Modern and contemporary poetry
Fordham University Press Midden
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsForeword: Midden, When Glory Comes xiii I Walk My Road at Dusk 1 The Way Home 3 Dear ghosts, I pick the list 5 The Story of Fire 6 Their Objects 7 Shipwreck at New Meadows 8 Bas-Relief: Jake Marks 9 Dear ghosts, in winter my camp on the hill becomes 10 Interview with the Dead 11 Dear ghosts, because you tell me to, I begin again 16 So Many Things 17 The Tray of Spades 18 Dear ghosts, my neighbor catches you with her camera 21 The Schoolteacher Answers the Call 22 Sestina Fragments: Our Teacher Prays for Bread 25 Dear ghosts, I wake wishing my body 27 No Man’s Land 28 Annie in the Boat 30 Dear ghosts, how can we stop the sunlight spinning the story 31 John Eason Stops Preaching 32 This Is Our Home Now 33 Sucker Fish 35 What William Marks Knows, Age 3 36 Dear ghosts, with a red pencil I draw a map. 37 Each Morning Drowns in Open Air 38 The Procedure 39 Upon Opening Another Folded Day 40 Feeble-Minded 41 Dear ghosts, because you are dead and restless 42 Lottie Marks Dreams Escape 43 Dear ghosts, there was a man who lived here 44 Lottie Marks on Silence 45 Agent Pease’s Defense 46 Midden 48 Dear ghosts, when I said all I ever wanted was land 49 Yellow Surprise 50 How to Build a Houseboat 51 Shed Night 52 Potter’s Field 53 Dear ghosts, you say all our bones are made of paper 54 Paddling the Storm 55 Descendant’s Riddle 56 Untold 57 Dear ghosts, this land harvests the body to rubble. 58 Erasure 59 Saudade 61 Final Invocation for Ghosts 62 Afterword 65 Notes 69 Acknowledgments 73
£18.04
Fordham University Press Xamissa
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsProloog 1 Rearrival 7 The Dream of the Road 17 Doppler Shift 21 Folding Screen 29 Twin Soldiers 31 The Prisoner 32 Elegy for the Gesture 33 The Water Archives 35 helena | Lena 43 Lontara Translation 111 Sources 113 Notes 115 Acknowledgments 119
£18.89
MP-NMX Uni of New Mexico A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery
Book SynopsisGives voice to abused children, murdered women, research animals, war veterans, and even metronomes and lampshades. In poems inspired by Ovid, Tina Carlson explores the roots of voicelessness and journeys into metamorphosis, granting speech to those ignored or victimized and thereby allowing them to provide witness to their own lives.Trade ReviewTina Carlson's images are always palpable, surprising, their resonance almost too powerful for the page. What she does with those images, how she shapes and where she takes them, is an experience her readers won't forget. I am still catching my breath."—Margaret Randall, author of Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises "Here lies a beauty great enough to capture and heal an aching heart, elegiac enough to canonize the lost. These poems cut a path lit by the ancestral flint of Carlson's scalpel. Stepping out into the light after the dark theater of these poems, one perceives more readily a world stripped of its skin, fed by their true seeing, their lazar gaze, and Carlson's own crooked smile, these the touchstones of her artistic reliquary."—Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium"In A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, vulnerable myths and porous pasts are 'blown open.' These poems unhinge for the reader a kind of nourishment. 'We were once specks of light,' Carlson writes, as she moves us toward illumination."—Lauren Camp, author of Took House "These are the poems, poet Tina Carlson the guide we need at this crucial time in the inferno of our own making."—Carole Simmons Oles, author of A Selected History of Her Heart: PoemsTable of Contents Backyard of Her Alphabets Ghost Town on Iris Avenue A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery My Mother as Moon Cigarette Smoke and a Blue Impala Gran Via Agoraphobia My Father Comes Home from War with Guns My Father Prayed Mud Babies The Embassy of Silence At the Rest Stop, Fully Gloved, She Calls Me Mommy You Will Dream that Great Aunt Dolor Loves Your Wild Hair Dark Dowry How holy the cloth sewn sidewise Sheltering in Place for Beginners Coat-Grave, Nation of Moths ALMA Anatomy of Silence Fin Feather Bark and Skin Day after America Metronome and Daruma Doll As Numbers of Dead Rise, Moths Fill the Room Lampshade and Floor Mat Turn the Ship Around Saint Ursula Heaven Snow Queen The Little Robber Girl Monster Open Your Mouth Why did you kill your wife, mr XYZ? Thirteen Children Rescued from Their Parents Testify Ice Matron West Side Murders, Seven Years Later How She Becomes a Fountain Every Bird in My Blood Has a Name Flo and the Frozen Girl Guest Place in the Shadow There I Stood, in All My Forms Until I Could No Longer Fly and So Became a Map: Pegasus From the Island of Pomegranates Pandora on the Mother Road Atlas There I stood begging at the door of my death I Fled the Dry Lips of Men Dermoid Dear Human, The Flying Boy Wearing His Father's Dog Tags Feathers Appear on Branches as Flame And When He Thought He Had Found Me In the Tree Museum The Painter Martia Avalanche Machu Picchu Notes Acknowledgements
£16.11
Seagull Books London Ltd Under the Aleppo Sun
Book SynopsisAleppo is Alice Attie's home city, where her grandparents were born, and with the poems in Under the Aleppo Sun, she takes us there to the months before Assad unleashed his attack in 2011.
£12.99
Seagull Books London Ltd Thick of It
Book SynopsisThe poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. This new collection finds her on her way to imaginary territories. Thick of It charts a journey through two hemispheres to the center of the world and navigates a thicket that is at once the world, the psyche, and language itself.
£12.99
Lynx House Press The Present State of the Garden
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. In The Present State of the Garden, both childhood and the natural world are elegized as the speaker works through layers of loss: the dissolution of a marriage and a world on the brink of ecological collapse.
£14.36
Lynx House Press The Many Beds of Martha Washington
Book SynopsisVan Winckel’s poems hover at the intersections of folktale and history, of past life regressions and future life visions, in a voice that is intimate, eerie, wry, and always strangely like a voice that has been going on in our heads without our noticing. The chill and pleasure it renders is a little like what one feels upon first reading Proust.
£18.95
University of Virginia Press Best New Poets 2021 50 Poems from Emerging
Book SynopsisEntering its seventeenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by America’s top literary magazines and writing programs.Trade ReviewPraise for earlier editions:"[A] reminder that contemporary poetry is not only alive and well but continuing to grow." - Publishers Weekly"This collection stands out among the crowd claiming to represent emergent poets. Much of the editing and preliminary reading was done by emerging poets themselves, which results in an anthology that’s fresh and eclectic, and may actually represent a significant portion of the best new poetry being written by the next generation." - Virginia Quarterly Review
£11.35
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries
Book SynopsisCritics have called Else Lasker-Schuler the greatest of all German women poets and one of the finest Jewish poets. This selection of translations by Robert Newton, supplemented by a biographical and critical introduction and a selected bibliography, was the first substantial presentation of her works in English at its original publication in 1982.Trade ReviewWith Robert W. Newton's collection of poems by Else Lasker-Schuler in translation, there is now available to the English reading audience a representative selection of this unique poet who is usually classified as a precursor of German expressionism and yet defies all classification." - German Studies Review
£21.56
Duke University Press The Chasers
Book SynopsisRenato Rosaldo's new prose poetry collection shares his experiences and those of his group of twelve Mexican-American Tucson High School friends known as the Chasers as they grew up, graduated, and fell out of touch, conveying the realities of Chicano life on the borderlands from the 1950s to the present.Trade Review"The Chasers is at once a snapshot of Chicano culture in the '50s, and contemporary in its humanity." -- Meredith O'Neil * Tucson Weekly *"The Chasers is a must read." -- Margaret Randall * World Literature Today *"Rosaldo’s antropoesía is an emerging hybrid genre, a method of knowledge production that cannot be codified. It insists on highlighting nuances rather than erecting schemas. It is precise in its ability to articulate the uncategorizable." -- Tara Westmor * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsPrelude xi Cast of Characters xiii Part I. Walnuts 3 Never Chicano Enough 5 Suddenly Blank 7 Nice Meals 8 Down the Little Arroyo 9 Never Dreamed 11 A Dark Side 13 Talking with Mom 16 Fastest Naked Sprinter 19 In the Cactus Chronicle 21 The Chaser Mystique 23 Part II. Playing Bull 27 Sports People 29 All about Fun 32 A Quiet Guy 34 In Formation 35 Champagne in a Martini Class 38 White, Black, or Blue 41 My Inner Mexican Comes In 42 No More Oranges 45 No Emblem 46 Ode to Ralph 48 I'd Like the Job 50 Part III. Not from Tucson 55 Ornamental Oranges 57 I Never Liked You 60 A Place to Stand 62 Fiftieth Reunion 64 I Was Shaking 69 Three Months Older 71 Guys on One Side 74 In the School Yard 76 Erased 77 You Won't Do Well 78 Part IV. Observing 83 Never a Fighter 85 Papa y yo hablamos 86 Dad and I Talk 87 You Were or Were Not 89 Raw Eggs 90 My Brother Raul 92 I Remember 93 An Old Story 97 I Am a Chaser 99 My Dad Died When I Was Six 101 Packager 103 Sure Hope We Can Enjoy a Few More Years 107 Acknowledgments 109
£75.65
Duke University Press The Chasers
Book SynopsisRenato Rosaldo's new prose poetry collection shares his experiences and those of his group of twelve Mexican-American Tucson High School friends known as the Chasers as they grew up, graduated, and fell out of touch, conveying the realities of Chicano life on the borderlands from the 1950s to the present.Trade Review"The Chasers is at once a snapshot of Chicano culture in the '50s, and contemporary in its humanity." -- Meredith O'Neil * Tucson Weekly *"The Chasers is a must read." -- Margaret Randall * World Literature Today *"Rosaldo’s antropoesía is an emerging hybrid genre, a method of knowledge production that cannot be codified. It insists on highlighting nuances rather than erecting schemas. It is precise in its ability to articulate the uncategorizable." -- Tara Westmor * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsPrelude xi Cast of Characters xiii Part I. Walnuts 3 Never Chicano Enough 5 Suddenly Blank 7 Nice Meals 8 Down the Little Arroyo 9 Never Dreamed 11 A Dark Side 13 Talking with Mom 16 Fastest Naked Sprinter 19 In the Cactus Chronicle 21 The Chaser Mystique 23 Part II. Playing Bull 27 Sports People 29 All about Fun 32 A Quiet Guy 34 In Formation 35 Champagne in a Martini Class 38 White, Black, or Blue 41 My Inner Mexican Comes In 42 No More Oranges 45 No Emblem 46 Ode to Ralph 48 I'd Like the Job 50 Part III. Not from Tucson 55 Ornamental Oranges 57 I Never Liked You 60 A Place to Stand 62 Fiftieth Reunion 64 I Was Shaking 69 Three Months Older 71 Guys on One Side 74 In the School Yard 76 Erased 77 You Won't Do Well 78 Part IV. Observing 83 Never a Fighter 85 Papa y yo hablamos 86 Dad and I Talk 87 You Were or Were Not 89 Raw Eggs 90 My Brother Raul 92 I Remember 93 An Old Story 97 I Am a Chaser 99 My Dad Died When I Was Six 101 Packager 103 Sure Hope We Can Enjoy a Few More Years 107 Acknowledgments 109
£18.89
University of Nebraska Press Nebraska
