Download or read book Kindertotenwald written by Franz Wright and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet. In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. “Take everything,” Wright suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.” With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.
Download or read book The Soul Is a Stranger in This World written by Micah Mattix and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soul Is a Stranger in This World is a timely examination of some of the best modern and contemporary poets and a trenchant defense of poetry as a narrative, musical, and theological art. While it is common today to view the poet as a revolutionary, who breaks old forms in the name of aesthetic and political freedom, this volume begins with the classical view of the poet “as a man speaking to men,” as Wordsworth put it. Poetry may challenge and shock, but it also consoles, probing the contours of the human soul in a broken world. Collected from essays and reviews first published in The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Books and Culture, First Things, and other outlets, the volume traces these concerns in the work of modern masters such as Rilke and Eliot, avant-garde exemplars like André du Bouchet and Basil Bunting, and contemporary writers such as Dana Gioia and Franz Wright.
Download or read book Walking to Martha s Vineyard written by Franz Wright and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours,– / but the world / will be filled with the living.” In prayerlike poems he invokes the one “who spoke the world / into being” and celebrates a dazzling universe–snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September sunflower, the planet adrift in a blizzard of stars, the simple mystery of loving other people. As Wright overcomes a natural tendency toward loneliness and isolation, he gives voice to his hope for “the only animal that commits suicide,” and, to our deep pleasure, he arrives at a place of gratitude that is grounded in the earth and its moods.
Download or read book Earlier Poems of Franz Wright written by Franz Wright and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The haunting collection of poems that gathers the first four books of Pulitzer winner Franz Wright under one cover, where “fans old and new will find a feast amid famine” (Publishers Weekly), and discover how large this poet’s gift was from the start.
Download or read book Handwriting written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tumultuous, vibrant, tragic and over too soon." --Newsday Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje's first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. The exquisite poems collected here draw on history, mythology, landscape, and personal memories to weave a rich tapestry of images that reveal the longing for--and expose the anguish over--lost loves, homes, and language, as the poet contemplates scents and gestures and evokes a time when "handwriting occurred on waves, / on leaves, the scripts of smoke" and remembers a woman's "laughter with its / intake of breath. Uhh huh." Crafted with lyrical delicacy and seductive power, Handwriting reminds us of Michael Ondaatje's stature as one of the finest poets writing today.
Download or read book God s Silence written by Franz Wright and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this luminous new collection of poems, Franz Wright expands on the spiritual joy he found in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. Wright, whom we know as a poet of exquisite miniatures, opens God’s Silence with “East Boston, 1996,” a powerful long poem that looks back at the darker moments in the formation of his sensibility. He shares his private rules for bus riding (“No eye contact: the eyes of the terrified / terrify”), and recalls, among other experiences, his first encounter with a shotgun, as an eight-year-old boy (“In a clearing in the cornstalks . . . it was suggested / that I fire / on that muttering family of crows”). Throughout this volume, Wright continues his penetrating study of his own and our collective soul. He reaches a new level of acceptance as he intones the paradox “I have heard God’s silence like the sun,” and marvels at our presumptions:We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplishedeven this, the holiness of things precisely as they are, and never will!Though Wright often seeks forgiveness in these poems, his black wit and self-deprecation are reliably present, and he delights in reminding us that “literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.”But in this book, literature wins as well. God’s Silence is a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silences) can do for us.
Download or read book The Living Fire written by Edward Hirsch and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive selection of one of our most beloved poet’s rich and signifi cant body of work alongside a gathering of “brilliant, deeply pleasurable” new poems (Booklist).
Download or read book The Math Campers written by Dan Chiasson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A father and husband's meditation on love, adolescence, and the mysterious mechanisms of poetic creation, from the acclaimed poet. The poet's art is revealed in stages in this "making-of" book, where we watch as poems take shape--first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world. In the long poem "Must We Mean What We Say," a woman reader narrates in prose the circumstances behind poems and snippets of poems she receives in letters from a stranger. Who made up whom? Chiasson, an acclaimed poetry critic, has invented a remarkable structure where the reader and a poet speak to one another, across the void of silence and mystery. He is also the father of teenaged sons, and this volume continues the autobiographical arc of his prior, celebrated volumes. One long section is about the age of thirteen and the dawning of desire, while the title poem looks at the crucial age of fifteen and the existential threat of climate change and gun violence, which alters the calculus of adolescence. Though the outlook is bleak, these poems register the glories of our moment: that there are places where boys can kiss each other and not be afraid; that small communities are rousing and taking care of each other; that teenagers have mobilized for a better world. All of these works emerge from the secretive imagination of a father as he measures his own adolescence against that of his sons and explores the complex bedrock of marriage. Chiasson sees a perilous world both navigated and enriched by the passionate young and by the parents--and poets--who care for them.
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 All Our Families written by Jennifer Natalya Fink and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocation to reclaim our disability lineage in order to profoundly reimagine the possibilities for our relationship to disability, kinship, and carework Disability is often described as a tragedy, a crisis, or an aberration, though 1 in 5 people worldwide have a disability. Why is this common human experience rendered exceptional? In All Our Families, disability studies scholar Jennifer Natalya Fink argues that this originates in our families. When we cut a disabled member out of the family story, disability remains a trauma as opposed to a shared and ordinary experience. This makes disability and its diagnosis traumatic and exceptional. Weaving together stories of members of her own family with sociohistorical research, Fink illustrates how the eradication of disabled people from family narratives is rooted in racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic sorting systems inherited from Nazis. By examining the rhetoric of genetic testing, she shows that a fear of disability begins before a child is even born and that a fear of disability is, fundamentally, a fear of care. Fink analyzes our racist and sexist care systems, exposing their inequities as a source of stigmatizing ableism. Inspired by queer and critical race theory, Fink calls for a lineage of disability: a reclamation of disability as a history, a culture, and an identity. Such a lineage offers a means of seeing disability in the context of a collective sense of belonging, as cause for celebration, and is a call for a radical reimagining of carework and kinship. All Our Families challenges us to re-lineate disability within the family as a means of repair toward a more inclusive and flexible structure of care and community.
