Poetry / poems by form or style
Penguin Books Ltd You Don't Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis:
Book Synopsis'A tremendous ball of fire hurled into the dark recesses of our world' Ocean Vuong'Radical . . . invites the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery' Tracy K. Smith'Psychotropic, visionary songs of love and defiance' Ralf Webb'Deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence' Eileen Myles'Queer . . . gorgeous . . . just stunning' Joelle TaylorA captivating, original call for creative freedom from one of the most singular poets of our time'this mechanistic world . . . has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry'Since their inception in 2005, CAConrad's (soma)tic poems have acted as an urgent appeal for an embodied, unfettered creative practice. Rooted in the Sanskrit 'soma', meaning 'to press and be newly born', and the Greek-derived 'somatic', relating to the body, Conrad's (soma)tic poetry reaches out from electrifying, esoteric rituals. Their methods are elaborate, and the results are unexpected: one, for instance, might begin by seeing the poet flood their body with the field calls of extinct animals - and end not only in a consideration of survivor's guilt and the destruction of ecosystems, but also in an elated sense of the presence, close at hand, of the many friends and lovers they lost to AIDS.Conrad draws on these rituals to enter a political, physical and spiritual state of consciousness, meditating on ecology, queerness and grief in powerful, dreamlike poetry that invites us to engage with the essence of things. This new selection is a testimony to poetry's capacity to reconnect us with the present moment and put an end to the alienation we feel: from our bodies, our surroundings, our planet.Trade ReviewCAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious -- Tracy K. SmithIn what is now the classic CAConrad mode of both exuberance and defiance, this book, like much of Conrad's epical body of work, is a tremendous ball of fire hurled into the dark recesses of our worlds (minds?). Luminous, sobering, but not without a capacious kindness in its ethos, this latest is a vibrant achievement from one of America's most legendary living poets -- Ocean VuongConjured in the extreme present, this is a vital addition to the global poetry canon. Through a lifetime of devotion to craft, Conrad has achieved an inventive and astonishing collection: a haunting, a prayer, a connection. They show how the ancient technology of poetry is between all things, living and not. Queer and gorgeous, filled with grief and belonging, a body within a body. Just stunning. I am dumb-struck -- Joelle TaylorCAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence -- Eileen MylesThese are psychotropic, visionary songs of love and defiance. CA celebrates poetry as a connecting force, a spell-work which binds us to the earth, animals, stars, and one another -- Ralf WebbCAConrad's work is as tough and as vulnerable as our bodies, as intricate and blunt as a flattened copper penny or a lily of the valley or the nests we'd build if we were birds. There's a love poem here for Jim Brodey, who once talked about poems bursting apart with 'extreme gracious information'. Right? Gleaming like a mineral in the contemporary nightmare, that's what this book is made of: through and through -- Luke RobertsI've been a fan of CAConrad's work from the beginning. There is always a necessary and vital life force at work in this poetry. This is a wondrous and essential selection of their noble life project -- Peter GizziAt a time when I don't always know how to make sense of what's going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer -- Jillian Steinhauer
£11.69
Little, Brown Book Group Enter the Water
Book SynopsisAN OBSERVER BEST POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023''A dark-light beauty'' Ali Smith''Totally compelling, Enter The Water pulls you along like a current. Gentle, deft, spacious yet searingly vivid, it wanders like our narrator and shows us both nature and the city through new eyes . . . This book will sneak up on you and leave its music long ringing in your ears'' Cecilia Knapp''Enter the Water is both visceral and perceptive, a discomfort formulated in great tenderness and pain'' Bhanu Kapil ''Enter the Water has horizons and wit and allusion and rhyme and disenchanted politics and birds, and lines that hit the reader right in the heart . . . The writing is original and perfectly pitched . . . A significant debut'' Ian Pattersoni sat in a chapel the other night in my big gay coat talking to a god whose answer is only sometimes no no that was a lie the hTrade ReviewA dark-light beauty -- Ali SmithEviction, insomnia, techno-divination and mythologies that "begin