Modern and contemporary poetry
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press Swale
Book SynopsisThis collection is named for a “swale,” a shallow channel used to direct the flow of rainwater. Similarly, Swale looks outward to the natural world and directs its focus inward to the landscape of the mind. The past presses in like a thick mist: plundering colonial ships and the cracking edges of empire coincide with contemporary scenes and personal erosions and failures. Alongside humans are animals both living and extinct: manatees, sea turtles, and whales; roaming bears, horses, and lambs; and the flightless dodo and Steller’s sea cow, gone for centuries. What happens when the mind eclipses what the body sees, and neither can be trusted—when demarcations between land and water blur, and one’s sense of self begins to recede?Swale interrogates the violence of colonialism and its reverberations over time, as well as the extinction and the rapid decline of animal species. By turns tidal and cloistered, Swale speaks of science, reliquaries, and lapis lazuli, traversing forests, seascapes, and meadows. Here, the ocean becomes a field, a medieval tapestry transforms into a space that can be entered, and the body is fleshless, struck through with light. The speaker of these poems is ultimately unfixed—and with that comes both imaginative possibility and a personal unmooring. In poems that cast and recast the interior self in different guises—from the perpetually off-kilter Alice to the divergent voices of the shorn lamb and predatory foxhound—an unsettling anxiety grows starker, along with the wish for repair.Trade Review“I feel both shaken and repaired by the alertness of Allison Hutchcraft’s poems. The announcement ‘When I swale, I cannot/tell border from border’ describes her art and where it carries us. Swale takes on the desire of the mind to land and activates new imaginative pathways to disorient the mind from its disorders. Her poems—beautiful and riveting—are excavations, topographies, and tectonic shifts all at once.” -- Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine“This is a splendid book. But when this poet says ‘I look/at the ocean and see only the ocean,’ do not believe her. Know instead how unnerving and strange and revealing her poems are about human time and love and loss through brilliant observations about the natural world (think: whales, otters, seabirds of oil slick or not, woodpeckers, crows, nuthatches, even extinct creatures like the heart-stopping long lost dodo.) Enormous empathy lives in this book, plus time-travel’s feel for past centuries where sailors in tall ships suffered (or were gifted) with ‘calenture,’ an affliction bringing on visions of the sea as a welcoming, irresistible ‘meadow silent/but for the ticking of insects.’ Where we can walk too—and fall into deep imagining as startlingly real as ‘submerged/grasses swaying like the drowned/hair of a doll.’ Did I say these poems are strange? Yes. As genuine beauty is.” -- Marianne Boruch“Swales direct and slow the flow of rainwater, and this collection directs the reader’s attention to the ways that the natural world has indelibly shaped our human consciousness and, in turn, the ways we have attempted to trap and tame the natural. In these poems, manatees turn to mermaids through sailors’ lore, priests weather Orinoco rainforests in the hopes of colonizing its inhabitants, and foals’ legs are taped to facilitate their breaking. ‘The animals we love most / we put in cages,’ Hutchcraft writes, and yet everywhere the natural finally evades our capture. Hutchcraft examines the delicate balance between rapture and ravishment, in poems as ambitious as they are beautiful.” -- Paisley RekdalTable of ContentsICalenture Sometimes My Body Lifts as a WaveSo I Try to Picture the PriestsOn the New Continent, Our Eyes Shining“I Have Written Myself into a Tropical Glow” ScurvySteller and the Sea CowThe Mermaids at Weeki WacheeIIThe Trouble Is IAs Lamb in FieldAlice in the CloistersReliquaryAs Knock-KneedAlice in Millefleurs Flock or Herd, They Came to MeThe Lapis Lazuli in Which She DreamedAs Twin HorsesAlice Goes for a Run, Considers the Year, How She Barely ShookOn this One Acre of the WorldForest Rising from Its Name When Living in Bear CountryAlice above TimberlineAs FoxhoundWhen Living in Bear CountryIIISwaleGhost ForestFrom an Age of SailPolarisOn Effort You Like to Think the Whales Are ListeningGhost LobsterDream from the ShadeA Color of SunsetSometimes I Am Permitted to Return to the SeaWhale FallAlice among the GravesIVSo Legged and Footed[Oh, Dodo. You can’t][Dodo, duodo, sluggard.][Swampland. Bog. Mare aux Songes. “Sea of dreams”] [Out the birds, out][Seeds, or the collapsed bodies][I dreamt my stomach was full of stones] [The lead scattered through your cranial bone][They called you melancholy, too.][You, again,][So legged, so footed, and who’s left to care?]Notes