Book SynopsisKwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his workthe intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska's discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant. Trade Review"Dawes is no longer a stranger to the middle American landscape, now a welcome newcomer creating space for new voices to be heard."—Luke Hollis, Harvard Review Online"As the poet contemplates the wealth of opportunity that seems innate—now, as well as when the plains people first saw the land, concluding in Prairie that the wide-ranging opportunity must be home to imagination and continual new beginnings. This is where Nebraska meets the poet most intimately, as a place of riches and with a history of new beginnings."—Jordan Charlton, Adriot JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgments I How I Became an Apostle Advent The Barking Geese of Edenton The Immigrant Contemplates Death Fledge Longing for the Hall of the Deaf The Midwestern Sky First Winter Loneliness Dark Season Plain-Speaking Novela The Scent of the Cankerworm Dawn Chadron Sandoz Revisited The Enemy of Memory The Poor Man’s Sacrifice Bones Sponge On History II The Epoch of Lies Sea and Rain Purple Forgetting The Quality of Light In These Times Sugar “All Teeth and Smile” Sniper III Half Long Distance Prairie Pleasure The Chronicler of Sorrows July Fourth IV Jasmine On Blindness Insomniac Bed Time Transplant Surviving, Again Sancho Panza The Messiness of Place Bone Dust Ambulation Falling Away On Picking Battles The Exile Remembers His Sisters Fatigue
£15.19
University of Nebraska Press Everybodys Jonesin for Something
Book SynopsisTurning an unflinching spotlight on the American Dream, Indigo Moor plunges headfirst into national—and personal—laments and desires. From Emmett Till to the fall of the Twin Towers and through the wildfires of Paradise, California, Moor weaves a thread through the hopes, sacrifices, and Sisyphean yearnings that make this country the beautiful trap that it is. Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something takes an imagistic leap through the darker side of our search for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,perusing what we lose, what we leave behind, and what strange beauty we uncover. Trade Review"Indigo Moor’s new book challenges us to look back to gain a wider understanding of what has been, look around to derive a deeper understanding of one another, and look inside to find our true home."—Entropy“Indigo Moor’s new collection shuttles between searing rebuke and hopeful anguish with accents of hard-edged humor. What I love most is the clarity of thought—the no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled sharpness of the language that carries the reader through each poem, jonesin’ for the next. Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something invites you out of your complacency and fuels a restlessness that reminds you that you’re alive, that this is no time for sleeping.”—Tim Seibles, author of One Turn around the Sun“An extraordinary and penetrating look at the world through the eyes of an electrifying writer who is indeed jonesin’ for something; perhaps the answer to who we are as Americans, or even who we are as human beings. There’s joy in experiencing a work like this one. Each page enthralls as Indigo Moor explores a myriad of topics in a keenly aware, yet compassionate voice filled with stirring language, powerful observations, and intense wonder.”—Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, author of Epitaph for the Beloved“Narratives don’t always belong to history’s victors,’’ writes Indigo Moor. If this line gives you pause, I strongly suggest you carry Moor’s brilliant book, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, home with you. In this dazzling book, you will read just how closely this poet has been paying attention, to us, to his histories, foreign and domestic, to our mighty (and sometimes mighty confusing) nation. Jonesin’ is a verse flashlight to all the corners you thought no one was supposed to pay attention to, line by beautifully crafted line, truth by earned truth. You’ll reach the last line of the last poem, and trust me, that’s when the hunger for more will begin.”—Cornelius Eady, author of The War Against the ObviousTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsThis American Groove Love Letter to Dr. Ford from the Patriarchy Trayvon Martin Disappears on Stage The New Math Extinction EventAll Night Jazz from the Sisyphus ClubAll Night . . .. . . Jazz . . .. . . from the Sisyphus Club Creole Rumspringa The Fortress of First and Last Thoughts Christ Is Summoned to the House of the Broken Ladder Mamie Till & the Minotaur What Was True and Not So. And Yet, Again . . . Unforgettable Birds in FlightA Dream Deferred/Detained Dismissed Genealogy Guardians Fermi Paradox for Black Nerds Happiness The Wandering Jew Drunk Dials God The Party Crashers of Paradise Exiled to America Oppenheimer’s Badass Cat Joshua in the New World Frac/Tured Finder of Lost Sheep Woods to Grow Out Of Red and Yellow QuartetWe the (Chameleon) People Unjumping the Broom Easter Morning Prayer Hunter’s Moon The Saint of McClatchy Park Veterans of Foreign Wars How We Got Here from There Blackberries Maisey Gets a Washing Machine Pretty Boy Sanchez American Bataan Lost in the World Machine Catching a Cotton Ball Anywhere but Here
£12.34
University of Nebraska Press More in Time
Book SynopsisMore in Time is a celebration and tribute to two-time United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. Trade Review"To recognize his [Ted Kooser's] retirement from conducting the beloved personal tutorials he has provided to graduate students at UNL, 68 of his former students, university colleagues and poetic peers have produced More in Time, a compilation of poems and memories of Kooser's influence upon their lives."—J. Kemper Campbell, Lincoln Journal Star“Ted Kooser is kind, as we know from every essay and poem published in this volume to honor the poet’s retirement from the University of Nebraska. Ted Kooser is accomplished and beloved as teacher, writer, poet, editor, painter and friend. And Ted Kooser leaves the public life of the university as a national poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner to become what he has always been, a private man of genius. Long may he thrive and publish, labor in his fields, make and paint the birdhouses that adorn our trees, the gorgeous chicken coop in his yard, and write poems so distilled that our souls bend in delight.”—Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020 “Ted Kooser’s poems are as natural and true as anything I know in American poetry. I love his honed-down style, his subtle humor, and his attention to a detail that will shine with kindness and grace by the end of the poem.”—Joyce Sutphen, author of Carrying Water to the Field“When I arrived in the U.S., I experienced an immense culture shock that was incredibly difficult to shake off, and it held me back, held my tongue back in my other classes. But each time I was in Ted’s presence, I grew fully into myself in ways that weren’t so apparent in his absence.”—Saddiq Dzukogi, author of Your Crib, My Qibla“Ted’s office was a place of magic for me for the few years that I did tutorials with him. . . . He deeply respected the mystery that arose in the course of writing, the surprising element of the poem that a poet might not see herself, until an astute reader pointed it out.”—Katie Schmid, author of NowhereTable of ContentsEditorial Note Marco Abel, Jessica Poli, and Timothy Schaffert Acknowledgments Introduction: Splitting an Order, Ted Kooser, Copper Canyon, 2017 Diane Glancy Naomi Shihab Nye Ted Kooser Is My President Jill McCabe Johnson What Ted Likes 1,001 Things to Amend Before You Die—Excerpt 244–258 Marjorie Saiser Ted Is Writing This Morning Jehanne Dubrow From Description to Discovery Pledge Mary K. Stillwell A Toast to Chance, Good Fortune, and Ted Kooser Amelia María de la Luz Montes Ted Kooser’s Near South History Tour Platte River Andrea Hollander The Things Themselves Old Snow Stephen Behrendt The Surprising Novelty of the Familiar: Ted Kooser’s Poetry Sarah McKinstry-Brown Supper with Amy Mark Sanders A Summer Letter to Old Friends Up North Sharon Chmielarz Aunt Bertha Suzanne Ohlmann Sustenance James Daniels The Crucial Lack of Redemption Sally Green Wildflower Samuel Green Feathering Mark Irwin The smaller house Ivan Young Translating Ted Kooser Ferris Wheel Dana Gioia Discovering Ted Kooser (1980) Cody Lumpkin Old Man in the Hall of Nebraska Wildlife Christine Stewart-Nuñez My Poetry Foundation Medical Arts Building, Watertown Robert Hedin Prunings Debra Nystrom Inland Sea Stuart Kestenbaum The Work at Hand Michelle Menting Absorbing the Moment Ode to the Poster of Reptiles & Amphibians on the Exam Room Wall at the Animal Clinic on South Street Gerald Costanzo Conversing with Ted Kooser for Nearly Fifty Years Barbara Crooker Forsythia Todd Robinson Broken Summer Sonnet Faith Shearin Menagerie Hope Wabuke On Ted Kooser: Poet of Clarity & Sight Afterwards Katie Schmid The Mechanic Turning 32 Grace Bauer Summer Morning Walks: 4 Postcards for Ted Kooser Stacey Waite The Politics of Noticing: Ted Kooser in Poetry and Pedagogy James Crews More in Time: A Letter to Ted Trey Moody Good Morning The Oriole Jessica Poli Holmes Lake Connie Wanek Sign Painter Twyla M. Hansen I Never Thought I’d Outlive My Evergreens Tami Haaland Sewing Room, 1973 Jeffrey Harrison Early Wonderment Peggy Shumaker Ted Talk Sarah A. Chavez Ted Kooser and the Act of Poetry as Life Practice Home Again Saddiq Dzukogi To See Beyond the Self Song to a Birdwoman Adrian Koesters “Late Summer”: Doing the Work and Giving the Gift Denise Banker At the Rehabilitation Hospital Biljana D. Obradović Tribute to Ted Kooser: “A Poem Has to Be Something More Than a Good Story” Elegy for an Eastern Fallen Star Linda Parsons April Wish Mark Vinz Ted Kooser, the Midwest Small Press Poetry Renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s, and a Poem Inspired by Both Great Plains JC Reilly Bathroom Spiders Freya Manfred When a Place Finds Voice Crystal S. Gibbins Writing toward Home Lake of the Woods Jonathan Greene One Light to Another Dan Gerber In Praise of Ted Kooser Todd Davis Fishing with Nightcrawlers Hadara Bar-Nadav House Sandra Yanonne A Valentine Sonnet Joyce Sutphen At the Graveyard Rosemary Zumpfe Grace in Poetry Making Ice Angels Rebecca Macijeski Making Sense, Making a LifeTime’s Beard, His Closest Thing to Seasons Amy Plettner How I Found Ted Maria Nazos Tuesdays with Ted Kooser: How I Found the Heart behind My Collection of Poems, Pulse The Ghost’s Daughter Speaks Jonis Agee Mercurius Matt Mason Opening Night Rehearsal Judith Harris For Ted, On His Hiatus Karen Head Ready to Hold My Hand: Ted Kooser as Mentor and Friend At the St. Elizabeth Mammography Center Jane Hirshfield Letter to TK: May 26, 2020 Kwame Dawes The Chronicler of Sorrows Fences Source Acknowledgments List of Contributors
£12.34
University of Nebraska Press Long Rules
Book SynopsisA book-length poem in six sections, Long Rules takes readers to five Trappist monasteries in the southeastern United States to consider the intersections of solitude, family, music, and landscape. Its lines unspool in a loose and echoing blank verse that investigates monastic rules, sunlight, Saint Basil, turnips, Thomas Merton, saddle-backed caterpillars, John Prine, fatherhood, and everything in between. Looking inside and outside the self, Perry asks, what, or whom, are we serving? Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, this essay in verse contemplates the meaning of solitude and its contemporary ramifications in a time of uncertainty.Trade Review“A remarkable addition to the company of book-length, broadly inclusive poems like James McMichael’s Four Good Things and C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road. . . . In blank verse that is flexible and assured, the poet’s attention runs the gamut from Saint Basil to Willie Nelson, from dulcimer acoustics to the caterpillars that eat his blueberry plants. The voice here is neighborly, its pacing exquisite. Perry’s rich meditation on nature, community, and the different forms of love brims with music and insight.”—Don Bogen, author of Immediate Song“With one of the greatest opening lines for a book ever, ‘Listen, child of God, to Willie Nelson,’ Long Rules is a joy to read. It calls itself an essay in verse, following a steady form so effortlessly you half forget it’s not just an essay. And the skill in putting these poems together is amazing to experience as a reader. The poet teaches about theology and contemplation through musings on songwriters and musicians, making centuries-old thoughts seem at home with us today.”—Matt Mason, state poet of Nebraska“Nathaniel Perry’s Long Rules is a gentle doctrinal essay exploring the mystery by which collectivity authors solitude and prayer invents the world. . . . Long Rules is so profound and beautiful that, but for the casual asides to the reader and references to contemporary singers, I would half think it was the lost work of some wise soul from the deep past.”—Jennifer Moxley, author of Druthers and The Open SecretTable of ContentsI. Our Lady of the Angels: Crozet, Virginia II. Holy Cross Abbey: Berryville, Virginia III. Mepkin Abbey: Moncks Corner, South Carolina IV. Our Lady of Gethsemani: New Haven, Kentucky V. Cumberland County, Virginia VI. Monastery of the Holy Spirit: Conyers, Georgia Acknowledgments
