Download or read book The King s Touch written by Tom Sleigh and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic. Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue. The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?” In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.

Download or read book Seasonal Performances written by Laurence Goldstein and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 The Refusal of Suitors written by Ryo Yamaguchi and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Asian American Studies. THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS draws on Penelope and her loom to engage the landscapes, wants, forms, and ultimately the repetitions and variations of contemporary urban life. Through varying styles, voices, and layouts, these poems move collectively with a sonic force, the "pure acoustics of declaratives," through "a night that begins / with our falling asleep, the wet paragraph that he aspirates," with a visionary amalgam of phenomenon and symbol. From long-lined, romantic odes to tight, pictorial meditations akin to classical Asian poetry from the jocular to the reposed to the amorous to the despondent these are poems that are never satisfied, that relish the "sweet chorea of the longest day."

Download or read book Amanda Paradise written by Caconrad and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new collection of poetry by CAConrad"--

Download or read book How Civil Wars Start written by Barbara F. Walter and published by Crown. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A leading political scientist examines the dramatic rise in violent extremism around the globe and sounds the alarm on the increasing likelihood of a second civil war in the United States “Required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) WINNER OF THE GLOBAL POLICY INSTITUTE AWARD • THE SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Financial Times, The Times (UK), Esquire, Prospect (UK) Political violence rips apart several towns in southwest Texas. A far-right militia plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for treason. An armed mob of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists storms the U.S. Capitol. Are these isolated incidents? Or is this the start of something bigger? Barbara F. Walter has spent her career studying civil conflict in places like Iraq, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka, but now she has become increasingly worried about her own country. Perhaps surprisingly, both autocracies and healthy democracies are largely immune from civil war; it’s the countries in the middle ground that are most vulnerable. And this is where more and more countries, including the United States, are finding themselves today. Over the last two decades, the number of active civil wars around the world has almost doubled. Walter reveals the warning signs—where wars tend to start, who initiates them, what triggers them—and why some countries tip over into conflict while others remain stable. Drawing on the latest international research and lessons from over twenty countries, Walter identifies the crucial risk factors, from democratic backsliding to factionalization and the politics of resentment. A civil war today won’t look like America in the 1860s, Russia in the 1920s, or Spain in the 1930s. It will begin with sporadic acts of violence and terror, accelerated by social media. It will sneak up on us and leave us wondering how we could have been so blind. In this urgent and insightful book, Walter redefines civil war for a new age, providing the framework we need to confront the danger we now face—and the knowledge to stop it before it’s too late.

Download or read book Scrapper written by Matt Bell and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of Detroit known as "the zone," an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he's come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly takes on the responsibility of avenging the boy's unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, his long-buried trauma, memories made dangerous again.

Download or read book Look How Happy I m Making You written by Polly Rosenwaike and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Among the thousands of books for prospective and new parents, I doubt any will make you feel more understood and less alone than this one."—ANTHONY DOERR, author of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE “Armed with wit, tenderness and candor, [Look How Happy I'm Making You] helps obliterate any taboos that may still exist surrounding the tribulations of women’s reproductive lives.”—PEOPLE MAGAZINE A candid, ultimately buoyant debut story collection about the realities of the "baby years," whether you're having one or not The women in Polly Rosenwaike's Look How Happy I'm Making You want to be mothers, or aren't sure they want to be mothers, or--having recently given birth--are overwhelmed by what they've wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its depiction of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about what having a baby looks like. One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another woman nervous about her biological clock "forgets" to take her birth control while dating a younger man and must confront the possibility of becoming a single parent. Four motherless women who meet in a bar every Mother's Day contend with their losses and what it would mean to have a child. Witty, empathetic, and precisely observed, Look How Happy I'm Making You offers the rare, honest portrayal of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women's most intimate choices.

Download or read book Fighting Is Like a Wife written by Eloisa Amezcua and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fighting is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua uses striking visual poems to reconstruct the love story—and the tragedy—of two-time world boxing champion “Schoolboy” Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. Bobby took to fighBobby took to fighting the way a surfer takes to water: the waves and crests, the highs and the pummeling lows. Valorie, as girlfriend, then wife, then mother of their children, was proud of Bobby and how he found a way out of the harsh world they were born into. But the brain-sloshing blows, the women, and the alcohol began to take their toll, and soon Bobby couldn’t hear her anymore. With her fate affixed to Bobby’s, and Bobby’s to the ring, Valorie sought her own way out of this dilemma. Using haunting, visceral language to evoke the emotion of the fight, and incorporating direct quotations from sports commentators and Bobby himself, Fighting Is Like a Wife reveals how boxing, like love and poetry, can be brutal, vulnerable, and surprising.

