Download or read book Hallelujah Blackout written by Alex Lemon and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2008 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex Lemon's work defies categorization. Stark juxtaposition of images evokes the New York School, verbal collages suggest the associative method of the postmodernists, and his playful attention to sound recalls elements of Language School poetry. While these elements surface in Lemon's work, his poetry remains profoundly original, his voice remarkably distinct. Lemon is also, like Frank O'Hara, an autobiographical poet, using the materials of life for inspiration. At 29, he is already a survivor of brain surgery. Still coping with the surgery's effects, including a gradual loss of vision, he invokes, proclaims, decries, and serenades the world that results after the violation of identity. When the membranes that divide mind and body rupture, the result is not a void, but a strange sensory landscape where all stimuli exist on the same level. Avoiding the easy temptations of both despair and consolation, Hallelujah Blackout embraces the full range of the human experience.
Download or read book The Best American Poetry 2008 written by Charles Wright and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Best American Poetry series is a beloved mainstay of American poetry. This year's edition was edited by one of the most admired and acclaimed poets of his generation, Charles Wright. Known for his meditative and beautiful observations of landscape, change, and time,Wright brings his particular sensibility to this year's anthology, which contains an ecumenical slant that is unprecedented for the series. He has gathered an astonishing selection of work that includes new poems by Carolyn Forché, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, Frederick Seidel, Patti Smith, and Kevin Young and showcases a dazzling array of rising stars like Joshua Beckman, Erica Dawson, and Alex Lemon. With captivating and revelatory notes from the poets on their works and sage and erudite introductory essays by Wright and series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2008 will be read, discussed, debated, and prized for years to come.
Download or read book Happy written by Alex Lemon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was supposed to be the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team. He was the boy getting every girl, the hard-partying kid everyone called Happy. In the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke. For two years Lemon coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse. His charming and carefree exterior masked his self-destructive and sometimes cruel behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and a crippling depression. After undergoing brain surgery, he is nursed back to health by his free-spirited artist mother, who once again teaches him to stand on his own. Alive with unexpected humor and sensuality, Happy is a hypnotic self-portrait of a young man confronting the wreckage of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother’s redemptive and healing powers. Alex Lemon’s Technicolor sentences pop and sing as he writes about survival—of the body and of the human spirit.
Download or read book Fancy Beasts written by Alex Lemon and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California wildfires, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism—in Fancy Beasts, Alex Lemon takes on American media culture, the obscene foil for personal legacies of violence and violation. The poems of this collection are a workout: vigorous and raw, frenetic and fearless. Yet they are also composed and controlled, pared down and sculpted, with a disarming narrative simplicity and directness. Even when dealing with toxic content—including the turning point in a life of abuse, in which the recovering victim/perpetrator puzzles through the paradigm of son-to-husband-to-father—Lemon’s point of view is always genuine and trustworthy. A frank, funny, and inimitably frenetic vision of post-millennial America, Fancy Beasts is a stunning achievement from Alex Lemon.
Download or read book Feverland written by Alex Lemon and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Alex Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.”—Mark Doty Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy. In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one’s history and the angels of one’s better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good? Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.
Download or read book The Wish Book written by Alex Lemon and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To read this book is to meet a man who would climb the sky." —BOB HICOK In his follow-up to Fancy Beasts, a book that “slice[d] straight through nerve and marrow on its way to the heart and mind of the matter” (Tracy K. Smith), Alex Lemon dazzles with his exuberance and candor. Whether in unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload or tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, Lemon blurs the nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. These poems are full of frenetic energy and images pleasantly, strangely colliding: jigsaws and bathtubs and kung-fu and X-rays. A carnival barker calls. A jellyfish celebrates a shaky adulthood. A sliding door shatters with the passing through of a body. And a heart is “ecstatically / Torn apart like Twizzlers.” Lean and muscular, The Wish Book is a collection of fireworks and wild emotion, defined by Lemon’s distinct brand of poetic edginess.
Download or read book The Book of Props written by Wayne Miller and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2009 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narrators in this mesmerizing collection often desire to hold time still -- in moments of love, yes, but also when feeling fully located in a particular place or experience. Yet they also acknowledge that to hold time still would mean the death of love, the death of experience. Thus, the grounding and locating sensory images that surround us -- and the eye that apprehends them -- become greatly important. At the heart of the book is "What Night Says to the Empty Boat," a sequence of lyric poems in which the three main characters -- Justine, Clarence, and Andy -- drift to and from, together and apart, viewed through the dispassionate lens of the unspoken fourth main character. An artistic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world, this stunning collection is a wholehearted embrace of being, where technique and subject come together in a remarkable combination of personal lyric and formal innovation.
Download or read book The Play S the Thing written by Kathleen Keena and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2015-04-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Play's the Thing: The Theatrical Collaboration of Clark Bowlen and Kathleen Keena, 1988-2012 Kathleen Keena iUniverse, 187 pages, (paperback) $17.95, 978-1-4917-6151-9 (Reviewed: June 2015) The Play's the Thing is Kathleen Keena's theater diary starting at Manchester Community College in Connecticut, 1988, where she meets theater chair Clark Bowlen. They collaborate (and eventually marry) until Bowlen's death at age 70. We follow their productions from academia to community to independent theater, as Keena directs while Bowlen designs sets and lighting. Keenas narrative takes a close look at individual plays. Including such productions as The Glass Menagerie, The Taming of the Shrew, The Rainmaker, Desire Under the Elms, and Buried Child, she breaks her discussion of each into categories: Background, Synopsis, Challenges, Actors. The author is incisive, articulate, and effective as she examines the thought process behind each play. While exploring The Glass Menagerie, she notes: Tennessee Williams' works are infused with fragile Southern belles, crumbling plantations, inarticulate males, sexual ambiguity, and a lyrical quality with a remorseful tone. She goes on to explain her vision of the piece, Bowlen's ideas for the set, any obstacles to the success of the production, and techniques she uses to prepare her cast. Readers arent likely to find a more absorbing, compelling account of theatrical production. Keena and Bowlen always took chances, pushing boundaries and rethinking traditional parameters to facilitate access to the audience, whether it was making the family home of Buried Child transparent or moving The Importance of Being Earnest to America on the verge of The Great Depression. The author shares interesting details about bringing one's interpretation of the script to the stage, while intertwining her professional evolution with her husband's. The Play's the Thing offers pleasurable, dynamic reading for anybody who enjoys understanding how a show is built from the ground up. Also available as an ebook.
