poetic masterpieces By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a place of stunning cultural diversity. Kindred Voices explores how the region&’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities. This convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period&’s literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era&’s major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem.
The King: Poems
by Rebecca Wolff"Wolff keeps company with Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and Beth Ann Fennelly."--Publishers Weekly, starred review A bold, lyrical invention by an award-winning poet whose "gift for the gorgeous" won praise from Robert Pinsky. The King is a groundbreaking collection following a Self--a mother, lover, wife, thinker--in her fractured approach to the absolutes of pregnancy, postpartum depression, childrearing, belief, love, and epistemology. Here is a potent exploration of one woman's coming together with the Other--her hard-won attachment to "the King." from "Deeply Psychological" And then I surfaced a whole matrix or rubric magical thinking other kinds of thinking but in layers, you understand, with supremacy a honeycomb.
King Lear: Large Print (Dover Thrift Editions)
by William ShakespeareFirst performed about 1805, King Lear is one of the most relentlessly bleak of Shakespeare's tragedies. Probably written between Othello and Macbeth, when the playwright was at the peak of his tragic power, Lear's themes of filial ingratitude, injustice, and the meaninglessness of life in a seemingly indifferent universe are explored with unsurpassed power and depth.The plot concerns a monarch betrayed by his daughters, robbed of his kingdom, descending into madness. Greed, treachery, and cruelty are rife and the denouement of the play is both brutal and heartbreaking. In fact, so troubling is its vision of man's life that, until the mid-19th century, the play was performed most often with a non-Shakespearean happy ending, with Lear back on his throne and Cordelia, the daughter nearest his heart, happily married to the noble Edgar. But there is a dark magnificence to Shakespeare's original vision of the Lear story, and the play is performed today essentially as he wrote it, uncompromised by later "improvements." King Lear is reprinted here from an authoritative British edition, complete with explanatory footnotes.
King Lear in our Time
by Maynard MackThis edition first published in 1966. Previous edition published 1965 by the University of California Press. Perhaps more than any other play of Shakespeare's King Lear has been subjected to almost totally contradictory interpretations. In the first historical section of the book the author describes the varying concepts of the play and the distortions of text and even plot that have been widely used. Garrick's playing of Lear as a pathetic and down-trodden old man. Laughton's and Olivier's versions and Herbert Blaus's theory of the 'subtext' are described and analysed. The central section of the book examines the medieval, folk and romance sources of the play. The final chapter illustrates how the action of the play and its pervading violence and evil are not explained in terms of human motive and rely for their meaning more on their effects than their antecedents. An important theme is the play's examination of society and the ties of service and family love.
King Me
by Roger ReevesOn the "Best Poetry Books of the Year" list from Library Journal "A sophisticated and breathtaking writer, Reeves takes the reader on a harrowing journey: each poem comes packed with arresting imagery, relentless in its examination of how tragedy and trauma become internalized - cleaning out the wounds to understand the pain."-Los Angeles Review of Books"Roger Reeves' King Me stitches together many worlds into one startling and visceral book. His ranging, encyclopedic knowledge crosses history, medicine, biology, metapoetics and more, but he tackles it all with a bold and sonorous surrealist flow."-American Microreviews From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s, King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became very interested in the mythology of king, the one who is sacrificed at the end of the harvest season. . . . For me, the myth manifests in the killing of young black men, Emmett Till, and in the ways America deems young, black male bodies as expendable-Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. These are the young kings whom we love to kill-over and over again."From "Some Young Kings":The hummingbirds inside my chest,with their needle-nosed pliers for tonguesand hammer-heavy wings, have left a messof ticks in my lungs and a punctured lullabyin my throat. Little boy blue come blowyour horn. The cow's in the meadow. And Dorothy's alone in the corn with Jack, his black fingers, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clickingalong her legs until she howls-Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker . . . Roger Reeves earned his MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing and his PhD from the University of Texas. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The King of Terrors
by Jim JohnstoneCBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves? Written after a brain tumour diagnosis early in the pandemic, The King of Terrors is a meditation on living with illness and the forces required to heal. These forces are not always what we expect – they may not even be medical. Jim Johnstone implies that language, relationships, and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Haunted by the decimation of the North American landscape and the anxiety of living in a polarized society, Johnstone’s poems are bodily reflections that ask how we can reframe our past to make sense of the present. The King of Terrors oscillates between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we’re never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar."There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‘each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.’ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as certain ‘as the body // it inhabits’ – offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." – Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems"The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being unwell, or, as the poet says, living 'between / age and agency.' Haunting, stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with the shock of the mortal." – Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar
Kingdom Animalia (American Poets Continuum #131)
by Aracelis GirmayThe poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth. Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kingdom Animalia
by Aracelis GirmayThe poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth. Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
by Marie HoweFinalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize: "Thought-provoking, poignant, brutal, amusing, and always beautiful."--Elizabeth Berg Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time--during those apparently unmiraculous periods of everyday trouble and joy?