£13.00
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at
Book SynopsisA collection of poems that delve into the experience of living with bipolar disorder. This collection of poetry explores the disruptive state of psychosis, with all its insights and follies, and the challenges of living life after a departure from the self. These poems reach for an understanding of the ecstasy and tragedy of madness through both lyric and prose forms that mimic the sublime state of mania through their engagement with language. Ordinary life becomes strange in these poems, which are playful and humorous at times and dark at others, as they seek resolution to the question of what happens when the mind overthrows the body.Trade Review“‘You are not alone,’ writes the poet on her dedication page. That beautiful assurance is addressed in particular to ‘those who are struggling with mental illness,’ but it is something, these poems convince us, that each and every one of us may take to heart. So perfectly does Metsker render a mind under pressure—from a punishing surfeit of stimuli, obsessive thoughts, proliferating options in a world of impediment—that, paradoxically, we are deeply comforted. Logic—and its torqued economies—do the work we normally assign to images: ‘I scour the obituaries, but they have no specific plans for me.’ The images themselves are crystalline: ‘The sugar in the sugar bowl hardens into a rock to represent one idea of patience.’ I am profoundly grateful for this marvelous book. On page after page, it demonstrates how intelligence, compassion, and poetry can triumph over chaos.” -- Linda Gregerson“In her exploration of mental illness, Metsker reminds me that poets are natural chroniclers of the line between a mind’s inventiveness and its unmooring. For a poem to function, the figurative has to feel real. Poems that draw us into their irrationalities can allow us to reach more rational states and understandings. While in poetry there is often this leaving sense and coming back to it, with mental illness, there is a similar, more severe leaving but not always a return. ‘Tomorrow will be another story, another pause by the window that could turn into a lifetime wearing cinched jackets.’ Just the opposite of a straight jacket, this book reads as a liberation from the fear that a familiar self, once lost, cannot be regained. While it’s ‘hard to stick a landing in sand,’ to find a way to sense when sense has been taken away, Metsker has done just that.” -- Bob Hicok
£13.00
Acre Books Manatee Lagoon – Poems
Book SynopsisThe third full-length collection from physician and poet Jenna Le blends traditional form and the current moment. In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself. Le aligns the genial but vulnerable sea cow with mermaids, neurologists, the month of November, harmful political speech, and even a family photo at the titular lagoon. In these poems, Le also reflects on the experience of being the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in today’s sometimes tense and hostile America. The morning after the 2016 election, as three women of color wait for the bus, one says, “In this new world, we must protect each other.”Manatee Lagoon is a treasury of voices, bringing together the personal and the persona, with poems dedicated to Kate Spade, John Ashbery, and Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. With this book, Le establishes herself as a talented transcriber of the human condition—and as one of the finest writers of formal verse today.
£13.00
Clemson University Digital Press The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual: Volume 3
Book Synopsis
£109.50
National Gallery Singapore regarding
Book SynopsisWritten over the course of a year in response to the National Gallery Singapore’s exhibitions, Madeleine Lee’s volume of ekphrastic poetry enacts the ways in which language may relate to art. Each poem is a vignette of a show; words compose, question and revision the visual in novel forms of their own making. The sum of this interplay between word and image is more expansive than its parts, and speaks to the generative force of intersecting mediums.
£9.50
HarperCollins Publishers Nobody Asked For This
Book Synopsis Bringing together the collected works of bestselling poet Charly Cox for the very first time with new and exclusive material. Trade Review‘Honest, relatable, and thought provoking.’ Stylist magazine ‘Funny and heartfelt and brilliant.’ Sunday Times STYLE ‘Relatable and funny.’ ELLE ‘Encapsulates what it is to be a young woman.’ Pandora Sykes ‘Divine.’ Cecelia Ahern
£18.62
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Storm for the Living and the Dead
Book SynopsisA timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowski’s best unpublished and uncollected poems Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to generations of readers all over the world.
