Modern and contemporary poetry
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
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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
Texas Review Press Coda: Last Poems
Book SynopsisThis collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan."Proposition" When we’re old lovers, sitting in separate chairs Silently, will you think our love has faded Though we smile richly and are still unaided By doctors, accountants and presumptuous heirs? Though talk has frozen in geologic layers Of long alignment of the loved and hated And even our sexuality is jaded And we have settled all our private cares Including death, listen to me, adored, Words cannot fail us ever, no matter how The fates brighten their implements to prove That even gods and geniuses get bored With marriage, fucking and poetic love, Because, beloved, we call each other thou.Table of Contents Foreword by Robert Phillips vii LOVE POEMS The Dinner Party 1 Waiting for Takeoff 2 Moving In 3 Homework 5 Interior 6 German 7 Sea Dance 8 Letter-Poem 9 A Kind of Gift 11 A Thank-You 13 Poems Like Flowers 14 The Meaning 15 "I'll Get Back to You" 16 Spate 17 An Exorcism 18 Archaeology 19 God 20 Proposition 21 Lost and Found 22 The Bestower 23 Total Immersion 24 Torso 25 Torso Fetish 26 The Legs 28 The Walk-Through 29 Talisman 30 No Doubt 31 The Spear 32 Rights 33 ROSE POEMS Late Bloomer 37 Hothouse Flower 38 Harvest 39 Prepositions 40 Vase of Dead Roses 41 VARIOUS POEMS The Day That Painting Died 45 The Camera 46 Ballpoint Pens 47 The Sacred Blue 48 Landscape 49 I Declare Peace 50 The Soldier 51 After the Surrender 52 Trajectory 53 Feminist Poem 54 Proverbs 55 The Tenses 56 Second Opinion 57 An Apology to a Bulldog 58 Karl Shapiro 59 Bar Mitzvah 60 The Jewish Problem 62 Again, for Sophie 64 About the Author 67
£18.66
Texas Review Press Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers: Poems
Book SynopsisIn questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000. ...From “No Trespassing”It’s me who worries about her mini-strokes and falls, the knot on her head from where she stumbled picking blackberries on the bank. She watches the bees come, stippling themselves with pollen, flowers bending in the breeze. This world is hers, for now—all she covets. Tonight it is a black bear and three cubs up against her window, spilling seeds from a bird feeder hung against the house. My mother stands in the dark by that window, her thin hand, the chill of ghostly glass.
£19.76
University of Arkansas Press A Theory of Birds: Poems
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside the woman a lake of funeralsThis layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds-particularly extinct species-become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze.Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems-their subjects and their logics-refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.Trade Review"A Theory of Birds opens with phrases stitched with commas that are both light and startling: a grammar-flux that produces the effect of something falling out of or off the page. Zaina Alsous: ‘I entered through the empty cage, hips first.’ Zaina Alsous: ‘Can the map eat?’ The questions that follow invert their cardinal nouns, reverting to zero each time the next one is asked. I became curious about the nothing-everything of the book itself, the logic of voids and flight. A book that proposes a ‘collaboration with the dead’ but also a paradise of solar pathways and outcomes (intense joy). Alsous offers the reader a ‘previously’ as much as an ‘almost.’ A jar in France, a blonde hair in Fez: foreignness composes fragments in the shape of an ibis, a harp, a broken lantern, pinning them on a sky-red space: the page, which also shakes—shakes so hard that letters lose their place. And what would it be to write anyway? To love anyway? Zaina Alsous: ‘When I say home, I mean origin as a transitive verb. / When I say love, I mean these miracles are work.’"—Bhanu Kapil "Gabriel García Márquez wrote that Christopher Columbus’s Diario, ‘a book that speaks of fabulous plants and mythological lands,’ was the first example of magical literature in the Caribbean. This ‘magic’ is the colonizer’s ability to falsify a history, to rename what has already been discovered, to create taxonomies and eradicate the epistemologies of entire peoples. Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds makes another kind of magic. Alsous writes, ‘While invading the New World, Columbus writes of sirens in / his notebooks, evoking the half-women, half-birds of Jason’s / Argonauts. Every time I look for women, I become more bird.’ Here is the magic of decolonization, the way it reconnects us past the romanticized past of the noble savage, past the Orientalist hybrids of an unimaginative colonial fiction, all the way to a poetics born of solidarity, of struggle, and pushing through the fissures that will eventually break apart empire. ‘Listen, next time, the flowers are naming themselves.’" —Raquel Salas Rivera
£17.06
University of Washington Press Carbon
Book SynopsisDonetsk, the black gem of Ukraine—Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe’s east: Svetlana Lavochkina sends readers on a double odyssey with two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose. A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city.
