Download or read book Poems To Live By in Uncertain Times written by Joan Murray and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2001-11-21 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The week after the attack on the World Trade Center, Joan Murray read her poem about it, "Survivors--Found," on National Public Radio. Thousands heard her poem and were so moved that they contacted her to ask for copies. In the wake of our nation's tragedy, poetry has taken on a new relevance in people's lives. As Dinitia Smith noted in The New York Times, "In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, people have been consoling themselves-and one another-with poetry in an almost unprecedented way." Poems to Live By features sixty of the finest poems by an international group of distinguished writers, including W. H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Yehuda Amichai, Mary Oliver, Miguel de Unamuno, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds. Agreeing with Kenneth Burke that literature is equipment for living, Murray has arranged the anthology in six sections that address our most urgent concerns: death and remembrance, fear and suffering, affirmations and rejoicings, warnings and instructions, war and rumors of war, meditations and conversations. Beginning with Faiz Ahmed Faiz's somber remembrance ('This is the way that autumn came to the trees: / it stripped them down to the skin') and concluding with D. H. Lawrence's simple and deep-felt "Pax," Poems to Live By addresses our need for wisdom in dark times, whether those times are personal or the ones we live through together.
Download or read book Poems to Live By in Troubling Times written by Joan Murray and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2006-04-12 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this allnew sequel to the Beacon bestseller Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, editor Joan Murray has once again gathered an astonishing group of poems that speak to our personal and shared concerns in a troubled time. Poems to Live By in Troubling Times features works carefully selected and deftly organized to help guide us through the complexities of our current situation. Included are poems that speak to our anxiety and terror; rally our hope and courage; warn us of complacency and complicity; stir us to action and compassion; lead us to question our leaders and politicians; move us to meditation and prayer; urge us to confront war and violence; and give us hope for peace and justice. Readers will find wisdom to sustain them as they face difficulties in their individual lives or confront our common contemporary predicament. These are not poems that provide easy answers or overheated rhetoric but poems that speak directly and deeply to the soul, from the most important and celebrated poets of our era.
Download or read book Sunshine In Your Pocket written by Denise Redford and published by Olcan Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sunshine In Your Pocket is an uplifting collection of light-hearted poetry that will bring a smile to your face. Perfect for reading to the family or alone, Denise Redford's second poetry anthology is filled with positive affirmations for difficult times. We would like to thank Equity - the UK trade union for creative practitioners - in their support for this publication. 100% of the proceeds of this book will go towards Equity's Benevolent Fund to provide grants for those who need it most. Due to Coronavirus (COVID - 19) thousands of entertainment workers have lost their jobs and are in dire financial need as bills are beginning to mount up. Despite the public perception, the vast majority of performers, stage managers and creative practitioners working in the entertainment industry earn modest sums and this sudden loss of income is devastating. “When days become so busy As along life’s road we tread We all need a friend like nothingness To have peace inside our head.”
Download or read book What We Live For What We Die For written by Serhiy Zhadan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation "Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully," reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world-renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where "every year there's less and less air." Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan's poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people "will never let it be / like it was before."
Download or read book Poetry Unbound 50 Poems to Open Your World written by Pádraig Ó. Tuama and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.
Download or read book A Collection of Poems written by Cheryl Williams and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-08 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Collection of Poems A Journey Through Life By: Cheryl Williams A Collection of Poems takes us through the power of the human mind, good or bad, and its impact on one’s direction and journey through life. With the help of music, writing, and positive thinking, author Cheryl Williams found hope and purpose in life. Life isn’t fair. It is unpredictable, bad things happen to good people, and we never know what tomorrow holds. Cheryl wants her readers to realize that even when faced with insurmountable, hopeless situations, even when life seems dark and uncertain, we should never let go of hope and appreciate the beauty and blessings that life has to offer, making the most of every day, loving, living, laughing, and learning. Seasons change, and there is always a rainbow after the storms of life.