£19.00
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Death Of Sitting Bear
Book Synopsis
£23.19
Penguin Putnam Inc All the Flowers Kneeling
Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery AwardA New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice Pick Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker “Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen)Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran''s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates in
£16.20
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Zero at the Bone
Book SynopsisChristian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work.
£22.49
Northwestern University Press Ground Zero
Book SynopsisInception and implosion, Chicago's grit and grandiosity all come together in the finite poetic power of the original Slam igniter, renowned poet Marc Kelly Smith and his retrospect denotation, Ground Zero.Trade Review“Listen up: Marc Smith’s poems are performances, fast paced and quick talking, beep beepin' and zoom zoomin,’ urban and hard-charging, jazzy and impudent, utterly authentic, full Chicago. They are filled with life.” —Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel“What Marc Smith invented when he created the poetry slam was so deeply, intuitively perfect . . .” —Ira Glass, host of This American Life"Harriet Monroe birthed the Chicago poetry scene at the start of the 20th century. Then Marc Smith came along at the end and gave it new life: straddling its fading body, pressing the heels of both hands down, hard, on its chest and hissing, 'BREATHE, damn you!' His words squeal and crackle, squish and gasp, always reflecting the city of his birth, a city forever in decline, yet forever struggling to rise again. Read them with joy and sorrow." —Neil Steinberg, co-author Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to RecoveryTable of Contents Uptown Monologue No Exit Sunday Nobody’s Here Ground Zero Man on his Cell Phone Shouting Winter Café Face on the Floor The Sign Rattled Pyromaniac Ball Park Poem Conga Beat Bradley Cockren My Father’s Coat Corners Chips Breakfast Rush Street Shuffle Stuttering Light Rosie Moon Moan Impudence Arnold the Jazz Prophet Turning Ten Small Talk Ameritech Deep Dish Chicago IT the Problem IT the Solution Something
£17.95
Northwestern University Press The History of Intimacy
Book SynopsisOffers a tender, tangled account of the heady days in South Africa following Nelson Mandela's release from prison. This award-winning poetry collection portrays the innovative forms of music, kinship, and even self in ""the new, intricate country / we understood was impossible.Trade ReviewBaderoon’s poetry . . . uses a gentle eye to consider all that is intimate between us, and in doing so, renders these quiet and still moments as sacred. In The History of Intimacy, she has rendered our most painful histories through an unobtrusive lens. She has written them with care, and left space and silence around them, so they (and we) may have room to breathe. In the act of listening, we render them sacred, and might begin to heal." —Toni Giselle Stuart, The Johannesburg Review of Books". . . Baderoon’s poetry does not shy away from attempting to forge an understanding, on a broader political scale and in the intimacy of our souls." —Karina Magdalena Szczurek, LitNet"South African poet Gabeba Baderoon’s fourth collection of verse impresses with its concision of language and clarity of ideas. With subjects ranging from the hidden tableaus of her personal history to the meaning and value of poetry, Baderoon’s verses invite the reader to join her on an exploration of history, culture, and the universal qualities of the subjective experience." —World Literature TodayTable of Contents Poetry for Beginners Tell Me What You See A Prospect of Beauty Closer Surface Focal Length Axis and Revolution Rain fall on the abstract world Port Jackson, Cape Town The Port Cities The River Cities Everything We've Said Diving Concentration Promised land Koggelbaai The Blue of the Night before We Left Ghost Technologies Song of the Husband 2 The Flats Black Butterflies Green pincushion proteas Effective Immediately The Edges of Things Hangklip* The Word No Name Not You I saw you walk toward something The History of Intimacy Answering The Law of the Mother Cardinal Points Glossary
