Search results for ""wings press""
Wings Press Famous
Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the most beloved poets in America, and the poem "Famous" is literally her most famous poem. It has been used in countless commencement speeches—from elementary school to university graduations. At once simple and profound, this illustrated version of the poem is a charmingly ironic take on what it means to be "famous." It is a perfect gift book for people of all ages—for those who need encouragement, who are at a crossroads, who are graduating, who are nervous about the future, or who want to be more or other than they are.
£15.95
Wings Press Early Farm Tractors
Providing an interesting glimpse into the steam traction engines and internal combustion tractors that revolutionised the world of farming, this collection focuses on American tractors from the late 1850s to the beginning of the Great Depression. With farm journal advertisements—dating from 1909 through 1929—this account considers how something as ordinary and utilitarian as a tractor seems to have inherent standards of good design, correct proportion, and beauty. Intended for tractor enthusiasts, historians, artists, illustrators, students of industrial design, and graphic art lovers, this fascinating book recounts an important piece of history.
£22.95
Wings Press Redoubt: A Mononovel
Structured like a jazz riff, this novel addresses questions of conception and birth, gender, war, and the slouch toward apocalypse.
£15.10
Wings Press Prison of Culture: Beyond Black Like Me
The companion volume to the 50th-anniversary edition of Black Like Me, this book features John Howard Griffin’s later writings on racism and spirituality. Conveying a progressive evolution in thinking, it further explores Griffin’s ethical stand in the human rights struggle and nonviolent pursuit of equality—a view he shared with greats such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thomas Merton. Enlightening and forthright, this record also focuses on Griffin’s spiritual grounding in the Catholic monastic tradition, discussing the illuminating meditations on suffering and the author’s own reflections on communication, justice, and dying.
£16.95
Wings Press Fractals: New & Selected Poems|Translations 1978-2013
Sudeep Sen's FRACTALS includes a wide swath of his poetry, from 1980 to the present, as well as a representative collection of his translations into English of other poets writing in Bengali, Hindu, Urdu and other languages. Sen's poems are both vivid observations and insightful meditations, often ekphrastic in that they are inspired by other art forms -- from modern European painters to classical Indian dancers. Narratives generally underlie his poems, giving us stories from around the world, past and present, from the grit of war to the mysteries of mythology. This collection gathers the best work from a writer described by Outlook India as ""the best-known Indian poetic voice of his generation working in English.
£23.29
Wings Press The National Economy / Economia Nacional
For nearly three centuries, Cuba's economy was based on a single crop - sugar cane. After Fidel Castro's Revolution of 1959, despite serious attempts at diversification, the country continued to depend on the monocrop. Men and women cut cane by hand. City people who had never swung a machete spent long volunteer hours aiding the national effort. But the US embargo and diminishing international markets destroyed Cuba's economy. Gaudencio Rodríguez Santana's The National Economy explores that collapse and its physical, emotional and psychic consequences. It is a powerful, insightful collection of eye-witness poems by one of Cuba's most celebrated contemporary poets.
£17.82
Wings Press Time’s Language: Selected Poems (1959-2018)
Time's Language contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, and autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. As US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera writes, "Here are Margaret Randall’s decades of love, ink, tears, contestation and light—let us bow in gratitude for this truth-telling, daring, border-breaking, pioneering long-time volume of soul fire.
£24.95
Wings Press Outcasts: A Novel of Mary Shelley
On a dark and stormy night in 1816, a teenage girl sat down and invented science fiction. Mary Shelley was no more than 18 years old when she wrote ""Frankenstein"". From the moment of its publication 200 years ago, readers have been wondering, as Mary put it, ""How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?"" ""Outcasts"" takes readers behind the scenes, to reveal the surprisingly contemporary thoughts and feelings of Mary, an unmarried mother and the lover of radical poet Percy Shelley, their friend Lord Byron, and the other guests at the ""most famous literary party in history"". What led the daughter of two of the most radical philosophers in England to turn her hand to horror? As the 200th anniversary of ""Frankenstein"" approaches, many readers will be rediscovering the novel, perhaps reading it for the first time. ""Outcasts"" reveals new insights into the origin of the most famous monster in the world, while showing us the stunning new science, radical politics and social turmoil of Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The world was on the brink of a new era, when anything and everything was possible, and in this brave new world a new literature – and a timeless Creature – was born.
