Search results for ""Saturnalia Books""

Derek Mong's highly anticipated new poetry collection, The Identity Thief, is a gathering of voices borrowed and voices lost. These illuminating poems explore how one learnsin an effort to cope, escape, survive, or atoneabout the possibilities of becoming someone else. In this collection of poems full of movement and wonder, saints, thieves, environmentalists, new parents, and glaciers all speak. The Identity Thief imagines the pleasures of being an other, using the contemporary dramatic monologue to dazzling effect. The result is a poetry collection full of vision and insight.

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Don't Go Back To Sleep answers the Sufi call to wake up to this life in the here and now where ecstasy serves its summons, inviting us to break out of the mundane quotidian. Timothy Liu winds the clock back to the Nanking Massacre in 1937, then traces its consequences on his family of origin, his mother's mental illness, his father's religious fundamentalism, and Liu's obsessive search for love. As trauma begets trauma the poems slowly accrete, and Liu takes on a legacy of poetic witness where carnal violence ultimately turns to spiritual joy.

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Peter Jay Shippy's A Spell of Songs evokes an enchanted world, one we eventually come to recognize as our own, where the cursed and the charmed unreel before the reader like characters in an unspooling film of the American fairy tale. About his poetry, Bin Ramke writes, Shippy's strange little machines of words are all kinetic, disturbing, and weirdly graceful, unlike anything else available in American poetry. A Spell of Songs continues his celebration of the adventitious in long, loping couplets, an amplitude, an amplifier unrestrained. His is a swirling, spellbinding, and impishly unnerving song.

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The poems in Lullaby (with Exit Sign), explore the very nature of the elegy as rite, memorial, mechanism for healing, and raw utterance. Bar-Nadav asks, what is the shape of grief-its forms, silences, and sounds? The muscular music of her language and whip-sharp syntax join forces with startling imagery. Prose poems dominate the collection, held in place by the phantom scaffolding of lineated verse in which the poet listens for her father who knocks on a little paper door.

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With humor and musicality, Martha Silano's The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception rollicks through fourteen billion years of cosmology: galaxies, aliens, an astronaut's dropped glove. When she's not picking a bone with a shortsighted and side-talking populous, she's conceiving her own personal Big Bang. When her nouns are diaper and bibs, Silano sticks to a larger vision, seeing past gelatinous mashed peas toward the moon and stars. This cosmic-consciousness is woven right in with the mittens and the meercats, her lens taking in not only the crumbs she must wipe up, but also polio-stricken nations, the hungry Eritreans, the old man who shuffles along / as if he might be carrying / in that steamy bowl / all our children's futures. We're all sibling citizens of this swirly world, writes Silano, but she knows that danger lurks not only in the heavens and the atmosphere, but also on our glistening streets. As Campbell McGrath notes, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception is

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Other Romes gathers together an eclectic range of influences-from Fellini films, to eating contests, Jesuit poetry, and jetliners-to confront the awkward but inevitable relationship between personal narratives and the larger public sphere. And like the title city that haunts much of this work, Mong refuses to settle on any one voice or form. Restrained at times as a Latin ode, or expansive as Whitman, these poems take erotic love and in-flight disaster through subtle, fissuring syllabics, strict sestinas, free verse, and more. The end result is an expansive collection, which as poet and critic David Baker remarks, demonstrates that the privacy of the lyric world is part and parcel with the communal imagination.

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Personification undertakes dreamlike journeys through crumbling architecture and airless interiors, discovering anachronistic and apocalyptic emblems among the commonplace particulars of modern day life. Breaking open in order to reinhabit the language of Puritan allegory and captivity narrative, these poems meditate on the possibility of personhood generated by the constraints of luminous unknowing, a form of captivity in which one is both bound and held rapt. They proceed by way of detour, boredom's indirection, and astonished pauses, endlessly seeking the perfect thought / we slept frozen inside / yet could not see. Of Personification, Carl Phillips writes, Here is a strange and arresting vision, indeed.