The Kingdom of Surfaces: Poems
by Sally Wen MaoA virtuosic new poetry collection from Sally Wen Mao, “a consistently inspiring and exciting voice” (Morgan Parker)In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.At its heart, The Kingdom of Surfaces imagines the poet wandering into a Western fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives. The title poem is a speculative recasting of “Through the Looking-Glass,” set in a surreal topsy-turvy version of the China-themed 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. The Kingdom of Surfaces is a brilliantly conceived call for those who recognize the horrors of American exceptionalism to topple the empire that values capital over lives and power over liberation.
Kingdom, Phylum
by Adam DickinsonShortlisted for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Ecologically aware poems, hardwired to the intellect and the heart in equal measure. Adam Dickinson's poems, with firm intellectual bite and imaginative scope, reach fresh levels of poetic -- and ecological -- awareness. Sometimes reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, sometimes of Christopher Dewdney, and with the ghost of Foucault always in attendance, they ply a language that is cool and precise on the surface to open into the deep resonance of geologic time. Imaginative and contemplative, this writing is bound to refresh the vision of the most world-weary reader. The poems in Kingdom, Phylum push the boundaries of thought and language. Bringing lyrical and unsystematic modes of understanding into play, and keeping his ear tuned to the many disruptions involved in taxonomical arrangement, Dickinson shows how poetry both participates in, and unsettles, the provisional orders which develop between word and world.
The Kingfisher Book of Family Poems
by Belinda HollyerThe 159 poems in this collection explore just about every family situation. There are poems about celebrations and about remembering sad times. There are poems about a grandmother's tired old legs, about a new baby sister, and about the awfulness of your mother wiping your face in front of your friends. There are poems about being the youngest in the family, about being an only child, and about being adopted. There's a poem about having to eat muesli for breakfast, another about what your pet hamster does all day, and even one about watching your dad cut his toenails.
The King's Touch: Poems
by Tom SleighA profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic.Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue. The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?”In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.
Kipling: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
by Rudyard Kipling Peter WashingtonBeloved for his fanciful and engrossing children's literature, controversial for his enthusiasm for British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most widely read writers of Victorian and modern English literature. In addition to writing more than two dozen works of fiction, including Kim and The Jungle Book, Kipling was a prolific poet, composing verse in every classical form from the epigram to the ode. Kipling's most distinctive gift was for ballads and narrative poems in which he drew vivid characters in universal situations, articulating profound truths in plain language. Yet he was also a subtle, affecting anatomist of the human heart, and his deep feeling for the natural world was exquisitely expressed in his verse. He was shattered by World War I, in which he lost his only son, and his work darkened in later years but never lost its extraordinary vitality. All of these aspects of Kipling's poetry are represented in this selection, which ranges from such well-known compositions as "Mandalay" and "If" to the less-familiar, emotionally powerful, and personal epigrams he wrote in response to the war.From the Hardcover edition.
Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free
by Mary D. Esselman Elizabeth Ash Vélez Bestselling authors of The Hell With LoveThe editors of "The Hell with Love" are back, applying their irreverent view of life and love to help melt the hardest heart. For anyone who's been let down by life and love, these poems reveal that the most important person one can fall in love with is oneself.