£16.16
Wilfrid Laurier University Press A Different Species of Breathing: The Poetry of
Book SynopsisWhat can it look like for poetry to bear witness? What might it feel like for a poem to keep company? A Different Species of Breathing: The Poetry of Sue Goyetteoffers an introduction to the work of a poet whose writing attends to these large and connected questions.Goyette’s poetry experiments with (and pushes at the edges of) lyric poetry to explore webs of connection. Whether considering the ways in which systems of care fail children, the devastating reach of Big Pharma, the reciprocal relationship between oceans and humans, or the possibilities that rest in rewriting one’s own story, Goyette’s poetry is rooted in the work of witnessing and being in company with others.A Different Species of Breathing opens with an introduction by scholar, editor, and poet Bart Vautour, which offers readers context for Goyette’s lyric innovations as well as her key poetic concerns. A selection chosen from across Goyette’s published work then presents readers with poems that appear in chronological order to ground readers in the poet’s trajectories of thinking. The volume closes with a new and previously unpublished interview between Goyette and scholar and writer Erin Wunker. For scholars, poetry aficionados, students, and those interested in questions of care, connection, and ecosystems.
£17.06
Wilfrid Laurier University Press A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom
Book SynopsisWith compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. Throughout her six collections, she is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love.Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight.Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers.Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In the Afterword, Ronna Bloom traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.
£17.06
AU Press What We Are, When We Are: Kaj smo, ko smo
Book SynopsisWorking within a postmodern style, this rhythmic and melodious collection of poems originally written in Slovenian by Cvetka Lipuš and translated here by Tom Priestly, blends the real with the surreal, dull urban lives with dreams. Lipuš, known for the lexical beauty of her work, dwells on topics of time and space which she handles in an almost revolving, irreverent manner. Priestly captures the maze-like characteristic of her verse and carefully reconstructs the sonoric beauty of the work in its original language.
£17.09
University of Calgary Press An Orchid Astronomy
Book SynopsisSophie grew up in Veslefjord, deep in the Norwegian North, where the ice stretches to the horizon and the long Arctic night is filled with stories about the animals of the sea, ice, and sky. Now the ice is melting and the animals are dying. Sophie's mother is also dead, leaving behind a daughter and a lover on the melting permafrost.An Orchid Astronomy is the story of Sophie, of her personal trauma and of climate catastrophe, told in striking experimental poetry. Crossing poetic styles and genres, words and sentences flow and break, twist into images, and cluster together like the Arctic stars. Coming together in a sustained narrative, these poems ask how we grapple with magnificent loss, searching for solutions in science, in mythology, in storytelling and ultimately, in our relived memories.Challenging, powerful, and beautiful, An Orchid Astronomy wrestles with the grief we feel for the loss of those we love and grief for the changing world. In the language of mass extinction and the unknowable sky, Tasnuva Hayden fearlessly explores the nuances of personal collapse, sublimated desire, unfulfilled longing, and the ways we must move forward in the face of the impossible in poetry that dazzles like the moon on a midwinter night.
£19.76
University of Calgary Press Refugia
Book SynopsisRelic species extinct everywhere else on the planet thrive on a remote archipelago. Evolution requires isolation, and these islands offer the perfect environment for genetic variation to take place, fostering new and unique forms of flora and fauna. Evolutionary biologists Emily and Roland have come on an extended field expedition to this secluded world, eager to expose its unique biosphere.As they work to gather a large dataset of dead specimens for study and description, Emily and Roland experience growing shifts in their perception, in their bodies, and even in the flow of linear time. The environment they have come to quantify acts upon them, the species they collect observe and comment upon them, and the controlled lens of science cannot save them. Succumbing to the dynamic power of isolation, they find themselves irrevocably changed.A poetic novel told through field notes, letters, and scientific data, Refugia is a story of discovery and transformation that shows the hubris inherent in the idea that humans live both outside, and at the center of, the natural world. This is a book that reveals science in all its imperfect beauty, crossing the line between observer and observed, scientist and subject, between what is known and what is unknowable.