£12.34
University of Nebraska Press The Track the Whales Make
Book Synopsis2022 High Plains Book Award Winner in Poetry Marjorie Saiser’s strong, clear language makes the reader feel at home in her poems. Dealing with all the ways love goes right and wrong, this collection honors the challenges of holding firm to who we really are, as well as our connections to the natural world.The Track the Whales Make includes poems from Saiser’s seven previous books, along with new ones. Her poetry originates from the everyday things we might overlook in the hurry of our daily routines, giving us a chance to stop and appreciate the little things, while wrapped in her comforting diction. Because the poems come from ordinary life, there is humor alongside happiness and sadness, the mixed bag we survive or create, day by day.Trade Review“Marjorie Saiser is a poet of ephemera, a poet who looks east at sunset to watch subtle light changing: ‘The glow is, and then is gone.’ And so is everyone and everything we love. Saiser tells this truth: ‘Every last thing is transitory.’ She looks at the difficult moments, at the precious fleeting moments: ‘That’s what it was like, though there is no record of it. / Let me be the record of it.’ When a whale’s flukes slip underwater, a trace shimmers for a fraction of a liquid second. That’s the moment of Saiser’s poetry, a poetry of generations of profound compassion, passed down.”—Peggy Shumaker, author of Cairn“Marjorie Saiser’s poetry is wise and generous and altogether genuine. No poet in this country is better at writing about love, and, in a sense, all of her poems are in some way about love.”—Ted Kooser, U.S. poet laureate, 2004–2006“Marjorie Saiser writes, ‘I wanted / the luminous coin, big sky over rooftops, / the celestial and the neighborhood.’ In these pages she finds both and gives them to us in an extraordinary volume of new and selected poems. With one poem, ‘Charmed by the Dirt Road,’ she explains generations of women. I move from delight to tears reading these brilliant, compassionate, and beautifully wrought poems. Saiser is a great poet.”—Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020 Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction by Ted KooserI Could Taste It: New Poems The Shirt I Would Have Bought You Sometimes I Remember to Watch When You Write the Story We Wait for the Trogon So Bad I Could Taste It I Had a Marriage in Those Days What I Shouted and He Shouted Charmed by the Dirt Road To the Cattle in the Dream The Moon Is a Swan This Is How I Bow Down in Homage Kindness Scraped Up the Money It’s a Small Breath Not Enough Space in Storage Device Hope SpringsFrom Learning to Swim, 2019 Weren’t We Beautiful I Save My Love Every Last Thing Is Transitory Plastic Bag on the Lawn Edith Porath Nelsen, You Signed Your Quilt After the Divorce the Soccer Game What She Taught Me To the Author I’m Reading at Night This Year I Did Not This Is the Photo of My Father Before He Taught Me to Drive I Pretend I Can Remember The One with Violets in Her Lap For the Record The Citrus Thief Insomnia Is a StreetlightFrom The Woman in the Moon, 2018 The Nobody Bird My Love With His Saw Has Taken the Cedar Down When Life Seems a To-Do List Each Wrong Choice Was a Horse I Saddled What I Think My Real Self Likes My Mother the Child What He Needed Final Shirt Despair Woke Me Ah, Charles, If You Could Have What Did You Think Love Would Be? About That Smart Thinly-Veiled Stuff My Daughter Tells Me She Loves Me Green Ash My Notes in MarginsFrom I Have Nothing to Say about Fire, 2016 The Track the Whales Make She Gives Me the Watch Off Her Arm The Story, Part of It How I Left You Bad News, Good News Thanksgiving for Two We Disagree Let Me Think of the Frost That Will Crack Our Bones Draw What Is There Those Pieces We Carry What I Think My Father Loved It Does Not Have to Be Worth the Dying Last Day of Kindergarten For My DaughterFrom Losing the Ring in the River, 2013 Clara Says I Do Clara Loses the Ring When I Have Hurt Him as Much as I Can Potato Soup I Was New and Shiny Playing My Cards Let Me Be the First Snake of Spring To the Moon in the Morning Note to My Father After All These Years I Leaned in Close Take, Eat; This Is My Body You and I, the Cranes, the RiverFrom Beside You at the Stoplight, 2010 Pulling Up Beside My Husband at the Stoplight Weekends, Sleeping In Even the Alphabet On the Road Template I Didn’t Know I Loved Stand-In She Was Perhaps Dead Labor Textile For My Body I Want to Be a Man You Can’t Say I Mammogram You Wonder Why We Don’t Get Along Her Kid Brother Ran Beside the Car We Visit the Homestead One-Finger WaveFrom Lost in Seward County, 2001 The Sisters Play Canasta in a Snowstorm Overheard at the Cafe Otto As Long as Someone Remembers Summer, Striking You Gave Me a Typewriter Lying on the Driveway, Studying Stars Holed Up in Valentine, Nebraska Prairie Pretends to Be Mild The Muse Is a Little Girl Night FlightFrom Bones of a Very Fine Hand, 1999 Resurrection The Green Coat Keeping My Mother Warm Saying Yes on the Road Perfume Counter, Dillard’s The World Was Not Enough Loving Her in the Mountains I Let My Daughter Down Cutting My Hair Washing the Walls Taking the Baby to the Marsh Shopping Storm at Night I Want to Create The Last Thing He Said Today
£15.19
University of Nebraska Press Cotton Candy Poems Dipped Out of the Air
Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2023 Midwest Book Award Finalist for the 2023 Heartland Booksellers Award Poems dipped out of the air describes the manner in which Ted Kooser composed the poems in Cotton Candy, the result of his daily routine of getting up long before dawn, sitting with coffee, pen, and notebook, and writing whatever drifts into his mind. Whether those words and images are serious or just plain silly, Kooser tries not to censor himself. His objective is to catch whatever comes to him, to snatch it out of the air in words, rhythms, and cadences, the way a cotton candy vendor dips an airy puff out of a cloud of spun sugar and hands it to his customer. Poems written in fun and now shared with the reader, Kooser's playful and magical confections charm and delight.Trade Review"There is much to be admired in Kooser's improvisational approach to composition."—Publishers Weekly“That Kooser often sees things we do not would be delight enough, but more amazing is exactly what he sees. Nothing escapes him. Everything is illuminated.”—Library Journal“There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser’s work.”—Washington Post“[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes the way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can’t help but feel significant truths behind his lines.”—Philadelphia Inquirer“Kooser’s ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift.”—Bloomsbury Review“Kooser is straightforward, possesses an American essence, is humble, gritty, ironic, and has a gift for detail and deceptive simplicity.”—Seattle Post-IntelligencerTable of ContentsAcknowledgements A Word from the Author I Cotton Candy Spider A Windy January Morning Wind in the Chimney A Light Snow in Late March Spring Turtles Handoff Culvert Shadows at Sunset Clouds and Moon Toad Easter Morning Burning the Prairie Raindrop Bucket In a Glade In Light from a Single Lamp II Following the Weather Rowboat In May Harpist Dandelion Yellowjacket A Brief Shower The Candle’s Butterfly A Kitchen Drawer A Breezy Summer Morning A Thump A Lake of Starlight Bicycles on Top of Cars Two Horses A New Moon A Sudden Storm A Walk with my Shadow In Midsummer One Cloud III Birdhouse A Sighting A Sound in the Night In a Shed A Cloudy Sunrise A Novelty In a Cold Late-Afternoon Rain A Fluttering Melon A Falling Feather A Few Things in Their Places A Light in a Farmyard A Seascape Full Moon A Dervish of Leaves IV A Windy Monday Egg Carton Cornshucks A Winter Landscape A Leaf in Wind On a Dark Winter Morning Pleasures of Snow An Oriole Nest in Winter November Snow After an Ice Storm A Falling Branch Fresh Snow, with Deer Tracks A Man Walking in Deep Snow Icicle A Stand of Ornamental Grass A Special Kind of Sunset
£13.29
University of Nebraska Press Might Kindred
Book SynopsisEric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist The poems of Might Kindred wonder aloud: can we belong to one another, and “can a people belong to a dreaming machine?” Conjuring mountains and bodies of water, queer and immigrant poetics, beloveds both human and animal, Mónica Gomery explores the intimately personal and the possibility of a collective voice. Here anthems are sung and fall apart midsong. The speaker exchanges letters with her ancestors, is visited by a shadow sister, and interrogates what it means to make a home as a first-generation American. Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, the poems in Might Kindred are rooted in the body and its cousins, seeking the possibility of kinship, “in case we might kindness, might ardor together.” Belonging and unbelonging are claimed as part of the same complicated whole, and Gomery’s intersections reach for something divine at the center.Trade Review"These generous and sensitive meditations on belonging and the first-generation experience cast intimate light on shared human experiences."—Publishers Weekly“What I found in this collection is not only an invitation to belong, but a reassurance that the self has always been unequivocally whole even if we must journey forward and back through time to come to that understanding.”—S.M. Badawi, Waxwing Magazine“Into this collection’s longing arms Gomery gathers all matter of kin and all kin of matter: landscapes, stones, ‘unsiblings,’ creation myths, God, language, home, bodies, soil, dignity, ‘jagged verges,’ mirrors, and eyes. She grapples: What are we to do in a world where loss is certain, time is defiant, and the self aches to transcend its borders? Instead of offering us synthetic answers Gomery’s poems arrive ‘bare skinned on the bridge between thinking and knowing.’ This book is an invitation, a constellation, a map. We are lucky, lucky victims of its grandeur.”—Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium “‘If you take a child to the mountain,’ writes Mónica Gomery in Might Kindred, ‘do not expect the mountain to not live inside the child.’ Reader, you and I are the child. This collection is the mountain. Expect nothing less than to be forever changed.”—Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary BeastTable of ContentsSelf-Portrait with Airplane Turbulence Theology Emblanquecer Immigrant Elegy for Ávila Family Is an Illumination of Shoulders Ghazal for a First Lover Might Kindred Prologue When My Sister Visits Here God Queers the Mountain It Isn’t Easy to Speak Falling Out A Poem with Two Memories of Venezuela Letter to Myself from My Great Grandmother Origin Stories Abecedario When My Sister Visits After Pulse The Synagogue Membership Assembles to Discuss the Fascist Presidency Imaginative Exercise in the Study of Epigenetics Dendrochronology of Hair Ode to the Poop Bag The Oldest Form of Prayer Now We Live Together Because It Is Elul When My Sister Visits We Thanked Her by Digging a Hole Fragments of an Anthem Banishing Loneliness Here A Poem About a Book About Venezuela Sleeping in Hurricane Season Emblanquecer Ghazal for a Year Halleluyah We Walked Dahlias to Her Front Porch I Thought I Was Done Writing About My Dead Ghazal for God & Wellbutrin The Poet Considers If Her Body Belongs to Her When My Sister Visits Here Love Letter Acknowledgments Notes
