Search results for ""Texas Review Press""

The Death of Bonnie and Clyde and Other Stories follows the trail of its wayward characters down the Delta back roads, crossing paths with Hernando DeSoto--hands bloodied by the indian slaughters--hitchhikers and thieves, UFO’s, concrete finishers, naked fishermen, a lusty cheer squad caught and confessing in the midst of a killer tornado, and trash telescope salesmen on the day after Christmas–all saintly guardians of the human heart. From the Florida Coast up through the Carolinas and over to Arkansas’ Ozarks, Bonnie and Clyde blazes a trail of love and deceit, hard liquor and the revelation of what it’s like to be free and wild and in love on this earth.

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An erasure of Herbert Read's The Meaning of Art, a seminal work of art criticism first published in 1931, Her Read is a hybrid text 'part sculpture part theatre part hospital.' In the summer of 2016, rendered otherwise speechless by the amplification of hate on the national stage, and its resonance with silencing in Steinorth's personal life, she began a hybrid project, at once poetry and visual art. Appropriating a library discard of The Meaning of Art, by Herbert Read (Faber & Faber, 1931), and with liberal use of correction fluid and ink, she began excavating a first-person lyric. From the voice of the male critic surveying the cannon of male artists, she imagined voice(s) of womxn - objects become authors, become artists.Her Read is part of Con[text]ual, a series illuminating the intersection of visual art and text in the context of ideas that deepen our understanding of the contemporary world.

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This is the most complete selection of work by 2005 Texas State Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach ever put in one volume. It brings together selections that represent his more recognizable pieces, work that has only been available in journals, work that has only been available in books that are out of print or unavailable, plus a generous selection of new work.

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As the Den Burns is a debut collection that renders a sublime world on the verge of vanishing. Elegiac and surreal, primal and lyrical, these unpredictable poems vault from Tallahassee vigils to flooded gardens after a hurricane’s landfall. Reading this collection is like swimming into the ocean; you float weightless amid waves of resistance, then knots form in your gut because something unseen moves beneath you. Mythology and song collide in this stunning collection as unruly poems waver from lifeguard chairs and cathedrals to lamps in underwater caverns. Rapier’s poetry could be spray painted beneath a beach pier; every stanza shifts rapidly without apology, the shape of the words like a signature.

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Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a trans speaker and his “ghost,” the “girl-ghost” of the self that he left behind to become the man he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book’s expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.

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This collection, Morton’s tenth, is a bold book of poetry delving into risks. It’s the moving forward; the constant discovery of new things. Using a combination of quotes, mythological images, and exquisite metaphors from nature, Morton delivers poems that describe the absolute urgency of giving one’s heart over to life, the burning drive to have faith in the world, the insistence that everything, in its own way, is holy. This book is unfettered joy.

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Joshua Robbins’s much anticipated and smartly provocative second book, Eschatology in Crayon Wax, evokes a feeling of being caught between a fragile yearning to be transformed and a whirlwind of botched divinity. Robbins faithfully asserts, “Paradise / doesn’t care / how you get there. / Only that you try,” and is met with divine contempt and a commandment to “shape ashes into ashes” because “besides / I can’t tell you what on earth I’m doing.” In the world of these poems, all one can do is survive the contradictions and cruel inscrutabilities embedded in a contemporary life of vacant tract houses, RFID, mall shooting bullet casings, drone targets, miscarriages, divorce, and suicide. These poems are in deep conversation with the theodicies of the book of Job, evangelicalism, class theory, and even the manic crises of Berryman’s Dream Songs. At times elegiac, always fearlessly confessional, even tragicomic, Robbins does not resist hope. With intelligence and style to spare, Robbins shows a fierce concern for this world of things, caught as we are between what is and what should be.

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A traditional game of chance popular in Mexico and in Mexican American culture, LoterÍa is poetically rendered in Esteban RodrÍguez’s eighth collection, with each poem revolving around one of the fifty-four cards. Using the image presented as a catalyst for exploration and self-reflection, RodrÍguez unveils the familial journey between two countries and cultures through both a surreal and narrative lens. Here, a mother unearths a severed hand in the desert. A father discovers his heart among a heap of discarded items. And at one point, the speaker—toggling between his role as witness and son—finds himself in a canoe on a river contemplating the meaning behind an authentic experience. Lyrical, insightful, and honestly engaging, LoterÍa sheds light on a world that doesn’t so easily reveal itself, adding to RodrÍguez’s prolific and important oeuvre.

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Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either is a debut poetry collection which seeks Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla as a means of reconnecting to the speaker’s cultural identity. As Spanish language and culture becomes more accessible to non-Latinx populations, the speaker grapples with her own complex story of assimilation. Modern marginalization, appropriation, tokenizing, and fetishizing are examined in this multi-generational memoir tracking a Latinx family’s journey to assimilation. This dynamic collection is far-reaching, exploring BIPOC experiences in predominantly white cultures.from “Young Memoir”di·as·po·ra is silent. is spiritual. It is being robbed of memoir while you sleep in a suburb. it is nonconsensually sensual—it is a ques­tion. when it comes for you, what will you recover? what will you do to reclaim all that was forced lost?

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Quiver is a book of reckoning, a book of ghosts, a book of lineal fracture and generational fatherlesness. It’s a visceral guide through boyhood into fatherhood. One that yields witness to trauma, erotic shames, brutalities and toxic masculinity, and in so doing, emerges with a speaker beginning to free himself. Patricia Smith said it best: “Quiver will change the way you see.” “floodghost” Mother couldn’t manage what sated me, so she prayed: sought in silence a substance that’d soothe, something familial with grace. I groaned. Broke bodies over blacktop’s pane, a bottom- less well of blood. At seven I smothered a frog and fed each leg to my quivering sister laughed while she choked out its skin. At twelve, I pulled a pistol from under the vacant shed and shoved its shudder to a schoolboy’s temple, teased while he wept in his piss. And yet all along a Psalm, a satchel of prayer: song. Mother making contracts with the sky, while I tore its pages to light a fire, warm my hands around it. Radiant blue. Red from a faraway pine.

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