Download or read book Harmony of the World written by Charles Baxter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1997-03-11 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune)—these ten stories show make everyday experiences seem utterly unprecedented, even as Baxter reminds us, gently and with a sly comic twist, that everything they feel is only the collateral damage of being human. Whether he is writing about the players in a rickety bisexual love triangle or a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home, probing the psychic mainspring of a grimly obsessive weight lifter or sifting through the layers of resentment, need, and pity in a friendship that has gone on a few decades too long, Baxter enchants us with the elegant balance of his prose and the unexpectedness of his insights. Harmony of the World is a masterpiece of lucidity and compassion.

Download or read book 808s Otherworlds written by Sean Avery Medlin and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "September’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature" —Lambda Literary "Most-Anticipated New LGBTQIA+ Books of 2021" —Paperback Paris "An elegant mash of memoir, poetry, tales of appropriation, thoughts on Black masculinity, Hulk, Kanye." —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune 808s & Otherworlds announces a bold and incendiary new voice in Sean Avery Medlin. Against the backdrop of the Phoenix suburbs where they were raised, Medlin interrogates the effects of media misrepresentation on the performance of Black masculinity. Through storytelling rhymes and vulnerable narratives in conversation with both contemporary Hip-Hop culture and systemic anti-Blackness, 808s & Otherworlds pieces together a speculative reality where Blackfolk are simultaneously superhuman and dehumanized. From the gut-wrenchingly real stories of young lovers unmythed by segregation or former classmates appropriating Black culture, to the fantastic settings of Hip-Hop songs and comic characters, Medlin weaves a tapestry of worlds and otherworlds while composing a love letter to family and self, told to an undeniably energetic beat.

Download or read book The English Boat written by Donald Revell and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revell's fifteenth collection creates a boisterous, magical world built upon Ancient Greek landscapes and Shakespearian tragedies and mixes it with modern-age life. These lively poems sweep readers into journeys of reflection, passion, and imagination as it explores human emotion along with the never-ending, dark mysteries of the mind.

Download or read book Riding Sidesaddle written by Miriam Suzanne and published by Springgun Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. LGBT Studies. Art. Eric M. Suzanne's RIDING SIDESADDLE* (SpringGun Press, 2015) is a work on 250 interchangeable index cards that explores the construction of narrative and the authority of the novel form. Here, a narrator navigates a host of recurring characters with fluid genders and bodies that resist order, category and completion. They re-mythologize figures such as Margaret Clap and Hermaphroditus as well as themselves. SIDESADDLE* opens up the world as its characters clash against and are turned away from it.

Download or read book Mothman Apologia written by Robert Wood Lynn and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age "Elegiac and witty."--Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2022" "These poems name the hurt wrought upon the meek that makes the elegy, here, as much an exaltation of the living as a mournful dirge for the land."--Major Jackson, Vanderbilt University The 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Robert Wood Lynn's collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less. Comprising poems of place set across the Virginias, this collection includes an episodic elegy exploring the opioid crisis in the Shenandoah Valley as well as a separate series of persona poems reimagining the Mothman (West Virginia's famed cryptid) reluctantly coming of age in that state's mountains and struggling with the utility of warnings. These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.

Download or read book My Emily Dickinson written by Susan Howe and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York Sun For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...."

Download or read book The Worlds We Think We Know written by Dalia Rosenfeld and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories that follow the lives of Jewish characters from the Midwest to the Middle East and beyond: “A profound debut from a writer of great talent.” —Adam Johnson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Orphan Master’s Son The characters of The Worlds We Think We Know are swept up by forces beyond their control: war, adulthood, family—and their own emotions, as powerful as the sandstorm that gusts through these stories. In Ohio, a college student cruelly enlists the help of the boy who loves her to attract the attention of her own crush. In Israel, a young American woman visits an uncommunicative Holocaust survivor and falls in love with a soldier. And from an unnamed Eastern European country, a woman haunts the husband who left her behind for a new life in New York City. The Worlds We Think We Know is a dazzling fiction debut—fiercely funny and entirely original. “Outstanding . . . Set in locales including present-day Jerusalem, the permafrost region of Russia and the streets of Manhattan, Rosenfeld’s best stories focus not only on loss, but on its aftermath: living in the presence of absence.” —Haaretz “Funny and poignant . . . The lush melancholy of this collection is bolstered by the characters’ deep intelligence and wit . . . Jewish history is shredded through with displacement, and many of Rosenfeld’s characters are caught in the position of a having a long cultural history and no sense of home.” —Electric Literature

Download or read book Talking Back written by bell hooks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In childhood, bell hooks was taught that "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion. In this collection of personal and theoretical essays, hooks reflects on her signature issues of racism and feminism, politics and pedagogy. Among her discoveries is that moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, making new life and new growth possible.