Search results for ""Western Michigan University, New Issues Press""
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press Mistress
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.
£12.83
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press When the Moon Knows You`re Wandering
£14.78
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press Would We Still Be
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.
£13.00
Western Michigan University, New Issues Press To Zenzi
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.
£13.50