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The notion of exchange circulates throughout Kristi Maxwell's superlative second collection of poetry, Hush Sessions. In a series of utterly unique poetic experiences, things transform or transfer: superstition becomes science, and bodies become texts to read. In addition, family mythologies become sites of substitution and a borderland where irrationality and rationalization touch. Kristi Maxwell's poetry reminds us that words, like objects, do not exist in a singular state, and their multiplicity is activated through perception: a veil during/ the trying on rather than the pride of/ the dress. As Fanny Howe says, Maxwell's poems have pure, ephemeral lines that suggest much thought about time and utterance, yet they float free without any need for explanation.

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In Days of Unwilling, Cal Bedient's third collection, a series of poems of mixed dialects and cadences weave together into a spiritual intensity that questions and queries our very existence in a universe that is spinning off its rails from the get go. Themes of art and artifice, sex and love, and even the ordinary details of life are alternately stripped down and dolled up with Bedient's signature polyphonic wizardry. Brilliantly going where it hurts, Bedient doesn't let up; he cuts a wild, wicked swath through each page with acumen and fecundity.

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Dummy Fire is a book full of surprises, its arms wide enough to encircle, it seems, all of creation, from the deeply personal to the existential. In Sarah Vap's debut book a mother's nose bleeds into tomato soup and a great blue heron is vivisected on a dinner table. There is nothing she is afraid to say. Sarah Vap, writes Forrest Gander, combines an utterly unsentimental domestic tenderness with an attentiveness to the lives of plants and animals that never approaches 'nature poetry' because it never seems separated from that realm. And Norman Dubie adds, she is brilliant and something entirely new under our sun.

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The Babies, by Sabrina Orah Mark, is the premier winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Contest, judged by renowned poet Jane Miller (Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poetry). Of The Babies, poet Claudia Rankine writes, Rarely do we encounter poems that are so precisely framed, though on their surface seemingly whimsical and erratic. These poems are gorgeous, intelligent, and disturbing.

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Polytheogamy is the fifth installment in the Saturnalia Books Artist/Poet Collaboration series. Poet Timothy Liu and artist Greg Drasler explore themes of sexuality, marriage, monogamy, and fidelity through a series of 64 lyric poems and 24 painting/sculptures. Liu's terse playful poems and Drasler's sparse decorative spaces create a thrilling, sensual dance, playing off themes of emptiness and fullness, as renowned critic Charles Altieri explains in his introduction.

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Sabrina Orah Mark follows up her critically acclaimed debut, The Babies, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize in 2004 chosen by Jane Miller, with a second collection of prose, Tsim Tsum, centered on two characters, Walter B. and Beatrice, first introduced in The Babies. Unbeknownst to them they have come into being under the laws of Tsim Tsum, a Kabbalistic claim that a being cannot become, or come into existence, unless the creator of that being departs from that being. Along their journey they encounter many beguiling characters including The Healer, The Collector, Walter B.'s Extraordinary Cousin, and the Oldest Animal. These figures bewilder and dislodge what is at the heart of the immigrant experience: survival, testimony, and belonging.

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The landscape of Ritual and Bit is littered with the speaker's past: empty 40s, old posters, family lies, and fragmented missives. Internal struggles play out in the detritus of long-ago. Yet even as the speaker attempts to cautiously map his movements, effect a survival, and navigate beyond his past, he faces emotional fissures wrought by the present. Throughout the book, he restlessly searches for ways to regain control of his life, partly through ceremonies, prayers, and devotions, and partly through lyrical force. The danger is palpable among wolves and claws, boxcutter and jackknife. There's both caution here and a willingness to abandon caution if anything or anyone could be reached. The poems ask, What makes a home? What should we expect when we are so determined to live in a world where everything is disappearing?

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Playful, penetrating, and often operating by aural law, the poems in That Our Eyes Be Rigged take shape as one word quickly transforms into another via sonic slippages. These fluid transformations simultaneously reveal the worlds within a word and build correspondences between unlikely termshighlighting the very notion of exchange between the linguistic and the physical realm. Maxwell's poems are both generous and demanding. While the operating intelligence behind the poems incessantly questions how one makes a life in language (and vice versa), the poems themselves enact arrangements that might make such pathways possible. These restless and inventive poems provide feats of language that lead us to agree with Maxwell's speaker when she says: Our awe is our confession.