£13.29
St Augustine's Press Spending the Winter – A Poetry Collection
Book SynopsisThe poetry of Spending the Winter is musical and structured, whimsical and piercing, begging to be read aloud when one is not laughing or arrested by an image that hooks the heart. “Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading,” writes one poet. “A throwback to a time when lovers of poetry…looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin,” adds another. With sections of comedy that show his wit, translations that echo his vast reading, and formalist poetry that reveal his craft, Bottum aims, in the way few poets these days do, at memorable lines and heart-stopping images as he seeks the deep stuff of human experience: God and birth and death—the beautiful and terrifying finitude of life. “We do with words what little words can do,” he writes. But in Spending the Winter, Joseph Bottum shows that words can do far more than a little. “Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading. . . . If you’re a reader who loves poetry whatever mood it’s in, just open Spending the Winter anywhere to find poems that hurt, enlighten, and delight.” —Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Rehearsing Absence and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize “Joseph Bottum is a brilliant formalist, and to read him is to enter the world of the tried-and-true classics, all achieved with an amazingly contemporary ring. His Spending the Winter is a delight. Here is a poetry of elegy, humor, wit, political savvy, and vast learning.” —Paul Mariani, author The Great Wheel and winner of the John Ciardi Award “Joseph Bottum’s Spending the Winter is a throwback to a time when lovers of poetry outside the literary establishment looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin. This is poetry from another age—an age when we expected intellectual, religious, and literary significance from our verse.” —A.M. Juster, author of Wonder and Wrath and winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize “Spending the Winter is a word-lover’s dream: Joseph Bottum’s poems pierce, probe, dazzle, and delight. They will open the eyes of your soul.” —Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well “When reading Spending the Winter, I recalled C.S. Lewis’s description of joy as a wanting for something that is beyond this world. There’s a sense in these poems that things around us are fleeting, yet for that reason, the poems ask us to pay all the more attention.” —Jessica Hooten Wilson, author of Giving the Devil his Due
£13.94
Kent State University Press The Many Names for Mother
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeThe Many Names for Mother is an exploration of intergenerational motherhood; its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past. This evocative collection hovers around history, trauma, and absence—from ancestral histories of anti-Semitic discrimination in the former Soviet Union to the poet’s travels, while pregnant with her son, to death camp sites in Poland. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dasbach ponders how the weight of her Jewish-refugee immigrant experience comes to influence her raising of a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child.A series of poems titled “Other women don’t tell you” becomes a refrain throughout the book, echoing the unspoken or taboo aspects of motherhood, from pregnancy to the postpartum body. The Many Names for Mother emphasises that there is no single narrative of motherhood, no finite image of her body or its transformation, and no unified name for any of this experience. The collection is a reminder of the mothers we all come from, urging us to remember both our named and unnamed pasts.Trade ReviewDasbach's collection is masterfully ordered to carry the reader through the weight and the gift of intergenerational inheritance. The history Dasbach has inherited, and which sits at the heart of these poems, is Jewish, Ukrainian, U.S.-American, and matrilineal. If it is not always an easy inheritance, it is one that Dasbach's poems honor and carry forward.... Dasbach's poems delve into motherhood in all its complications in a way I didn't know I needed to read until I read them."—The Adroit Journal
£15.16
Kent State University Press How Blood Works
Book SynopsisHow Blood Works is a collection of poems that considers the way memory, identity, and our very blood take shape in the places we inhabit: rooms, cities, landscapes, and the spaces within the body. Moore examines the idea of bloodlines—literal familial ties and the traumas, secrets, and complex relationships passed from one generation to the next. To explore these motifs, many of the poems borrow from the world of visual art, including painting, sculpture and its resonance with the creation of the self, and architecture, too, as a metaphorical counterweight to nature.In keeping with the central theme that the stories we tell ourselves—and, by extension, our understanding of who we are—are shaped by the spaces in which we tell them, the poems in How Blood Works vary in form. From traditionally lineated lyrics to more architectural, segmented prose pieces, the poems themselves become a space for narratives of the self to play out.Trade ReviewWinner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize"A luminous debut collection of poems." —Peg Boyers, author of To Forget Venice"Moore explores the difficult territory of all that we cannot explain yet must embrace." —Jim Daniels, author of The Middle Ages
£15.16
Kent State University Press Sister Tongue
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeTrade ReviewForeword Indie Awards Honorable Mention 2023 in Poetry "Fatemi makes language think aloud and sing in these ruminative, beautiful poems." —Publishers Weekly *starred review* "Farnaz Fatemi's Sister Tongue explores the experience of living between the cultures of Iran and the United States, and of trying to find a voice to describe that in-betweenness. The poems take root in various liminal spaces, tracking the poet's journey through cross-cultural identity and expression."—Pedestal Magazine "In her debut verse collection, Farnaz Fatemi skillfully explores the nuanced between-life of Farsi and English and how that negative space houses language, displacement, longing, and the materiality of memory. .... This celebration of honoring roots, as a poem and a collection of poems, creates a treasury of understanding and introduction within the Iranian diaspora as a culture." —World Literature Today "…[a] complex [and] dazzling collection of poetry and poetic prose…" —EscapeIntoLife.com "In Sister Tongue, Fatemi shines gorgeous light on the liminal space between languages, bearing witness to the joy and longing that accompany every act of translation." —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Life on Mars "Delicious, provocative, and incredibly wise, Farnaz Fatemi transcends years and oceans in these pages. Like gripping a cup and string to the ear, Sister Tongue is a hopeful missive, proof of words and their witnesses, an atlas of the wonder of becoming."—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls "I praise the present tense of these poems for its tensile strength, its ability to hold the struggle that is happening in the past, present, and future. The way it speaks of the perpetual, of what it is to be tongue-tied in the presence of one's other self. 'Language is geological,' this speaker tells us, 'a process of accumulation, and accretion accompanied by landslides.' In setting out to speak the language of her blood, she finds herself at once estranged and embraced. Thrilled and defeated. What to do with such a natural disaster? These poems persist in their attempts to bridge worlds, offering hope of a complex and hard-won reconciliation, one richly crafted line at a time. In the words of Fatemi, 'I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.'" —Danusha Laméris, author of Bonfire Opera "Sister Tongue, Farnaz Fatemi's debut poetry collection, transports us to a place where language must stretch to fit the largeness of human love and longing, and in doing so, fills the absences we did not even know we harbored. Sister Tongue begins to say what many of us already know—that borders and countries are too limiting to define us. Her poems offer us both a reckoning and a salve."—Persis M. Karim, chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University "Poet Farnaz Fatemi is the soulful Iranian American truth-teller and wonder-wanderer we've needed to hear. In Farsi, in English, in Tehran, or California, these poems cherish the miracle of connectedness by weaving family threads through time and space—through sisters, mothers, grandmothers, through a changed and changing world. Sister Tongue is a luscious love letter to language(s), spoken in a trusting, intimate voice. The poet recognizes the twinned solace of silence and song, of sister and self. Loss takes its seat, as it does, at the table, and Fatemi, with tea, family history, powerful memory, and a new/old tongue, inscribes it alongside the depths of beauty and joy in this radiant book of passionate understanding." —Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum "Neither exile nor immigrant, Farnaz Fatemi writes with a double intelligence that transcends any presuppositions we might bring to a poetry of the other. She claims her strategic advantage with confidence and laser-like insight, the gift of deep listening and the power of naming, as she slips back and forth freely across borders like a master spy reporting from an uncharted world suspended between two cultures. I am optimistic that Sister Tongue speaks the language of our future."—Zara Houshmand, writera
£15.16
University of Iowa Press I Always Carry My Bones
Book SynopsisI Always Carry My Bones is a complex ideation for many people of color and migrant peoples. Felicia Zamora explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging.Trade ReviewIt's said that the body remembers, and this book reveals that memories, too, embody. The story of a lived, living body is stored, stored-up until it spills over onto pages full of memories, rage, power, cruelty, survival, love . . . and some stubborn belief that a body will find a way to tell the truth. The poems ask: What did it take to survive? The poems answer: It took every cell moment by moment, accounted for, told on, inscribed, memorized." - Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize"What dwells in land, dwells in you,' - writes Felicia Zamora in I Always Carry My Bones, a book that flows as streams do: relentlessly despite obstructions, despite injustices. Through a boundless range of analysis, Zamora renders trauma in the brown body as a 'lone thistle in the torrent of letters.' Her poems are ecstatic and leap in pursuit of truth and cruel beauties. Zamora's work will remind you that the world is the body' science and psyche. This book is thread let loose and there's no telling which direction Zamora will pull it." - Diana Marie Delgado, author, Tracing the Horse"A body is a landscape. Ridges outlining a horizon, shared, even as yet remaining particular and positioned. In Zamora's lines, one connects images to narrative threads, peaks to trails, glimpsed like a face lit up 'amid the mulberries at twilight.' The fact of the horizon, light over the ridge, even as it shines unevenly, is grounding: 'we're all born grounded.' We share the fact of an embodiment however asymmetrically available to violences. One carries 'ruptured rules & words & shelter' and often literally. I Always Carry My Bones carries itself, past salvage or triage, the unevenness of light, to imagining - 'we imagine / ourselves every moment' - where the body might carry itself, imagined anew. How the fact of one particular body's history signals all that was, 'memories in the cavities,' but also all that could have been otherwise. And how to imagine an otherwise. 'How, like an egg, a body maps out the body,' but also how it 'questions it, runs broken in the sun.'" - Jos Charles, author, Feeld