£16.95
Wings Press Blood Flower
In Blood Flower, passionate imagery married to music bursts from each line pushing out the boundaries of Uschuk's earlier poems. It continues themes in Uschuk's American Book Award winner, Crazy Love. The poems braid the startling, sometimes brutal stories of her Russian/Czech immigrant family during the McCarthy Era in a conservative Michigan farming community with stories of courageous individuals, especially women, who persevere to love, despite it all. Uschuk's step-grandfather, father, brother, nephews, and first husband all suffered severe PTSD as combat veterans who returned home from wars that ravished not only their lives, but the lives of the women and children closest to them.This is the history not just of one family but of immigrants in this nation. These poems, although set in landscapes across the globe, commonly draw their imagery and healing from the natural world, the wild world, and the integrity of the human heart.
£15.95
Wings Press Last Call
Few poets of Western America fill the "organic intellectual" role better than David Lee. His poetry is the real deal when it comes to recording hilariously insightful—and linguistically accurate—observations of rural culture and America at large while using a host of astute literary allusions and techniques.Imagine Robert Frost simultaneously channelling Will Rogers and Ezra Pound. Imagine Chaucer with a twang. Last Call is bloody brilliant and wickedly witty.
£15.95
Wings Press The Rood and the Torc: The Song of Kristinge, Son of Finn
When Kristinge, a young monk at a monastery in southeastern France, discovers he is the son of a famous Frisian hero and king who died in battle six years earlier, he leaves the monastic life and sets out in search of his identity. Traveling with his old mentor Willimond, a monk originally of Lindisfarne, Kristinge’s journey brings him first across France to Denmark to search of his mother, and eventually back to his native soil of Friesland. Along the way he meets the young, decadent, and half-crazy Frankish king Clovis who resides in Paris, and the holy Abbess Telchild of the nearby monastery of Jouarre—two of several historical figures woven through the novel. However, what begins as a quest to uncover his heritage and find whether his mother still lives becomes a sort of spiritual journey of discovery at many other levels. Kristinge wrestles with the question: who is he, and who should he become? Is he the monk he has spent the past six years training to be? Or the gifted bard that was trained as a youth to compose songs, sing, and play the harp? Or is he the future king that will unite Friesland and save it from the threat of the increasingly powerful Danes and Vikings on the one side and decaying but still threatening Frankish empire on the other. Compounding his confusion, Kristinge also rediscovers and falls in love with a young woman whom he had known many years earlier as a child: a woman who would be far above his station were he to remain a monk but not above his station were he to become king.
£15.95
Wings Press The Love Queen of the Amazon
This hilarious novel is a feminist spoof on the mostly-male magical realists of the "Boom" generation.
£19.61
Wings Press Frieze
This poetic narrative discusses the creative life of a 9th century Indian stonecarver who is drafted at an early age to spend his entire life working on the thousands of statues that fill the niches of an Indonesian temple. Exploring the muse–artist relationship as few works of fiction have done, this novel is an intensely political work—a parable that pits the blind cruelty of a feudal ruler against the creative expression of a single slave.
£17.31
Wings Press Sublime Blue: Selected Early Odes by Pablo Neruda
A translation of Pablo Neruda's early collections of odes, this book features poems that are addressed to hope and to gloom, to numbers and to the atom, to blue flowers and to artichokes. Reflecting the lucent, candid vitality driving Neruda's charming accounts, these poems celebrate things big and the small: even lamentations become commemorations. Compassionately amused one moment then sobered by injustice and supportive of resistance the next, this bilingual compilation will appeal to fans of one of the 20th century's most popular poets.
£15.95
Wings Press Moments of Delicate Balance
A collection featuring the works of two renowned poet laureates, William Kloefkorn and David Lee, this volume offers an intelligent introspection to rural life. Truly western writers in love with the land, both poets bring their highly literate acumen to bear upon both the mundane and the magnificent. Reflective, irreverent, and funny, this compilation also plays with the idea of balance—past and future, lyric and narrative, life and death.