£19.76
University of Calgary Press body works
Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.
£35.06
University of Calgary Press body works
Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.
£19.76
University of Calgary Press Muster Points
Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a “fancy academic” who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.
£23.70
University of Calgary Press Muster Points
Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a "fancy academic" who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy's trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.
£15.26
Liverpool University Press A Perfect Mirror
Book SynopsisWalking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett’s fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence – part found poem, part assemblage – draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights – a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child – attempt to balance the darkness.Trade Review'Mature, intense, necessary – in turbulent times, the poems of A Perfect Mirror haunt and hold the reader, showcasing the gifts of a poet as accomplished in evoking the natural world as she is in communicating a powerful psychic landscape. Deploying imagery at once idiosyncratic, apposite and utterly memorable, with an remarkable feel for the line, and terrific sonic effects, Corbett never fails to move and excite, prompting me to return again and again to wonder, with not a little envy: how does she do it? Here is a talent who illumines darkness with a fierce emotional and intellectual rigour. There can be no doubt: Sarah Corbett is one of the finest, most essential poets now writing.'Kathryn Gray'A Perfect Mirror flickers more secrets about the Calder Valley into view than a mirror ever could. Marvelling at moss and the moon of ice, elsewhere plying the mystery of puddles, these miraculous poems nurse the glint of sun into gold. Even the sky begins to speak, graced by the ghosts of Wordsworth, Plath, Bronte and Austen, as scaling each hill entails a hike into the imagination, “where the mind goes gliding beyond the shores of its ocean... moving towards a horizon we will never touch”.'Jade Cuttle, Poetry Book Society'Often, cautious students of poetry worry that their poems oughtn’t be about one ‘controversial’ thing or another. What Corbett has shown is that they should take the opposite approach: fill their poems with all the savages and saints which make up the human condition. Only then will the mirror of poetry be perfect.'Jake Campbell, Poetry School'Corbett’s writing on nature is both jubilant and troubled, lit by the joys of exploring the countryside of West Yorkshire, but equally alert to environmental problems caused by humans...When Corbett lets her enthusiasm for the natural world loose her writing is energizing...'Suzannah V. Evans, Times Literary Supplement'Corbett proves herself throughout these poetic depictions of nature to be a timeless and sensual writer. She is subtly sonnet-like in her portrayal of opposing concepts, pitting safety and surety against risk, the rural against the urban, the here versus the elsewhere, and the then versus the now.'Biana Pellet, The London Magazine‘Corbett’s creative engagement with earlier literary figures, including Marvell, Blake, and especially Dorothy Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath, is only part of the pleasure of this book, in which the poet treads carefully from line to line while retaining much of the wildness of spirit and thought she so clearly values.’David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent Reviews ‘A Perfect Mirror reflects brilliantly on the craft off its maker, on the places of its making and on the literary heroines and heroes with whom, it proves, Corbett is amply deserving to be ranked.’Mike Farren, The High Window'Corbett’s creative engagement with earlier literary figures, including Marvell, Blake, and especially Dorothy Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath, is only part of the pleasure of this book, in which the poet treads carefully from line to line while retaining much of the wildness of spirit and thought she so clearly values.' David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent
£13.26
Liverpool University Press The Station Before
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021Linda Anderson's much anticipated first collection travels across time and space, employing a range of voices, including historical ones. At the heart of the collection, though, is always the moment of encounter, the moment when things appear strange, before they settle into a pattern or become known. This is as true of the explorer Charles Kingsley, awed by the Caribbean landscape, as it is of the poet herself, confronted with moments of vision or almost vision, either in her own travels, or in the ordinariness of a domestic life. Nothing is quite secure in this collection: memory destabilizes with its resurrections; seeing has many angles and cannot be taken for granted; borders fluctuate and crossings abound. And although not afraid to draw on ideas from many sources, these poems often explore how thinking masks a fragility, the knowledge of our mortal selves. What are the fragments that make a poem, the book asks? How are they held within a form? And how do we negotiate the multiple memories, ideas, sights, meetings, and losses