£17.05
University of Iowa Press Lo: Poems
Book SynopsisLo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.Trade ReviewMelissa Crowe is a new kind of genius of sensory memory. Mina Loy–like, Sappho-seeming, as if those ancient fragments blossomed so many centuries later as lush nerve endings signaling desire, signaling help for the crushed blooms of a childhood betrayed, in a cycle of agonizing poems the book’s other sections surround as if holding, carefully, even joyfully. Lo is a love song with a haunting melody that thrills me and makes me weep with gratitude." —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize"Lo rides the exclamation and imperative of its title with indefatigable tenderness and dogged reverie and confirms Crowe’s place as one of contemporary poetry’s most skilled raconteurs. Crowe knows attention is a kind of love, and her work resonates with the easy hum of concentrated care; what’s rare, then, is how these finely spun poems carry us through the sweet and the bitter, reviving a buried bravery both necessary and all our own." —Meg Day, author, Last Psalm at Sea Level"Lo is a devastatingly gorgeous, sigh-out-loud-every-other-line celebration of the inner life. Like a geode, an ordinary looking rock, Lo insists that there is more—more to discover inside or underneath, more in the secreted and unsaid. In these poems, Crowe cracks open the ordinary, the harrowing, even the ugly, to reveal the jewels inside. This book—this poet—is a marvel." —Maggie Smith, author, Goldenrod
£17.05
University of Iowa Press Anthem Speed
Book SynopsisAnthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin’s emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic, and visionary, Bolin’s poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: “among / the disinformation of the distress feeds,” Bolin writes, “a pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes.” This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water, and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Bolin tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms, and mountainsides, and envisions—with animal acuity—a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths.Trade ReviewWhat won’t a ‘saint with a shovel’ unearth in these exquisite, disquieting, soul-trawling poems that variously mine, measure, tally, sample, body-scan, and heat-capture our bereaved universe? Anthem Speed drops us here in the ruins mid-song, in wonder and sorrow, dappled ‘in forensic light,’ holding on to Bolin’s dire music for dear life." - Robyn Schiff, author, A Woman of Property"With a jade eye, but never a jaded one, Christopher Bolin offers us our contemporary condition’s ‘changing symbols / in forensic light.’ Here the world is an ongoing apocalypse, where ‘the uranium thinning quail’s eggs’ hint at a wider irradiation, where ‘birds’ bodies smell of smoke,’ and the images chatter their jagged clarities through the Geiger counter’s static, and the logic of the lyric poem suffers such mutation that one line’s leap to the next can feel like a gnostic juxtaposition. Search engine bots vie with capital’s half-life to claim the human heart’s worried worth, and the security state sings to the link satellites that surveil us. And yet a strange hope runs its electric current through these lines: not that all is not lost, but that the very evidences of our vast dismantling can be rebuilt into another structure, ones that witness the world even if it cannot heal it, while quietly suggesting that a meaningful life still exists, and these poems are our path to it." - Dan Beachy-Quick, author, Arrows
£17.05
Michigan State University Press Not For Luck
Book SynopsisIn Not For Luck, Derek Sheffield ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. In particular, these poems explore a father's relationship with his daughters, which is rooted in place and time. There is tenderness and an abiding ecological consciousness, but also loss and heartache, especially about environmental degradation. We are invited to listen to the languages of other beings. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, two bears on a stretch of coast, a river otter, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth.
£21.91
Michigan State University Press Ice Hours
Book SynopsisIce Hours is a suite of poems set in majestic and severe Antarctica, chronicling the nearly forgotten story of the Ross Sea party. Weaving historical and scientific research into lilting verse, Marion Starling Boyer follows the adventurers who sailed on the Aurora at the beginning of World War I to support Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. These poems reveal the characters of the explorers and the conflicts they faced during the two years they labored to lay a chain of supply depots across the ice, unaware that Shackleton would never come because his ship, the Endurance, sank on the opposite side of the continent. The Ross Sea men battled frozen wastelands, scurvy, snow-blindness, starvation, hypothermia, and frostbite while their ship, the Aurora, was ice-trapped, marooning them without vital equipment, clothing, fuel, and food. Through lyric and formal poetic forms, Ice Hours brings to life the close of a heroic period interwoven with the brooding voice of the Antarctic continent, evoking themes of what occurs when humanity engages with the sublime.
£19.27
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Crosshairs of the Ordinary World
Book SynopsisIn Crosshairs of the Ordinary World, the author, Dixie Salazar explores social justice issues such as the pervasive violence in our modern society, incarceration and homelessness filtered through the author’s experiential lens. Salazar has taught art in the prisons and currently volunteers on two boards dedicated to solving the local homeless crisis. Avoiding negativity and cynicism, the author searches for and finds elements of hope and redemption in these lyrically inspired poems.
£16.96
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Waking Past Midnight: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisWaking Past Midnight collects elements of the rough South and life as a teenager on the Delta, tinged with threat and violence. In my late teens a pewter flask Rode my hip and I tucked in my right boot An eight-inch blade crafted in dimpled bone. I didn’t court trouble, but knew cemeteries Were full of coffins, their rubber gaskets Rotting in the August humidity. In Greenwood, Mississippi, my maternal Grandfather primed his rage with bonded Whiskey. He loved to roll the bones, to shoot The jive with dock-hands behind the Quinn Drug Co. A blue .38 riding his hip, he passed The collection plate odd Sundays, blackjack Tucked in his breast pocket. Some devout Church-goer whispered how a white hood And sheet haunted his bedroom closet.
£16.96
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Listening Devices
Book SynopsisIn Listening Devices, James Dennis brings a near- Renaissance breadth of vision to bear on a dizzying array of topics—murder hornets, the Fibonacci sequence, reincarnation, Gandhi, the dreariness of January, even an ill-behaved dog. While much of his work probes spiritual mysteries or confronts societal ills like the death penalty, U.S. immigration policy, and Covid-19, he still finds room for humor, vigorously defending “the cowardice of (his) convictions.” Dennis is as much at home with the sonnet or ghazal as with free verse, and this command of craft, coupled with his deep music and arresting imagery, transforms the seemingly ordinary into the breath-taking. No doubt about it: James Dennis is a poetic wizard, and at least some of that magic is sure to rub off on his readers. How lucky they are.
£23.96
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Markers: A Shared History through Poetry
Book SynopsisMarkers is an exploration of friendship and personal journeys by two public historians who first met in 1979 as overseers of the Official Texas Historical Marker Program of the Texas Historical Commission. The “markers” they write about in this collection of reflective poetry speak to perceptions of place, memorable characters, life-changing encounters, quiet times, and shared perspectives of the past. These are the abiding landmarks of two friends who, after only three years as colleagues, traveled seemingly divergent professional paths that nevertheless crossed many times through the years, always in meaningful ways. Herein are some of the many stories they have shared along the way.
£16.11
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Little Palace
Book SynopsisIn his debut poetry collection Little Palace, Adam Gellings gives readers a perfect example of that often-repeated but rarely achieved instruction: “show, don’t tell.” These sophisticated poems wander through the busy streets of Paris, past quiet courtyards full of flowers, into a kitchen that smells of fresh-baked bread. This metropolitan yet nostalgic collection brings the reader into new places and experiences while reminding them of familiar truths about human connection, the fugitive feeling of travel, and the universality of art. "Adam J. Gellings doesn't write poems so much as he partitions arrondissements of feeling on the page." Dante Di Stefano, author of Lullaby with Incendiary Device
£16.16
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Dreaming of Endangered Species
Book SynopsisDreaming of Endangered Species explores issues of health and illness, disability and cure, and human frailty and vulnerability in an age of global unease and uncertainty. It maps a tension between the infinite and finite, between the concrete and ethereal. In some ways, it is a celebration of the mundane, by which I mean the world of everyday objects, of plants and animals, scents, textures, movements, water, and phases of the moon. But interwoven with this testament to ineffable beauty, this celebratory mode, are reflections on my cancer, for example, my autistic strivings, my gender queer identity, and the plight of the natural world. A recurrent thread that runs through the manuscript is the idea of dreaming, which offers a kind of poetic membrane, a connective tissue that softens some of the weighty concerns and allows them a more muted resonance than they might otherwise have.
£16.16
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Below Zero
Book SynopsisIn Below Zero, her fourth poetry collection, Carol V. Davis explores Siberia, an area in Russia largely unknown to Americans. Flying into Ulan-Ude, capital of Buryatia Republic, where she had never been, she mutters a prayer that her plane will be met. On a trip to Lake Baikal, she and her colleagues drive past trees strung with Tibetan prayer flags and stop to drop rubles in the lap of a Buddha. In Irkutsk, when her host dips a finger in a glass of beer and taps it on the tabletop, “For the house spirits,” she thinks of her own Passover, “finger dipping in the wine.” Intermingling faith practices, shamanistic rituals jostle with Russian Orthodox blessings. Amid a harsh life in winter “below zero,” the poet finds wonder and majesty in the vast landscape and the warmth of people who welcome her. These poems wander over borders, America to Russia, Los Angeles to Nebraska, from cities to tall grass prairie to forest. Faith and doubt, magic and superstition, place, cultures, and family history weave through this journey, inviting us to ask ourselves: Where do we belong and why?