£16.95
Wings Press My Town: A Memoir of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in Poems, Prose and Photographs
Incorporating short prose, photography, and poetry, this memoir celebrates Albuquerque, New Mexico, and recollects how the author's life and the city itself were impacted by Cold War politics, the atomic bomb, McCarthyism, racism, and misogyny. Covering topics such as familial relationships, troubled marriage, lesbianism, and human rights activism, this collection also provides a poetic understanding of the region's history and culture over the past half century. Politically charged, this account highlights inhumane government policies while recounting the history of this Southwestern town.
£15.95
Wings Press Uncertain Ground
Set in 1953, this novel follows 21-year-old Celia Henderson during a month of uncertainty in her life. Visiting Galveston, Texas, a barrier island with its own history of instability and survival, Celia faces a series of conflicts - between a lawless Galveston and a hypocritical, 'moral' mainland; between the old south and the old west; and, between homosexuals and those prejudiced against them. Celia, who narrates her story 30 years after the fact, must also cope with a sexual double standard inherent in her attraction to an unhappy law student. As she interacts with her irrepressible cowboy cousin Emmett Chandler and a Mexican American artist, Louis Platon, Celia grows to accept her own fears and understand others and life's continual uncertainties. While Celia personifies the innocence of the 1950s - seldom as innocent as portrayed - this tale offers an inside look at continual social problems in the U.S.
£16.95
Wings Press Thats Not Fair No Es Justo Emma Tenayucas Struggle for JusticeLa lucha de Emma Tenayuca por la justicia
A vivid depiction of the early injustices encountered by a young Mexican-American girl in San Antonio in the 1920s, this book tells the true story of Emma Tenayuca. Emma Tenayuca's story serves as a model for young and old alike about courage, compassion, and the role everyone can play in making the world more fair.
£20.66
Wings Press Ismaelillo
A seminal work in Latin America’s modernismo movement, this first anthology of verse by José Martí is available in a complete English translation for the first time. This accessible, annotated edition includes a critical introduction, presented in both English and Spanish, which explores the volume’s historical and literary contexts and addresses issues of the translation. Composed after domestic separation from his wife and infant son, and after his second exile from Cuba due to his involvement in the Guerra Chiquita, the 15 poems that comprise the collection demonstrate a poet-hero whose revolutionary spirit would ultimately lead to his participation—and subsequent death—in the conflict that freed Cuba from the Spanish yoke.
£17.95
Wings Press Sonnets and Salsa
This major poetry collection is a fearless depiction of a Latina living in the best and worst of times.
£15.95
Wings Press Out of Violence into Poetry: Poems 2018–2021
Margaret Randall's most recent collection of poems, Out of Violence Into Poetry, was written over these past few years when language itself was violated by a president who lied until each lie, repeated often enough, resembled a terrible truth in the public discourse. Reality, sanity, beauty: all bend and run the risk of breaking when distorted beyond recognition. These poems consciously restore language to its natural habitat. They deal with history, memory, loss, life, death and promise. They address love and aging. They become a welcome refuge at a time of uncertainty and take us on disparate journeys that often have surprising twists. There is humor as well as rage. We cannot leave it to the politicians alone to give words their meaning back. That is the job of poets, and this book does that job well. Randall is the author of nearly 200 books, spanning more than six decades. Out of Violence into Poetry may well be her finest collection of poetry to date.
£15.26
Wings Press Trout in the Desert: On Fly Fishing, Human Habits, and the Cold Waters of the Arid Southwest
Matthew Dickerson takes his readers from tiny mountain streams in the southern Rockies of New Mexico to the mighty Colorado River at the head of the Grand Canyon, to the Hill Country of Texas, exploring these various waters that manage to hold cold-loving trout in the midst of the hot desert landscapes of the American southwest. This lovingly described journey brings us through Dickerson’s own life of discovery and his love of fly fishing, trout, and the rivers where trout live. Though neither an historical nor a scientific text, the writing is informed by both. The book is illustrated by original prints from Texas artist Barbara Whitehead.
