Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisBe Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Gimenez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion - against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.

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Book SynopsisIBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.Trade Review“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nurember *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *Table of ContentsForeword by Ernest D. Cole Notes on the Text Introduction: Silence, Language, and the Making of Art The Amputee’s Mother The Child Soldier The Grieving Father The Rape Survivor The Blinded Farmer The Widower The Gravedigger The Beggar The Victim of War Further Resources Acknowledgments About the Cover Artist About the Author

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Book SynopsisIBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.Trade Review“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nurember *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *Table of ContentsForeword by Ernest D. Cole Notes on the Text Introduction: Silence, Language, and the Making of Art The Amputee’s Mother The Child Soldier The Grieving Father The Rape Survivor The Blinded Farmer The Widower The Gravedigger The Beggar The Victim of War Further Resources Acknowledgments About the Cover Artist About the Author

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Book SynopsisYou're the clump of blackened sprucethat lights my gasoline-soaked heartIt's just impossible you won't be backto quench yourself in my creme-sodaancestral spiritIrreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill.In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in her interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate Gill's interior landscape—of heartbreak, humor, and, ultimately, unrelenting light—amidst the boreal geography.Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill's poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Quebecoise woman.Trade Review“Miller’s translation skillfully delivers the energy and pacing of Gill’s ruminative poems… These pages full of irreverent musings deliver affecting details and candor.” —Publishers Weekly“Heating the Outdoors is a study in tone, beautifully captured in Kristen Renee Miller’s translations from the French.” —Poetry Foundation“An exceptional third book by the Saguenay poet, who kneels in the beautiful snowbanks of a love that melts all too quickly.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir“A luminous, resilient read that finds resonance in our little hidden wounds.” —Rose Carine Henriquez, Le Devoir

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Book SynopsisGriffin Poetry Prize finalist Sandra Ridley offers a breathtaking, harrowing immersion in cruelty behind different veils: the medieval hunt, ecological collapse, and intimate partner violence. Sparked by a haunting chance encounter with a fox, and told in six chapters of varying form, Vixen is as visceral as it is mysterious, sensuous as it is terrifying. "Thicket" introduces us to stalking being akin to hunting; the similar threat of terror and—too often—a violent end. "Twitchcraft" locates the hunt in the home, the wild in the domestic, while "Season of the Haunt" explores the unrelenting nature of hunting. "Stricken" asks common questions that often implicitly justify such violence: Is the harassment 'bad enough' to allow us to label it criminal? Has all control been taken? Is the fear reasonable? Vixen propels us to examine the nature of empathy, what it means to be a compassionate witness —and what happens when brutality is so ever-present that we become numb. This is a beautiful, difficult, wild tapestry of defiance and survival.

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Book SynopsisThe Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) is an existential meditation on grief, the kind which pins you down and minimizes you. The first half of the collection, The Vanishing Act, captures the ruminations of a mind which feels limited physically and spiritually. The imagery in this section intermingles magic and violence as the speaker confronts systemic issues as a middle-class woman, a person of colour, and a survivor of abuse.The second section, (& The Miracle After), offers a fresh perspective on recovery. In this section, the speaker revisits images of bodily harm. Objects previously used for violence are brought back to a state of benign normalcy. As spring arrives, the speaker contemplates renewal and the paradoxical nature of taking agency of her life, while knowing the act of survival is made possible only because of miraculous intervention.

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Book SynopsisWhat, then, for the work of poetry? It’s at the very periphery of popular speech, niche even among the arts, yet it’s also rooted in the most ancient traditions of oral storytelling, no matter where your ancestors originate from. And, as we were reminded by an audience member at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival in 2020, who are we to say poetry cannot change the world? A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment, but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds. Whether the poems you read here are cloaked in ironic apathy or bare their hearts in rousing calls to action, they all arise from a deep sense of care for this living world and the people in it. Our poets are eulogists and visionaries, warriors and worriers. Most of all, they’re ordinary people prepared to sit and stare at a blank page, trying to do something with the bloody big troubles looming over our past, present and future. (from the introduction by the editor)

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Book SynopsisThe Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.Table of ContentsInto Night I The Unseen Spotlight Safe Route Abscission PTSD Birthday, 1956 Shine The Dark Age of Providence Caesura Mam Recounts Family History This Morning, In the Mist The Time I Stole Dancing in the Stars Pocket Money Night Music Ode on an Onion Persimmons II Notes from the Forgotten Year Closed Hold Shadows Lair What I Learned Mississippi, 1964 Haiku Take This Leaf Longing Jack Higgs Walks Alone at Hindman Kept Things Persist Pyburn Creek Safety of Small Things Follow After Chemo #2 Neophyte Tobacco An East Tennessee Parking Lot III Remnants of a Saving Life Communion Drawn Cumberland Gap Above the Furnace The Farmer's Son Begs Relief Changeling Eclipse Solstice Bird Boy Walking the Wilderness Road at Cumberland Gap Buick Reverie Menagerie First Morning Publications Acknowledgements

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