Search results for ""western michigan university, new issues press""

A 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.

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Poetry. Winner of the 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize, selected by Marvin Bell. From Judge's Citation: "I was caught by the clarity of mind and expression of SKY=EMPTY--quality distinctive at any time. I was caught by the ear and eye, the tone of voice, and the easy movement between inner and outer. The respect for language is tangible. This is a beautiful, engaging first book."

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Poetry. "In THE WINDOW FACING WINTER, the urgency of the beautiful andsometimes murderous urban landscape, set alongside the seductive, intricateoasis of the Japanese garden, renders possible a vision into 'sliver ofthe absolute.' With unflinching accuracy, LaFemina delivers a sacred, ifmomentary, world, laying bare its essential loneliness, its obstinatebeauty" --Robin Behn.

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This delicate, beautiful yet often heartbreaking collection peels back the layers of daily social convention and hardened family mythologies to reveal the viscous and resonant sorrows beneath. It houses the mind and heart harmoniously and detonates the family romance to remind us how home an be both schoolhouse and ground zero.

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This collection of poetry deliberately and beautifully weds the secular to the divine in poems which, steeped in the Cajun landscape of Serpas's Louisiana, prickle with exhilarating sensuality. Through its votive offerings to a God who is all too aware of the longings and aspirations of humankind, 'Coc;te Blanche' becomes testament to a new personal belief that is simple yet breathtaking in its reach.

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“Whether her subject is mental illness, the oppression of one human being by another, or the constantly-cast shadow of our mortality, Marsha de la O’s resilient, unpretentious, sharply intelligent and unsentimental voice speaks to us of what we need to know. This is a disturbing and memorable book.”—Chase Twichell, from the foreword

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Poems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language. In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence—grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty—into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book’s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty’s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages—those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become—Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul’s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.

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To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig’s odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy’s cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city. Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer’s bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair—all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans. With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.

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In Flyshoals, Georgia, karma is writ small enough to witness. When Doreen Swilley discovers that her boss and lover of thirty years intends to fire her to placate his dying wife, she devises a plan to steal his business from him. Her plan just might work too, if she is not thwarted by a small town’s enmeshed histories and her family’s own dark secrets. Set during the 2009 recession, The Nature of Remains rests at the intersection of class, gender, education and place. Through extended geological metaphor, readers witness the orogeny, crystallization, and weathering of the human soul. Doreen’s journey reveals the ways even a woman’s most precious connections—her children, her grandchildren, her lover—operate within larger social structures capable of challenging her sovereignty.

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Poetry. Winner of the 2008 Green Rose Prize in Poetry. "In a time when there's little to laugh about, Patty Seyburn's HILARITY is an epic punch line: sparkling and smart. I rely on her 'sort of music eliding joy and pain'--and the echoes in the great church of disbelief to keep us all sane and savvy. Read HILARITY and weep, and laugh. And get better because of it"--Carol Muske-Dukes.

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Poetry. Winner of the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize, judged by Carl Phillips. "Here is a rarely expressed self-awareness that accedes as little to words as it does to the pain of the condition itself"--Fanny Howe.

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The Ginseng Hunter’s Notebook records a vital and eccentric dance for life. In poems of brilliant texture and intimate gesture, the poet, wounded yet resilient, evokes a music as compelling and fresh as birdsong. In her love of language, and in her reasons for travel, Deanne Lundin calls to mind Elizabeth Bishop as she searches for something to name home, and for the knowledge to solve the equations of the human heart. Here is the wayfarer’s journal in which each item has been carefully observed and duly entered as though it might harbor the one true remedy for the soul’s longing.

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Gladys Cardiff is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and a member of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Her small book, To Frighten a Storm, from Copper Canyon Press, won the Washington State Governor's First Book Award in 1976. These are poems from a mature and wise consciousness that understands loss, grief, and the value of the unassailable "solaces we yearn for." One emerges from Cardiff’s intense, complex meditations with a renewed sense of both the durability of the human spirit and its potential.

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With these dark, triumphant poems, Diane Seuss takes us on a journey through the landscape of the soul––and it’s a world full of beauty and violence in equal parts. Relentless and incantatory, these poems are charged with an almost religious intensity as Seuss looks for God’s presence in nature and sexuality. Again and again the poet confronts whatever it is that guides us through a life that is sensuous, yet exacting in its terrible cost.Nothing is solved by the end of this book, but much is gained as the quest itself has become a victory of perfectly pitched and furious language. God’s still hidden away, but by now the natural world has evolved to replace the absence Seuss feels. In the book’s erotically charged universe, one paradoxically begins to feel a calm settle over the burned-up panorama of the soul. It Blows You Hollow is a book, rare these days, that feels as if it had to be written. Diane Seuss goes for broke.

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Erasable Walls is a series of elegant personal meditations on the always evolving self. These beautifully crafted poems show a degree of mastery that’s rare in a first book. Though quiet and subtle, Larsen’s voice is also nervy and truth-telling, with considerable cumulative power.

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This book represents a mental construct of salvation. It portrays the individual way in which a person saves the psyche. Fifth Season is an amalgamation of losses transformed into a state of serenity for the individual. The fifth season is that imaginary place where time becomes less relevant, where the poet attempts to make sense of the tangible world around him. The fifth season represents a unique path, one which may not be traveled twice. It is the imaginary construct of a season of hope.