£16.95
Wings Press Nine Sephardic Songs: Arranged for Voice and Harp
This is a collection of nine familiar Sephardic folk songs, most dating to the 16th century or earlier, both religious and secular in nature, in attractive arrangements for voice with pedal or lever harp accompaniments of moderate difficulty. Texts are in Ladino, with translations provided. Arranged by a well-known arranger/transcriber, Nine Sephardic Songs is perfect for those preparing voice and harp programs and fills a specific niche in available harp music.
£20.25
Wings Press This River Here: Poems of San Antonio
San Antonio poet laureate Carmen Tafolla captures her hometown—the city of her ancestors for the past three centuries—in poems that celebrate its history as a cosmopolitan multilingual cultural crossroads. Discover San Antonio's corazón in Tafolla's poetry, accompanied by historic and contemporary photographs that convey its enduring sense of place.A century ago, San Antonio gave Oscar Wilde ""a thrill of strange pleasure."" J. Frank Dobie claimed that ""every Texan has two hometowns—his own and San Antonio,"" and Will Rogers declared it to be ""one of the three unique cities of America."" To Larry McMurtry, ""San Antonio has kept an ambiance that all the rest of our cities lack.""Carmen Tafolla calls forth the soul of this place—the holy home of the waters, called Yanaguana by los indios—and celebrates the many cultures that have made of it ""un rebozo bordado de culturas y colores.
£16.95
Wings Press The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones
A poetry collection about connectivity, this book suggests that humankind is linked by its concerns for global human rights and a sustainable global climate. Named for a root system that connects seemingly separate plants, like a stand of aspen trees, this compilation seeks to celebrate common human roots.
£15.95
Wings Press Where We Are Now: Short Stories
A collection of stories that Carolyn Osborn has developed over two decades, Where We Are Now is about a single family, the Moores. Marianne is the main narrator of these stories about her mother's family. In the first tale, "The Greats," her relatives are so distant Marianne can only give brief glimpses of the eccentric Moores. "The Grands," an O. Henry Prize–winning story, first introduced readers to many of the characters who inhabit Where We Are Now. By knowing the Moores, we begin to know Marianne, who tries to understand them. Curious as she is, she must continually accept the mystery of reality. Aware of the need for family mythology, she orders her world as best she can with what she is given by reacting, reflecting, inventing, and enlarging on the fragments. Other narrators reveal omissions Marianne can never know. Marianne's life and the lives of the Moores have a definitively southern flavor; they mirror fading 19th-century morality, an acceptance of eccentricity, the habit of storytelling, a strong consciousness of place, and the influence as well as the particularity of family. These stories are an attempt to show the failures and triumphs of love, the necessity of forgiveness, and the usefulness of different sorts of families.
£16.95
Wings Press With the Wind, Kevin Dolan: A Novel of Ireland and Texas
Set in 1834, this historical novel follows the adventures of two young Irish brothers and their families and friends as they endure the hardships and joys of immigrating to the Texas frontier.
£14.92
Wings Press Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood
Told in the voice of a five-year-old girl who sees more than she understands, this novel chronicles her passage through sickness, the separation of her parents, and a maze of secret lives, all with the richness of her budding imagination.
£16.91
Wings Press Bardo99
Depicting the 20th century as a character, this novel explores what happens when that character, dying, passes through a Bardo state—an intermediate state of the soul between death and rebirth.
£15.20
Wings Press Rebozos
Celebrating both the rebozo as a cultural icon of Mexico and the series of rebozo-inspired paintings by Mexican–Californian artist Catalina Gárate, this bilingual collection of poems gives voices of strength, endurance, joy, and sorrow to the women of Gárate’s paintings. The rebozo is considered a physical manifestation of Mexican womanhood throughout every stage of life and can be used as a tool of daily labor: a sling to carry children, a shield from weather or from prying eyes, an heirloom, and even a shroud. Inspired by each painting, these poems, in both Spanish and English, are accompanied by a historical explanation of the role of the rebozo in Mexican history, art, and culture.
