Download or read book Furious Lullaby written by Oliver de la Paz and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2007-09-25 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Furious Lullaby is both a celebration of and a eulogy to the body in the twenty-first century. The collection, which examines the larger concepts of salvation and temptation in a world of blossoming strife, includes a series of aubades – dramatic poems culminating with the separation of lovers at dawn. The lovers suffer a metaphysical crisis, seeking to know what is good, what is evil, and how to truly know the difference. Knowing, however, invites the terrible into their world. The Devil, a seductive trickster, haunts the landscape as a voice who dares each inquisitor to learn about mortality, morality, the beautiful, and the unspeakable through direct experience. Furious Lullaby offers a departure from the lighter prose poetry of de la Paz’s Names above Houses and preserves the author’s concern with the nature of human grace.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater written by Wenying Xu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.
Download or read book Terra Nova written by Cynthia Huntington and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, Balcones Poetry Prize, 2017 In this bold and ambitious book-length poem, National Book Award finalist Cynthia Huntington explores exile and migration—what it means to lose, seek, and find home in all its iterations—through a polyphonic work, written in multiple voices and evoking the method of Hart Crane’s The Bridge or the Nighttown episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet it is also a tough and vernacular work, owing as much to Patti Smith and the Clash as it does to High Modernism. Again and again the work shows us outsiders forced into metaphorical and literal wildernesses, whether in a retelling of the biblical Israelites lost in the desert or in stories from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the new world struggles into being at the edge of the sea. Yet the voices here, across many times and places, refuse to give in to desolation and despair. Huntington’s approach is hybrid, oscillating between verse and lyrical prose to create a work that falls somewhere between an epic poem and a collection of lyric essays. Whether chronicling the creation of the world and the first exile from the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden or imagining the terror and thrill of the first sea voyages, this is electric poetry: challenging, startling, and fulfilling.
Download or read book American Indians and Popular Culture written by Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-02-22 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are still fascinated by the romantic notion of the "noble savage," yet know little about the real Native peoples of North America. This two-volume work seeks to remedy that by examining stereotypes and celebrating the true cultures of American Indians today. The two-volume American Indians and Popular Culture seeks to help readers understand American Indians by analyzing their relationships with the popular culture of the United States and Canada. Volume 1 covers media, sports, and politics, while Volume 2 covers literature, arts, and resistance. Both volumes focus on stereotypes, detailing how they were created and why they are still allowed to exist. In defining popular culture broadly to include subjects such as print advertising, politics, and science as well as literature, film, and the arts, this work offers a comprehensive guide to the important issues facing Native peoples today. Analyses draw from many disciplines and include many voices, ranging from surveys of movies and discussions of Native authors to first-person accounts from Native perspectives. Among the more intriguing subjects are the casinos that have changed the economic landscape for the tribes involved, the controversy surrounding museum treatments of American Indians, and the methods by which American Indians have fought back against pervasive ethnic stereotyping.
Download or read book Persephone in America written by Alison Townsend and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2009-02-25 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Persephone in America, Alison Townsend deftly weaves autobiography with myth in this reinvention of the tale of Demeter and Persephone as seen from the modern woman’s perspective. Fraught with emotional honesty, this captivating collection of lyrical and narrative poems chronicles the struggles of the figurative Persephone in three parts—the abduction, descent to the underworld, and return. Townsend turns a shrewd eye to her own experiences, as well as to the lives of other women, to offer an unflinching yet deeply compassionate exploration of such themes as girlhood and the vulnerability of the motherless; the demons of depression, addiction, and abuse; as well as passion, aging, and celebration of the natural world. Although the poems traverse dark emotional territory at times, the picture that emerges ultimately is one of revelation and wisdom. Persephone in America is above all a journey of the soul, following the narrator as she explores what it means to be a woman in America, at times descending into darkness, only to emerge into redemption and realize “time’s sweet and invincible secret—that everything repeats—and we watch it.” Townsend’s candid portrait of female loss and discovery seeks to illuminate the truths inherent in myth, and the awakenings that hide in our darkest moments. Persephone, Pretending (Madison, Wisconsin) When the news says that the girl who had been missing almost four days, only to be found in a marshy area at the edge of our medium-sized city, was faking it all along, I wondered what made her do it. I'd seen her face—bright smile, dark eyes— on a flier masking-taped to a pillar at the airport the week before, felt the involuntary frisson of the curious, then only fear at the thought of a girl abducted in this place once voted "America's most livable city." She must have wanted something she couldn't name, that good girl with good grades who looks like so many girls in my own classes, but who keeps changing her story. It happened here; no, it happened there; no, I really just wanted to be alone. Then she turns her face away, tired of telling her tale, not sure what to make up next or where invention will take her. “Fictitious victimization disorder,” Time magazine claims, but I wonder what else, imagining her in the marsh, cold, unrepentant, powerless, her mind gone muddy with lack of sleep, no way out of this lie she almost believes, or the lies ahead, nothing but memory of the rope, duct tape, cough medicine, and knife she bought at the PDQ with her own cash, wanting to be taken by someone so badly, she takes us, she does it to herself.