£14.36
Northwestern University Press Blessed Are the Peacemakers
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£15.15
Northwestern University Press Loner Forensics
Book SynopsisThis sprawling collection comprises a series of interviews with denizens of the shifting city, each mediated through the lonely lens of the Detective, a character whose refractive investigation atomizes the scene.Trade Review“You’ll likely find Thea Brown’s collection Loner Forensics shelved under poetry, but this book is something all its own: lyric noir, speculative elegy, private procedural. A story told through story’s negation ('The city is not a story'), here we feel we might glimpse SchrÖdinger’s cat gone stray, living out one of its lives off alley scraps in the intimate estrangement of the metropolis. While the chorus of voices builds a litany of delightfully dubious testimony out of postmodern materials—fragments of the attention economy, consumer culture, and so on—place (as in any good Gothic) is a crucial character as well: dangerous, endangered, and indelible. Alongside Brown and her Detective, we search for truth in the trappings, asking the big questions, like, well, 'What was the question?'” —Dora Malech, author of FlourishTable of ContentsHEAD SOUTH, CATAFALQUE 6 THE ANNOTATOR 14 THE FORENSICS TEAM 15 THE MAYOR 16 THE PALM READER 18 THE AMATEURS 19 THE CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST, PART 1 20 THE CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST, PART 2 21 THE CURATOR 22 THE WEATHER 24 THE REGISTER 25 THE LUXURY CONSULTANT 26 THE FORENSICS TEAM 28 THE MUNICIPAL LANDSCAPER 29 THE FRAMER 31 THE INTERNIST 32 THE RIDER 33 THE CONCIERGE 34 THE CORRESPONDENT 35 THE RADIO PRODUCER 36 THE FLORIST 37 THE DIPLOMAT 38 THE JOURNALIST 39 THE FORENSICS TEAM 41 THE TWINS 42 THE STENOGRAPHER 44 THE INGENUE 45 THE CENTAUR 47 THE COLLECTOR 48 THE COPY EDITOR 49 THE RUNNER 50 THE ACTUARY 51 THE DANCER 52 THE MAKEUP COUNTER 53 THE BLOGGER 54 THE TALKING HEADS 55 THE HOUSEKEEPER 56 THE ADJUNCT 57 THE FORENSICS TEAM 59 THE PROVOST 60 THE DREAMBOAT 61 THE TELLER 63 THE SHOPPER 65 THE TEMP 66 THE TOUR GUIDE 67 THE NEOTRANSCENDENTALIST 68 THE FORENSICS TEAM 69 THE DESIGNER 70 THE NOSTALGIST 71 THE COPS 73 THE IMPALEMENT ARTIST 74 THE TRANSPLANT 75 THE POLLSTER 76 THE FORENSICS TEAM 78 THE INDUSTRIAL ARCHITECT 79 THE NARC 80 THE THIRD SHIFT 81 THE CARTOGRAPHER 83 THE BACKPACKER 84 THE FORENSICS TEAM 85 THE GROUNDSKEEPER 86 THE OPENING ACT 87 THE VISITOR IN THE HILLS 88 THE CRONE 89 THE MISANTHROPE 92 THE RINGMASTER 94 THE GARDENER 96 THE FORENSICS TEAM 97 THE DETECTIVE 98 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 101
£16.16
The University Press of Kentucky Back to the Light Poems
Book Synopsis
£17.10
The University Press of Kentucky Back to the Light
Book Synopsis
£25.65
The University Press of Kentucky Marrow
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsSHELBY COUNTY ALABAMA THE INVITATION ROSTRUM BOOKISH GIRL SWEEPS THE SANCTUARY THE BLACK BOOK A REVOLUTIONARY LOVE STORY WATER WILD CHILD JUBILEE THE PEOPLES TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT WISHING TREE FOR YONDER COMPOSTING MAKING SOAP DISAPPEARANCE THE RULES HOW TODAY WILL LOOK WHEN IT'S HISTORY I LEARN TO LOVE THE BODY SHE LOVES A TREE GETS IN THE WAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH CHRISTINE BUCKET BRIGADE HARVESTING HOW SLEEP FINDS US SOMETIMES MOLASSES GOVERNMENT NAME WHAT WE TALK ABOUT IN OUR COTTAGE WHEN SHANDA SAID NO THE SCENT OF HER GROOMING IN DEFENSE OF DEVOTION SPIT SHINE ALGEBRA MAKESHIFT DADDY FOR JUST PENNIES A GLASS [REDACTED] EARNS HIS WINGS IMAGINE, FIRST, A GIRL AS FOR DANCING AFTER THE GAME LOOKING THE CAMERA IN THE EYE WARREN FETUS HOUSE ON STILTS A MEDIC MISTAKES ME FOR DEAD SEPIA AFTER AN NBC INTERVIEW I MISSED YOU MORE MARROW OIL DRUM NOTES ACKOWLEDGEMENTS