Download or read book Joyful Noise written by Tim Slover and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Frederick Handel is in trouble: his last opera flopped, he is no longer in favor with King George II and preachers are raging that his latest work is blasphemous. In this climate, he struggles to present "The Messiah." Handel's travails are linked with those of his leading soprano. Forced into retirement because of a scandal, she is slated to make her comeback in his new masterpiece and fears a nasty reception. A malicious, back stabbing alternate is waiting in the wings to replace her. A devious bishop and Handel's bulky librettist add to the conflict in this true story of the politics and passion that nearly prevented "The Messiah" from ever being performed.
Download or read book The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever readers copy written by Joe Marshall and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-11-10 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get a readers copy of the script for the Off-Broadway smash hit THE GAYEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER! It's time for the annual holiday production for a struggling gay theatre company in West Hollywood. Jim, the pot-smoking straight tech guy, offends M&M, the eclectic playwright, causing him to walk out and take his script with him. Now the crazy and drama-addicted team has just a few weeks to product the ""gayest Christmas pageant ever."" This holiday camp-fest is as fast-paced comedy packed with hilarious dialog and over-the-top characters. From award-winning playwright Joe Marshall ('Dirty Secrets, ' 'A Night in Vegas, ' 'A Waning Gibbous Moon').
Download or read book Seedlip and Sweet Apple written by Arra Lynn Ross and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seamlessly bridging the material and spiritual worlds, Seedlip and Sweet Apple takes the reader into the mind of a true visionary: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religion in colonial America. With astonishingly original poems inspired by extensive historical research, Arra Lynn Ross creates a collection linked thematically through the voice and story of the woman who was believed by her followers to be Christ incarnate. Broadly and inclusively spiritual, this remarkable debut captures the ineffable experience of ecstatic vision, activating the progression from literal reality to heightened perception. Simultaneously, this journey delves into the manifold issues of gender and religion, public image, and charismatic leadership, as well as the line between cult and commune and the tenuous bond between faith and behavior. Written in an impressive cornucopia of forms including iambic quatrains, free verse, and prose poems Seedlip and Sweet Apple honors a complex figure startlingly relevant to contemporary life, pointing to a revolutionary way to work at living and to live in working that promises simplicity, peace, and joy.
Download or read book Pebble Lake Review written by Amanda Auchter, editor and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Superfecta written by Clay Matthews and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. SUPERFECTA examines our relation to time and memory with surprising energy and consistent empathy. The tension between systems and chance connect the collections' poems, balanced as they are between the abstractions of symbol and the immediacy of language. For Matthews, there is a thin line dividing the body's physicality and the wonder of the mind, where "The cartography of a rat is the same for all species/ in that it is always a map of the unknown." Matthews writes about our desire to identify mythos in everyday experience, and celebrates when it is discovered amid our anxious and uncertain place in history.
Download or read book Beauty is a Verb written by Sheila Black and published by Cinco Puntos Press. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chosen by the American Library Association as a 2012 Notable Book in Poetry. Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both. Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace. "[BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." —Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree "This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other.”“br />—Publishers Weekly, starred review From "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries: How else can I quench this thirst? My lips travel down your spine, drink the smoothness of your skin. I am searching for the core: What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the laws of nature be defied? Your body tells me: come close. But beauty distances even as it draws me near. What does my body want from yours? My twisted legs around your neck. You bend me back. Even though you can't give the bones at birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside. You give me—what? Peeling back my skin, you expose my missing bones. And my heart, long before you came, just as broken. I don't know who to blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my body doesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. If innocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful. Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship. Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school. Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.
Download or read book Zone 3 written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ridley Plays 1 written by Philip Ridley and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-01-16 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains Ridley's first three plays, which heralded the arrival of a unique and disturbing voice in the world of contemporary drama. They are seminal works in the development of the 'in yer face' theatre that emerged in Britain during the mid-1990s.The three plays here all manifest Ridley's vivid and visionary imagination and the dark beauty of his outlook. They resonate with his trademark themes: East London, storytelling, moments of shocking violence, memories of the past, fantastical monologues, and that strange mix of the barbaric and the beautiful he has made all his own. The Pitchfork Disney was Ridley's first play and is now seen as launching a new generation of playwrights who were unafraid to shock and court controversy. This unsettling, dreamlike piece has surreal undertones and thematically explores fear, dreams and story-telling. The Fastest Clock in the Universe is a multi-award-winning play which caused a sensation when it premiered at Hampstead Theatre in 1992. An edgy and provocative drama, it is now regarded as a contemporary classic. Ghost from a Perfect Place is a scorchingly nasty blend of comedy, spectacle and terror where a monster from the past meets the monsters of the present. The volume contains the definitive version of the plays, plus an extended and updated introduction and three monologues (Bloodshot, Angry and Voosh), published here for the first time.