Download or read book Salt Moon written by Noel Crook and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize Co-Winner, Julie Suk Prize Finalist, INDIEFAB Book fo the Year Throughout Salt Moon, Noel Crook forges the kind of tragic vision Howard Nemerov described as the mark of our finest poets: drawing on myth and memory, Crook’s fierce lyrics reveal a world that is at once “hopeless and beautiful . . . giving equal emphasis to both words.” Sacrifice and betrayal, parental love and patricide, unleashed desire and cornered despair—these antitheses fuel Crook’s Ovidian imagination, which ranges freely from Comanche raids in Texas to a slave plantation in North Carolina, from a carpet maker in Istanbul to beggars in Delhi, from her daughter’s hospital room to the war in Iraq. Rendered in unforgettable images, Salt Moon is that rare book which grows richer with each reading.
Download or read book Kartika Review 2011 Anthology written by Christine Lee Zilka and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-01-13 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kartika Review's 2011 Anthology of Asian Pacific Islander American Literature. Read past issues at www.kartikareview.com.
Download or read book Hijra written by Hala Alyan and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Islam, hijra refers to the Prophet Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina; the term has come to mean any exodus. Bearing witness to the testimony of immigration--not only the poet's but also that of her family--the poems in the collection create a dialogue between the two worlds of migration"--
Download or read book Vanishing Acts written by Brian Barker and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vanishing Acts, Brian Barker cements his reputation as one of contemporary poetry’s great surrealists. These prose poems read like dreams and nightmares, fables and myths. With a dark whimsicality, Barker explores such topics as extinction, power, class, the consequences of tyranny and war, and the ongoing destruction of the environment in the name of progress. A linked sequence of poems forms the book’s backbone, with an oracular voice from the future heralding the return—or hoped for return—of common animals. Part lyrical odes, part creation myths, part excerpts from a bizarre guide for naturalists, these poems mix fact and fiction, science and fable to create an unsettling vision of a dystopian world stricken by extinction, one where the world’s last catfish sleeps “in the shadow of a hydroelectric dam.” The imaginative language and bizarre stories of these poems are perfectly suited to capture a world that no longer makes sense: a man who wears a toupee to hide an injury inflicted by secret police, a group of villagers who make a bad bargain with a land agent. The poems in Vanishing Acts straddle the comic and the tragic. They are by turns funny and haunting and ripe with scathing satire. They draw on the genres of speculative and science fiction as much as poetic traditions, and speak to the precarious state of man and the natural world in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Oblivio Gate written by Sean Nevin and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suffused with lyrical grace and the language of loss, Sean Nevin's Oblivio Gate explores the mental and emotional struggles of Solomon, a veteran battling the onslaught of Alzheimer's disease. Set against Solomon's memories of the Korean War, Nevin's poems draw us into an intimate view of a man's confusion as everything he knows slowly unravels around him, leaving him abandoned in the suddenly unfamiliar landscape of his own mind. Readers experience first- hand Solomon's dismay as he watches himself inexorably slip away from reality, fighting to hold on to the shreds of his identity. Intertwined with his perspective are the voices of loved ones and caregivers who can only watch helplessly as Solomon is ravaged by the illness. Also central to the collection are the figures of Aurora and Tithonus, the famously doomed couple of mythology whose own happiness was destroyed by the inevitability of age and the betrayal of the body. But if this evocative portrait of Alzheimer's disease is tragic, it is also at moments inspiring. Oblivio Gate reveals not only what is lost, but also what is found, what is pure, and even what is funny in our fleeting lives. Ultimately, Sean Nevin crafts an unforgettable collection of contemporary poetry that yields heartbreaking insight into memory, the mind, and an affliction that has left millions lost and looking for themselves.
