Download or read book Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory written by Jeffrey Thomson and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2022-05-11 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Titled after a small gallery of the same name found in Rome, the poems are devoted to meditations on religious relics and works of art. They explore the narrative power these objects carry—the way we imbue totemic figures with both meaning and story, and the potential they have to define the world.
Download or read book Burning Like Her Own Planet written by Vandana Khanna and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the backdrop of iconic, ancient Hindu texts, Burning Like Her Own Planet reimagines the lives of Hindu goddesses through a contemporary, feminist lens. Told in a series of persona poems and dramatic monologues, the book reinvents these myths into essential stories of love, betrayal, and faith. In these poems, the goddesses question their predetermined fates and examine what it means to be human and divine. They speak in the voices of girls, wives, and mothers, all trying to carve a space for themselves in a world ruled by jealous gods and capricious luck. Overcoming a string of challenges, these goddesses discover their own agency, and the power that comes from telling their own stories. At the heart of the book are the goddesses Sita and Parvati—women who are cast in the role of the “perfect” wife, the “perfect” mother. Here, the goddesses describe their own transformations from naïve, untried women into powerful forces claiming their autonomy. Each in her own way challenges the traditional notions of what it means to be a woman, illuminating the connections between the personal and the universal, the devout and the earthly. The poems highlight the tension between obligation and freedom, examining the consequences for those who try and change the narrative. Whether blessed or cursed, these women, these girl-goddesses, forge their own place within the pages of ancient texts, writing the bitter and the sweet of own lives as they undergo the trials of becoming holy.
Download or read book Theophanies written by Sarah Ghazal Ali and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2024-01-17 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving between the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, these poems explore the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family by unraveling the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Navigating both scripture and culture, the poems in Theophanies work to spin miracles from the mundanities of desire and violence. Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, these poems struggle to envision a true self and speak back against time to the matriarchs of the larger Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history Stitched through these poems is longing—for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine. Theophanies asks: is seeing really believing, and is believing belonging? The speaker seeks to understand her own, bewildering “I,” to use it with reverence, and to mythologize herself and all mothers to ensure their survival in a male-dominated world hard at work erasing them In the absence of matrilineal elders in her family, the speaker turns to the archetypal “mother of nations” for whom she is named, Sarah, and her sent-away “sister,” Hajar. What does it mean to have a woman’s body when that body has been hailed a vessel for the divine? Theophanies arises from the speaker’s tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.
Download or read book I Am the Most Dangerous Thing written by Candace Williams and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2023-05-10 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is a comment on writing itself. What have words done? When does writing become a form of disengagement, or worse, violence? The book is an exercise in paring the state down to its true logic of violence and imagining what can happen next. There are many contradictions—Although the protagonist teaches the same science that was used to justify enslavement and a racial caste system, she knows she will die at the hands of science and denies the state the last word by penning her own death certificate. As an educator and knowledge worker, she is an overseer of the same racist, misogynistic, and homophobic systems that terrorize her. Yet, she musters the courage to kill Kurtz, a primordial vision of white terror. She is Black and queer and fat and angry and chill and witty and joyful and depressed and lovely and flawed and an (im)perfect dagger to the heart of white supremacist capitalism.
Download or read book The Goodbye World Poem written by Brian Turner and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent “afterward” of someone’s death. Losing his wife, his father, and his best friend in quick succession, Turner explores those relationships through the complicated lenses of moments in time, weaving in and out of memory to explore the disparate history that fuses together to form ones psyche. Throughout the collection, a prevailing motion recurs: that of submersion, sinking, plunging into the deep—whether it be the ocean or the subconscious. In other words, this book is a kind of poetic biography, a journey of the self that ultimately pours everything that’s happened in a life—all of the love and all of the loss—into the moment of death itself. The poems are meant to be celebratory and sublime in their comprehension of what happens to our memories when we die. And, if the reader is inclined—the reader becomes the vessel who holds all of this in their own imagination, carrying Turner and his memories forward into their own lives in a small way.