which constitute us and our complex selves.Trade Review'This marvellous first book is a journey into the wisdom of years - it knows 'arrival is a myth', that we live in a constantly unfolding mystery, fluttering in our memories, hovering over the present, pollinating the page with our presence. And as the poems roam from post-war Scotland to tropical lushness the reader is drawn deeper and deeper into an astonishing attention to the 'uncontrollably multiple' world around us, and the parallel world within.' Mary Ruefle'Linda Anderson’s The Station Before is a wondrous lyric meditation on liminal space— temporal and sensory thresholds, fissures, glimpses of world flickering in consciousness, and most especially the moment of taking pen to paper. The poet untethers herself from all certainties to set the mind aloft, accompanied throughout by winged beings: among them fulmars, kittiwakes, ravens and lapwings in a virtual aviary of tutelary spirits. Great distances are crossed within and without, and if a secret is revealed it is this: Always write in the moment. There is a truth/ that cannot afterwards be transcribed. Anderson’s poems are luminous with this truth.' Carolyn Forché'Linda Anderson’s is a poetry of acute perception and close scrutiny, where ideas and feelings are fused in patient enquiry about what and who and how we know. A subtle music invites and receives the reader’s trust in the work of Anderson’s imagination.' Sean O'Brien'“Tilted between past and present”, a childhood in post-war Scotland and the death of a Father, Anderson surveys the tender remnants of life… In these lyrical and liminal poems “arrival is a myth” and we can only ever reach The Station Before.' Poetry Book Society'When a life-long academic distills a lifetime of images into a such a tight collection, the result is as strong as aged single-malt whiskey. This is the good stuff hidden on the top shelf, only uncorked at weddings and funerals... Anderson’s writing is precise, meticulous, and bursting with acuity.'DM O’Connor, RHINO Poetry'In The Station Before, Linda Anderson demonstrates a clear eye, a depth of thought, and a probing, restless intelligence. Whether watching a fulmar fly or giving voice to Virginia Woolf in her study, Anderson's attentiveness and her discreet, convincing music are entrancing and deeply impressive. After reading her some trace of the poems remains, some 'intimacy left over' like 'a dusting of pollen'.' Nick Laird, Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize Judge'Whether Linda Anderson’s collection, The Station Before is looking to her past, present, dreams or the lives of others, its preoccupation is the same: to privilege seeing; to rapturously observe our lives so that we might uncover new meaning. [...] Anderson’s voice, positioned at this frightening fault line of seeing/unseeing, memory/imagination, past/present arrives on the page quietly, with patience, sorrow and consideration. [...] These are not poems that manically dash about or shout for attention; their voice is poised and their shape largely contained in regular couplets, quatrains and sonnets. Anderson’s language likewise does not push for idiom or explicit playfulness but quietly asserts itself through precision – a rapturous contemplation so focused on its subject it clears the page of ego.'Genevieve Stevens, PN Review
£13.26
Liverpool University Press bird of winter
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2021Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2022PBS Special Commendation Summer 2021Alice Hiller’s debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected – and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.Trade Review'Alice Hiller’s bird of winter is a vital work of poetic witness. It is necessary, alive, resilient. Unflinching in its account of childhood abuse and trauma, it depicts a world ‘harsh as ash over sunshine’ and in its process of recovery, makes of it something beautiful and new.' Karen McCarthy Woolf'bird of winter reminds us that the root of courage, etymological and otherwise, is heart. Prepare, Dear Reader, to feel.'Nuar Alsadir'Alice Hiller’s project is the excavation of a city of grief from beneath the ashes of memory. It does what poetry does best: it makes a new, hard-won truth and a beauty of its absences and denials. Its partial shapes and unstable formal qualities consequently come to live in the reader.It doesn’t redeem, it scorches.'Sasha Dugdale‘This collection bears witness to the resilience of human nature, with poetry giving voice to the silences within that are so hard to talk about. Yet they must be voiced, and Alice Hiller has turned her devastating childhood experiences into a narrative of transformation that everyone should read.’ Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon‘Between the obscurity and bewilderment of her erasure poems, and her other visually arresting, formally playful work, Hiller never loses sight of the vivid world in which an escape from oppressive interiority is made possible.’ Juliano Zaffino'Alice Hiller’s potent debut collection, Bird of Winter, commands respect and reverence. Composure is required to absorb this essential and courageously intimate exploration of sexual abuse. [...] Hiller’s fearless writing is neither crude nor violent despite indicating unbearable violations. The specifics and long-standing impact of abuse are rarely written with such tender flair. [Her] words are cathartic, proud, persistent and we are compelled to read to further our understanding of a violation perturbingly common. [...] Through dynamic form and the powerful imagery of excavated histories, that offers a deeper awareness of the reality of sexual abuse and the consequent devastation, Hiller reclaims a voice that we are compelled to hear. This is a poet so brave, resolved to gather the ruins of an appalling early childhood and redefine herself as more than a catastrophic moment in time.'Victoria Lothian, Dundee University Review of the Arts'Hiller’s writing is precise, delicate and starkly austere. [...] These accessible poems often reflect the vulnerability of the speaker as a child and make use of white space and fragments of text. The disturbing subject matter is depicted with care and distance through searing image-making. An exceptional début, courageous and devastating in equal measure. This is a profoundly moving and important book, which oscillates between life and death, loss and regeneration, light and dark. The final poem ‘o goddess isis’ epitomises the speaker’s movement towards freedom, to ‘dissolve night’, ‘reveal the sunrise’.' Jennifer Lee Tsai, Mslexia'Through great erudition and a razor-sharp focus on image, this collection raises faultless victimhood from the ash like a phoenix. [...] With exacting erudition, a strong connection to the natural world, and the power of a witness statement, Alice Hiller’s bird of winter is beautiful to hold, a pleasure to open, and a testament of vindication. Hiller exorcises shame through beauty and assembles redemption with acute detail.'David Morgan O’Connor, RHINO'The book is an impressive example of the power of poetic control, in its choice of what information to share with the reader and its simplicity of diction and line. [...] The poems throw off the tethers ofsocially sanctioned silences around abuse till the unpunctuated and carefully punctured lines soar. [...] With their gaze resolutely on the grievous hurt arising from abuse, these poems are a deep reproach to the act of looking away. bird of winter will turn your gaze towards damaging behaviours that we know happen but can’t bear to focus on. Read it.'Claire Crowther, Magma Poetry'Alice Hiller’s debut poetry collection bird of winter is an act of witness, exceptional in its exploration of form, sources and landscape, and deeply humane in purpose. [...] Some poets wait patiently for poems to reach them like gifts from the elements, from air and water. Others build work from their own flesh, blood and bones, in defiance of censorship and silencing. Alice Hiller is a rare poet who uses both approaches to write an extraordinary testimony of trauma that offers fierce resistance, as well as hope to survivors of sexual abuse.'Pauline Rowe, Poets' Directory ‘Hiller offers extraordinary resilience and moments of immense, liberatory tenderness… This is a harrowing book, yes, but ultimately, with its invitation to “billow forth the wrecks we hold”, with its emphasis on resistance and joy, it is a staggeringly beautiful piece of life-affirming work.’ Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Poetry Review
£13.26
Liverpool University Press Bloom
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. Shortlisted for the Ledbury Hellens Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2023. ‘Have you looked / have you looked deeply?’ ask these poems, rooted in the human body and its movement through an interconnected living world. Bloom, Sarah Westcott’s second collection, approaches the cultural and physical spaces where human and non-human lives co-exist. These poems are attuned to a tender, bleeding world in which ‘all flesh is grass’ and language is matter. These are poems of resistance: attentive to non-human life, ‘eternal and plaintive … counter-balanced, strange.’ Here are field flowers, walled gardens and lost species, the particularities of ‘undistinguished things … seeds, waterbuts, palpable concerns’. Exploring sacrifice and loss, these poems push at the boundaries where girlhood and flower might bleed. These poems are a hymn to being alive in the twenty-first century - the frailties and vigour of life in all its dazzling form, its ‘looped breath, perpetual singing’.Trade ReviewReviews'Like a deep Summer meadow, "thrumming in wet light", Bloom teems with wild, restless energy: bird song, flowers, birth and death, the body in its ecstasy and decay. Sarah Westcott's beautiful poems pivot upon a strange dazzling curiosity. They urge us to kneel in the long grass and pay tender attention to the spaces within nature and within ourselves where life blooms.' Liz Berry'Sarah Westcott’s poems are an enquiry into perception, in which looking is refracted, and the line between subject and object becomes permeable. They look back to a time when “form and perception were … the same”, and trace the contours and textures of loss, the way longing sets birds “circling”, and green is “inconsolable”. And yet elegy is not the only key: there are celebrations, too, exhilarations of surface, colour, voices on and in the body. Bloom brings the human and its various others – the weathers, weeds, flowers and creatures - into delicate focus, attending to their forms and relationships with tender precision and care.' Mina Gorji‘Sarah Westcott in her second poetry collection Bloom, picks up where she left off with Slant Light; at once fully immersed in the natural world, and yet devastatingly unable to escape the body, its attendant implications of mortality, humanity, in a world that renders us tiny.’ Juliano Zaffino'Westcott blends dynamic, sensual language with the scientific [...] the poet-narrator of Bloom seems to almost bodily flow, meld and join with the natural world. [...] This second of the Westcott’s ‘sister’ collections shows us a powerful nature poet unafraid of a bolder reach in expression, where we are ‘one layer of carbon’ (The Turn) among so many others in nature, but one grounded in the particularity and exactitude of that world.'Ken Evans, The Manchester Review'Wescott create[s] a palimpsest of hymns to the natural world [...] Bloom is a subtle meditation on the underlying connection between humans and Nature with ecological overtones, rooted in passionate, precise observation.'Theresa Sowerby, Orbis Magazine'[Wescott] invokes moments of sanctity which have meaning for her without invoking theology. In this wide context, she reads as both eco-poet and love poet. What makes her an eco-poet (not strident but urgent) is her respect for life. [...] Because she often strikes a note of fine spontaneity, it would be easy to overlook that Westcott is a clever technician and witty with it. Several love-poems here are down-to-earth, high-flown and tender all in one. [...] Awareness of touch, of one texture against another, is an insidious (in a good sense) presence through poems which are invariably sensual at one level or another; she is also, however, making a point about the need to feel, the ‘civilisation’ that comes from a trembling awareness. 'Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry'Sarah Westcott's keen-eyed second collection, Bloom, deals in surfaces that shift, cut and resist. [...] It is a particular gift of Westcott's poems to connect directly with an animal nature that can slip past intellectual overlay. [...] These are poems that capture a sense of the things that are 'bewildering', 'tender' [...] Wescott reveals the multiplicity of our experience, its many truths. This is a mesmerising volume that invites us to rove, and in so doing, to leave a different track behind.'Lesley Sharpe, The Alchemy Spoon'The poems in this luminous book are tight, fragmented things, varying in shape and typesetting, in a style both abstract and committed: the world placed firmly underfoot even as the work revels in strangeness and uncertainty. [...] There’s something original about Westcott’s nature writing, something unsettling, where clarity of observation is never far from an obsessive sense of derangement. Maybe that’s because hallucination and actually seeing are closer to one another than we might think: our interiors influence our perception of the exterior. [...] The world is always rolling in this collection, brought to life by Westcott’s quick but careful observations: in flux and subjected to harmonious processes, always in bloom.'Daniel Bennett, Wild Court'With humility, reflectiveness, and careful attunement to her surroundings, Westcott calls for her readers to stop and contemplate the wonders of the natural world. Her language is tender and vivid. [...] These poems describe ordinary moments made noteworthy by the poet’s good eye and deft imagery. “All beginnings are naïve,” she writes, and, in this collection, her curiosity proves contagious.'Maggie Wang, Harvard Review'Eerie and sensuous ... Westcott’s poems seek to collapse the differences between human and non-human entities in order to show how human beings can contain multitudes' Dzifa Benson, Magma Poetry‘When we read Westcott we know ourselves, instantly, to be in another world, flowering… She is a deeply instinctive poet, at ease in her own poetical character… Westcott has a way of dissolving boundaries between self and other, self and world, self and time, so that any reader of hers must end up feeling: I want to be this way all the time. The word I want here is an over-used and badly understood one: natural. Reading Bloom makes one ache for that naturalness, but also, and this is rare, gives us a portal, a way of finding it.’ Nichola Deane‘Skilful patterning, sharp observation, sensuous evocativeness and startling leaps of metaphorical imagination give her poems a vivid, immediate impact, absorbing the reader in the experiences they present.’ Edmund Prestwich, London Grip
£13.26
Liverpool University Press A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost
Book SynopsisMention Robert Frost and people instantly think of snowy woods and less-traveled paths and rural neighbors meeting to fix their stone fence. But what does Robert Frost have to do with science? You might be surprised. Born in 1874, Frost lived through a remarkable period of scientific progress, including the development of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, the Big Bang theory, the discovery of the structure of DNA and the beginnings of space travel. Possessing a powerful intellect driven by keen curiosity, Frost was highly knowledgeable about the science of his time and infuses his poetry with imagery and language borrowed from science. Frost not only uses the language of science to enrich his poetry in the same way he uses classical, historical, biblical and literary allusions, but he also uses ordinary language to create sophisticated metaphors based on scientific concepts such as evolution and