Search results for ""author dennis james""
Autumn House Press In the Antarctic Circle
This collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator’s gender skips and changes, and the characters’ self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney’s poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever. The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world.In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
£14.39
Skyhorse Publishing Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries: Travels after Sixty-Five
Abandoning the comfort and security of a typical retirement, a couple travels and treks through the most isolated parts of the world.After their retirement, Dennis James and Barbara Grossman decide to travel where tour buses won’t and where the US government says don’t,” incorporating trekking into their travels as a way to see untouched areas of the world considered inhospitable by many.Armed with a passport, an interest in non-Western and indigenous cultures, a spirit for adventure, and a sense of humor, they hike through the forests in the highlands of Papua New Guinea; visit the traditional hunter-gatherer Baka Pygmy community in Cameroon; stay with the cliff-dwelling Dogon people in Mali; explore Roman ruins in Algeria; meet a nervous mother rhino in Nepal; and witness bull-jumping, a coming-of-age ritual for young Hamer men in Ethiopia.In defiance of typical tourist travel, ignoring State Department warnings, and with a curiosity and hardiness that belies their ages, Dennis and Barbara choose to travel the roads not taken so frequentlyto places like Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and Gazaseeking the truth behind the headlines and exploring the deeper questions about the local cultures they encounter. Why do these people cling to the art, sexual mores, economic and political hierarchies, and spiritualities that govern their lives? And how and why do they remain resistant to the pressures of globalization?A journey into the other sides of the world, Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries puts aside preconceptions and combines the wisdom of age with the stamina of youth.
£18.99