£19.95
Wings Press Contrary People: A Novel
In the late 1960s in Austin, Texas, Theo Isaac is grappling with being both recently widowed and retired from a professorship he loved, taking refuge from his life at the Elisabet Ney sculpture museum. Rose Davis, a student from his distant past, returns to Austin after her nonconformist life in Paris falls apart. Together they find that discovering unexpected futures is not just for the young. This is a beautiful, witty tale of human renewal sculpted within a metaphor.
£16.95
Wings Press Kd
Written in tightly constructed rhymed quatrains, this is the first biography of internationally acclaimed Texas jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham. Beginning in 1963 with Dorham’s recordings in Denmark, this book-length poem traces the story of the Texan’s career performing with the greatest musicians of the bop and hard bop eras in jazz history—including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. Also discussing extensive traveling as a musician and his lamentably short-lived group the Jazz Prophets, this account demonstrates why Dorham remains something of a cult figure despite his premature death at age 48.
£19.95
Wings Press Indios: A Poem . . . A Performance
Filled with powerful imagery, this poem relates the tragic story of Indios, a native woman falsely accused of the death of her children. As it echoes the plight of other women like Indios—including Malinche, Pocahontas, La Llorona, and Medea—this narrative conveys the truth of a history twisted to suit the needs of a conquering power. Weaving Native American history with contemporary situations, this evocative poem focuses on the concept and consequences of the oppression of women.
£12.95
Wings Press On the Line: Poems
With gentle yet sardonic wit, this collection of poetry considers the transcultural experience and encourages engaging with the world, both intellectually and emotionally, despite feelings of isolation. Fusing personal, socio-political, and ecological concerns, this compilation exposes public as well as private wounds in an accessible and thought-provoking manner. Addressing human rights and gender issues, these significant poems evaluate current predicaments and express hope for a future without them.
£15.95
Wings Press Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems
Conjuring the voice of Edward Hopper, this powerful collection of poetry investigates the mind of an iconic American painter. Lyrical and beautifully crafted, the poems convey both frightening and amusing messages as "Hopper" commentates on his own paintings—from the iconic Nighthawks to his depiction of his wife and himself taking a final bow in Two Comedians—as well as those of other artists. Shocking in their honesty, these poems also provide a window into the American Modernist period due to their biographical nature and evaluations of the visual arts.
£15.95
Wings Press The Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World
The Morning After is Margaret Randall's 30th poetry collection and eleventh with Wings Press. The title poem was written, as so many in this country were, the morning after the November 8, 2016 presidential election: "I wish there was a pill for that," is one of its lines. But Randall doesn't stay with anger, irony, or a pamphleteering voice. Her work goes much deeper, grappling with ageless concerns and unexpected details. Throughout this volume there is a concern with time, place, and memory; intimate landscape; mature love; the current threat to the richness of language; global consciousness; a mapping of human questioning and exploration of identity. In these pages the reader will find George Zimmerman's gun, a herd of buffalo at Standing Rock, rebar, the Super Moon, ""reptile dysfunction,"" and multiple choice vs. Socratic wisdom. Reflecting Randall's recent work with translation, several poems take on that practice in its broadest sense. Stylistically, for the first time in half a century she has gone back to her modus of the 1960s and mixed story and prosody with poetry; only now the result is more sophisticated and much harder hitting. The title poem of The Morning After first appeared in two anthologies of poetry responding to the January 2017 presidential inauguration: Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Truth to Power; and in Spanish translation in Revista Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba. The Morning After contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, both of which soar through "limitless rooms, unfenced spaces / where our thoughts may procreate / before they change direction," as well as autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. If ever there were a time for the words of Margaret Randall, it is now. Read this book. Howl this book!