£25.65
The University Press of Kentucky Gay Poems for Red States
Book SynopsisThis poetry collection offers insight into life in Appalachia and hope for the members of the LGBTQ+ community that live there.Table of ContentsPreface Minnie Mouse Toy Supermodel (You Better Work) Goodbye First Crush Clean Room Found Kitten Biscuit Girl Self-Hating Preacher Creek Cornmeal and Water Pancakes Neckbones Embarrassing Thank You, Jerry Springer Library Hard to Take Seriously Clubhouse Character Food Stamp Holiday Song Waiting for God Gay Road Home Salt-Free Funeral Power of Ain't Josh A Guy Named Casey Who I Had Never Met I'm Sorry, Chris The Space Under the Pews Mountain Learning Charisma Scientist Promise Ramen Noodles Bluegrass Moon Trombone Cogitating Builder Someday Child Reassurance Family Dollar Orange Drink Product and Beef Jerky Take a Seat The Truth will Stand Acknowledgements
£17.10
The University Press of Kentucky Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House
Book SynopsisLaden with their belongings and informed by their experiences, these immigrants became citizens of a new diaspora searching for space to exist in their adopted home.In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina Stoykova follows that which "calls / the roaming mind / looking for land" with the shell of her homeland at her back.Table of ContentsA. America, you are so big, I feel endless What is the difference Light without her body Stained Glass Butterflies America, do you remember So much depends upon America, what do you hide Sus-toss The Country Who no Longer Wanted Her Children America, I visited Visit Conversation The Way I Pray to St. Catherine America, you made me in your image He Catches a Magic Fish A Man and a Woman in a Bedroom Once America, you watched me change Honey, this is the scary truth To the Foreign Woman... in the Post Office Dear Numbness America, here is the answer Dear One There once was a woman who wanted to be a better mother America, there will be nothing left Shame is a private punishment I Shame, Therefore I Am Wasn't it easier with less awareness? America, I love doing stupid things At some point you stopped The entire day I loved someone It's a Great Day to Burn, the Man Said Some Catastrophes Approach Slowly America, It's complicated 8th Floor Balcony Ghazal So, You Miss Your Depression I don't know America, if your eyes are dry Better Darling Everybody needs a pen America, what you have You'll be given everything, twice By the end of your life You look for proof America, if there were a rule The Body, the Collateral and in the morning, we saw a moth America, now I know We Must Be Very Careful When Using the Word Home Black Stone Over White Stone America, I don't know The Apple Who Wanted to Become a Pinecone A Dream America, would you be a part of me Imagine a raw egg Creative Spurt As I'm writing this America, I dally Bo from the Choctaw Nation What Happens to the Prophet B. Theorem: America is the greatest country in the world. Proof Conclusion Alternate ending Alternate conclusion Acknowledgements and Notes Brief Bio
£27.00
Wesleyan University Press Frayed Light
Book SynopsisThis poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
£13.92
Bauhan (William L.),U.S. Girl as Birch
Book SynopsisPoetry collection exploring female gender roles.
£12.30
Hebrew Union College Press,U.S. Now at the Threshold The Late Poems of Tuvia
Book SynopsisThe translated poems in Now at the Threshold: The Late Poems of Tuvia Ruebner are from Ruebner's final three collections, all written from 2014 onward, after the poet's 90th birthday. Translated into English by award-winning translator Rachel Tzvia Back.