Download or read book The Wild Delight of Wild Things written by Brian Turner and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2023-08-08 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although grief is at the forefront of these poems, The Wild Delight of Wild Things is a simple love letter to Turner's late wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016). The poems are also a love letter to our planet during the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Intertwining this immense grief, Turner explores the hybrid borderlands of genre, and the meditations on love and loss blur the boundaries between poetry and lyric prose. In Italian, the word "stanza" is rooted in the word "room." And so, stanza by stanza, room by room, page by page, we draft ourselves forward into the imagination, our arms filled with all that we can carry from the days gone by. This is the art of survival. Profound grief teaches us how to dwell in the house of memory—that vibrant temporal landscape of the past—where we might live with the dead we love once more.
Download or read book The Dead Peasant s Handbook written by Brian Turner and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the loose series of Turner’s other recent 2023 publications, The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem, this third book in this “collection” serves as a poetic guide to help us navigate the world we live in. The Dead Peasant’s Handbook begins with the difficulty and hardship of living in the world after losing a loved one before allowing oneself to gravitate again towards delight and wonder. With deep dives into history, the poems traverse the wild terrain of our lives, and it remains ever-constant to the theme at the core of all three recent books—that of love and loss. The poems take their structure from guidebooks, featuring subject areas connected to the general experience of being human: war and conflict, dreams, love and loss, and survival. The book itself takes its title from an insurance industry policy (“Dead Peasants”) in which companies can take out insurance on their workforce in case of loss or death—sometimes without employees knowing. And so, this book is also a commentary on the people and moments that are too often elided over and given the vault of silence, and maybe lost to time.
Download or read book Standing in the Forest of Being Alive written by Katie Farris and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life—even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question "What isn't hell?" and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a "redvioletcerulean handkerchief."
Download or read book Feast written by Ina Cariño and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2023-03-08 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of a 2022 Whiting Award in Poetry Winner of the 2021 Alice James Award At times located in the Philippines, at others in the United States, the speaker of these poems is curious about how home can be an alchemy from one to the other. Feast explores the intricacies of intergenerational nourishment beyond trauma, as well as the bonds and community formed when those in diaspora feed each other, both literally and metaphorically. The language in these poems is full of musicality—another way in which abundance manifests in the book. Feast feeds its readers by employing lush sonics and imagery unafraid of being Filipino and of being Asian American. Feast offers abundance and nourishment through language, and reaches toward a place an immigrant might call home. The poems in this collection—many of which revolve around food and its cultural significance—examine the brown body's relationship with nourishment. Poems delve into what it means to be brown in a white world, and how that encourages (or restricts) growth.
Download or read book We Borrowed Gentleness written by J. Estanislao Lopez and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2022-10-09 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope. By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.
Download or read book Song of My Softening written by Omotara James and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommended by Cosmopolitan, USA Today, Shondaland, & Book Riot “It’s not often that fat women feel such thorough representation of themselves not only in poetry but in any media and not only in the beautiful moments but in the sorrowful ones, ranging throughout life. James does a brilliant job of portraying this and all her themes brilliantly; highly recommended.” —Starred review by Library Journal The raw poems inside Song of My Softening studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. Poems open wide the questioning of how we express both love and pain, and how we view our bodies in society, offering themselves wholly, with sharpness and compassion.
Download or read book Brother Sleep written by Aldo Amparán and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2022-09-14 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brother Sleep is a collection of grievances through which a speaker mourns the loss of a brother, grandfather, and a sense of self as they navigate a landscape of desire marred by violence against queer and Mexican people. Set in the border cities of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, these poems navigate the liminal space between language and silence. As the poems grieve the loss of family, the violence perpetrated against queerness, the bodies lost border-side, and the cruelty against tenderness, Amparan's words bloom in evocation. Reflecting on lovers, friends, family, classmates, and others of impact, they navigate personal reconciliation in response to imposed definitions of their personhood. These poems evoke an equal sense of sorrow and tenderness amidst a complex landscape of the self.
Download or read book Mrs Wakeman vs the Antichrist written by Robert Damon Schneck and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American history is more than just what you read in your high school textbooks. There's a wild and weird side to America's past, filled with strange creatures, bizarre happenings, and fantastical figures. Researcher and writer Robert Damon Schneck has spent more than a decade devoted to sleuthing out these forgotten weird, grotesque, and mysterious gems of American history, like: • The man who preached good health through blood-drinking. • The California family driven insane by Ouija board séances, and the national panic that they ignited • The West Virginia town named after its resident poltergeist, who was obsessed with cutting everything into crescent shapes. • The Antichrist-obsessed cult leader whose disciples became brutal murderers, all in the name of saving her (and the world). You’ll also learn about homemade guillotines, magical ape-men on Mt. St. Helens, the psychic who smuggled a crystal ball into the White House, and the origins of those baffling modern bogeys, evil clowns driving vans. These historically researched, scrupulously verified, and always shockingly true tales in this collection come from an America that lies beyond the skyscrapers, cornfields, and suburban strip malls where we make our homes—a place where monsters guard buried treasures, schoolgirls develop stigmata, and we never run out of strange things.
