Search results for ""Graywolf Press""

In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence speaks in the voice of international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of colour are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.

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The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one's sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of "the oracle"-an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends-the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma-a home whose construction starts "with a razing."

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* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry ** Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award *ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . .A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine''s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don''t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.Claudia Rankine''s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are inte

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The Devil's Snake Curve offers an alternative American history, in which colonialism, jingoism, capitalism, and faith are represented by baseball. Personal and political, it twines Japanese internment camps with the Yankees; Walmart with the Kansas City Royals; and facial hair patterns with militarism, Guantanamo, and the modern security state. An essay, a miscellany, and a passionate unsettling of Josh Ostergaard's relationship with our national pastime, it allows for both the clover of a childhood outfield and the persistence of the game's service to those in power. America and baseball are both hard to love or leave in this by turns coruscating and heartfelt debut. Josh Ostergaard holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an MA in cultural anthropology. He has been an urban anthropologist at the Field Museum and now works at Graywolf Press.

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Sarah Gorham is the author of two collections of poetry, Don't Go Back to Sleep (Galileo Press, 1989) and The Tension Zone (FourWay Books, 1996). Her work has appeared widely in such places as The Nation, Antaeus, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Grand Street, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest, where in 1990 she won the Carolyn Kizer Award. She has received grants from the Kentucky State Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Delaware State Arts Council, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, She is Editor-in-Chief and President of Sarabande Books, Inc.Jeffrey Skinner has published three collections of poetry, Late Stars (Weslyan University Press, 1985), A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988) and The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Georgia Review, and Poetry. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and several state arts councils. He is also a playwright, and two of his plays were finalists in the Eugene O'Neil Theater Conference competition. He is currently Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at the University of Louisville.

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'This book left me stunned. Breathtaking in its scope and generosity . . . We are in the midst of a transcendent talent.' Maaza Mengiste, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Shadow King 'Rapturous . . . [Horn] is the mystic's David Attenborough.' New York Times Book ReviewLars Horn's Voice of the Fish, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, is a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory memoir that explores the trans experience through meditations upon aquatic life and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak, read and write. In their adept hands, these poignant, allusive shards take shape as a unified whole: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries and antiquities serve as interludes between - and subtle reflections upon - longer memories of their life, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.Horn swims through a range of subjects; across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity and illness. From their childhood modelling for their mother's art installations - immersed in a bath with dead squid; encased in a full-body plaster cast - to their travels before they were out as trans, these beguiling fragments are linked by a desire to interrogate the physical, and to identify the current beneath. Horn re-examines presumptions about the body, privileging instead ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. Sensuous and immersive, Voice of the Fish is unique: a masterful and moving achievement.

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How We Speak to One Another is some of the most engaging evidence we’ve got that the essay is going strong. Here, essayists talk back to each other, to the work they love and the work that disquiets them, and to the very basic building blocks of what we understand “essay” to be. What’s compiled in these pages testifies to the endless flexibility, generosity, curiosity, and audacity of essays. Even more than that, it provides the kind of pleasure any great essay collection does—upsetting our ideas and challenging the way we organize our sense of the world.Ander Monson is the author, most recently, of Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries (Graywolf Press). He is also the author of Vanishing Point, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Neck Deep and Other Predicaments.Craig Reinbold's writing has appeared in journals and magazines including the Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Brevity. He was the managing editor of Essay Daily from 2013 to 2016.Contributors include: Ander Monson, Marcia Aldrich, Kristen Radtke, Robin Hemley, Robert Atwan, Matt Dube, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, T. Clutch Fleischmann, Rigoberto González, Kati Standefer, Julie Lauterbach-Colby, César Diaz, Emily Deprang, Lucas Mann, Danica Novgorodoff, Bonnie J. Rough, Peter Grandbois, Albert Goldbarth, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Steven Church, Bethany Maile, David Legault, Joni Tevis, John D'Agata, Meehan Crist,Thomas Mira Y Lopez, Danielle Deulen, John T. Price, Maya L. Kapoor, Chelsea Biondolillo, Megan Kimble, Brian Doyle, Nicole Walkder, Paul Lisicky, Brian Oliu, Pam Houston, Dave Mondy, Phillip Lopate, Amy Benson, Patrick Madden, Elena Passarello, Erin Zwiener, Patricia Vigderman, and Ryan Van Meter.

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One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Transtromer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a letter waiting for him from its author. With this remarkable coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant correspondence between two poets who would become essential contributors to global literature. Airmail collects more than 290 letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Transtromer suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralysed and diminished his capacity to write. Across their correspondence, the two poets are profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of affording a life as a writer. Airmail also offers remarkable insights into the processes of translating literature from one language into another. As Bly began to render Transtromer's poetry into English and Transtromer began to translate Bly's poetry into Swedish, their collaboration soon turned into a friendship that has lasted fifty years. Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, Airmail provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to each other's particular genius. Based on the original Swedish edition published in 2001, this publication marks the first time letters by Transtromer and Bly have been made available in Britain. Robert Bly's translations of Tomas Transtromer appear in The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer, published by Graywolf Press. Transtromer's complete poetry is available in English in Robin Fulton's translation, New Collected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books (and by New Directions in the US under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems).

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"Discipline, humility, kindness. These qualities cohere in the best mentors, bundled into an overarching approach to the art of writing. It is not, I think, coincidence that the writers in this collection remember these qualities best when speaking of their mentors as people, as fellow pilgrims who helped them on the way. In some sense, whether consciously or not, we seek out mentors who learn how to live—as an artist, and as a human being."—from the Introduction by Jeffrey Skinner Lee Martin is the author of a collection of stories, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande, 1996), a memoir From Our House (Dutton 2000), and a novel Just Enough Haughty, also forthcoming from Dutton. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas where he also edits the American Literary Review. Jeffrey Skinner is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. His published collections of poetry include The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), and A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Contributors include: Michael Collier on William Meredith Jay McInerney on Raymond Carver Tess Gallagher on Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz Reginald Shepherd on Alvin Feinman Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Bishop Maura Stanton on Vert Rutsala and John Berryman Elizabeth Graver on Annie Dillard, Angela Carter, Stanley Elkin, and others Sylvia Watanabe on Dorothy Vella David Huddle on Peter Taylor David Wojahn on James L. White Erin McGraw on John L’Heureux CONTENTS PREFACE by Lee Martin, vii INTRODUCTION: The Scrupulous Philanthropy of Expertise by Jeffrey Skinner, xi MICHAEL COLLIER An Exact Ratio, 3 The Farrier, 12 JAY MCINERNEY Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice, 15 Getting in Touch with Your Child, 24 TESS GALLAGHER Two Mentors: From Orphanhood to Spirit-Companion, 39 Behave, 45 DAVID HUDDLE What about Those Good People?, 51 Backstory, 57 REGINALD SHEPHERD T

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