£23.75
University of Virginia Press Best New Poets 2019 50 Poems from Emerging
Book SynopsisEntering its fifteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs.Trade Review"A reminder that contemporary poetry is not only alive and well but continuing to evolve." "This collection stands out among the crowd claiming to represent emergent poets. Much of the editing and preliminary reading was done by emerging poets themselves, which results in an anthology that’s fresh and eclectic, and may actually represent a significant portion of the best new poetry being written by the next generation."
£11.95
Green Writers Press Landscapes with Donkey
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn Paisajes con burro, the donkey is here converted into the incarnation of wisdom a corporeality in which the purity of childhood and the honorability of accumulated experience come together. -- Antonio Puente, La Provincia
£13.25
WW Norton & Co Almost an Elegy
Book SynopsisA moving and incandescent volume from a poet celebrated for her “unfailing mastery of her medium” (New York Times Book Review).
£21.59
WW Norton & Co Up Late Poems
Book SynopsisOne of NPR's "Books We Love" in 2023 Acclaimed poet Nick Laird reflects on the strange and chaotic times we live in with singular precision, clarity, and daring.Trade Review"Ruminative and daring…Laird [is] a wild poet-soul attentive to everything in poetic omniscience, challenging readers to see what he sees in the double witnessing of art’s power…This is mastery over formal limitation—a kaleidoscope of perfectly calibrated chains of attention, constraints that break, release and re-form." -- Carol Muske-Dukes - Washington Post"Up Late is an incredible book. It finds a music for our moment—its fragilities and terrors, it sets restlessness to a rhythm. It finds a new kind of irony, one that confronts our endless gallop into a mechanical, artificial, made-up idea of future, and asks instead why are we here in the first place, asks so without patronizing, almost without irony itself. There is an honesty in the tone of this book that stays in mind days after the last page is turned." -- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"With Up Late, Nick Laird has stepped into his own future and produced a daring new poetic idiom that is all his own. His fortunate readers will be delighted and amazed." -- Billy Collins, author of Musical Tables
£19.80
Houghton Mifflin Tap Out
Book Synopsis
£11.39
Exile Editions J'Accuse...!: (Poem Versus Silence)
Book SynopsisIn a time of malevolent righteousness, often described as Cancel Culture, J’Accuse is an essay-in-poetry by Canada’s Parliamentarian Poet Laureate emeritus that responds to the impacts of being “cancelled.” Shame is not a word that gets much play these days among the caustically righteous, but Clarke had been wronged, and the people who did the wronging should be ashamed of themselves.J’Accus is a poignant statement that calls upon individuals, scholars, artists, and journalists to never submit to impulses that intentionally, or even unintentionally, forbid debate and questioning.J’Accus ponders what is truly unspeakable: injustice.Clarke boldly confronts the reality that in our turbulent time there must be an interest in real voices and stories, otherwise any individual can fall victim to silencing – blacklisting – gag-orders – cancelling… And ultimately, this cri-de-coeur reveals the personal cost.
£17.95
Graywolf Press,U.S. Be Recorder: Poems
Book SynopsisBe Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Gimenez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion - against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.
