Search results for ""author michael casey""

As the longest Psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119 comprises 176 verses. Its message sings the praise of Israel’s Law and describes how the faithful should respond to the gift of God’s self-revelation. In The Longest Psalm, Michael Casey offers a meditative reading of each verse of the psalm, intended to be read one at a time, to facilitate a personal prayer and reflection. Psalm 119 brings together elements found throughout the Psalter and the reflections focus on universal themes as well as specific questions of daily life, such as our experience of yearning, service, affliction, and stumbling. Each verse stands alone, intended to be read slowly, like the litanies familiar to Catholic devotion. Perfect for a brief meditation before beginning the day, Casey invites us to spend time wandering with the psalmist to allow God’s Word to play a significant role in our lives. Through this careful reflection on the longest psalm, readers will discover the text is not merely a psalm to be sung but also a path to be followed.

Read more less

"The poems in Millrat are full of blessed and flawed humanity, based on author Michael Casey’s experience working in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. This is a 25th anniversary edition of the book, with additional poems plus commentary by early reviewers and contemporary writers. The book gained national attention when first released in 1996. Poet Michael Casey writes, “My writing about the mills stemmed from the jobs during summers from college, undergrad school at the Lowell Technological Institute (LTI, now University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and then later when on leave from the State University of New York in Buffalo. A friend told me not to give the phony impression that the jobs there were at that time my career. Mention that here in compliance. I did not always work at a textile mill but for a book’s setting in Lowell, the textile mill was appropriate. Lowell was where the other American revolution began. History. The Industrial Revolution. For any writer at any time you are apt to write about what you are doing. I have to say think of Robert Frost and apple picking or Fred Voss at the airplane factory and writing about factory work is not restricted to men. I can recommend here the wonderful books by Inez Holden. Author Jeanne Schinto wrote in The Nation magazine: “In 1972, when Michael Casey was twenty-four, he won the Yale Younger Poets award with a book called Obscenities. Stanley Kunitz called it “the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam.” . . . “Casey didn’t see action in Vietnam; he was in the military police, assigned to the highway patrol and gate-guard duty. So it’s no wonder that very little of Obscenities is about combat; instead, many of the poems illuminate the Army’s pecking order and its hyper-logical nonsense. In Millrat, Casey explores the mill hierarchy, at times even more complex than the military’s, since the rules there are less rigid and the consequences of disobeying them less certain. You may not lose your job, but you may lose face, which is often more valued. . . .” Poet Helena Minton says, “Michael Casey’s Millrat, first published twenty-five years ago by Adastra Press in western Massachusetts, is a novel distilled, spoken in a series of distinctly American voices. These laconic, but visceral poems, with their blunt language, immerse us in the world of a textile mill, featuring characters whose mishaps, trials and escapades sometimes land them “on the outside lookin in.” “In deceptively simple, yet startlingly original lines, Casey uses true sleight-of-hand. The job at the mill involves heavy machinery, dangerous chemicals and working with others who can’t be counted on for much of anything. Even moments of downtime—at the coffee truck, a softball game, a picnic, or signing up for the company betting pool, with its byzantine rules—are fraught with complications. On first reading, we might be tempted look at the world of the millrat as absurd, but it is all too real, and we laugh at our own peril. Thanks to Loom Press, Millrat will remain in print. It already has the feel of a classic, and should be widely read and re-read."

Read more less

In 1972, Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Obscenities, a collection of poems drawn from his military experience during the Vietnam War. In his foreword to the book, judge Stanley Kunitz called the work a kind of anti-poetry that befits a kind of war empty of any kind of glory and the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam. Its raw depictions of wars mundanity and obscenity resonated with a broad audience, and Obscenities went into a mass market paperback edition, and was stocked in drugstores as well as bookstores. In the decades since, Caseys poetry has continued to document the places of his work and life. Then and now, his poems foreground the voices around him over that of a single author; they are the words of young American conscripts and their Vietnamese counterparts, co-workers and bosses, neighbours and strangers. His compressed sketches and unadorned monologues have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. There It Is: New and Selected Poems presents, for the first time, a full tour through Caseys work, from his 1972 debut to 2011s Check Points, together with new and uncollected work from the late 60s on. Here are all the locations of Caseys life and work -- Lowell to Landing Zone, dye house to desk -- and an ensemble cast with a lot to say. The publication of Michael Casey's New and Selected Poems, with his quirky portraits of ordinary Americans, is an event to celebrate. Like a photographer snapping pictures relentlessly, he must have written a poem about everyone he ever met with dead-on realism. Compared to him, the Spoon River Anthology is a work for kiddies.

Read more less

N3xt Practices is a ground-breaking advisory book for education decision makers. Its purpose is to challenge the top trends and initiatives of the previous decade in educational technology and bring light to their short-falls and misses. It also highlights successful endeavors and strategies and details a common-sense methodology to move your school/district forward in its technology initiatives while insuring sustainability, and longevity and ultimately, success through results. Next Practices identifies technology-based initiatives, such as Interactive White Boards, Data Centers, and 1-to-1 Computing, and reviews actual implementations and case studies – both successful and unsuccessful – to provide a structure to plan and implement educational technology initiatives practical for schools and districts of all sizes. Next Practices goes beyond the examination of current best practices and redefines for educational leaders NEXT Practices for successful technology initiatives in support of 21st century learning.

Read more less