entropy. A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost represents the first systematic attempt to catalogue and explain all of the references to science and natural history in Frost’s poetry. The book, which is organized chronologically, uses language that is accessible to laymen and is supplemented by numerous illustrations, and appendices that should make it a valuable resource for teachers and scholars. Trade Review'What a wonderful idea Virginia Smith, with her strong scientific background, had in providing us with A Scientific Companion to my grandfather’s verses! Always impressed by Rorbert Frost’s deep understanding of his natural surroundings – in botany, archaeology, astronomy, among others – we learn here just how his scientific knowledge enriches the metaphorical language of many of his verses. As a teacher of his poems, I frequently note the need for such a Companion: the heal-all in “Design,” the iris in “Iris by Night” that is not a flower, or the complex interaction of fruit, trees, ancestral primates, and a young girl, in “Wild Grapes,” one of my favorites. Richly illustrated, the volume will help you move ever more deeply into the poet’s layers of meaning while, at the same time, awaken you to the endless mysteries of the universe.'Lesley Lee Francis, author of You Come Too: My Journey With Robert Frost and Robert Frost: An Adventure in Poetry, 1900–1918'More than half a century ago, C. P. Snow lamented that science and the humanities had become so specialized that their practitioners could no longer speak to one another. With the publication of A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost, Virginia Smith proves the exception to the “two cultures” divide. A professor of biochemistry at the United States Naval Academy, Ms. Smith is also an astute reader of Frost’s poetry. In combining her “avocation and vocation,” as Frost advises in “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Ms. Smith demonstrates the breadth of Frost’s engagement with science and carefully discloses how Frost used the lessons of science—in astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, and natural history—to inform his poetry. In doing so, she provides devotees and scholars with an invaluable primary resource that will surely stimulate new thinking about our most thoughtful and complex American poet.' Robert Bernard Hass, author of Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science and co-editor of the Letters of Robert Frost'Any lover of Frost’s poetry will be delighted by Virginia Smith’s A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost. It brings an exciting new perspective to many of the poems we have all long admired. Now with her book as our guide through all the allusions to matters of science that Frost continually turned to in writing his poetry, we can experience and appreciate these poems more fully. Smith has not missed a single one of these allusions, providing us with clarifying details of the significance and history of specific words and phrases in the poems related to the fields of botany, ornithology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, physics, and the technology of his day. But her book is not merely a catalog of Frost’s use of scientific language and imagery; Smith puts her commentaries in the context of where he was living, the books he was reading, the people he knew, and the discussions of the times. Each entry is meticulously documented, drawing on an impressive body of research, often primary sources, including what he had read, courses he had taken, and letters he had written and received. The ninety one illustrations throughout the book further illuminate and enrich our understanding of Frost’s fascination with science. While scholars will surely make use of this book for academic study, I urge the multitude of readers who have made Frost their favorite poet not to pass up this opportunity to get to know his poetry more deeply and enjoy it even more.' Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, author of Robert Frost: The People, Places, and Stories Behind His New England Poetry'Robert Frost was one of the few poets who knew as much about science as he did the humanities. Here at last in one volume Virginia Smith allows readers to see just how deeply informed and rich with scientific knowledge Frost’s poetry could be.' Jonathan N. Barron, director of The Robert Frost Society and author of How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter'The careful research Smith has conducted into Frost’s reading is a great strength of this volume... A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost will help scholars and students alike see new dimensions in Frost’s poetry.’ Steve Knepper, The New England Quarterly 'A professor of chemistry and an active Frost scholar, Virginia F. Smith is uniquely positioned to contribute to these interdisciplinary conversations. In A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost, she draws on her authoritative knowledge of both scientific concepts and of Frost’s life and work to give us an invaluable guide to scientific references in Frost’s poetry. The book not only illuminates these references, it also makes clear the significance of scientific ideas to Frost as both man and poet. Any engaged reader of Frost will benefit from having this Companion at his or her elbow while leafing through the poems.'Marissa Grunes, The Robert Frost ReviewTable of ContentsIntroductionA Boy’s Will North of Boston Mountain Interval New Hampshire West-Running Brook A Further Range A Witness Tree Steeple Bush An Afterword A Masque of Reason In the Clearing Uncollected Poems Works Cited Annotated Bibliography Concordance of Plants Concordance of Animals