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The poems in My Scarlet Ways are, most often, attempts at self-destruction by any means necessary-love, sex, language, God, and ultimately, fantasies of motherhood. With piercing passion and linguistic precision, Tanya Larkin, pursues and retreats from her reader like a poetic Mata Hari, drawing us closer, if only to entice and strike us again in poem after poem. As judge, Denise Duhamel writes, Larkin is a poet of intelligence and intuition, of wily and wicked wisdom. My Scarlet Ways is a new and unique addition to American poetry.

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Reversing their roles in 2006's Stigmata Errata Etcetera, Star Black serves as poet, and Bill Knott takes on the role of artist. Bill Knott's colorful, mischievous, semi-abstract paintings compliment Star Black's meditations on love and relationships, as well as the divide between what time holds captive and what eludes time. In Velleity's Shade the temporal collides with the imagined and the passing years become a confluence of queries, shifting views, odd inventories, and light-hearted challenges as if time were a rocking-chair on a flying carpet and turbulence was nothing to fret about.Velleity's Shade is a special treat for lovers of art and poetry.

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Yau's comic and cutting poetry collides with the work of Nozkowski, whom the New Yorker has termed the Chardin of contemporary abstraction. The end result is a dazzling and vibrant concoction of visual and written imagery. All the poems in Ing Grish are new, as are Nozkowski's paintings and illustrations, which he created expressly for this collection. Ing Grish was namedBook of the Year by Small Press Traffic in San Francisco.

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Allison Titus's newest poetry collection, The True Book of Animal Homes, is obsessed with animal and human alike, and how each one of us makes our home in the stations we holdfrom the wilds of southern brambles to a desk in an office cubicle. This book ponders the question: how much wildness are we allowed in this life, and how do we claim that wildness? The poems of The True Book of Animal Homes leap and scurry after the truth on all fours, devouring us with sharp language and brave new forms.

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In a voice at once direct, musical, and surreal, these poems document the journey of a woman as she examines her role in both the political landscape of modern American culture and within the scope of her familial history. Addressing modern environmental concerns and global destruction, the poems maintain a connection with a larger literary history as well as the author's personal history. Sometimes grounded in the concrete, physical world, sometimes floating in imaginative abstraction, this book unveils a version of the America we live in, this industry of brief distraction.

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In Catherine Pierce's most peculiar second collection, we enter a world of longing and destruction, of death and rebirth, and of wonderfully odd girls-girls who read too much, who drink too much or not enough, who craft necklaces from earwigs and wring nostalgia from Spiro Agnew. These are poems of questions and restlessness, but also of answers of a sort. As Beth Ann Fennelly writes, [t]he big themes here-self identity, desire, escape-are illuminated with clarity, scored musically, and enlivened with wit. The Girls of Peculiar is a fabulous book.

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With lushness and a perplexity reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, the poems of Michael Robins' second collection blend allusion-from late-20th century rock lyrics to the Gettysburg Address-and negotiate feeling amid a troubled history of the United States. These persistent, cunning voices claim prey and hunter alike: whether a tortured prisoner or the nation's first colonists who might coexist among the indigenous populations if their arms could hold steady, but instead take aim by spreading disease to the kind people of the new country. Ladies & Gentlemen is an invitation to the spectacle-and spectral-of American life, where the plugs of ordinary billboards are as probable as the horrors suffered when any people are under siege. John Yau writes, With the precision of a diamond cutter, Michael Robins taps into the harsh murmurs of the daily world.As its title intimates, Ladies& Gentlemen proceeds with a seething civility and Robins' measured couplets, a failing brace, belie the aggression

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Catherine Pierce's debut, Famous Last Words, is a love letter to life, poetry, and all things American. Beginning with a series of literal love poems (to the word lonesome, to blank space, to doo-wop, to fear, etc.), Pierce whisks the reader on a cross-country road trip (both literally and figuratively) that takes a tangential spree into a series of genre films and ends with gallows humor in the re-imagining of the events surrounding the famous last words of icons like Billy the Kid, Marie Antoinette, Isadora Duncan, and Pancho Villa. From start to finish, Pierce's book is a delight to the senses, a playful, nostalgic dance that ends with the reader wanting more.

