Search results for ""Western Michigan University, New Issues Press""

Poems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language. In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence—grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty—into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book’s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty’s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages—those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become—Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul’s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.

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To Zenzi is the extraordinary story of Tobias Koertig’s odyssey through the apocalypse of Berlin in 1945. An orphaned thirteen-year-old who loves to draw, Tobias is coerced into joining the German youth army in the last desperate weeks of the war. Mistaken for a hero on the Eastern Front, he receives an Iron Cross from Hitler himself, who discovers the boy’s cartoons and appoints Tobias to sketch pictures of the ruined city. Shuttling between the insanity of the Führer’s bunker and the chaotic streets, Tobias must contend with a scheming Martin Bormann, a deceitful deserter, the Russian onslaught, and his own compounding despair—all while falling for Zenzi, a girl of Jewish descent (a mischling) who relays secret news of death camps and convinces Tobias to make a treacherous escape to the Americans. With thrilling risks in plotting and prose, with moments of pathos and absurdity, Shuster richly conjures a mad, tragic world.

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“These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don’t. Thus in our sister’s memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives.” —Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of American Poets “In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred and militarized fear, ‘Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say nothing?’ Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and receive love.” — Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America “Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne’s, Honeyfish is that she shows the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the day when these times are over and we can rejoice.” — Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

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Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, this debut novel digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships. When Etta's grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel to Myanmar to explore complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother's family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and complex relationships, The Golden Land explores those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.

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The poems in this powerful new collection explore the history of conflict and resilience—whether it occurs during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Balkan wars in Bosnia and Croatia, or within the intimate tableaux of a family’s dissonance. Weaving poems into three distinct sections, Linda Nemec Foster pays close attention to not only what divides us, but also to what can heal and redeem our common journey: an artist’s notebook; the imagined life of Mary Magdalene; a fascination with Mount Fuji; a mother’s obsession with vintage movie stars; a dead father’s love. The Blue Divide resonates with the landscape of the world and the landscape of the heart.

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“The poems of Rebecca Dunham’s Strike invoke the terse, noiseless monstrousness of the toxic-domestic, the ‘once-us,’ in which ‘to fall numb is not to fall/out of pain.’ This collection is Plathian in its riven depiction of anger, which both ‘presses/down and in,’ where denial ‘is beaten to silver foil, to silver leaf,’ and in which ‘[o]ver the butcher/paper’s sheets’ her ‘red story sprawls.’ In poems whose edges are honed on a whetstone of impeccable craft, and which delve into history, archetype, and ekphrasis, Dunham exposes the face that ‘ripples beneath her mask’ and builds a ravishing myth of the unveiled lyric interior.” —Diane Seuss “In Rebecca Dunham’s gorgeous new book there are secrets, shames, and a fury that bites like frost. Strike reminds me that ‘fidelity / demands not only virtue’s deep mortal stab, / but the love of it’; that anger burns clean; that forgiveness can burden the one who was hurt, asking them to console the one who made them suffer. Dunham brings to light a rage that has felt unutterable to me for so long, as well as the lineage of women who know betrayal’s slow burning. When you read this stunning book, you can’t fail to feel these poems strike you as well, how even after you set it down, you can still feel the scorch of it.” —Traci Brimhall “D.T. Suzuki describes the start of a bad poem as one that ‘does not fly straight to the target, nor does the target stand where it is…’ Rebecca Dunham’s Strike is a campaign of targets all hit, dead-center, by furiously composed poems—arrows that cannot miss. Whether real life fortifies her aim, or pure imagination, or the progeny of both, the reader need not know. What matters is that this writer is on fire—and for sharing her archery, her heartache, and her hunger for catharsis, we thank her, as this is poetry that confirms the weirdly compatible damnation and grace of language used to expunge and expose and exalt. ‘Heap of tortured hairpins/at my feet…,’ Strike hurts, and thereby saves.” —Larissa Szporluk

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Longlisted for the National Book Award 2017

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Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems' chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music.

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Poetry. African-American Studies. "This versatile poet blinks at nothing under thestars. Speaking and singing in the many voices and key signatures of poetry, our primal human language, Kocher shines and sheds visible and audiblelight" - Al Young

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At the beginning of Rodney Torreson's fascinating second book, everything is in its place -- ordinary, time-honoured, known. Then quite without warning, the familiar becomes new, alien, strangely awful or strangely dazzling. In subversive ways, this book takes the human figure out of his seat in the foreground, strips him of all privileges and asks him to understand himself as nature understands him.

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These strong and vital poems are a tribute to water, the source of water and the expression of water in the forms of rivers, bloodstreams and pools of mystery. This extraordinary collection is poetry with teeth that both nibbles and bites hard. It is full of the things of this world scarcely notices even by most poets, and shared with a marvellous sense of grace and wit.

