Download or read book Counting the Black Angels written by Len Roberts and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Len Roberts is a poet of unwavering truthfulness and unwavering mercy," commented Sharon Olds about Black Wings, a 1988 National Poetry Series selection. Counting the Black Angels, Roberts's eighth book of poetry, is a piercingly painful and redemptive work in which he probes memories of a violent family history and his covenants with God and the "Black Angels." "Roberts's new work is among the most intelligent, moving, and expressive poetry now being written." -- Hayden Carruth
Download or read book The Black Angels written by Maria Smilios and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gotham Book Finalist 2024 NPR Science Friday Best Summer Beach Reads 2024 Winner of the Christopher Award 2024 New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage. In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.” Spanning the Great Depression and moving through World War II and beyond, this remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives working under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history. The Black Angels recovers the voices of these extraordinary women and puts them at the center of this riveting story, celebrating their legacy and spirit of survival.
Download or read book A Map of the Night written by David Wagoner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Wagoner’s wide-ranging poetry buzzes and swells with life. Woods, streams, and fields fascinate him--he happily admits his devotion to Thoreau--but so do people and their habits, dear friends and family, the odd poet, and strangers who become even stranger when looked at closely. In this new collection, Wagoner catches the mixed feelings of a long drive, the sensations of walking against a current, the difficulty of writing poetry with noisily amorous neighbors, and many more uniquely familiar experiences.
Download or read book Floating on Solitude written by Dave Smith and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Forging through this voluminous collection is akin to visiting at length with a charismatic, if highly disturbed, relative. Generally, the poems start out presenting facades of well-mannered normalcy, e.g., brief narratives or odes to nature and the sea, but then something shifts and goes terribly right. A sentence turns odd and powerful; a quiet, streak of insanity emerges; a young girl leaves her scent upon a young boy's body. Sometimes a poem pops up that is dangerous from start to finish, such as "The Suicide Eaters" or "Drunks," about a reading at a V.A. hospital for recovering addicts and alcoholics. Smith is highly conscious of word choice. He tinkers with grammar and rhythm just enough to be utterly engaging, leaving the reader exhausted after the visit, but wiser for the effort."- Publishers weekly.
Download or read book Points of Departure written by Miller Williams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of our very finest poets in full stride." -- HarvardReview, on Adjusting to the Light A 1995 recipient of the Academy Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Miller Williams is one of America's best known and loved poets. He also has won the prestigious Poets' Prize; the Amy Lowell Award in Poetry, presented by Harvard University; the Prix de Rome for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many others. Williams's newest collection is built of the idiom of ordinary speech. Mostly narrative and dramatic, these indelible poems are populated by individuals who go about their lives much as all of us do; in fear of pain and loneliness, in hope of something like love. The breath of Williams's talent gives them life, his honesty and precision make them unforgettable.
Download or read book Visiting Picasso written by Jim Barnes and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Barnes’s familiarity with the European poetic traditions has been deepened through long periods spent in France, Germany, and Italy, and through his translations of European poetry. In Visiting Picasso he repays Europe for its gifts to him in a series of poems that evoke the lush poetic history that ties European culture together, sometimes darkly. A heightened sense of place and purpose infuses the poems of Visiting Picasso with meaning drawn from actual landscapes, events, and observations.