with a bird" mark the psychic "circumference" of Enter the Water. This is "a narrative of trying" performed or lived as a book of poetry. Gates open unexpectedly, startling both the person exiting a space and the one peering in. It's this quality of being "both in and out always" that I most appreciate about Jack Wiltshire's writing. It's a place that's both visceral and perceptive, a discomfort formulated in great tenderness and pain. All the water in the book, all the animals and insects and birds: help. How "the felt-tip green of a butterfly" is a form of titration: a way to follow something, to look up, to stay connected, until it disappears -- Bhanu KapilEnter the Water has horizons and wit and allusion and rhyme and disenchanted politics and birds, and lines that hit the reader right in the heart. The emotional depth and intellectual scope are extraordinary. The writing is original and perfectly pitched, the developing narrative shares an anger at the uncaring corruption of the world with an awareness that being a person means "it is lonely being at the centre of things". A significant debut. -- Ian PattersonTotally compelling, Enter The Water pulls you along like a current. Gentle, deft, spacious yet searingly vivid, it wanders like our narrator and shows us both nature and the city through new eyes. With razor sharp questions and keen observations, our systems of power and privilege are destabilised and the precarity of existing in the current moment is exposed. This is a book full up to the throat with feeling; the intensity and inexpressibility of love, of uncertainty and displacement. But it's also funny, wry and original. This book will sneak up on you and leave its music long ringing in your ears -- Cecilia Knapp, author of Peach PigEnter the Water tempts you to wade straight in. And it will take only the briefest of dips, a toe in the water, before you find yourself needing to read on... [Wiltshire's] writing is fresh, funny and serious -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *Part Beckett, part Robert Macfarlane on LSD -- Philip Terry * Guardian *
£13.49
Deep Vellum Publishing Herostories
Book SynopsisHerostories reveals tales untold by most history books: the harrowing journeys and vital triumphs of nineteenth - and twentieth century midwifery in the vast landscape of Iceland. Composed from the memoirs and biographies of 100 Icelandic midwives, poet-historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s found poems illuminate the dangers and valor of birthwork. Forgoing traditional sagas of androcentric conquest, these poems center the adventures of ljósmæður, “mothers of light.” Tómasdóttir leverages epic elements—dashing mountain treks, rivers forded on horseback, unyielding compassion—to challenge how and by whom stories become legend. The follow-up to Tómasdóttir and Thors’ award-winning, PEN-nominated Stormwarning, Herostories documents the professional achievements of Iceland's first women to work outside the home, precursors to today’s midwives who remain central to contemporary health care on the island. Beyond archival recognition, the text's formally ambitious poetics render gender-based battles for literacy and education alongside narratives of selfless womanly caretaking, pressurizing the fundamental tensions between feminine self-actualization and the romanticized service of these trailblazing figures.Trade ReviewWinner of the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Leif and Inger Sjöberg AwardLong-listed for the PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation“Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir has done the seemingly impossible: taken our contemporary capitalist culture, suffused with moralism as well as not-so-hidden prejudice, glorying in its achievements while squandering its wealth, and submitted it to critique while making us laugh at the whole thing.” —Magdalena Kay, World Literature Today
£999.99
Wilfrid Laurier University Press Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, A
Book SynopsisErasing Frankenstein showcases a creative exchange between federally incarcerated women and members of the prison-education think tank Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) in Kitchener, Ontario, and graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Working collaboratively by long-distance mail, the artists and contributors made the first-ever poetic adaptation of Frankenstein, turning it into a book-length erasure poem. An erasure poem is an example of “found art,” a poem created by piggybacking on an existing text; the words that are not part of the poem are erased or blacked out, and what is left is the poem. This book presents the original erasure poem alongside reflections from participants on the experience.
£29.71