£12.34
Bucknell University Press,U.S. Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for
Book SynopsisIBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.Trade Review“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nurember *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *Table of ContentsForeword by Ernest D. Cole Notes on the Text Introduction: Silence, Language, and the Making of Art The Amputee’s Mother The Child Soldier The Grieving Father The Rape Survivor The Blinded Farmer The Widower The Gravedigger The Beggar The Victim of War Further Resources Acknowledgments About the Cover Artist About the Author
£17.99
Bucknell University Press,U.S. Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for
Book SynopsisIBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.Trade Review“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *“When politics invades lives in the most brutal of ways, what can be fashioned from the aftermath? In these found poems Shanee Stepakoff has taken the testimonies of those upon whom the violence was committed and turned them into a work of witness, Nadine Gordimer’s ‘inward testimony’ that it is the task of artists to deliver. Outwardly the poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.” -- Aminatta Forna * author of Happiness *“Of the many forms of human suffering, ethical loneliness—the experience of enduring atrocity only to be confronted with the annihilating cruelty and injustice of remaining unheard—sheds a radiant, hurt light on the very nature and power of language itself. In stark, beautifully calibrated lines, Shanee Stepakoff reaches into that silence to serve and bring forth these necessary voices. Here, the plainest words—‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I walked,’—take on an almost shocking and devastating dignity. As the survivors recount their stories, it is as if each syllable, each word, is a bone stripped bare. ‘He was burning,’ ‘I used to be,’ ‘I was born,’ ‘he was cutting the child.’ At once unsparing and informed by a deep tenderness and care, this darkly luminous work implicitly interrogates the nature of authorship and poetic form, and like all seminal works, helps to question, expand, and re-define their boundaries.” -- Laurie Sheck * Pulitzer Prize nominated author of The Willow Grove *“These ‘found poems’ are unquestionably harrowing to read and painful to absorb. Eight survivors of the murderous cruelty and atrocities committed during the civil war in Sierra Leone tell their own stories, and in their own words. Every one of these words is drawn from transcripts of the war crimes tribunals that came with the end of that war. Shanee Stepakoff—a psychologist who has long worked with survivors of torture—brings to these transcript accounts her poet’s sense of lineation, stanzaic structure, pauses, refrains, and repetitions. Thus, she creates a ceremonial space in which we as readers might begin to hear and bear witness to the unbearable degree of violence, suffering, and loss that these women and men endured." -- Fred Marchant * author of Said Not Said: Poems *“With this collection, Shanee Stepakoff finally breaks the veil of silence that surrounds the unspeakable horrors of Sierra Leone’s long civil war. She has recomposed the official accounts to offer us both the intimacy and eternality of survivor stories.” -- Remi Raji * author of A Harvest of Laughers * “The incredible horrors painfully recited herein, including the mutilation of children, mass rapes and torture by rival revolutionary groups makes us wonder whether humans are really human. Shanee Stepakoff’s documented testimonies illustrate the continuing crying need for effective international controls and binding laws to deter such atrocities everywhere.” -- Benjamin Ferencz * investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the last surviving prosecutor at the Nurember *"At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long." * Poetry Foundation *Table of ContentsForeword by Ernest D. Cole Notes on the Text Introduction: Silence, Language, and the Making of Art The Amputee’s Mother The Child Soldier The Grieving Father The Rape Survivor The Blinded Farmer The Widower The Gravedigger The Beggar The Victim of War Further Resources Acknowledgments About the Cover Artist About the Author
£44.65
Book*hug Heating the Outdoors
Book SynopsisYou're the clump of blackened sprucethat lights my gasoline-soaked heartIt's just impossible you won't be backto quench yourself in my creme-sodaancestral spiritIrreverent and transcendent, lyrical and slang, Heating the Outdoors is an endlessly surprising new work from award-winning poet Marie-Andrée Gill.In these micropoems, writing and love are acts of decolonial resilience. Rooted in Nitassinan, the territory and ancestral home of the Ilnu Nation, they echo the Ilnu oral tradition in her interrogation and reclamation of the language, land, and interpersonal intimacies distorted by imperialism. They navigate Gill's interior landscape—of heartbreak, humor, and, ultimately, unrelenting light—amidst the boreal geography.Heating the Outdoors describes the yearnings for love, the domestic monotony of post-breakup malaise, and the awkward meeting of exes. As the lines between interior and exterior begin to blur, Gill's poems, here translated by Kristen Renee Miller, become a record of the daily rituals and ancient landscapes that inform her identity not only as a lover, then ex, but also as an Ilnu and Quebecoise woman.Trade Review“Miller’s translation skillfully delivers the energy and pacing of Gill’s ruminative poems… These pages full of irreverent musings deliver affecting details and candor.” —Publishers Weekly“Heating the Outdoors is a study in tone, beautifully captured in Kristen Renee Miller’s translations from the French.” —Poetry Foundation“An exceptional third book by the Saguenay poet, who kneels in the beautiful snowbanks of a love that melts all too quickly.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir“A luminous, resilient read that finds resonance in our little hidden wounds.” —Rose Carine Henriquez, Le Devoir
£14.36
Book*hug Vixen
Book SynopsisGriffin Poetry Prize finalist Sandra Ridley offers a breathtaking, harrowing immersion in cruelty behind different veils: the medieval hunt, ecological collapse, and intimate partner violence. Sparked by a haunting chance encounter with a fox, and told in six chapters of varying form, Vixen is as visceral as it is mysterious, sensuous as it is terrifying. "Thicket" introduces us to stalking being akin to hunting; the similar threat of terror and—too often—a violent end. "Twitchcraft" locates the hunt in the home, the wild in the domestic, while "Season of the Haunt" explores the unrelenting nature of hunting. "Stricken" asks common questions that often implicitly justify such violence: Is the harassment 'bad enough' to allow us to label it criminal? Has all control been taken? Is the fear reasonable? Vixen propels us to examine the nature of empathy, what it means to be a compassionate witness —and what happens when brutality is so ever-present that we become numb. This is a beautiful, difficult, wild tapestry of defiance and survival.