£15.95
Wings Press Voices from the Center of the World: Contemporary Poets of Ecuador
In Voices from the Center of the World, Randall has gathered 25 poets born in Ecuador between 1926 and 1993. These include some cultural heroes of the 20th century, and many of the voices that define Peruvian political dissent. It also focuses on a new generations of poets, especially women and indigenous poets born after 1950. Especially exciting are poets writing in the Kichwa language, Ariruma Kowii (1961) and Lucila Lema (1974) who serve as custodians of indigenous knowledge and imaginations, at once political, historical, and ancestral. Margaret Randall's selection and translations are alert to the edges and cadences of an individual idiom, to the plural alignments with the long view of history, and to consciousness of the country's literary dynamism. Often overshadowed by the literatures of Colombia, Argentina and Chile, Voices from the Center of the World brings the literature of Peru -- fully engaged in contemporary issues like human rights and climate change, yet infused with a wisdom drawn from its ancient mountain cultures.
£16.16
Wings Press A Fine-Spotted Trout on Corral Creek: On the Cutthroat Competition of Native Trout in the Northern Rockies
Matthew Dickerson’s well-crafted prose narrative takes readers from the headwaters of the Colorado River in Wyoming to the Crown of the Continent in Glacier National Park. In the midst of the lovingly described wild and scenic beauty of these places, readers will learn about the science, history, conservation, and restoration of an important native fish—cutthroat trout—and the habitats where they live, while enjoying stories of the pursuit of those fish with both a fly rod and a camera. The book is well-informed by science as well as careful observation, and conveys both the passion and knowledge of the author. The author, Matthew Dickerson, was a 2017 artist-in-residence at Glacier National Park, invited to that residence specifically to learn and write about cutthroat trout. Much of what he learned and observed is shared in this book, along with stories and knowledge gleaned from times in the national forests of Wyoming and interviews with USGS, U.S.Forest Service, and National Park Service biologists. It is well-informed by science, but doesn’t read like a scientific text.
£19.76
Wings Press Early Automobiles: A History in Advertising Line Art, 1890-1930
Image archivist and transportation historian Jim Harter follows his work, Early Farm Tractors, with an even larger collection of images from advertising line art from 1880 to 1930, this time focused on Early Automobiles. Nearly 250 entrancing illustrations - many suitable for framing - are gems of the art of commercial engraving. Harter provides a very substantial, detailed history of the development of the “horseless carriage” into the brands famous from the early 20th century - racers like Stutz, Dusenberg, Stanley, as well as those that became household names like Oldsmobile, Ford, Chrysler and others. The history includes many colorful anecdotes about early long-distance races as well as interesting details of engineering breakthroughs.
£30.45
Wings Press Strange Angels
In this first major collection in nearly a decade from a revered American poet, William Pitt Root concerns himself with those extremes—spiritual, physical, or both—at which social and cultural forms disintegrate, leaving the individual as an unshielded witness to transitioning miracles that induce a state of awe that cannot be diminished, diverted, or ignored. In poem after poem, Root compels the reader to discover that these key moments require the heart to open and the mind to still in order to fully accept whatever results, whether it is to suffer inconsolably or to discover new facets of wisdom. With an imagery that is by turns beautiful, tender, provocative, and terrifying, this collection signals the triumphant return of a poet of national renown.
£15.95
Wings Press Maria, Daughter of Immigrants
More than a memoir of personal and political achievements, this volume chronicles a family's development from Mexican immigrants to American leaders. Written in an authentic and unique voice, this book describes how the author’s Mexican parents instilled a love of learning, a desire to excel, and a commitment to community in their children. Relating how her heritage and upbringing allowed her to lead her community and promote social justice, the author conveys a courageous story of hope, love, faith, and a fighting spirit long committed to social and environmental justice, regardless of the personal cost.
£25.16
Wings Press Curandera
Featuring historic photos of the Chicano Movement in San Antonio and a new introduction, this is the 30th-anniversary edition of Carmen Tafolla’s first solo poetry collection. Having filled a cultural and linguistic void in 1983, when it was first published, this compilation showcases the poet's creation of a literary language from the natural Spanish and English code-switching of the barrios of San Antonio. Banned in Arizona along with many other multicultural books, this work celebrates bilingual and bicultural diversity and the power of individual imagination while simultaneously examining social inequities. Many poems from this book have been widely anthologized throughout the past three decades.