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Bill Knott has to be the only poet who can claim to have been-for nearly forty years now-at the head of both the avant-garde and the rear-garde of American poetry. Meticulous and formal, yet wildly inventive, Knott is among the very finest poets living today. Paired perfectly with his poems is the surreal and oddly beautiful world of Star Black's collages. Stigmata Errata Etcetera is a book that brings absurdity and wit into clear focus, reverberating with Knott's unique blend of heartrending humor and Black's playful and passionate imagery. As Doty writes, These two not-so-different sorts of creation together point back to the mystery of origins: the new arises, out of its polyglot beginnings, one unlikely thing rubbing up against another. Found things, assembled with the strange freshness of the ordering eye or ear, bring new and distinct presences into the world.

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Poet Jane Miller collaborates with artist Beverly Pepper on a highly personal journey through the debris of the poet's crumbling relationship, and her mother's descent into illness. Beautifully rendered poems and short chapters of poetic prose combine with Pepper's chalk and oil drawings to form an intimate and unique meditation on the nature of love, of heartache, of the many midnights we, each and every one of us, live through and carry with us through our lives. The goal is not to make sense of, but art of this story, writes poet C.D. Wright in her introduction. The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess. There are mental sufferings and physical sufferings to go through; to apprehend if one can. There are the spent casings of history to sift through, pick up and examine. Calm-like, hysterical, forensic. This life not just a worn passage. In the end, the light shines through Miller's midnights and the rewards of passing through the darkness with her are countles

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Correspondence, writes Mark Doty, is a fresh accomplishment, swift with feeling and intelligence, the work of a restless critical mind mapping its way toward a way to bear the weight of love. Kathleen Graber's debut book takes us on a trip through history and time, varying her subjects with speed and seamlessness, to a dizzying, dazzling effect. From the Philadelphia Eagles to Cornell's boxes, from a fertility clinic to Daguerre's prints, from Kafka to running over two cats, from Annette Benning to Marianne Moore, Kathleen Graber's poems embrace what her inquisitive mind traverses, ensnaring past and present, familiar and foreign, soulful and scientific, in a celebration of chaos that is generous and healing.

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To the Bone, winner of the 2008 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Doty, is a poetic feast. These lush, highly detailed, and at times vulgar poems give insight into the body, mind, and soul of the millions of kitchen workers across the globe. Told with gritty authenticity that only someone with true life experience working the back of the house, to use culinary lingo, can bring, Agudelo leads us by the mouth and nose on a one of a kind experience. In Whitmanesque style, Agudelo gives voice to the myriad of colorful characters who prepare our foods and clean up after us, lifting the veil on what we'd rather not see, but can't turn away from. To the Bone is a unique collection by a stunning new talent. As Mark Doty writes, To the Bone is an unexpected, bracing debut. You'll have trouble putting it down.

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Martha Silano's new collection begins with The Big Bang and ends with the unleashing of twelve million bees from a jack-knifed semi. In between Reckless Lovely ricochets from Renaissance masterworks to amusement parks, from fissures to fission, praising the peregrine, the paramecium. Reveling in galaxies and marveling at Earth's miracles, Reckless Lovely opens the door to the radiantly inscrutable, the splendidly baffling.

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Set in the vernacular origins of modernity, Live at the Bitter End puts the racialized logic of 20th century aesthetics on trial. Mixing anonymous voices with the testimonies of figures such as Paul Cézanne, Charles Mingus, Emma Bardac, Erik Satie, Alberto Giacometti, Billie Holiday, Pierre Bonnard, Samuel Beckett, Miles Davis, and others, Ed Pavli weaves a playfully raucous and intimately violent work of satirical force. Adhering to the structure of a murder trial, Live at the Bitter End bears lyrical witness to racial separation, masquerade, mongrelization, and communion to show how those connections (in love, lust, trust and betrayal) sound deep in the textures of who we are.