£16.16
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Interrupt the Sky
Book SynopsisIn John Hazard’s collection of poems, Interrupt the Sky, the title comes from a line in “Hills,” in which the speaker imagines an Ohio River landscape, with hills that send their chatter outto interrupt the sky,which has been too vast, too long.The hills have had about enough. Attending to detail and gesture, these poems present humans and other modest creatures set against larger forces, usually in nature. With varying degrees of hope and affection, Hazard is pulling for the small and the vulnerable to interrupt the sky, to declare themselves in one way or another. The book’s three parts are titled “Small,” “Beautiful Clowns,” and “Home Before Dark.” In each section, the poems move from darkness toward cautious affirmation. The light comes at angles, muted by realism and shadow, but it seems right there, on the horizon, if we look hard.
£16.16
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Now and Then
Book SynopsisNow and Then, Poems for Eustress represent experience, insight, ideas, introspection, and impression. Some of the poems contain historical content, while others contain contemporary or current trends. Written to provide inspiration, the book is divided into five parts: Historical, Philosophical, Humor, Mythic, and Social Commentary. Consider campus unrest in the ’60s, mythical beasts, rat ranches, cryptids, and coronavirus. In each section, the reader will find the haunting, the violent, the satirical, the realistic, and the metaphorical in an experience that will, like Vonnegut, unstop time.
£17.95
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Harmonia
Book SynopsisHarmonia explores the psychic distance and damage created by loss as it considers art, physics, geology, and literature. These poems offer an intimate look at how grief can sink us, forever changing how we see our closest relationships and the spaces we share.
£16.16
Stephen F. Austin State University Press Aisle 228
Book SynopsisAisle 228 is a book of poems about the Chicago Cubs and listening to baseball on the radio. The speaker also details attending games with her father. The book highlights milestones across baseball in the past 70 years and culminates in the Cubs 2016 World Series win.
£16.16
Stephen F. Austin State University Press If Not Him
Book SynopsisIf Not Him, gifts us with an exquisite collection of poems about love, family, and grief, a love all the sweeter because it contrasts sharply with a difficult childhood.
£16.16
University of Massachusetts Press How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Book SynopsisWrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo, the over in lover? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future?Trade Review“Headlong, agile, volatile, Lara Egger’s poems crackle with collision and invention. They shoot the divide between unsayable and unknowable. They ‘traipse the vast / in devastation.’ It’s a thrill to discover her work.”—James Haug, author of Riverain “Beating inside Lara Egger’s chest is a beast of pathologic geometry. She cries and curses, begs and screams, and laughs it over the cliff. She refuses to love and die alone, will not ever judge you, will gladly swap all of your jaded conceits for a few hardy knocks of messy wonder. If you’re feeling lucky, say yes to her eternal burning questions. Say yes to all of them.”—Barrett Warner, author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?
£14.20
Omnidawn Publishing The Breathing Place
Book SynopsisThe poems in The Breathing Place, Calvin Bedient’s fifth collection of poetry, take in and move through three areas of consideration. Focusing first on the turmoil of an imperfect world before turning to raging social concerns, the poems finally come to find a refreshed sense of hope, offering spaces to pause and breathe in the world around us. First the poet addresses “the limits of the containing air,” the atmosphere of a world that moves along a journey ever-farther from whatever Eden it began in. He walks us through the fear and bewilderment, the dips and bumps, the guilt of gazing and desire along a path pointed away from paradise. These poems take in the deep—even if unadmitted—resentment at having to live and breathe in an uninviting world, amid scorched earth, and in a human body that feels the burning of precariousness, anxiety, and grief. The second space calls us to breathe in the now, bringing attention to a troubled world where the atmosphere is filled with strongmen hungry for rivalry, with the stink of age-old inequalities, and where looming climate emergency and nuclear war hover over the waters. The poet finally leads us to green nature, to a space of freshness that somehow survives under threat. Here is the living flow of the senses, the wonders of art, and a renewed feeling of sublimity that thrills from earth to the heavens.Trade Review"[W]holly accessible and bracing." * Library Journal *“‘What is a song without excess?’ Bedient asks in his latest book of odd odes, eddying odysseys, antsy still lifes, and abstract memos on various acts of kindness, cruelty, panic, grief. Accompanied under the ‘standoffish stars’ by Elvis and Eros, Rossini and Ceres, Billy Budd and Bobby Kennedy, the fire- and flower-tongued voice of these poems—chthonic, muscular, debonair—endeavors to overflow limits with lyric, while its elemental ‘song with Rogue shadows’ rebuffs official national power and its tweeting twit-in-chief. Governed by thunder and lightning and birds, by a gravitas of red, The Breathing Place suggests that beauty may be a seismic, even cosmic disorder.” -- Andrew Zawacki, author of UNSUN : f/11"Cal Bedient's poetry has always been singular and I can happily attest that the The Breathing Place is as sui generis as his other books. Dazzling, peculiar, piquant, Breathing Place is bold and picaresque, with dashes of the Western. His kaleidoscopic play on these dark times tickles the ear, drenches the senses, and saturates the mind. I absolutely love this book and you should too." -- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings and of Engine Empire"At once galloping and exact, Cal Bedient’s newest volume is a work of energy and invention; I found myself racing down the staircase of these poems, eager to bring each phrase-shaped wonder into view. This world is familiar in its unlikeliness and lit up by paradox, by O’Hara’s erased orange hanging in the sky like the sun. Like tomorrow’s sun today. It’s shrewd and it’s tender. It stuns me a little, and it makes me feel religious, as if I were French." -- Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne"Teeming with utter, gem-cut particulars but vast as the 'ever-more-enormous material world' itself, The Breathing Place titillates with radical specificity as it stretches one’s perception to the limits of what it can hold. Bedient has always been drawn to what glimmers, shudders, sizzles and combusts; his poems blister with a beauty rooted in turbulence, defiance, and 'the rage to be extravagant,' as if each of them—even the most elegiac—were, at heart, an argument that all true poetry should emulate 'the Blast that got us here in a Perfect Offense to reason.' Coming to us late in history and late in the poet’s own life ('at eighty-three,' he writes, 'I am past caring'), these new poems persist in celebrating the 'furious blunder of creation,' but do so with extra measures of tenderness, poise, and self-reflection, situating Bedient among the very best and boldest of our 'grasshopper-quick troubadours,' who still spin 'cosmic splutter' into song." -- Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many"Cal Bedient's new book is a ruminating, visionary work, the power of which draws from a fierce attending to the element of water. 'Living water' and 'planetary water'--the element connecting the local mountain wilderness rivers to global rising seas--mark the passage of time where new 'currents in the currents' become familiar returns from the past: 'the chafing of limits in the fashion of water’s pulsing pliancy.' The Republic reels with white fascism and from wall-building and from withdrawal from climate accords and from lead in the water system--from all of these 'millions of White Accidents' against which Cal Bedient's laments are wholly unprecedented in their primal sublimity and startling pragmatism." -- Richard Greenfield, author of SubterraneanTable of Contents1. Limits of the Containing AirCoupling6How Live, How Love?7The Breathing Place 9Bluely Boundless Sea11Beethoven’s Metronome12There Are the Old Grand Things Still13Retrieval14Bus15Ferns, Fingers, Gorges17Ovid on the Lake18Breathless19What Was to Be an Elegy for Emily Dickinson20Herds of Stags Among Fir Trees21Self-Portrait as Absence of Days 22Winds from the Wilderness242. The EraObscenity the First Language of Soldiers28The Era30No Leaf Will Shade 32Sat Down and Wept by Lake and Cloud Gear33Birds of Washington35 I Am a Circle until I Become a Power36Supervising the Woods37Thin Bible-Paper Skies393. Green Water Los Vientos de Mi Vida42Absalom in the Flower’s Throat43Solo Rip44Seven of My Sweet Loves Drove off of Cliffs46Like a Waterfall Seen from the Lip, More Felt than Seen47Singing in Octaves with the Breakfast Robins48The Persistence of the Particular: a Letter to the Painter Brian Shields49And I After So Many Words . . .50Blessed Disorder51Sunny Flow from Little Barks52I Want to Walk with You in the Roaring Gardens 53Canoeing a Worn River55Notes60Acknowledgments61
£15.00
![wyrd] bird](//bookcurl.com/cdn/shop/files/9781632430847.jpg?v=1730511499&width=645)
Omnidawn Publishing wyrd] bird
Book SynopsisIn times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats’s hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition’s central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.Trade Review"Don’t miss outrageously word-hungry Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird." * Library Journal *"This really is a stunning collection, one that works a unique complexity and depth through such dark, amid the searching, stretching and attending." * rob mclennan's blog *“wyrd] bird immerses us in a world of disproportionate amounts of pain and beauty. This book wants equity but won’t settle for a pat response. Through intermittent states of dream, wake, and the in-between, along with a channeling of the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, and a panoply of other writers (Marvell, Donne, Milton, Keats), wyrd] bird is dream journaling, resistance writing, chant and meditation; the work goes deep. Stancek has a careful, gorgeous eye and ear, and her lines will make you stop in your tracks. Words here are frenetic, alive and ‘honey red-burning.’ Stancek asks, ‘What would it mean to write an utterly embodied book?’ To read this is to know.” -- Jennifer Firestone, author of Story“The tremendous and multi-faceted range—historical, thematic, formal—of this book-length poem creates a new structure, one that might best be called a wander, through which we’re led by Hildegard of Bingen and a constantly transforming and transformative host of birds. The birds become a way of interrogating corporality, their wings offering an anti-gravitational counterpoint to the round solidity of body. Haunted by recurrent characters—shattered glass, a recent death, or simply the color green—Stancek’s language-machine cuts and splices normative syntax into sparkling patterns, juxtaposing clarity with a marvelous opacity, an opacity that gives her language reflective properties.” -- Cole Swensen, author of Gravesend"'What would it mean to write an utterly embodied book?' asks Claire Marie Stancek, in the midst of writing one (this one). Which makes me wonder: 'What would it mean to write oneself into becoming a musical instrument?' Because that is one of several things I thought while reading wyrd] bird: that the poet’s orientation—and Stancek’s waking magic—is the presence and precision of an instrument constantly positioning—fashioning, embodying, availing—itself so as to best receive what is being offered of the withering yet still somehow possible world and to convert it into something that both is and is beyond music." -- Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall"Destiny enters our lives—we do not like to say so—and wyrds them—. That is, the destination that is a life grows strange when, as if fated, we wake up into this life that is, I’m told, my own. But life isn’t only a daylit realm—it’s dusk, it’s dawn, the half-lit all. The tight weave of the will unwinds, the self is a selvage fraying at its edge apart, and the mind learns again it is a thinking dream, learns to ask, as Claire Marie Stancek knows it must, 'what / is a green thought?' To read wyrd] bird is to become its student. And so I’ve learned, in part, that the 'green thought' is the vital, mystic tendril that threads together opposites into union more profound: God and Satan, sun and moon, night and day, dream and waking. The mystic knows paradise is not conclusion, but is found only in the 'vigor of the unfinished thought,' where song undoes mere fact, and the world becomes again the poem of love. It is not an easy poem. Love here is difficult because it is so true. Includes the riots. Includes the police. Includes guns. But also includes the wish that 'the song could take some pain away,' and indeed the song does. When the intimate inverts into the infinite we have the mystic’s book and balm—which is this very book’s deepest nature. Not that it heals all our harms; it doesn’t, and shouldn’t. This book serves a deeper need: to let us behold the wound, our helpless openness, that lets us love the world that wounds us all the more dearly for bearing its mark." -- Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk