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“The shape-shifting realms of longing are fitful setting for local genius. But here, in Lisa Fishman’s beautiful first collection of poems, is where for the love of the world we find ourselves. As a reader, I could say I see in these poems a devotion approaching to love, if love ever stayed still enough to take a linguistic reading of. The poet sees much more, though. There’s possibly no harder stance for the young poet to take up than one of love and longing. . .”—William Olsen, from the foreword

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Insofar is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A–Z filing system. This alphabet is akin to a damaged rosary or abacus—an accounting system that carries on in the midst of physical or spiritual impairment. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others. Four of the poems share the same title, “Insofar,” as if transfixed by the relational reasoning set up by that adverbial phrase. The collection as a whole is cast in an adverbial mood, exploring disposition as a vital qualifier to thought and action. Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses.

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Deftly making use of historically specific events, Raghead examines the Gulf War, relaying untold narratives of occupation and warfare, as well as addressing the violence the war inflicted on the female body and on the land itself. In these poems, Eman Hassan explores the idea of trauma and memory through a maze of recollecting and forgetting, weighed against the importance of “being in in the now.”Raghead examines what’s at stake in a world that places greater value on capitalist machinations of war and oil production than on human life and the environment. With these poems, Hassan urges the reader to transcend the boundaries of identity and values, to reconcile the beautiful and ugly paradox of human existence, and to take a collective responsibility for the present. The work is both feminist and humanist: women are not painted as victims, even though some poems show how their bodies are controlled or abused. Rather, the poems seek to empower the feminine and explore how women can be complicit in power games.Raghead often hits sublime high notes to offset some of the more tonally violent accounts. It offers a glimpse into Gulf-Arab culture that is oftentimes obscured, attempting to show an inherent violence and beauty that has marked the region. The poems are told from the vantage of being bicultural, exploring the inherent tension that comes from being simultaneously Kuwaiti and American, and musing on what it means to be both and yet neither in a journey towards self-emancipation. These lyrical witness poems are sometimes angry, oftentimes spiritual, in an attempt to rekindle a sense of interconnectedness between all people.

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In his debut novel, The Truth, Geoff Rips creates a moral universe in a series of tales narrated by the palsied hunchback Chuy Pingarron who spends his days on the front porch of a San Antonio whorehouse and is proud to dubbed the standard of perversion by those whose stories he tells.

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Poetry. "Matthew Thorburn's SUBJECT TO CHANGE gives us a poetry of the meta-empirical, asking, `It's not too late, is it?' Exuberant and crystalline, these poems articulate the problematic beauty of our grand mix-up, our new and comic Dark Ages. The next time a student asks me, `What's after Postmodernism?' I'll tell her, `Read this.'"--Angela Ball

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Poetry. "In a Combination of Practices is just that, a combination of various poetic practices that creates a sense of varied-at times even conflicting-wonderment . . . Hers is a turning, folding, heaping world, where meaning shifts like geological forces." -Douglas Messerli

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Poetry. Includes a CD with Liebler and the Magic Poetry Band. "These poems byM.L. Liebler fall into righteous extremes--from prayers and meditations to diatribes and paeans, all grounded in the solid savvy of all-American working-class roots. Always accessible and ever soulful"--Wanda Coleman.

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Reynolds tests delineations between the interior and exterior worlds, between self and world. The poems address these distinctions, often wrestling with the blur that results from their mingling. Revelations in these poems are small and quiet and open to questioning-both delimiting and mirroring our human business.

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Sarah Mangold's brilliant and eccentric 'Household Mechanics' is about the attempt at telling the story. And the impossibility of telling the story. Never fully narrated but introduced and re-introduced, a continuous attempts at a telling. Overheard conversation, family stories, literary theory, music, and even TV become part of history -- what you repeat and share -- the story you retell. What is the story? It is an attempt at communication -- the reattempt -- with different words. It is an attempt at telling it right -- that there is no right -- no ultimate story.

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In James Armstrong’s pellucid poetry the drifting of autumn leaves shares space with the baroque architecture of nineteenth century England. A woman peruses a book of pharmaceuticals in a coffee shop looking for hints of happiness. And a naked woman wearing hip boots stares out of the 1940s in a photograph hung in a Michigan bar. Twilight is always moving the shadows of our urban lives out toward the country, our inherited past, where a deer or a heron waits like an angel glimpsed through the fog. Armstrong’s poems elucidate the mystery and beauty of borders– temporal and historical, as well as geographical– while his pastoral sensibility floods our senses with images of the natural world, seemingly stopping time, edifying us, and helping us–for a few moments anyway–to transcend our enervated contemporary lives. Reading this book is like diving into a deep lake. It cleanses the soul.

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In Greatest Hits, Marc Sheehan tells the story of the dispossessed better than anyone since Raymond Carver, with a lyrical élan that seems to reveal––like a brushing away of light snowfall––those things in our lives we hold most dear, whether it’s an old stolen fiddle, a recycled Xmas tree, or the Portable Nietzsche one reads while on break at the factory. In a voice that is gentle yet honest, Sheehan is able to lay bare our most desperate moments and to leave in the stillness a redemption offered up by something as simple and beautiful as a blue snake gliding over stones at the edge of a grassy quarry.

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