Download or read book Theory of Devolution written by David Groff and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With blazing wit and a searing language, David Groff writes fiercely of erosion and endurance in this stunning debut collection. At turns fervent and elegiac, dishy and sly, these poems confront the effect of AIDS and HIV on a brotherhood that dealt firsthand with grief and loss and, later, the tenuous prospect of survival. Peopled with the spirits of dead gay men, uncertain lovers, mortal parents, and spectral friends and brothers, Groff's poems are unified by their preoccupation with what erodes us and what we can hold onto when life and love devolve. Theory of Devolution is a book of balances: alternately passionate and restrained, headlong and meditative, engaged and knowingly detached. David Groff's territory is Chelsea and Fire Island, at the end of a nightmare crisis but nowhere near the end of an epidemic. How, in such times, to speak? These pages give voice to an 'always-dying particular man,' examining the evidence of loss and pleasure and the deep bonds of affection in poems alive with 'an odd crabbed pulse of beauty they refine to true detail.'" -- Mark Doty "David Groff's poems open our attention by a subtle, unflinching love of human being. The live, known past spins sharp and fine in and out of the now of his vision. His language exhilarates." -- Marie Ponsot
Download or read book Lost Wax written by Heather Ramsdell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experiential and analytic, the work of Heather Ramsdell is perceptually acute and sensually resonant. The poems in Heather Ramsdell's book LOST WAX map a metaphysical treasure hunt, here a stick, there a door, a closet, a shirt. As the book unfolds, the accretion of their ascetic values forms an evermore human shape in a symphony of poems that is original and profoundly full of wonder.--James Tate.
Download or read book The Silent Singer written by Len Roberts and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Poetry Series awards, Len Roberts presents his best past work with a sizable collection of new poems.
Download or read book Good Morning and Good Night written by David Wagoner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By continually discovering what's new in each day without forgetting yesterday's surprises, David Wagoner has succeeded in constantly expanding his range in a career that spans more than fifty years. In Good Morning and Good Night, this range includes his usual rich forays into nature and personalities, and poetry for all ages, young and old, amidst a vivid array of memories and explorations. Readers will find homages to the poets that have inspired him, as well as the bountiful lyricism that has made Wagoner's poetry one of our most enduring sources of delight and joy. Good Morning and Good Night features poems previously published in American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, New Letters, The New Republic, Poetry, Shenandoah, Southern Review, The Yale Review, and other leading literary journals.
Download or read book Pursuit of a Wound written by Sydney Lea and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-winner of the prestigious Poets' Prize for his collection To the Bone, Sydney Lea is known for his mastery of the narrative style and his clear and unwavering vision of the natural world and humanity's place in it. His latest work, Pursuit of a Wound, is marked by this acuity and by his uncanny ear for language as well as his willingness to speak for the unlucky and the dispossessed. Delving in equal measure into the flinty northern New England landscape and the exiled souls of ordinary people, Pursuit of a Wound moves beyond Lea's previous work to explore new poetic strategies, including some that approach prose poetry. Combining a free-ranging sensibility akin to Whitman's with a keen attention to verse's formal possibilities, this collection of twenty-eight new poems evokes a beautiful and threatened place and ratifies Lea's status as heir-apparent to Robert Frost.
Download or read book The Ways We Touch written by Miller Williams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in The Ways We Touch, Miller Williams's twelfth volume of poetry, range from reminiscences of old love to meditations on the relationship between God and human beings to reflections on English poetry and children's stories. Throughout, Williams's poems use small scenes from daily life, drawing from them ruminations about life itself. They may be nostalgic or challenging, humorous or full of moral fortitude; always Williams speaks with the kind of insight that rises from wisdom and experience.
Download or read book Renunciation written by Corey Marks and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renunciation introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air." The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.
Download or read book So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until it Breaks written by Rigoberto González and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astonishing new talent, Rigoberto González writes with a clarity of the senses that pulls the reader into a marvelous and unfamiliar world. The sidewalk preacher, the umbrella salesman, the nurse on the graveyard shift, the professional mourner-- all allow González a clandestine glimpse of their lives. Crackling with the dry electricity of the desert and flashing with the brilliant colors of Mexico, González's poems are rooted in the fertile soil beneath poverty's dust, the border's violence, and longing's desolation.
Download or read book The Welcome written by David Friedman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fables for the modern age
Download or read book The Wild Card written by Karl Shapiro and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Supported by a grant from the Eric Mathieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets.
Download or read book Shiva s Drum written by Stephen Cramer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Departing from simple observations of the people and setting around him-- neighbors, friends, and lovers in New York City--Stephen Cramer's Shiva's Drum explores personal and familial relationships set to the rhythms of jazz in an urban landscape. Though comfortable at the edge, these poems deal with reality and move forward by transforming pain into beauty.