£15.00
Omnidawn Publishing This Red Metropolis What Remains
Book SynopsisAnswering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation and part prayer, re-imagining the form of the confessional poem by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. In This Red Metropolis What Remains, Leia Penina Wilson composes a mysteriously stark and playful pop-surreal romp through a mythic apocalypse. Dropping in and out of this mystic narrative are voices of characters who are trying to survive and to reconcile their own belonging. These poems reckon with what happens in the aftermath of brutality, questioning what anyone can or should do after tragedy, questioning everything until they begin to break down even their own authority. The landscape in the world of This Red Metropolis What Remains is itself deeply unsettled. Each form varies and reflects an endless transformation of embodiment and interrogation. These poems ask what can be recovered, if anything, through an uninterrupted interrogation of memory, category, and language and with an unbroken attention to the speaker’s own power. Creating shifting architecture and landscape that reveals both the disintegration of cultural time and the eternity of interior time, confession and lyric wrap both speaker and listener together. Trade Review“I enjoyed the fabular vibe of This Red Metropolis What Remains, the way that exacting loss and neon pleasures combine with a light yet complex tone. ‘[I] want to be wild/in the wilderness,’ exclaims the narrator-poet, as a centaur canters past or stamps its hoof in sudden anger. And what would it be to step over the boundary of ‘red salt’? How do ‘menace’ and ‘extinction’ speak to each other across zones of human and animal comfort, or desire? Leia Penina Wilson conjures her magic as a poet in service of questions that, themselves, form during the act of reading itself. All of this feels quite generous and free, optimistic, while at the same time speaking to survival. How ‘something must come’ no matter how ‘beastly’ the experience is.” -- Bhanu Kapil, author of How to Wash a Heart"In our riven American moment, one which Leia Penina Wilson rightly sees as reeling between apocalypse and carnival, what can cure us? Not a poem. And certainly not a poem like all the other poems. We need something more like poetic fury and mythic rage. We need words drawn from the wounds of those violated bodies and gas-lighted souls now suffering among us. And we need not a poet, but a witch, a ghoul, a nighthag, a demigorgon, some darkly feminine spirit with the ferocity and will to 'unwound' us. This is exactly what Wilson strives to be and do. Through her epic upendings, her feral incantations, and her savage heart, she conjures up for us the specter of our post-wounded selves." -- Eric LeMay, author of In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Other ExperimentsTable of Contentscontentsapocalypse & carnival—3 longing to be held—46 #mercy #mercy #mercy—78
£15.00
Omnidawn Publishing Storage Unit for the Spirit House
Book SynopsisWith sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win’s second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and “show dogs with bejeweled collars” crowd into Win’s real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family’s homeland of Burma, haunt the book’s six sections. The nats, spirits believed to have the power to influence everyday lives, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father’s cigarette smoke. Assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon “a circle of drums and copper bells” to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This careful curation of unlikely objects and images becomes an act of ritual collection that uses language to interrogate how pain in life can transform someone into a nat or a siren that lives on. Restrained lines request our imagination as we move with the poet through haunted spaces and the objects that inhabit them.Trade Review"To enter the spirit houses, storage units, and myriad spaces Maw Shein Win opens for us in the pages of her new collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House is to enter a universe where familiar objects and structures take on new shapes and significance. The poems are tight, condensed, and without digression, and the result is transporting. Shein Win sets scenes with particularity and immediacy to fully immerse the reader in each storage unit or sky, water, or physical space, and her sparing use of punctuation, along with lineation that includes short lines and ample white space, dictate a slow, thoughtful pace." * Women's Voices for Change *"It is as though Win operates a time machine, moving through the experiences of her life with great alacrity, erring always on the side of self-awareness and wisdom. Win longs for memory the way some people long for wealth or fame. One has the sense that it is an essential component of her daily life. So too is the belief that optimism and joy are vital to human existence, which we see whether she is 'riding her wooden bicycle along the dust path,' or listening to the 'sound of coworkers arguing in the bathroom.' From these simple moments, the poet derives a sense of peace, however fleeting it may be." * LA Review of Books *“There’s a lot here that will encourage gluttonous readers to consume more of Win and others in her league. . . . Storage Unit for the Spirit House is brave and multifaceted. It smolders and sings.” * The Rumpus *"Longlisted" * PEN America/Pen Open Book Award *Finalist, Poetry * Northern California Book Awards *"In a dense and sketched-out lyric, Win's is a poetic of accumulated dailyness, a lyric journal of dreams and domestic composed via shorter units of precision around ordinary extraordinariness. She writes portraits of medical appointments, local landmarks, storage units and strange dreams, a litany of family and subconscious images, children who won’t sleep and a house on the lake." * Rob McLennan's Blog *“These spare poems are haunted. With a blown-up heart, Win writes about possessions and flashes that hark back like ghosts to our before’s. In Storage Unit for the Spirit House prisons, tombs, portals, bottles, storage units are memorials. I would call these poems luminous and gorgeously darkly-edged, bellowing as they do with the knowledge that we never truly depart from all of our departed things.” -- Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree"Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions, keepsakes. This piercing, gorgeous collection stands both inside and outside of containment: the porcelain vase of stargazer lilies is considered alongside the galley convicts, the children sleeping on the cement floors of detention cells, the nats inside their spirit houses; the spirit houses inside their storage units. 'The soft part of the brain fits into a clear jar.' One observes, in these nestings and inclusions, dioramas and offices, the human eye peering out and peering in: 'I witness each body through the missing bricks.' These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely and resilient book." -- D A Powell"This book is a gem. Maw Shein Win's compact lines have the power of haiku. She is mistress of the acute, quietly searing detail, of precisely calibrated shifts between the vast and the tiny, of haunting flashes of overlapping worlds, and of her own lyrical-telegraphic style. Constructed from shards of what can only be remembered or recounted in fragments, these poems are startling stream-of-consciousness mosaics in which childhood is 'a burning kingdom,' the moon is a 'lucent coin' and the future might be a 'birthmark on forehead in the shape of a flame.'" -- Amy Gerstler"Maw Shein Win has no weaknesses nor restraints in this collection that might map how thought and memory were meant to exist. Poems that sharpen the soul. Cosmic architecture made from and into the simple organs of small places. And while an afterworld owes her for its articulation, she won’t kick the ghosts while they are down." -- Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Heaven is All Goodbyes"In Maw Shein Win’s second poetry collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, we enter various portals, from Burma to California (and beyond), emerging in pieces with 'directions to the otherworld.' Each poem is a small offering, a look at certain illnesses and violence within family, including land and the bodies they occupy. To honor these spaces, Win writes 'we wore bright colors to disorient the animals.' These poems are crafted with such precision that these travels teach us how 'to mark the now' even when we feel trapped by sunsets, cinemas, or reliquaries. This is a beautiful book." -- Khaty Xiong, author of Poor AnimaTable of ContentsCONTENTS 6 Spirit House (one)ONE8Storage Unit 2029Storage Unit 20210Storage Unit 20211Water Space (one)12Water Space (two)13Water Space (three)14Sky Space (one)15Sky Space (two)16Sky Space (three)17Vase (one)18Vase (two)19Vase (three)TWO 21Spirit House (two) 22Which gives the outer pair the heavy look of bronze clothes on statues23When the galley convicts clanked out of the prison in their chains24Desolation appears greater when pinpointed by light25The eye may allow some confusion26Cinema27Theater in Four Acts28Spectre Show29Theater in Three Acts30Hippodrome31Reliquary32Tomb33Tower 34Halls35Storage Unit for the Spirit HouseTHREE37 Spirit House (three)38 Bone (pantoum)39MRI Scan40Bottle41Imaging Center42Hospital43Room Tone44A State of Mind45The Soft Part of the Brain46BoneFOUR 48 Spirit House (four)49Huts50Phone Booth51Factory52Restaurant53Diorama54Shops55Eggs56 The Parlors FIVE58Spirit House (five)59Convention Center60Office in Lovelock, Nevada61Container62Relationship63Cave 64Portal65 DenSIX67The Cellars: A One-Act Play70Spirit House (six)71Notes72Acknowledgements
£15.00
Omnidawn Publishing Train Music – Writing / Pictures