£32.95
Liverpool University Press Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country
Book SynopsisThe ‘country house poem’ was born in the seventeenth century as a fruitful way of flattering potential patrons. But the genre’s popularity faded – ironically, just as ‘country house society’ was emerging. It was only when the power and influence of the landed classes had all but ebbed away that poets returned to the theme, attracted perhaps by the buildings’ irresistible dereliction, but equally by their often very personal histories. This is the first complete anthology of modern country house poems, and it shows just how far (as Simon Jenkins points out in his Foreword) poems can ‘penetrate the souls of buildings’. Over 160 distinguished poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer fascinating perspectives on stately exteriors and interiors, gardens both wild and cultivated, crumbling ruins and the extraordinary secrets they hide. There are voices of all kinds, whether it’s Edith Sitwell recreating her childhood, W. B. Yeats and Wendy Cope pondering Lissadell, or Simon Armitage’s labourer confronting the Lady who’s ‘got the lot’. We hear from noble landowners and loyal (or rebellious) servants, and from many an inquisitive day-tripper. The book’s dominant note is elegiac, yet comedy, satire, even strains of Gothic can be heard among these potent reflections. Hollow Palaces reminds us how poets can often be the most perceptive of guides to radical changes in society. The book is illustrated by Rosie Greening.
£29.99
Liverpool University Press Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry:
Book SynopsisEbook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. The years following the Second World War saw an exponential increase in the translation of contemporary foreign poetry in Italy. The practice was at its most prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, when publishing houses across the board almost doubled the number of foreign poetry titles in their catalogues. This remarkable phenomenon, however, has received scant critical attention, which has been limited to an aesthetic perspective. Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field, 1939–1977 is one of the first studies to examine the sociological significance of publishing poetry translations. Drawing on untapped archival materials, it investigates from an interdisciplinary perspective the processes and products of poetry translation, and how they impacted on publishing, cultural, literary, and political dynamics in Italy. It explores the internal reconfiguration of Italian culture, and how Italy sought to position itself in the world, without neglecting the contradictions of national and transnational cultural networks and movements. The book argues that translation was a means to modify power relationships in the field of poetry publishing and the contemporary literary arena; this ultimately changed the map of Italian cultural production and its transnational networks, thus anticipating the further developments provoked by globalisation in the 1980s.Trade Review"An insightful analysis of the way that the translation of foreign poetry helped shape the Italian publishing industry and its power dynamics – enormously well-researched and highly readable."Liz Wren-Owens, Cardiff UniversityTable of ContentsINTRODUCTIONPublishing and Poetry Translation: A Methodological IntroductionCHAPTER 1Publishing, culture, and poetry: a field investigationCHAPTER 2Editors, Habitus and Translation: publishing strategies in poetry translationCHAPTER 3Contemporary foreign poetry anthologies for new cultural and publishing horizonsCHAPTER 4Towards Globalisation, by a way of conclusionAppendix 1Appendix 2Works Cited
£110.00
Liverpool University Press Sergio Raimondi, Selected Poems
Book SynopsisSergio Raimondi’s work engages in the most complex issues of his time, including globalisation, colonialism, industrialisation and environmental degradation. Yet all his concerns are rigorously analysed through the medium of the poet’s art, steeped in literary tradition and craft. He is widely considered Argentina’s most important and influential contemporary poet, with an international reputation. Many of Raimondi’s poems address what might seem unlikely subjects for poetry: industrial practices, global trade, or labour legislation. Yet among the allusions, the immense research, the unsparing gaze, and the expert skill of the language there’s also room for desert-dry humour, touches of self-deprecation and immense empathy for individuals caught up in seemingly implacable historical processes. This volume includes a generous selection of his poems from Poesía civil (Civil Poetry) and Lexikón (Lexikon) in bilingual Spanish-English facing-pages format. A substantial introduction by the translators places Raimondi’s work in its literary and wider cultural context, and reflects on the challenges faced when bringing his unique poetry into English.Table of ContentsIntroductionSelected PoemsGlossary
£95.00
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