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Sharp Blue Search of Flame (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
by Zilka JosephSharp Blue Search of Flame is an exploration in poetry of a complex network of nuanced journeys into a variety of worlds. The searingly rich poems reflect Zilka Joseph's own history of living in Eastern and Western cultures, as well as the influences of her Jewish Indian roots. Joseph's free verse and forms shift scenes from the real to the imagined landscapes of the mind, and search for fulfillment and solace amidst the terrifying beauty and chaos of the human condition. Joseph's poems, while dark and brooding in subject matter--bride burnings and infanticide in her native country, the loss of Eden, mourning for a beloved mother--offer a tactile insight into life in India and the United States. Through a flurry of sounds and smells, the reader learns an interpretation of the history of the sari, witnesses the horror of attacks on women, and wrestles with death, whether it be that of an elephant, an extinct frog, honey bees, humans, or goddesses. Her poems dig deep and aspire for something beyond. Colored by fire, blood, ash, and rain, these poems present images of great joy and deep loss in a complex harmony. Sharp Blue Search of Flame embraces worlds within worlds and worlds between worlds, which is not only intrinsic to the fabric of the poems but to the life of the poet as well. Readers of poetry will savor this sensory collection.
Shelley and the Romantic Revolution (RLE: Percy Shelley #3)
by F.A. LeaFirst published in 1945. In this work the author seeks to correct the misinterpretation and incorrect labelling of Shelley’s thought. While not neglecting Shelley as a poet, this book focuses on his contributions made to the general movement of political and philosophical thought of his era and by so doing his relevance to contemporary issues. This title will be of interest to students of literature.
Shelley's Music: Fantasy, Authority and the Object Voice (RLE: Percy Shelley #4)
by Paul A. VatalaroFirst published in 2009. This book argues that the images of and allusions to music in Shelley’s writing demonstrate his attempt to infuse the traditionally masculine word with the traditionally feminine voice and music. This further extends to his even more fundamental desire to integrate the "object voice" with his own subjectivity. For Shelley, what plagues this integration is the prospect of losing both the poet’s authority and the subjectivity upon which it relies. This book asserts that the resultant deadlock and instability paradoxically becomes Shelley’s ultimate goal — creating a steady state of suspension that finally preserves both his authority and his humanity.
Shelter
by Carey SalernoDisturbing because of the cruelty intended as kindness to animals and the speaker's unflinching, relentless insistence on her culpability, these poems force us to consider whether we can be redeemed by our capacity for love, compassion, and personal responsibility.
Short Takes on the Apocalypse
by Patricia YoungThe poems in this collection originated as a response to Elmore Leonard's "Ten Rules of Writing" and metamorphosed into poetic responses to quotations and epigraphs on a variety of subjects.
The Sick Bag Song
by Nick CaveThe legendary indie rock star offers a genre-bending chronicle of his 2014 American tour with the Bad Seeds that&’s part memoir, part epic poem. The Sick Bag Song began when Nick Cave was struck with inspiration during a flight between tour stops and reached for an airplane sick bag to scribble it down. This improvised diary soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary odyssey. Spurred by encounters with modern-day North America, beset by longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books, and the music that have influenced him over the years.Drawing inspiration from Leonard Cohen, John Berryman, Patti Smith, Sharon Olds, folk ballads and ancient texts, The Sick Bag Song takes the form of a quest, turning over questions of creativity, loss, death, and romance. It is also the perfect companion piece to the Sundance award-winning feature documentary 20,000 Days on Earth.
Silvija
by Sandra RidleyGrief is personal and unpredictable; no two people experience it the same way, and yet, each person that comes out the other side is transformed by their experience of loss and redemption.In a sequence of five feverish elegies, Sandra Ridley's Silvija combines narrative lyric and experimental verse styles to manifest dark themes related to love and loss: the traumas of psychological suffering (isolation and confinement), physical abuse (by parent and partner), terminal illness (brain tumour and heart attack), revelation, resolution, and healing. Pulsing with the award-winning writer's signature blend of fervour and sangfroid, the serial poems in Silvija accrue into a book-length testament to a grief both personal and human, leaving readers with the redemptive grace that comes from poetry's ability to wrestle chaos into meaning.Because of its overarching themes and serial form, Silvija is best read cover-to-cover, analogous to a work of fiction, rather than a book of individual or occasional poems. In this way, and in dealing with timeless subjects of human significance, this book-length 'requiem for loss' bears comparisons to Anne Carson's Nox and Daphne Marlatt's The Given, and will resonate for the many people who have dealt with traumas of physical and mental illness, who have survived physical and/or emotional abuse, and who search for beauty after catastrophe.
Sir John Denham (1614/15–1669) Reassessed: The State's Poet
by Philip MajorSir John Denham (1614/15–1669) Reassessed shines new light on a singular, colourful yet elusive figure of seventeenth-century English letters. Despite his influence as a poet, wit, courtier, exile, politician and surveyor of the king's works, Denham, remains a neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary collection provide the sustained modern critical attention his life and work merit. The book both examines for the first time and reassesses important features of Denham's life and reputations: his friendship circles, his role as a political satirist, his religious inclinations, his playwriting years, and the personal, political and literary repercussions of his long exile; and offers fresh interpretations of his poetic magnum opus, Coopers Hill. Building on the recent resurgence of scholarly interest in royalists and royalism, as well as on Restoration literature and drama, this lively account of Denham's influence questions assumptions about neatly demarcated seventeenth-century chronological, geographic and literary boundaries. What emerges is a complex man who subverts as well as reinforces conventional characterisations of court wit, gambler and dilettante.
The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks
by Aaron ShurinIn The Skin of Meaning, Aaron Shurin has collected thirty years' worth of his provocative essays. Fueled by gender and queer studies and combined with radical traditions in poetry, Shurin's essays combine a highly personal and lyrical vision with a trenchant social analysis of poetry's possibilities. Whether he's examining innovations in poetic form, analyzing the gestures of drag queens, or dissecting the language of AIDS, Shurin's writing is evocative, his investigations rigorous, and his point of view unabashed. Shurin's poetic practice braids together many strands in contemporary, innovative writing, from the San Francisco Renaissance to Language Poetry and New Narrative Writing. His mentor-ships with Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov; his studies at New College of California, where he was the first graduate of the epochal Poetics Program; and his years of teaching writing provide a rich background for these essays. San Francisco provides the color and context for formulations of "prosody now," propositions of textual collage, and theories of radical narrativity, while the heart of the book searches through the dire years of the AIDS epidemic to uncover poetic meaning, and "make the heroes heroes. " Book jacket.
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.
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.