Download or read book F written by Franz Wright and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these riveting poems, Wright declares, “I’ve said all that / I had to say. / In writing. / I signed my name. / It’s death’s move.” As he considers his mortality, the poet finds a new elation and clarity on the page, handing over for our examination the flawed yet kneeling-in-gratitude self he has become. F stands both for Franz, the poet-speaker who represents all of us on our baffling lifelong journeys, and for the alphabet, the utility and sometimes brutality of our symbols. (It may be, he jokes grimly, his “grade in life.”) From “Entries of the Cell,” the long central poem that details the loneliness of the single soul, to short narrative prose poems and traditional lyrics, Wright revels in the compensatory power of language, observing the daytime headlights following a hearse, or the wind, “blessing one by one the unlighted buds of the backbent peach tree’s unnoted return.” He is at his best in this beautiful and startling collection.
Download or read book Unterzakhn written by Leela Corman and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths. “A haunting and often heartbreaking look at Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century [and] also a story about women, power, and bodies.” —Austin American-Statesman For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York’s Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life’s lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for “Underthings”) tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the “golden land,” where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.
Download or read book Stop Time written by Frank Conroy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1977-02-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy's passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy's wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father's early death and a son's exhilarating escape into manhood.
Download or read book The O Henry Prize Stories 2017 written by Laura Furman and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 contains twenty breathtaking stories—by a vibrant mix of established and emerging writers—selected by the series editor from the thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The collection includes essays by the three eminent guest jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and a comprehensive resource list of the many magazines and journals, both large and small, that publish short fiction. “Too Good To Be True,” Michelle Huneven “Something for a Young Woman,” Genevieve Plunkett “The Buddhist,” Alan Rossi “Garments,” Tahmima Anam “Protection,” Paola Peroni “Night Garden,” Shruti Swamy “A Cruelty,” Kevin Barry “Floating Garden,” Mary La Chapelle “The Trusted Traveler,” Joseph O’Neill “Blue Dot,” Keith Eisner “Lion,” Wil Weitzel “Paddle to Canada,” Heather Monley “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness,” Jai Chakrabarti “The Bride and the Street Party,” Kate Cayley “Secret Lives of the Detainees,” Amit Majmudar “Glory,” Lesley Nneka Arimah “Mercedes Benz,” Martha Cooley “The Reason Is Because,” Manuel Muñoz “The Family Whistle,” Gerard Woodward “Buttony,” Fiona McFarlane The jurors this year are David Bradley, Elizabeth McCracken, and Brad Watson. For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com
Download or read book Fox Girl written by Nora Okja Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-03-25 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nora Okja Keller, the acclaimed author of Comfort Woman, tells the shocking story of a group of young people abandoned after the Korean War. At the center of the tale are two teenage girls—Hyun Jin and Sookie, a teenage prostitute kept by an American soldier—who form a makeshift family with Lobetto, a lost boy who scrapes together a living running errands and pimping for neighborhood girls. Both horrifying and moving, Fox Girl at once reveals another layer of war's human detritus and the fierce love between a mother and daughter.
Download or read book Blind Spot written by Teju Cole and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative synthesis of words and images, the award-winning author of Open City and photography critic for The New York Times Magazine combines two of his great passions. One of Time’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of the Year • One of Smithsonian.com’s Ten Best Photography Books of the Year When it comes to Teju Cole, the unexpected is not unfamiliar: He’s an acclaimed novelist, an influential essayist, and an internationally exhibited photographer. In Blind Spot, readers follow Cole’s inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm as he continues to refine the voice, eye, and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. Here, journey through more than 150 of Cole’s full-color original photos, each accompanied by his lyrical and evocative prose, forming a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel: from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; landscapes and interiors, beautiful or quotidian, that inspire Cole’s memories, fantasies, and introspections. Ships in Capri remind him of the work of writers from Homer to Edna O’Brien; a hotel room in Wannsee brings back a disturbing dream about a friend’s death; a home in Tivoli evokes a transformative period of semi-blindness, after which “the photography changed. . . . The looking changed.” As exquisitely wrought as the work of Anne Carson or Chris Marker, Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature. Praise for Blind Spot “Common things [are] made radiant by the quality of Cole’s looking. . . . In this new, luminous book, Cole shows himself to be really one of the best at seeing.”—The Guardian “This lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts explores the mysteries of the ordinary.”—The New York Times Books Review (Editors’ Choice) “Stunning . . . feels like the fulfillment of an intellectual project that has defined most of [Cole’s] career.”—Slate “Dazzling . . . cerebral yet intimate . . . combines personal essay, history, biography, journalism, and photography into a seamless package, capturing human dignity and grace through careful, clear-eyed reverence.”—Vice “An eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book The Beforelife written by Franz Wright and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2010-02-24 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery. Wright negotiates the precarious transition from illness to health in a state of skeptical rapture, discovering along the way the exhilaration of love--both divine and human--and finding that even the most battered consciousness can be good company. Whether he is writing about his regret for the abortion of a child, describing the mechanics of slander ("I can just hear them on the telephone and keening all their kissy little knives"), or composing an ironic ode to himself ("To a Blossoming Nut Case"), Wright's poems are exquisitely precise. Charles Simic has characterized him as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception. Here is one of the poems from the collection: Description of Her Eyes Two teaspoonfuls, and my mind goes everyone can kiss my ass now-- then it's changed, I change my mind. Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.