£14.36
Wings Press Black Like Me: 50th Anniversary Edition
On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin underwent a transformation that changed many lives beyond his own—he made his skin black and traveled through the segregated Deep South. His odyssey of discovery was captured in journal entries, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th-century American racism ever written. More than 50 years later, this newly edited edition—which is based on the original manuscript and includes a new design and added afterword—gives fresh life to what is still considered a “contemporary book.” The story that earned respect from civil rights leaders and death threats from many others endures today as one of the great human—and humanitarian—documents of the era. In this new century, when terrorism is too often defined in terms of a single ethnic designation or religion, and the first black president of the United States is subject to hateful slurs, this record serves as a reminder that America has been blinded by fear and racial intolerance before. This is the story of a man who opened his eyes and helped an entire nation to do likewise.
£22.46
Wings Press Available Light: Exile in Mexico
Culled from previously unpublished material, this collection of writing and photography by John Howard Griffin was taken from the period during which he was writing and revising what would be his most famous book, the bestselling Black Like Me. Living in exile in Mexico at the time, along with his young family and aging parents, Griffin had been forced from his home town of Mansfield, Texas, by death threats from local white racists. Knowing that he would become a controversial public figure once he returned to the states, he kept an intimate journal of his ethical queries on racism and injustice—and to escape from his worries he also immersed himself in the culture of the Tarascan Indians of Michoacan. Accordingly, Robert Bonazzi's introduction contains substantial unpublished portions of the journals, and the main body of the book is made up of three essays by Griffin—one on photography and two about trips he made to photograph rural Mexico.
£19.99
Wings Press Mississippi
The imperishable quiet at the heart of form. This quietness to be found by contemplating the photographs of Maude Schuyler Clay was at the heart of Ann Fisher-Wirth's poetic process, which involved listening - listening to the voices that spoke their stories somehow in connection, however oblique, with the photographs. Clay is a seventh-generation Mississippian; Fisher-Wirth has lived there for 30 years, so the images and words represent long, complicated accumulations and recombinations of visual and linguistic experience.
£25.80
Wings Press About Little Charlie Lindbergh and Other Poems
About Little Charlie Lindbergh, like earlier Margaret Randall poetry collections, presents a unique poetic voice by a revered elder in the genre. These poems are all about making connections, many of them unexpected. Randall links national events with intimate family moments, ancient ruins with present-day communities, and prehistory with history (making a convincing argument for the former as a part of the latter). Everyday speech and expressions that have become social cliches or advertising banter find their way into these poems and acquire the precision of literary elegance. Straightforward speech becomes passionate lyricism. This book gives lie to the notion that so-called political poetry must by nature come off as propagandistic; complexity and grace are always present. The poems collected here pay attention to birth, love, loss, Jewish identity, domestic and international violence, the environment, language, art, class, race, gender, and sexual identity. All these seemingly disparate subjects are linked by an empowering way of seeing and saying. This is social justice poetry that packs a wallop and moves the reader deeply.
£15.95
Wings Press Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives: Fronteras: Dibujando las vidas fronterizas
Featuring 25 drawings in charcoal, conte crayons, and pastels, this handbook pairs portraits of people who live and work along the U.S./Mexico border with bilingual poems that have been inspired by each of the drawings. A testimony to the people of the Rio Grande Valley, these drawings and poems capture their spirit, their quest for happiness, and their struggles to overcome economic hardship. This remarkable book highlights characters such as the "young street musician," the "six-year-old street vendor," and the "wise woman with rings." Compassionate and aesthetically compelling, this record raises awareness about social and cultural issues associated with border life, such as education, literacy, and poverty, and fosters cross-cultural understanding.
£15.95
Wings Press Their Backs to the Sea: Poems and Photographs
Detailing the natural and human history of Rapa Nui - more commonly known as Easter Island - this extraordinary collection of poems and photographs links together the ancient inhabitants of the most isolated, inhabited spot on earth with common concerns and hopes of the present. Illustrating the unique culture and ongoing struggle to survive against dramatic odds, this volume dramatically depicts the basic desires, misgivings, and challenges that human beings have long faced, regardless of time and place.
£15.95