Download or read book I Am Not My Struggles Poems written by Randell Adjei and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-03 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an unflinching eye, an extraordinary ear, and a story as timely as any on the nightly news, poet Randell Adjei brings us I AM NOT MY STRUGGLES, a collection of poetry so honest and beautiful you won't want to put it down. Randell Adjei's is a story of a reckless youth, early incarceration and the lessons learned, and, above all, resilience. Randell Adjei writes to know himself and to redeem himself, as well as to honor his mother, her homeland, and all the young people who come after him. The energy in I AM NOT MY STRUGGLES in infectious; once you begin the first poem you?ll find yourself rapt until the very last word of the book. I AM NOT MY STRUGGLES is an urgent and necessary poetry collection, arriving at just the moment we need it most.
Download or read book You Better Be Lightning written by Andrea Gibson and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards Gold Medal Winner 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Gold Medal Winner 2022 Over the Rainbow Short List 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist 2021 Bookshop's Indie Press Highlights You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between. One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.
Download or read book Nature Poem written by Tommy Pico and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Download or read book The New World written by Kelly Schirmann and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hybrid collection of poetry and prose, The New World follows the attempts, failures, and re-attempts at understanding and articulating an era of immense social upheaval, political corruption, and environmental consequence. In five distinct sections, the book refracts, explores and investigates these global themes through the realm of the personal and private. Old journals and notes are revisited as a way of understanding the self and its various revisions and mistakes. The New World tells the story of escapism and arrival, growth and decay, and despair and optimism as they occur, often simultaneously, within the mind of our narrator. The book asks, "How do you write poems in a country like this?", inviting every reader to take stock of themselves, and to reassess the ways "One human world / [empties] completely / into the bigger one."
Download or read book Bringing the Shovel Down written by Ross Gay and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2011-01-23 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?
Download or read book Killing the Black Dog written by Les Murray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression. In the months that followed, the "Black Dog" (as he calls it) ruled his life. He raged at his wife and children. He ducked a parking ticket on grounds of insanity, and begged a police officer to shoot him rather than arrest him. For days on end he lay in despair, a state in which, as he puts it precisely, "you feel beneath help." Killing the Black Dog is Murray's recollection of those awful days: brief, pointed, wise, and full of beauty in the way of his poetry. The prose text—delicately balanced between personal and informative—gives a glimpse of the imprint that depression can leave on a life. The accompanying poems show their roots in his crisis—a crisis from which, he reports toward the close of this poignant book, he has fully recovered. "My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment," he recalls. "I no longer wear only stretch-knit clothes and drawstring pants. I no longer come down with bouts of weeping or reasonless exhaustion. And I no longer seek rejection in a belief that only bitterly conceded praise is reliable." Killing the Black Dog is a crucial chapter in the life of an outstanding poet.
Download or read book Firefly July and Other Very Short Poems written by Paul B. Janeczko and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of A Poke in the I and the Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator of A River of Words present a collection of short poems written to demonstrate how a few carefully chosen words and images can invoke powerful messages.
Download or read book Why Poetry written by Matthew Zapruder and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.
Download or read book True Expressions written by Levette Pinkey and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2016-08-11 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True Expressions Everyone has their way of dealing with pain or something that occurs in your life. I love the rain, the thunder, and the lightning. I can’t explain fully what it does to me. But that’s when I have my best moments of writing and creativity. One day I stumbled across my tablet with poems in them, and I thought, Wow I have been doing this for some time now. So I put the poems in order of events in my life. When reading these poems, I thought not only did I express my emotions within in my words but that the words spoken are of truth and not of fiction. Struggles of a Poet In each poem I could see and, most importantly, feel my own struggle, and remembering, this was once real, and today I still face struggles of my past. My desire to be heard and my not knowing if one day my poetry could be heard and if somehow my words could help or touch another. Wise words of my late brother, I remember him saying, “Why do you continue to write in those tablets and then put it in the closet? If you don’t ever invest and believe in yourself first, no one else will, and how will you know if you never try?” I give you my poetry, and within that, I give you my life story of how my passion for writing became true expressions of my life struggles.
Download or read book The Song Poet written by Kao Kalia Yang and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Latehomecomer, a powerful memoir of her father, a Hmong song poet who sacrificed his gift for his children's future in America In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.
Download or read book Why I Wake Early written by Mary Oliver and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2005-04-15 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to wake early.
Download or read book The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon written by Jane Kenyon and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear. She was an exquisite master of the art of poetry.” —Wendell Berry Published twenty-five years after her untimely death, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon presents the essential work of one of America’s most cherished poets—celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace. In their inquisitive explorations and direct language, Jane Kenyon’s poems disclose a quiet certainty in the natural world and a lifelong dialogue with her faith and her questioning of it. As a crucial aspect of these beloved poems of companionship, she confronts her struggle with severe depression on its own stark terms. Selected by Kenyon’s husband, Donald Hall, just before his death in 2018, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon collects work from across a life and career that will be, as she writes in one poem, “simply lasting.”
Download or read book Good Bones written by Maggie Smith and published by Tupelo Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring “Good Bones”—called “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International. Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility, poems that have a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency, and the ability to address a larger world. Maggie Smith's previous books are The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), and three prize-winning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse, 2016), The List of Dangers (Kent State, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poem “Good Bones” has gone viral—tweeted and translated across the world, featured on the TV drama Madam Secretary, and called the “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International, earning news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Guardian, and beyond. Maggie Smith was named the 2016 Ohio Poet of the Year. “Smith's voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark....”—Ada Limón “As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith's poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. 'There is a light,' she tells us, 'and the light is good.'”—D. A. Powell “Good Bones is an extraordinary book. Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible.”—Erin Belieu
Download or read book Good Poems for Hard Times written by and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-08-29 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book is full of strong, memorable poems that stick with readers like a friend during a long, hard night. " - The Christian Science Monitor Here, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and courageous, organized into such resonant headings as "Such As It Is More or Less" and "Let It Spill." From William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman to R. S. Gwynn and Mary Oliver, the voices gathered in this collection will be more than welcome to those who've been struck by bad news, who are burdened by stress, or who simply appreciate the power of good poetry.
Download or read book Madness Rack and Honey written by Mary Ruefle and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is one of the wisest books I've read in years... —New York Times Book Review No writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act—the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back... Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle’s work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that’s vital and welcome, that doesn’t make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon Review Profound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny...These informal talks have far more staying power and verve than most of their kind. Readers may come away dazzled, as well as amused... —Publishers Weekly This is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way. This is a desert island book. —Matthew Dickman The accomplished poet is humorous and self-deprecating in this collection of illuminating essays on poetry, aesthetics and literature... —San Francisco Examiner Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.
Download or read book Snowflake different streets written by Eileen Myles and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New poems that hurtle through time and space from an irrefutable force in American poetry.