Book SynopsisA poet and a book artist take a train across the United States, creating and conversing along the way. Late in the fall of 2017, poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and, four days later, stepped off another train at the edge of San Francisco Bay. Giscombe was returning home to California to address an all-white audience on the problem of white supremacy, and expatriate Margolis, accustomed to a somewhat solitary existence, was visiting the United States and making collages. Traveling together, they each turned their train quarters into writing and drawing “studios” where they engaged in conversations and arguments and shared experiences of the discomforts and failures of recent times. Their original intention had been to travel west and document, in journals and sketchpads, the complex, charged American landscape, but as the trip progressed—and in the months afterwards—the project took on a new shape. Train Music, the book that resulted, recollects and explores the century’s racial and gendered conflicts—sometimes sensually, sometimes in stark images, sometimes in a “mixed economy” of poetry and prose.Trade Review“Giscombe and Margolis compose their travelogue in the present-absence of tender doubt. ‘Power’s always locatable on the other side of the mountain, distant,’ but Giscombe activates the line and the sequence to articulate poems that range far while simultaneously enfolding near. Margolis answers with sketches that are always more than their figures, because the seen bring their own annotations to their rendering. See that, the artist says. Hear that, the poet says. But they know the trains come and go like italics on the says.” -- Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse“Reading Train Music, the collaboration between the African-American poet Giscombe and the Jewish-American artist Margolis, I find myself swaying in tune with the train on the curving irregular tracks. The book is an account of the friends’ four-day journey from New York to San Francisco. While Giscombe evokes cultural and personal history in the passing geography, Margolis wrestles a moody insomnia with layered collages and drawings of the very landscape that Giscombe catalogs. The divergent responses of the poet and the artist to their shared experience create a tantalizing and graphic mix of poetry, image, and prose but what feeds the creative explorations of both Giscombe and Margolis is their unknowing. Discovery is deferred and the book flows forward.” -- Gilah Yelin Hirsch, California State University, Domingues Hills“In Train Music, Giscombe’s narrative disjunctions and Margolis’ figurative abstractions crisscross at a roundhouse (‘I’m not a white girl, you said,’ ‘How do I get away with it, you wanted to know’) as they cut yard, heading West. For Giscombe, on his way to either ‘shake things up’ or ‘furnish comfortable words’ for a white audience about to hear his lecture on white supremacy, the ironies are hardly unique. Margolis’ moody, dark drawings evade easy definition by swaying back and forth, from depictions of a woman asleep in a bed and a woman wearing a house as her head to women standing on the roof of a house (upright coffin, empty coffer). Her vertical spirituality (the moon is one of her motifs) serves as counterweight to Giscombe’s horizontal zig-zag agnosticism, laying low like the Greenland shark that ‘runs those seminars/ way down under that ice,/ unconsumable/ maybe/ alive a thousand years/ down there.’ Train Music celebrates the survival of two artists selected by two histories for extermination. Together though, Giscombe and Margolis dance to the singing wheels of their cross-country trains, ‘A foot in one car, / a foot in another, passing from one to the next one.’” -- Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ “Hauntingly exquisite and powerfully prescient, Margolis and Giscombe’s, collaborative, Train Music is a tour de force of diasporic poetics. Between destinations, and dreams, desire and displacement, it both literally and figuratively dances through an interwoven collage of identity, history and culture, celebrating the exilic performativity of being.” -- Adeena Karasick, author of Checking in“A Jewish woman and a Black man, long time friends (but not lovers). Children of the 60’s. Self-sustaining adults in the real world. Collaborators. What can they make together that they can’t do alone? Dreams and nightmares. Asking questions and shaking things up. Two travelers on a journey of friendship looking for creative sparks. Art and life, life and art. Crossing America, awake and asleep. Waking dreams and sleeping dreams. Keen mental observation combined with intuition. Giscombe’s poetry is like a map, with references worth investigating. Follow the cues. Maps of the heart, maps of the mind, marking time. Margolis’ artwork is a perfect counter point to the writing. Dream like and rich in color and emotion, giving you clues and a tone, but leaving much to fill in from your own imagination and experiences. This book is all about Train Music. The devil may care or not, but not all sharks are alike.” -- Victor Raphael, artist"Train Music is a venturesome alliance of poetry with artwork, each moving the other onward. The poems are filled with vibrancy and momentum, the pictures with heart and solicitude – together they make train music." -- Mary Felstiner, author of To Paint A Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era"In this radiant collaboration—C. S. Giscombe’s explorations of various possible paths through poetry and identity, Judith Margolis’ deft drawings and collages—Train Music traces the travel and friendship of the alternately colored, Negro, cold-water Negro poet Giscombe and the artist Margolis ('raised amidst Yiddish endearments') across the land by rail, tunneling through histories by word and image. 'Poetry’s fightin’ words' that train the reader for navigating in 'the unsounded ocean in that gasp that is life.' This collection invites us right on board." -- Tonya M. Foster, author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court"Train Music is a guide, not only a poem. It is a song, a journal, a biography, and a graphic score. Like a map, its words and drawings trace the journey of two friends crossing the US: C.S.Giscombe’s words are verbal images, while Judith Margolis’s collages and drawings playfully morph into text, prose and verse alike. Each of the two parts accompany the other, while contrasting the dynamic conversation between a black American and a Jewish American voice. . . . Take this ride. It’s worth it." -- Luisa Muhr, interdisciplinary performer, founding director of Women Between the Arts"It’s the long train ride from New York City to San Francisco—two friends with notebooks, sketch pads, questions, speculations, conversations about poetry wars, race, family and place—four days and nights with eyes and ears open to create a sound track—a kind of railroad music as accompaniment to the vast American landscape that crawls or flashes by. . . . But this is just a hint of the complexity and overall context of this wonderful book." -- Barry McKinnon, author of The Centre"Train Music is an inspiring synthesis of words and visual images. Friends, African American poet C. S. Giscombe and Jewish American artist Judith Margolis, have seized upon their fascination with train travel in order to create a narrative that is both deeply felt and almost metaphysical in scope. . . . For the poet, trains are redolent with history—they call up the physical construction of the railroads, the Great Migration, and Jim Crow and its aftermath. Meanwhile, Margolis’s drawings, paintings, and collages evoke a different story, paralleling the poem, but not in illustration of it. Her diaristic, and richly colorful artworks depict a mysterious female dreamer as an alternate point of reference for her audience. Taken together, Train Music anchors readers to the specificities of everyday life, but then frees them to fly amidst the percussive meditative sound of the rails." -- Joel Silverstein, artist, co-founder of Jewish Art Salon
£15.20
Boydell & Brewer Ltd New Poems
Book SynopsisA new translation of Rilke's groundbreaking volume, following the formal properties of the original poems, especially meter and rhyme, as closely as English allows. Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century - a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine - wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the modernist sensibility, often using traditional forms like the sonnet to explore the inner essence, the deep heart, of things - often, quite literally, things. Influenced by his time spent as Rodin's secretary, Rilke turned to quotidian life and sought to artistically redeem it in all its possibilities. His exquisite use of meter and rhyme marks him as a "formalist" and yet a contemporary of Eliot and the later Yeats, so this translation follows, as closely as English allows, the formal properties of the original poems, in a line-for-line version, while trying to capture the spare diction and direct idiomsof modernism. Len Krisak is a recipient of the Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Frost prizes in poetry. He has published more than five hundred poems, including translations from the Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.Trade ReviewKrisak's translation of the New Poems offers readers a fresh opportunity to consider not only Rilke's poetry but also Rilke himself. * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *[Rilke's poetic project] was an ongoing, constantly shifting enterprise, a significant stage of which is rendered admirably in Len Krisak's new bilingual edition of New Poems . . . . The poems themselves [are] rendered . . . with careful attention to the experience of the original. . . . [This is] a sober and meticulous translation, which allows the poems' light to shine . . . by seeking out its source in the words themselves. -- Jack Hanson * PN REVIEW *Though not the first to render Rilke's work into English, Krisak-in striving especially to imitate Rilke's form, rhymes, and meter-succeeds in conveying both the force and subtleties of the original. . . . Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsPart II. Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil / New Poems: The Other Part Translator's preface by Len Krisak Introduction by George C. Schoolfield Part I. Neue Gedichte / New Poems Part II. Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil / The New Poems: The Other Part Index of Titles and First Lines in German Index of Titles and First Lines in English
£27.99
Texas Review Press The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX:
Book SynopsisHome to extraordinary writers such as William Styron, Tom Wolfe, and Ellen Glasgow, the state of Virginia’s literary past is among the most prolific in the nation. Indeed, this state, with its beautiful and varied ecosystems—Appalachia, Chesapeake Bay, the Shenandoah Valley, and Virginia’s beautiful beaches, just to name a few—seem to serve as the landscapes from which equally varied and nutritive writers spring, from the lyrical, often ecstatic meditations of Charles Wright to the poignant, dynamic narratives and lyrics of Ellen Bryant Voigt, from the moving narratives of Rita Dove to the formal mastery and wit of R. T. Smith. Series Editor William Wright, along with Volume Editors J. Bruce Fuller, Jesse Graves, and Amy Wright, have collaborated to bring readers a wide-ranging survey in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia. This volume seeks to emphasize the uniqueness of the poetic voices of Virginia. In doing so, the editors have acknowledged and included many celebrated writers from the recent past as well as relatively new, diverse voices that reiterate the literary fecundity of one of the most beautiful, revered, and complicated states in the American South.
£23.96
Texas Review Press Landlock X: Poems
Book SynopsisSarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, joins a growing body of adoptee poetics. By examining the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience—her own—Audsley’s collection finds more questions than solid answers. Employing a variety of poetic forms, co-opting the pastoral tradition to argue for belonging to the rural landscape—despite the inheritance of displacement and removal from a country of origin—Landlock X tries to solve for all of the (adoptee’s) variables and knows it is an impossible task that the “I”, “you”, and “we” of the poems only approximate. ...From “The Black Cows in the Foreground” it is unknown where the bones of your mother turned to fragments none in the painting of the black cows so where to grieve her body no parcel of land to plant sorrow in furrowed rows the black cows grazeTable of Contents [ untranslated ] ix I. F I E L D In the X Pastoral 1 Crown of Yellow 2 Greenhousing 4 Case Number: K83-5XX 5 Primary Color 6 On Creating False Memory 7 Swarm 8 Letter to the Woman on the Plane 10 Moonface Phases 11 Origins & Forms: Eight Sijos 12 While in Miryang, Searching 14 Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequin, Dead Mouse 16 [ translation/1 ] 17 II. D R E S S Confessional 20 On Not Fitting In 21 It Was a Yellow Light 22 Lament for Some Other Saigon 23 Letter To My Adoptee Diaspora 25 Broken Palette :: a retrospective in panels 26 On Meeting My Biological Father 33 Korea Doll Box 34 [American] Sampler 35 Dear Connie Chung 36 Beauty Being Beauty 37 Continuum 38 Field Dress Portal 39 [ translation/2 ] 40 III. P O R T A L Six Persimmons 44 Anti-Pastoral 45 Initial Gestures 46 “Now, where are you from?” 49 Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2018 50 We (or in the Blue House) 51 Planet Nine, a primordial black hole, new research suggests— 52 The Black Cows in the Foreground 53 The Half-Sister, Unmet 55 Fishheads (or Fuckheads) 56 Caspian Lake 57 Notes on Garnets 61 [ translation/3 ] 62 When My Mother Returns as X 63 Waiting Children 64 Notes 66 Acknowledgments 68 With Gratitude 69
£19.76
![wyrd] bird](http://bookcurl.com/cdn/shop/files/9781632430847.jpg?v=1730511499&width=645)