Download or read book Ten Poems to Set You Free written by Roger Housden and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2003-12-30 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten Poems to Set You Free inspires you to claim the life that is truly yours. In today’s world it is deceptively easy to lose sight of our direction and the things that matter and give us joy. How quickly the days can slip by, the years all gone, and we, at the end of our lives, mourning the life we dreamed of but never lived. These ten poems, and Roger Housden’s reflections on them, urge us to stand once and for all, and now, in the heart of our own life. This volume brings together the voices of Thomas Merton, David Whyte, the Basque poet Miguel de Unamuno, Anna Swir from Poland, Stanley Kunitz, the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, and Jane Hirshfield, as well as three of Housden’s favorites, Rumi, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye. His luminous essays on the poems show us how to integrate the poets’ truth into our own lives. Roger Housden’s love of poetry and life leaps from every page—so much so that his readers feel they have found a guide and mentor through the extraordinary Ten Poems series. He has opened the eyes and hearts of many, not just to the power of poetry, but to the truth and beauty of the life of the soul. What more can one ask?
Download or read book Ledger written by Jane Hirshfield and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate—"Some of the most important poetry in the world today" (Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine). Ledger's pages hold the most important work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems by a "modern master" (The Washington Post).
Download or read book Selected Poems written by Linton Kwesi Johnson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-06 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from protests against police brutality to eulogies for departed friends and celebrations of urban life, Linton Kwesi Johnson's use of Jamaican dialect to tackle British subjects contributed to a revolution in the notion of literary English.
Download or read book Say Her Name written by Zetta Elliott and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2020-01-04 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the #SayHerName campaign launched by the African American Policy Forum, these poems pay tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists insisting that Black Lives Matter. Elliott engages poets from the past two centuries to create a chorus of voices celebrating the creativity, resilience, and courage of Black women and girls. This collection features forty-nine powerful poems, four of which are tribute poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Phillis Wheatley. This provocative collection will move every reader to reflect, respond-and act.
Download or read book Who Is Mary Sue written by Sophie Collins and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world. Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.
Download or read book How I Discovered Poetry written by Marilyn Nelson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful and thought-provoking Civil Rights era memoir from one of America’s most celebrated poets. Looking back on her childhood in the 1950s, Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson tells the story of her development as an artist and young woman through fifty eye-opening poems. Readers are given an intimate portrait of her growing self-awareness and artistic inspiration along with a larger view of the world around her: racial tensions, the Cold War era, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement. A first-person account of African-American history, this is a book to study, discuss, and treasure.
Download or read book Love for Now written by Anthony Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A River of Words written by Jen Bryant and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2008-07-09 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2009 Caldecott Honor Book An ALA Notable Book A New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book A Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book NCTE Notable Children’s Book When he wrote poems, he felt as free as the Passaic River as it rushed to the falls. Willie’s notebooks filled up, one after another. Willie’s words gave him freedom and peace, but he also knew he needed to earn a living. So he went off to medical school and became a doctor -- one of the busiest men in town! Yet he never stopped writing poetry. In this picture book biography of William Carlos Williams, Jen Bryant’s engaging prose and Melissa Sweet’s stunning mixed-media illustrations celebrate the amazing man who found a way to earn a living and to honor his calling to be a poet.
Download or read book Incorrect Merciful Impulses written by Camille Rankine and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A poet to watch."—O Magazine "I tell the truth, but I try to be kind about it."—Camille Rankine in 12 Questions Named "a poet to watch" by O Magazine, Camille Rankine's debut collection is a series of provocations and explorations. Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms." From "Symptoms of Aftermath": …When I am saved, a slim nurse leans out of the white light. I need to hear your voice, sweetheart. I see my escape. I walk into the water. The sky is blue like the ocean, which is blue like the sky. Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem.
Download or read book After written by Jane Hirshfield and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets.” —David Baker, The American Poet "Hirshfield's poems . . . send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness.” — Booklist (starred review) A profound, generous, and masterful sixth collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation, After explores incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with others and with all existence. Jane Hirshfield’s alert, incisive, and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from sparseness, possibility, judgment, and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, the meanings to be found in generally overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing. In respective series of “assays” (meditative imaginative accountings) and “pebbles” (each a “brief, easily pocketable perception that remains incomplete until the reader’s own response awakens inside it”), Hirshfield explores a poetry-making that looks simultaneously outward and inward, finding resonant and precise containers for the deepest currents of our inner life.
Download or read book Letters to a Young Poet written by Rainer Maria Rilke and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2021-04-14 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rainer Maria Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse, these ten letters of correspondence between Rilke and a young aspiring poet reveal elements from the inner workings of his own poetic identity. The letters coincided with an important stage of his artistic development and readers can trace many of the themes that later emerge in his best works to these messages—Rilke himself stated these letters contained part of his creative genius.