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Sebastian Agudelo's second book engages a documentary poetics to dissect an inner city neighborhood and explore the social, political, and economic tensions and affinities as well as search for the humanness of living together. The book is bracketed by an introductory section that looks to the past to contextualize and complicate the contemporary questions, and a closing section that looks to the future for a more global and environmental definition of what a neighbor might be. As Daisy Fried writes, Each Chartered Street is a complicated, wonderful, humanist book about urban life and urban characters, novelistic in its reach, intricate in its lingo, literary in its references, and alive to the troubled streets of Philadelphia. Do put it on your list.

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Nowhere Fast offers a view of a world where fools rush in only to be baffled by ordinary dramas-of sexuality and gender, of family, of death and dying. By turns rueful, sardonic and tender, these narratives are overseen by a joyous mockery which reveals to us what Allen Ginsberg once called our quintessential jerkhood-to be living in a realm where satisfaction is denied and expectations are frustrated-the heart and soul of the absurd. In sixty exquisite prose poems, memory, dream and fantasy take turns animating the many identities of the I in a dark comedy of manners where the surreal underscores our eternal condition. In turns jocular and menacing, masculine and vulnerable, bawdy and rueful, Nowhere Fast marks the debut collection of a poet it seems we've always been waiting for.

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In her latest collection, Arco Iris, Sarah Vap explores race, tourism, market, history, intimacy, and the vulnerability of lives beneath the stamp of longstanding powers. Whiteness is considered through the action of travel in South America where white bodies disappear, or are invisible, or attempt to become irrelevant, or are impossible to destroy. These hallucinatory poems explore the subtle violence beneath the commonplace in a foreign land, a violence which underscores the naiveté of the traveler. As she writes in the haunting poem, Trace: The white and gold // fairy dust left of some spent bomb / settles // to the eyes of three children cuddling / in their hammock, belly-level of our boat.

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XING is about fraught crossings: East versus West, doubt versus belief, conformity versus individuality, the external world versus the internal one. These haunting, startling poems re-cast the world as we think we know it into playfully offbeat and idiosyncratic new molds. Using an array of idiosyncratic voices-an answering machine, a Sixties sanitation worker, a post-war refugee, a marionette, and the head and body of a mannequin, to name just a few-Kuan reinvents the speaker's voice as an entity that is unfixed, fragmented, peripatetic, and endlessly pleasurable to hear.

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Sarah Vap, award-winning author of Dummy Fire and American Spikenard, dazzles again with this third collection. Vap celebrates the mysteries of pregnancy with wonder, fear, sorrow, and joy. Like counting the beads on a rosary, she takes us along a trail of connected couplets, building a concrete yet mythic exploration of the body as it prepares to bring another body into the world. Alice Notley writes, This is a poetry of light, edge, and coherence, and it is beautiful. And Cynthia Hogue adds, I am in awe of the rare beauty of these poems.Sarah Vap is a quickly rising star in the poetry world.

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Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics brings together eighteen poets of wide-ranging backgrounds, united in their ability to push the aesthetic envelope through radical, femme, Third Wave strategies, and pairs them with visual artists who do the same. At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital-perhaps viral-new strain of female poetics: the Gurlesque, a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. Poets include Brenda Coultas, Brenda Shaghnessy, Cathy Park Hong, Matthea Harvey, and Sarah Vap.

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Kendra DeColo's award winning debut, Thieves in the Afterlife, explores the ambiguities of sexuality and gender, refusing to settle for easy answers or simple explanations. Whether in a strip club or a prison these poems weave together an array of personae, celebrating the profane while taking apart tropes and cultural signifiers to expose the human pulse underneath. Part battle cry and part striptease, Thieves in the Afterlife targets the culture of commoditization and violence, articulating the pain, joy, and bravery needed to resist categorization in what Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize judge, Yusef Komunyakaa, calls a hardcore reckoning.

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From intimate meditations on birthing, motherhood, and parenting in a time of war to its explorations of the frank and grave matters surrounding a life lived while a lover is off fighting a war, these lush poems of the human interior always put themselves in harm's way, for there the poet finds the truest meanings. Sweet Insurgent, winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize, is a book of vivid and crushing lyric poems, each one landing like a mortar to the earth.

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