£14.36
Guernica Editions,Canada The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After)
Book SynopsisThe Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) is an existential meditation on grief, the kind which pins you down and minimizes you. The first half of the collection, The Vanishing Act, captures the ruminations of a mind which feels limited physically and spiritually. The imagery in this section intermingles magic and violence as the speaker confronts systemic issues as a middle-class woman, a person of colour, and a survivor of abuse.The second section, (& The Miracle After), offers a fresh perspective on recovery. In this section, the speaker revisits images of bodily harm. Objects previously used for violence are brought back to a state of benign normalcy. As spring arrives, the speaker contemplates renewal and the paradoxical nature of taking agency of her life, while knowing the act of survival is made possible only because of miraculous intervention.
£14.36
Te Herenga Waka University Press James K. Baxter: The Selected Poems
Book SynopsisJames K. Baxter (1926–72) was, as he once described Louis MacNeice, ‘the most human of poets’: a flawed, passionate, complex, haunted man, a ‘lively sinner’ who revealed himself fully and unapologetically in his poems. As editor John Weir has written in his introduction, ‘from his various quarrels with God, self, society and death emerged a body of work which reveals him to be not merely the most accessible and complete poet to have lived in New Zealand, but also one of the great English-language poets of the twentieth century.’ John Weir’s definitive selection of James K. Baxter’s best poems has been made from the more than three thousand poems that comprise his literary legacy.
£20.76
Auckland University Press No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate
Book SynopsisWhat, then, for the work of poetry? It’s at the very periphery of popular speech, niche even among the arts, yet it’s also rooted in the most ancient traditions of oral storytelling, no matter where your ancestors originate from. And, as we were reminded by an audience member at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival in 2020, who are we to say poetry cannot change the world? A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment, but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds. Whether the poems you read here are cloaked in ironic apathy or bare their hearts in rousing calls to action, they all arise from a deep sense of care for this living world and the people in it. Our poets are eulogists and visionaries, warriors and worriers. Most of all, they’re ordinary people prepared to sit and stare at a blank page, trying to do something with the bloody big troubles looming over our past, present and future. (from the introduction by the editor)
£28.45
The University Press of Kentucky The Safety of Small Things: Poems
Book SynopsisThe Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.Table of ContentsInto Night I The Unseen Spotlight Safe Route Abscission PTSD Birthday, 1956 Shine The Dark Age of Providence Caesura Mam Recounts Family History This Morning, In the Mist The Time I Stole Dancing in the Stars Pocket Money Night Music Ode on an Onion Persimmons II Notes from the Forgotten Year Closed Hold Shadows Lair What I Learned Mississippi, 1964 Haiku Take This Leaf Longing Jack Higgs Walks Alone at Hindman Kept Things Persist Pyburn Creek Safety of Small Things Follow After Chemo #2 Neophyte Tobacco An East Tennessee Parking Lot III Remnants of a Saving Life Communion Drawn Cumberland Gap Above the Furnace The Farmer's Son Begs Relief Changeling Eclipse Solstice Bird Boy Walking the Wilderness Road at Cumberland Gap Buick Reverie Menagerie First Morning Publications Acknowledgements
£27.00
