Download or read book Plume written by Kathleen Flenniken and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM

Download or read book Pacific Walkers written by Nance Van Winckel and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories--first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs--but who no longer belong to anyone.

Download or read book Charming Gardeners written by David Biespiel and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel’s new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America. Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California. These poems explore the “insistent murmurs” of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America’s wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy. We are offered poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals — all in a masterful idiom Robert Pinsky has called Biespiel’s “own original grand style.” I should stop back there And stand on both feet in the grazing sunlight And hear this chorus of America singing. But I am so afraid of the testament of the delivered. from “TO __________ FROM THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN WILLIAMSON, WEST VIRGINIA

Download or read book Three Pacific Northwest Poets written by Sanford Pinsker and published by Boston, Mass. : Twayne Publishers. This book was released on 1987 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Post Romantic written by Kathleen Flenniken and published by Pacific Northwest Poetry. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Post romantic, the twenty-first volume in the Pacific Northwest poetry series, is published with the generous support of Cynthia Lovelace Sears"--Title page verso.

Download or read book Voyager written by Srikanth Reddy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Srikanth Reddy’s second book of poetry probes this world’s cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim—Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht—who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.

Download or read book Theorem written by Elizabeth Bradfield and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theorem, spare images, distilled text, and the resonant space between investigate the legacy of secrets acquired in childhood and held through a life. Part illustrated dream journey, part lyrical interrogation, Theorem maps a luminous path of self-discovery that unsettles and upends. Beyond mere revelation, Bradfield's words and Contro's images "open up another possibility," writes John Yau. "The revelation is not in arriving at a destination but in beginning to map the journey, as well as in recognizing that one's perspective of past events changes as time goes by. This is the enigma of being alive and alert. This is what Theorem offers the willing reader -a place to return to in order to set out again and see what has changed."

Download or read book CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home written by Pamela Yenser and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Everything abandoned comes alive" Pamela Yenser writes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home, which becomes an invocation for resilience in a world filled with disaster at every turn: whether it's the wreckage of flying saucers in Roswell, or a brother and a mother who are irrevocably changed after a complicated birth, or an abusive father who is always in the driver's seat-whether it's by plane or car. Yenser does the difficult work of reckoning with trauma and the "family / history slamming the lid on truth." And though there's comfort in escape, and beauty to be found in the landscapes these poems traverse in a wide range of traditional and open poetic forms, Yenser reminds us "As long as you live / you won't forget," and there's danger everywhere. Lucky for us, we have a wonderful guide who knows her way around language and line, and is cunning enough to "have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." -Gary Jackson Pamela Yenser is a learned poet who knows the context, history, and texts of literature. Here she uses her supple and strict prosody to tell a family story about an abusive, daredevil father, a denying-praying mother, her "little retarded brother" ("She is her brother's keeper") and more. In airplanes and Airstream trailers "one catastrophe after another" happens to mark a childhood where "Visions of the devil / made you tithe, trade in the family silver." This astonishing chapbook delivers one revelation after another in poems exquisitely structured: "The past is a trap the Jaws of Life / can't break," she writes, "... but isn't this the work a poet is meant to do?" One poem in exact rhyming couplets is called "In the Garden of Demented Parents." Another, also in couplets, ends: "Look! I have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." Read this brilliant and triumphant chapbook by a poet who limns the tragedy and triumph of her life. -Hilda Raz Pamela Yenser's brave and tender poems spin together family history, personal resilience, and imaginative perseverance "sharp as that wreckage/ strewn like tinsel on glitter-/fields of tumbled rock" (as she writes in the title poem). Encompassing everything from a "bad weather balloon made of Kryptonite" to "a pineapple/ ruffled doily," Yenser juxtaposes the images and dreams of the otherworldly and the day-to-day life while also writing deeply of love and survival, monsters and angels, magic tricks and memories. This is a captivating and sparkling collection. -Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Pamela Yenser's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS refers to, yes, the Roswell UFO, as well as family relationships that are a parallel encounter. The poems' narrator sees the flying saucer wreckage as a four-year-old. She writes about this iconic disruption of the skies as a way to reveal the workings of memory itself. This is an exciting personal fable that blends journalism, verse, and narration. -Denise Lowe

Download or read book Turn Around Time written by David Guterson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most outdoor enthusiasts understand the phrase "turn around time" as that point in an adventure when one must cease heading out in order to have enough time to safely return to camp or home. In that vein, an award-winning novelist explores midlife through a lyrical journey along a trail.

Download or read book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven written by Sherman Alexie and published by Random House. This book was released on 1997 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaves characters, themes and language in 22 linked stories that evoke the complex density of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. The author is one of Granta's 20 Best Young American Writers.

Download or read book Bloodline written by Radha Marcum and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry book

Download or read book Writing In Place written by Kizzie Elizabeth Jones and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthology compilation of prose in essays, vignettes, memoir excerpts, short stories, newspaper columns, peppered throughout with poetry and prose poems from the Edmonds Writing Sisters, critique writing group.

Download or read book Singer Come from Afar written by Kim Stafford and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singer Come from Afar, by Kim Stafford, offers poems that challenge, sustain, and forgive.

Download or read book Poets on the Peaks written by John Suiter and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Making Poems written by Todd F. Davis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This diverse collection of poems and companion essays by forty nationally and internationally known poets allows readers to experience the creative process through the eyes and voice of each poet. No matter how often we are told that revision is an essential component of poetic composition, it can be difficult to resist the temptation to think of the poem as having sprung spontaneously, Athena-like, from the writer's head. By exposing readers to the finished product as well as the poet's own account of the poem's creation, Making Poems offers a behind-the-scenes perspective on the poetic process that will fascinate both beginning and established writers. The book also affords poetry instructors an opportunity to demonstrate to their students the ways in which poems can originate from seemingly mundane and unlikely sources.

Download or read book Playlist for the Apocalypse written by Rita Dove and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives. Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness. At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”

Download or read book Door to Remain written by Austin Segrest and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There are some poets we admire for a mastery that allows them to tell a story, express an epiphany, form a conclusion, all gracefully and even memorably—yet language in some way remains external to them. But there are other poets in whom language seems to arise spontaneously, fulfilling a design in which the poet’s intention feels secondary. Books by these poets we read with a gathering sense of excitement and recognition at the linguistic web being drawn deliberately tighter around a nucleus of human experience that is both familiar and completely new, until at last it seems no phrase is misplaced and no word lacks its resonance with what has come before. Such a book is Austin Segrest’s Door to Remain. Ranging between Atlanta, Georgia, and the Eternal City of Rome, these poems offer a poignant chronicle of haunting by a mother who is simultaneously present and absent even before her death. The centerpiece of the book is a poem in nineteen sections entitled ‘Majestic Diner’ that strives to answer its own epigraph, from George Herbert: ‘My God, what is a heart?’ Elsewhere, the poet writes ‘Humankind / cannot bear to be cheated out of our most guarded truths,’ paraphrasing T.S. Eliot’s dictum that ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ and part of what makes this book memorable are the clear-sightedness and charity with which those truths are anatomized.”—Karl Kirchwey, author of Poems of Rome and judge