Download or read book The Intense Reality of Eternity written by John Carpenter and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2020-11-20 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mankind has pondered the existence of life beyond death for centuries. Religions propose a variety of interesting but differing beliefs. So what does actually happen? Initially, science assumed it was some kind of neurological process sparking memory fragments at the moment of death. Having studied thousands of firsthand experiences, science now finds undeniable credibility and fascinating patterns of details that cannot be easily dismissed. These witnesses are from various cultures and countries around the world—yet they report the same types of visual, auditory, and sensory details. People, blind since birth, are seeing and testifying to the same sights that sighted people are also reporting. Preschool children are claiming the same experiences as mature, educated, worldly individuals. Atheists are stunned into becoming devoted to God. What is going on? Author John Carpenter returns with his third book, providing the reader with a breath-taking and inspirational journey through three realms of the afterlife. Instead of recounting hundreds of individual tales as in other books, he constructs a unique experience by orchestrating one composite journey, illustrated by hundreds of firsthand witnesses. Crafting the fascinating pieces of their testimonies into a masterful flowing collection creates an unforgettable journey for the reader. Masterminding this jigsaw puzzle of credible experiences takes the reader where no other book has gone before! But it can be intense—in its joy, love, and beauty—or its nightmarish and dark terrors. Be not afraid. Learn the truth of what people are reporting so that you can navigate your own spiritual journey wisely toward your future place in eternity.
Download or read book Hungry Souls written by Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg and published by TAN Books. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a week of hearing ghostly noises, a man is visited in his home by the spirit of his mother, dead for three decades. She reproaches him for his dissolute life and begs him to have Masses said in her name. Then she lays her hand on his sleeve, leaving an indelible burn mark, and departs... A Lutheran minister, no believer in Purgatory, is the puzzled recipient of repeated visitations from "demons" who come to him seeking prayer, consolation, and refuge in his little German church. But pity for the poor spirits overcomes the man's skepticism, and he marvels at what kind of departed souls could belong to Christ and yet suffer still... Hungry Souls recounts these stories and many others trustworthy, Church-verified accounts of earthly visitations from the dead in Purgatory. Accompanying these accounts are images from the "Museum of Purgatory" in Rome, which contains relics of encounters with the Holy Souls, including numerous evidences of hand prints burned into clothing and books; burn marks that cannot be explained by natural means or duplicated by artificial ones. Riveting!
Download or read book Half Life New Selected Poems written by Jeffrey Thomson and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The quirky and macabre [ninth] book from Thomson is rich with breathtaking juxtaposition. ... These elegant poems are full of surprising and moving revelations.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Heaven Can Wait written by Diana Walsh Pasulka and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After purgatory was officially defined by the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century, its location became a topic of heated debate and philosophical speculation: Was purgatory located on the earth, or within it? Were its fires real or figurative? Diana Walsh Pasulka offers a groundbreaking historical exploration of spatial and material concepts of purgatory, beginning with scholastic theologians William of Auvergne and Thomas Aquinas, who wrote about the location of purgatory and questioned whether its torments were physical or solely spiritual. In the same period, writers of devotional literature located purgatory within the earth, near hell, and even in Ireland. In the early modern era, a counter-movement of theologians downplayed purgatory's spatial dimensions, preferring to depict it in abstract terms--a view strengthened during the French Enlightenment, when references to purgatory as a terrestrial location or a place of real fire were ridiculed by anti-Catholic polemicists and discouraged by the Church. The debate surrounding purgatory's materiality has never ended: even today members of post-millennial ''purgatory apostolates'' maintain that purgatory is an actual, physical place. Heaven Can Wait provides crucial insight into the theological problem of purgatory's materiality (or lack thereof) over the past seven hundred years.
