Download or read book How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems written by Mikeas Sánchez and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant. “I am woman and I celebrate every vein,” she writes, “where I guard my ancestors’ secrets / every Zoque man’s word in my mouth / every Zoque woman’s wisdom in my spit.” How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love. Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.
Download or read book In Accelerated Silence written by Brooke Matson and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Anguished and unblinking . . . Accomplished poetry that will move those who have sorrowed—that is, everyone.” —Library Journal “The thin knife that severed your tumor,” writes Brooke Matson in these poems, “it cleaves me still.” What to do when a world is split—terribly, wholly—by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time? Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries—between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge, “now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a robe,” only to find it has continued “full and flourishing and larger than before.” Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence—selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring. “Blends chemistry, astrophysics, light, and time with grief, mystery, resilience, and love into some truly gorgeous poems that you don’t have to be a scientist (or a poetry nerd) to love.” —Electric Literature
Download or read book Beautiful Zero written by Jennifer Willoughby and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From love and war to Shark Week and college football, this award-winning poetry collection “makes both the marvelous and quotidian buzz with brilliance” (Matt Rasmussen). Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like “a knife you don’t see coming.” A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos. A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because after all, “Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are.” Winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry
Download or read book Rise and Float written by Brian Tierney and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.
Download or read book Bodega written by Su Hwang and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Winner of the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents’ bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work. In Su Hwang’s rich lyrical and narrative poetics, the bodega and its surrounding neighborhoods are cast not as mere setting, but as an ecosystem of human interactions where a dollar passed from one stranger to another is an act of peaceful revolution, and desperate acts of violence are “the price / of doing business in the projects where we / were trapped inside human cages—binding us / in a strange circus where atoms of haves / and have-nots always forcefully collide.” These poems also reveal stark contrasts in the domestic lives of immigrants, as the speaker’s own family must navigate the many personal, cultural, and generational chasms that arise from having to assume a hyphenated identity—lending a voice to the traumatic toll invisibility, assimilation, and sacrifice take on so many pursuing the American Dream. “We each suffer alone in / tandem,” Hwang declares, but in Bodega, she has written an antidote to this solitary hurt—an incisive poetic debut that acknowledges and gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, suggesting frameworks for how we might collectively move forward with awareness and compassion.
Download or read book Worldly Things written by Michael Kleber-Diggs and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry “Sometimes,” Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.” In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.” Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics. Additional Recognition: A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021" A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021" A Reader's Digest "14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now" Selection A Books Are Magic "Recommended Reading" Selection An Indie Gift Guide 2021 Indie Next Selection
Download or read book The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz written by and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1578, during months of imprisonment for his reformist beliefs, San Juan de la Cruz composed a series of narrative poems inspired by the Biblical Song of Songs—and, the story goes, a popular love song overheard from his cramped cell—that take God as the beloved. Erotically charged, initially scandalous, his mystical poetry engages with the journey of the soul through the darkest trenches of suffering and despair toward an enlightened spiritual connection with God. For hundreds of years, these poems have resonated deeply with those who search for meaning in the dark, and have influenced generations of poets, artists, and philosophers. This bilingual edition of the Complete Poems—including “Dark Night” and both the Sanlúcar and Jaén manuscripts of “Spiritual Canticle”—presents an intimate and exceptionally collaborative new translation from María Baranda and Paul Hoover. Baranda, one of the most distinguished Mexican poets of her generation, lends her deft hand with expansive, meditative poetry. Hoover—the accomplished American poet, editor, and translator—offers his dexterity with form and the possibilities of language. The product is uniquely faithful to image and idea, and loyal to the ecstatic lyricism of this canonical text. A volume that hums with the soul’s longing to find solace, The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz is a collection to be treasured.
Download or read book Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night written by Joyce Sidman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2010-09-06 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Come feel the cool and shadowed breeze, come smell your way among the trees, come touch rough bark and leathered leaves: Welcome to the night. Welcome to the night, where mice stir and furry moths flutter. Where snails spiral into shells as orb spiders circle in silk. Where the roots of oak trees recover and repair from their time in the light. Where the porcupette eats delicacies—raspberry leaves!—and coos and sings. Come out to the cool, night wood, and buzz and hoot and howl—but do beware of the great horned owl—for it’s wild and it’s windy way out in the woods!