Download or read book On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year written by Lee Ann Roripaugh and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2009-10-14 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lady Murasaki wrote in The Tale of Genji that thirty-seven is “a dangerous year” for women. Evoking the styles of Murasaki and other women writers of the Heian-period Japanese court, Lee Ann Roripaugh presents a collection of confessional poems charting the course of that perilous year. Roripaugh, in both an homage to and a dialogue with women writers of the past, explores the trials of women facing the treacherous waters of time while losing none of the grace and decadence of femininity. Often calling upon the passing of the seasons and revelations of nature, these lyrically elegant poems chronicle the dangers and delights of a range of issues facing contemporary women—from bisexuality and biracial culture and identity, to restless nights and lingering memories of the past. The pleasures of the senses collide with parallels of time and the natural world; tangible solitude lies down beside wistful memories of relationships gone by. What is ultimately revealed is both heartbreaking and illuminating. At once provocative, humorous, and bittersweet, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year is a pillow book for the twenty-first century, providing a candid and whimsical look into the often tumultuous universe of the modern woman.
Download or read book Poetry written by Amorak Huey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fully revamped and expanded, this second edition offers a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing poetry. Mapping out 38 foundational elements of poetry including image, line, point of view, metaphor, movement, and music, authors Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko use these elements as starting points for discussion questions and writing prompts. The book guides readers through a range of poetic modes and styles such as: o Elegies and Odes o Found poems o Aubades and Nocturnes o Documentary and Protest poems o Ars Poetica o Lyric and Narrative poems o Personas and Portraits With a focus on contemporary poems, the anthology features a truly diverse and global line-up of poets and poems to illustrate the elements and craft discussed in the book. Featuring all-new chapters on traditional poetic forms, prosody, writing poems that engage the current moment, and the value and ethics of imitation, this is the ultimate companion to studying and practicing the craft of poetry.
Download or read book Millennial Teeth written by Dan Albergotti and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-18 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both bleak and bewildering, Millennial Teeth, the visceral new collection by poet Dan Albergotti, maps a contradictory journey filled with longing and dread, cynicism and hope. A heady mix of traditional forms and more experimental verse, Albergotti’s volume lures readers inexorably into the poet’s obsessions with mystery, doubt, ephemerality, and silence. The poetry in Millennial Teeth will feel both refreshingly new and strangely familiar to Albergotti’s audience. Some poems pay direct tribute to such literary luminaries as Wallace Stevens and Philip Larkin, while others give nods to icons of pop culture, from Radiohead to Roman Polanski. The narrator muses on the resurrection of Christina the Astonishing, the works of Coleridge, and the mindless duties of minor players in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Yet these familiar faces are not our friends; they are juxtaposed with the heartbreaking apocalypses, both natural and man-made, that have plagued the world since the first plane flew into the World Trade Center. A reluctant witness to such events, the narrator of these poems attempts to navigate his own personal crises, including the mental illness and dementia of loved ones and the inability to connect with others, from the darkness of a personal orbit far from the sun. As he vehemently rejects the notions of religious succor, immortality, and the passive acceptance of fate, he simultaneously yearns to be proven wrong. Yet despite his trials, Albergotti’s narrator maintains a gallows humor and wry insight that balance his despair. A riveting exploration of the all-too-human struggle between faith and doubt, skepticism and obsession, Millennial Teeth has both heart and bite in plenty.
Download or read book Incarnate Grace written by Moira Linehan and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Incarnate Grace, poet Moira Linehan explores, questions, and ultimately celebrates her attempt to live in the present after learning she has breast cancer. Vivid and compelling, Incarnate Grace finds beauty in the worst of circumstances and redemption in the fabric of daily life.
Download or read book Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing written by Charif Shanahan and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award In this affecting poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.” With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an uncompromising exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.
Download or read book Errata written by Lisa Fay Coutley and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A finely wrought poetry collection about love, loss, and the will to continue in the face of adversity and struggle"--
Download or read book The Winter s Tale Paraphrased written by Curtis Mosley and published by Cambridge Fidelity. This book was released on 2023-09 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Winter's Tale, Paraphrased. This book converts William Shakespeare's famous play into contemporary English. Modern terms and language replace the renowned playwright's antiquated references and phrases. You don't need to dig up obscure expressions to understand the gist of Shakespeare's dialogue. The impact remains intact without all the baggage. This paraphrasing demystifies the archaic lingo of the 1600's but retains the spice of Shakespeare's cut-and-thrust dialogue and raucous comedy. It is easy to read but hard to put down. Additionally, 90 pictures set the stage for the time when kings, queens, and noblemen ruled the land. These vivid images, most of which are masterpieces, frame the successes and failures of the story’s heroes, villains, and fumbling stooges. The old becomes alive, tangible and tasty. You will be refreshed and enlightened to discover this window to the author and his acclaimed tragicomedy. It brings the charm and panache of long ago to modern times. "The Winter's Tale, Paraphrased" is a friend to all who love the stage and entertaining adventures.