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Fusing lyric meditation and narrative perceptions, the poems in Cynthia Hogue's new collection 'Flux' track the natural world and the self in it -- from the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest to the far north of Iceland. In the tradition of the distilled and lyrically abstract poetry of Dickinson and H.D., Flux opens into visionary language and the search for transcendence.

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This book of poems presents a cross-generational conversation between Sally Hemings and the contemporary narrator about what it means to be a black woman in their respective landscapes, while at the same time demonstrating how little the ways in which we talk about black women and black female experiences have changed in more than two hundred years. In these poems, the speakers engage with historical texts, art, literature, and popular culture, while never allowing us to lose sight of their location within their own settings, the twenty-first century and the antebellum South. With an intentionally fraught title, Mistress not only addresses the ways in which that word is perhaps inappropriate to define Hemings, but also about how we tend to oversimplify the ways in which we see women. The title is investigated through a series of poems, in which the speakers contemplate the various definitions of “mistress”: extramarital partner, skilled individual, school teacher, authority figure, head of household, etc. In this way, the collection asks readers to complicate their understandings of both the word “mistress” and of black women. This collection seeks to resurrect Hemings from the limited historical narrative she’s often provided, while also bucking up against the limited ways in which black women are currently represented in popular culture. Through a series of poems with “mistress” in the title, the book looks at how narrowly we use the word, almost exclusively as extramarital partner, but how the word’s different definitions are related to power and strength. When we strip the term of its positive connotations, it mirrors the way that we strip Hemings of the agency she had over her life and the lives of her children.

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Told in two alternating timelines, this novel follows a friendship over twenty-five years.Boy Meets Girl is the story of a twenty-five-year friendship between Sammy Browne (young, idealistic, and broke) and Ben Eisenberg (older, jaded, and almost unimaginably rich)—two characters drawn together, and ultimately torn apart, by their differences. This novel tells the story of their relationship over the decades—from youthful flirtation to unrequited love, to long-term friendship that flourishes in middle age, to estrangement and then reunion. The novel unfolds in alternating chapters, toggling back and forth between Ben and Sammy as young people and in middle age, showing everything the characters hoped to become and how things turned out for them. Boy Meets Girl unfolds against the political and social backdrop of the last three decades, with Bill Clinton’s election, the events of September 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the Trump era providing context and contrast for the personal stories of the main characters.

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This striking new collection explores identity, race, and history with a lively and intelligent music

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Poetry. "A humanist at heart, Linda Nemec Foster has demanded from her poetry an artfulness that engages ordinary life. With each new book her work has continued to mature, deepen, console, surprise, and TALKING DIAMONDS is as wise as it is lovely"--Stuart Dybek.

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Poetry. African American studies. "For Lydia, poetry is about everything--love, family, hate, the forbidden--everything. This book gives a new voice to poetry with the wildness of fire, with the wildness that only words can know"--Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.

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Poetry. Winner of the 2003 Green Rose Prize. "As subversive in itssimplicity as any truly American Buddhism, or as any truly feminineanything, the poetry in Buddha Box is both radical and beautiful; bothunflinching and consoling. These poems contain joy and promote love butnever at the expense of complexity, precision, inventiveness, or therecognition of loss"--Gail Wronsky

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Poetry. A Brenda Hillman Selection. "Here, the sum of the parts generates'such a brutal equation' that there is little difference between 'the longerlife' and 'the lush line.' Mathias recognizes the 'lush line' was everimplemented not for the sake of beauty, but to counter the fact that mortalinquiry is always fraught with the danger of temporal collapse"--Richard Greenfield.

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Poetry. "David Dodd Lee's Abrupt Rural is as exquisite as it is excruciating, though in a matter-of-fact, even understated way; it surprised me with its afterburn, and left me disoriented and oddly happy"--Claire Bateman.

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Gladys Cardiff is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and a member of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Her small book, To Frighten a Storm, from Copper Canyon Press, won the Washington State Governor's First Book Award in 1976. These are poems from a mature and wise consciousness that understands loss, grief, and the value of the unassailable "solaces we yearn for." One emerges from Cardiff’s intense, complex meditations with a renewed sense of both the durability of the human spirit and its potential.

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Poet Julie Moulds has battled non-Hodgkins lymphoma for years, through remissions, recurrences, and a bone marrow transplant. In The Woman with a Cubed Head, Moulds summons up an exotic band of kindred spirits to accompany her as she engages the forces of darkness. Here are the loves of her life, from Mary, Mother of God, to Baba Yaga, the evil Russian witch. More like the Monty Python Flying Circus than the Knights of the Round Table, assembled here are characters from folk tales, myth, Moulds’ favorite childhood books, icons of her Catholic upbringing, as well as her personae––Iva with steel-toed boots on, and the indefatigable Dog. In poems of wit, spirit, and attitude; in language that is sensual, fresh, and unabashed, Julie Moulds goes forth, tilting with real windmills.

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