Download or read book A Different Distance written by Marilyn Hacker and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Indie Next Selection for December 2021 A Ms. Magazine Recommended Read for Fall 2021 In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr—living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time—began a correspondence in verse. Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of tōki and tōza: this season, this session. Here, from the “plague spring,” through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Naïr’s renga charts the “differents and sames” of a now-shared experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity persists—even thrives—in the face of a strange new kind of isolation. Between “ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones,” there’s cancer and chemotherapy and the aches of an aging body. There is grief for the loss of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States, Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where we all are “mere atoms of water, / each captained by protons of hydrogen, hurtling earthward.” At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history.
Download or read book Return Flight written by Jennifer Huang and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between. When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold. Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past. Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”
Download or read book Solve for Desire written by Caitlin Bailey and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A debut poetry collection exploring the real lives of siblings Georg and Grete Trakl while addressing themes of desire, addiction, loss, and absence. Georg Trakl is one of the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century. Less is known about his sister, Grete: also gifted, also addicted to drugs, and dead by her own hand three years after Georg’s overdose. But in Solve for Desire—selected by Srikanth Reddy as the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Caitlin Bailey summons Grete from the shadows. At once sensual and acidic, obsessive and bereft, the Grete of these poems is a fairy-tale sister leaving “missives dropped around the city, crumbs / for your ghost.” Can one person be addicted to another? Can two souls be twinned, and where does that leave the physical? How do we solve for desire when the object we adore disappears—and how does the poet solve and resolve the past, its wounds and its absences? “Each time I write your name,” Bailey writes, “a key / turns somewhere in a lock.” Like the “perfect red burst” of poppies and of blood, these poems are a blooming, keening exploration of desire between brother and sister, poet and subject, the living and the dead. Praise for Solve for Desire “The work of a poet who sings, boldly, across the distances between us.” —Srikanth Reddy “A sobering look at desire, addiction, loss, and absence in this debut collection of short, lyric poems that are by turns lush and understated, lofty and plainspoken. . . . She performs a kind of feminist resuscitation of the lesser-known Grete, focusing on small moments of quiet, grief, lust, and memory, and fleshing out a story that is still disputed” —Publishers Weekly “This precarious, satisfyingly disjointed debut collection of poetry captures the spirit of the [Trakl] siblings. . . . Bailey’s brilliantine lyrics shine brightest when the siblings’ characters are wrought in full relief.” —Booklist
Download or read book Cold Pastoral written by Rebecca Dunham and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY) A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time—and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral. In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources—poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where “I can’t see the bugs; I don’t hear the birds”—Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. “I owe him,” she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, “must learn, at last, how to look.” Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.
Download or read book Imaginary Conversations and Poems A Selection written by Walter Savage Landor and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This captivating book contains a unique mix of dialogues and poems. The dialogues are fictional conversations between historical figures, such as Queen Elizabeth and Cecil, Essex and Spenser, Diogenes and Plato, Dante and Beatrice, and even Oliver Cromwell and Sir Oliver Cromwell. The poems cover a range of topics and include titles like 'Fiesole Idyl', 'To Charles Dickens', and 'The Lover'.
Download or read book The Kissing of Kissing written by Hannah Emerson and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent¬—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps. In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.” With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.
Download or read book Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes written by Nicky Beer and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”? Nicky Beer’s latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books—and her personal one, too—in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious. Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini’s operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation—but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they’re right. “Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music.” Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one—or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both—together, they might contribute to something like truth.
Download or read book Thrown in the Throat written by Benjamin Garcia and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unabashed celebration of complexity in queerness and gender, an arresting snapshot of survival and a triumphant reclamation of language.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review) “Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages.” And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with. With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive. “Angry, tender, and resounding with the speech of flowers, birds, and diamonds, every syllable carries a glorious charge.” —The Boston Globe, “Best Books of 2020” “Electrifying . . . explores unrepentant sexual desire, interrogates fraught familial relationships, and examines our troubled cultural moment.” —Lambda Literary
Download or read book The Star By My Head written by Malena Mörling and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, this breathtaking anthology features eight of Sweden’s most highly regarded poets. From Edith Södergran to Gunnar Ekelöf to Nobel Prize-winning Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world. In the poems of The Star by My Head, which begin in the early twentieth century and come up to the present day, pinecones cluster out of reach and lilacs attempt their tentative rebirth each year. A bee makes a face like a newborn’s. A name etched in vapor on a windowpane, and its erasure, brings happiness. With exquisite translations by internationally acclaimed poets and translators Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström offered alongside the Swedish originals, The Star by My Head is an essential bilingual volume and the premiere American anthology of its kind.
