Search results for ""cavankerry press""

A coming-of-age collection set to the music of the 1980s and 90s. This novel in poetic form tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia. In this time of change, both for himself and the world around him, he seeks to “remember / just when I stopped being cute…” Narrating run-ins with the police (“The minute they see me, fear me”) and confrontations with himself, the speaker in this collection must learn to navigate a world that sees him as a threat. When Did We Stop Being Cute? reflects on the beauty and horrors of life in the United States, telling a personal story that shows Black lives and how they matter.

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A poetry collection centered on the Korean American experience. The term “half-life” is used to describe radioactive decay, pharmaceutical drugs, rocks, the atoms of our human bodies, and even technological products. Using this idea as a starting point, A Half-Life provides a rare glimpse into the Korean American experience. The poems utilize the literal metaphor of the highway as the intersecting point of America, Asia, and the globe, to reflect on the emotional and physical journeys many Asian Americans take. From Chicago to Seattle, from the biographical to the fictional, from current times to the Korean and Vietnam wars, A Half-Life covers the joy and pain, the probable and improbable, the individual and communal—the cultural histories we all share.

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What is a person to do upon finding out that his older brother has six months to live? What is a father to tell his young sons about the everyday violence, inequities, and injustices of the world? What is a husband to do when confronted with his domestic foibles and failings? What can poems possibly offer us in the face of unanswerable questions? Deke Dangle Dive explores illness, fatherhood, brotherhood, and masculinity through a variety of lenses, including ice hockey, contemporary culture, and the natural world. This unique collection considers how poems can speak to us and through us when all seems lost.

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Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she embarked on a journey to discover where she came from and, ultimately, who she was. After many missteps and dead ends, Ross uncovered her heartbreaking and inspiring origin story and began navigating the complicated turns of reuniting with her birth parents and their new families. Through backcountry travel in the American West, she also came to understand her place in the world, realizing that her true identity lay not in a choice between adopted or biological parents, but in an expansion of the concept of family.

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In Eleanor, Gray Jacobik presents sixty-two poems written in the voice of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Set against the backdrop of many of the major national and international events of the twentieth century, this famous historical figure has much to say. This collection includes poems about Eleanor’s husband Franklin, her children, her mother-in-law, her intellectual mentors, and her most passionate and intimate friendships. Other poems focus on Eleanor’s evolving relationship to servants, issues of class and human rights, as well as her service to the world community. Jacobik’s monologues constitute a sustained imaginative work that embodies Eleanor Roosevelt’s emotional experience, moral conflicts, fears, losses, desires, and aspirations. Eleanor Roosevelt was a bold and outspoken advocate for issues that are still relevant today: social justice, economic security, freedom from war and violence, and the rights of workers and immigrants. Modern readers will find much to admire, and much that resonates, in the themes of this collection. Publishing one hundred years after the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, this collection reminds us how far we have come, and how much further we have yet to go.

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The struggle and anguish in finding meaningful work in an economically depressed city

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Founded twenty years ago by poet, memoirist, and clinical psychologist Joan Cusack Handler, CavanKerry Press has published fine literary work by established and emerging writers focused on the pursuit of understanding what it means to be human through insightful, accessible writing. This unique collection looks back at CavanKerry's first two decades with excerpts from each of the one hundred books in its publishing catalog, featuring poems and memoirs that capture the heart of living—through life's joys, illnesses, and moments of both gratitude and challenge. This collection features work by renowned writers of contemporary poetry and memoir such as David Cho, Robert Cording, Ross Gay, John Haines, Joan Cusack Handler, Marcus Jackson, Gray Jacobik, January Gill O’Neil, Jack Ridl, Mary Ruefle, Maureen Seaton, Jack Wiler, Baron Wormser, and many others. Places We Return To is the perfect introduction to CavanKerry’s catalog, representing the deeply resonant writing for which the Press is known. Several authors in the CavanKerry library have gone on to find acclaim as poets laureate, Pushcart recipients, and finalists in national prizes. Places We Return To is a collection of work of the highest caliber.

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Poems that imagine Persian and Iranian American lives. In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham troubles preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing the reader into the Iranian American home, offering glimpses of familial love and intimacy. Atefat-Peckham reaches for a network of care—the foundations of which are located in the ability of these poems to evoke the rich landscape of Iranian American lives. Articulating a spirituality that has no spatial or temporal boundaries, one which travels effortlessly between life and death, this collection is a treatise on the empathy we need now more than ever. An up-and-coming poet who died just four years after winning the National Poetry Series Award in 2000, Susan Atefat-Peckham was deeply concerned by the Islamophobic “Axis of Evil” rhetoric deployed after 9/11 and was skeptical of attempts by the United States to “democratize” the Middle East. Representing the lives of immigrants in the United States and Persians in Iran, as well as the distance that separates their experiences and the love that binds them together, Atefat-Peckham brings an important voice to that conflict—one of the family and the home, where glimpses of intimacy and care rival imperial oppression.

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A critical look at female queerness through the lens of first-generation culture. In Tanto Tanto, a queer daughter of immigrants highlights the struggles she faces in romantic relationships amidst a culture of oppressive, culturally sanctioned heteronormativity. Exploring the consequences of queer love in both contemporary American and Luso-American societies, Tanto Tanto unsettles ideas about the privileged queer body, romantic love, queer motherhood, femininity, gender identity, sex, and more. This collection makes visible and troubling what is often overlooked, misunderstood, and romanticized in “American” homosexuality.

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Kali Lightfoot’s kindergarten teacher told her parents that Kali had “a well-developed sense of beauty and can skip with both feet.” This proved prophetic for a life that has included a number of careers and passions—Lightfoot has earned a master's degree in physical education, worked as an executive and a teacher, served as a wilderness ranger, managed educational travel, and provided body-oriented psychotherapy. After gaining her sobriety and coming out as queer, Lightfoot returned to poetry at the age of sixty-five, earning her MFA at age seventy. In a debut collection of poems that favor a narrative style but also experiment successfully with poetic forms, Lightfoot writes in a voice that is by turns wistful, comedic, and grave. After a long career, she has come late and happily to a life in poetry.

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Winner of the 2022 Paterson Poetry Prize, this coming-of-age collection is set in 1960s Paterson, New Jersey.Wonderama is a collection of cinematic, surprising, and at times harrowing poems that capture 1960s Paterson, New Jersey, as experienced by the poorest, most vulnerable children living there. With candor, ferocity, and stunning imagery, Catherine Doty’s poems explore survival and loss in the life of a young girl escaping the perils of want, neglect, and abuse. At times both heartbreaking and vaudevillian, Doty’s work chronicles sexual awakening and assault, alcoholism, the hazards of Catholic school, and the complex consequences of coming of age in the inner city.

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Explores the pushpull of received histories, of forces we can't control no matter how hard we try

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