Download or read book Iowa s Best Emerging Poets 2019 written by Z Publishing House and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-12 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Home to the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop where aspiring writers perfect their craft, Iowa has much to offer. Under azure skies that cover endless acres of farmland, Iowans have worked the land for generations. In the rich soil of this wondrous state, it's not just crops that grow. The hopes and dreams of its people do so as well. Residents and visitors alike are treated with equal kindness in Iowa, where poetry is always in the air. And in Iowa's Best Emerging Poets 2019, 28 up-and-coming poets have their share their own visions, hopes, and words. Covering a wide array of topics ranging from love and heartbreak, family and friendship, the inherent beauty of nature, and so much more, these young talents will amaze you. Containing one poem per poet, this anthology is a compelling introduction to the great wordsmiths of tomorrow.
Download or read book Lyrical Iowa 2019 written by and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of 381 poems by Iowans of all ages, chosen from poems submitted to Iowa Poetry Association's annual contest. This 2019 edition is a perfect-bound book of 178 pages with a full-color cover.
Download or read book A Lucky Man written by Jamel Brinkley and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
Download or read book All Is Forgotten Nothing Is Lost A Novel written by Lan Samantha Chang and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-09-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting story of art, ambition, love, and friendship by a writer of elegant, exacting prose.
Download or read book The Abridged History of Rainfall written by Jay Hopler and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.
Download or read book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers written by Yiyun Li and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose. “Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives. “After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations. These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.
Download or read book I Always Carry My Bones written by Felicia Zamora and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Home is a complex ideation for many POC and migrant peoples. I Always Carry My Bones explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging-a belonging inside and outside the flesh. Space-making requires a clawing at the atrocities of today's social injustices. Space-making requires a dismantling of violent systems against brown and black bodies. Home is the place where the horrid and beautiful intertwine and carve a being into existence. At times, the reaction is recoil: "biomimicry-how I adapt away/ from you-biomimicry-as if to chant my way/ into something worthy of your affection." At other times, the reaction is love: "if we fracture a system long enough/ our voices build/ a neoteric system/ with our voices inside." The voices in these poems are never truly singular. POC, trans/queer individuals and all marginalized people hold evolutionary revolutions in our cells. In language and elements, we are a collective. Survival held in our adaptation-another action that culls from us. We summon the magic inside of us to create a world in which we see ourselves beyond the death expected of us. We pray to our own tongues to conjure ourselves into existence. This book longs for a sanctuary of self-the dwelling of initial energy needed for our collective fight for human rights"--
Download or read book Reenactments written by Hai-Dang Phan and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reenactments, poet Hai-Dang Phan explores the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as a second-generation Vietnamese American. Woven throughout the poems is a narrative of his family’s exodus from Vietnam that beautifully elucidates the American record of immigration, dislocation, inheritance, and ultimately hope. The poems are persuasively varied in their approach. The past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles, providing bold new perspectives. And, in a fresh move, Phan widens the lens, interspersing translations of several other contemporary Vietnamese poems to the mix. This subtle and moving debut is an important addition to the literature of immigration.
Download or read book The Best American Poetry 2019 written by David Lehman and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry—“one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets)—now guest edited by Major Jackson, award-winning poet and poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, “The poems...have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today…While readers may question some of the selections—an annual sport with this series—most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology.” The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it—to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, “makes poems that rumble and rock” (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year’s most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.
Download or read book The Most Fun We Ever Had written by Claire Lombardo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • “A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory.” —Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe In this “rich, complex family saga” (USA Today) full of long-buried family secrets, Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of unrest. Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. With the unexpected arrival of young Jonah Bendt—a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before—the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past. As they grapple with years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, they also find the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.
Download or read book The Fire Eater written by Jose Hernandez Diaz and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surreal, playful, and always poignant, the prose poems in Jose Hernandez Diaz’s masterful debut chapbook introduce us to a mime, a skeleton, and the man in the Pink Floyd t-shirt, all of whom explore their inner selves in Hernandez Diaz’s startling and spare style. With nods to Russell Edson and the surrealists, Hernandez Diaz explores the ordinary and the not-so-ordinary occurrences of life, set against the backdrop of the moon, and the poet’s native Los Angeles. The TRP Chapbook Series
Download or read book Homie written by Danez Smith and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY Danez Smith is our president Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.
Download or read book We The Interwoven written by Chuy Renteria and published by . This book was released on 2018-06 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Untold stories from the American heartland of migration, belonging, and home.
Download or read book System of Ghosts written by Lindsay Tigue and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In System of Ghosts, Lindsay Tigue details the way landscape speaks to isolation and personhood, how virtual and lived networks alter experience. She questions how built environments structure lives, how we seek out information within these spaces, and, most fundamentally, how we love. Rooted in the personal, the speaker of this collection moves through society and history, with the aim of firmly placing herself within her own life and loss. Facts become an essential bridge between spatial and historical boundaries. She connects us to the disappearance of species, abandoned structures, and heartbreak—abandoned spaces that tap into the searing grief woven into society’s public places. There is solace in research, one system this collection uses to examine the isolation of contemporary life alongside personal, historical, and ecological loss. While her poems are intimate and personal, Tigue never turns away from the larger contexts within which we all live. System of Ghosts is, at its core, an act of reaching out—across time, space, history, and across the room.
Download or read book How to Be Better by Being Worse written by Justin Jannise and published by New Poets of America. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jannise's Poulin Prize-winning debut poetry collection subverts the self-help genre to celebrate drag culture, queer identity, and breaking the rules.
Download or read book Walking on Cowrie Shells written by Nana Nkweti and published by Black Spot Books. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “boisterous and high-spirited debut” (Kirkus starred review)“that enthralls the reader through their every twist and turn” (Publishers Weekly starred review), named one of the Most Anticipated Books for Brittle Paper, The Millions, and The Rumpus, penned by a finalist for the AKO Caine PrizeIn her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti's virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar,” a pregnant pastor's wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother's traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves.
Download or read book New Poets of the American West written by Lowell Jaeger and published by Many Voices Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Poets of the American West is a panoramic (and revealing) view of the West through the eyes of more than 250 poets and 450 poems, including poems in English, Spanish, Navajo, Salish, Assiniboine, and Dakota languages. In these pages you will visit flea markets, military bases, internment camps, reservations, funerals, weddings, rodeos, nursing homes, national parks, backyard barbecues, prisons, forests, meadows, rivers, and mountain tops. In your ¿mind¿s eye,¿ you will meet a simple-minded girl who gets run over by a bull, two mothers watching a bear menacingly nosing toward unsuspecting children, and children who ¿have yet to be toilet trained out of their souls.¿ You will learn to ¿reach into the sacred womb, / grasp a placid hoof / and coax life toward this certain moment.¿ You¿ll teach poetry to third graders, converse with hitchhikers, lament for an incarcerated brother ¿trying to fill the holes in his soul / with Camel cigarettes / and crude tattoos.¿ You will sit at the kitchen table where perhaps the world will end ¿while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.¿ In the short time each of us has in this world, here¿s your chance to experience life widely and to reflect on your experiences deeply.
