Download or read book Postcolonial Love Poem written by Natalie Diaz and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
Download or read book When My Brother Was an Aztec written by Natalie Diaz and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams. I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow! With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars. The lion didn't want to do it— He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowd this: I only wanted some goddamn sleep . . . Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language.
Download or read book Letter To My Daughter written by Maya Angelou and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of wisdom and life lessons, from the beloved and bestselling author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to my Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: it's part guidebook, part memoir, part poetry - and pure delight. 'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY 'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON
Download or read book The Water Museum written by Luis Alberto Urrea and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This hard-hitting, beautiful short story collection from one of America's preeminent literary voices “reflect[s] both sides of his Mexican-American heritage while stretching the reader's understanding of human boundaries” (Kirkus). Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice. Suffused with wanderlust, compassion, and no small amount of rock and roll, The Water Museum is a collection that confirms Luis Alberto Urrea as an American master.
Download or read book The First Water Is the Body written by and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhibition catalogue for The First Water Is the Body, on view at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey October 9, 2021 - January 23, 2022.
Download or read book What Noise Against the Cane written by Desiree C. Bailey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets is a lyrical and polyvocal exploration of what it means to fight for yourself “Bailey invites us to see what twenty-first-century life is like for a young woman of the Black diaspora in the long wake of a history of slavery, brutality, and struggling for freedoms bodily and psychological.” —Carl Phillips, from the Foreword The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey’s “poems argue for hope and faith equally. . . . These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance.”
Download or read book Voyage of the Sable Venus written by Robin Coste Lewis and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
Download or read book Ghost Letters written by Baba Badji and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ghost Letters, one emigrates to America again, and again, and again, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one grows up in America, and attends university in America, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one wrestles with one’s American blackness in ways not possible in Senegal, though one never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; and one sees more deeply into Americanness than any native-born American could. Ghost Letters is a 21st century Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, though it is a notebook of arrival and being in America. It is a major achievement. —Shane McCrae
Download or read book Nature Poem written by Tommy Pico and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Download or read book How To Wash A Heart written by Bhanu Kapil and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020. Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020. Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers. Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a ‘Literature that is not made from literature’. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.
Download or read book What to Do When You re Having Two written by Natalie Diaz and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised and updated in 2020 The creator of Twiniversity delivers an essential update to her must-have manual to having twins, now with expanded info on twin pregnancy and tandem breastfeeding, and advice on the best gear to help save your sanity. With almost two times as many sets of twins today as there were forty years ago, What to Do When You're Having Two has quickly become the definitive resource for expectant and new parents of multiples. A mom of fraternal twins and a world-renowned expert on parenting multiples, author Natalie Diaz launched Twiniversity, the world's leading global resource for twin parenting information and support online. Now, with her expanded edition of What to Do, she includes new information on breastfeeding, gear, sleep, and having two when you already have one, as well as: • creating your twin birth plan, • maintaining a realistic sleep schedule, • managing tandem breastfeeding, • stocking up on what you'll need (and knowing what high-tech products are now available and what's a waste of money), and • building a special bond with each of your twins. Accessible, informative, and humorous, What to Do When You're Having Two is the must-have manual for every parent of twins.
Download or read book Runaway written by Jorie Graham and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every new book by Jorie Graham is worth reading. . . . Frustrating, frustrated, afraid, panicked, pleading, Graham has once again written the poems of our moment.” — NPR.org "This engaging, evocative collection from Graham explores the experience of struggle in a rapidly-changing world plagued by existential threats. The poems consider the present and interpret it through a critical eye, carefully mindful of each subject's impact on daily lives. More than anything, the collection invites readers to tap into a deeper state of consciousness." — Chicago Tribune, "Best Books of Fall 2020" "Challenging as [these poems] are, many of them seem like prayers. For all poetry fans.' — Library Journal "[Graham's] most thrilling poems hurtle through long, unpredictable lines that devour and spit out ancient echoes and internet detritus as they go...She in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in which you can sense what it is you're letting go of, now, before it's gone." — Harper's Magazine “Graham’s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer’s debut . . . Runaway taps into a free-floating end-of-the-worldness (is there a German word for that?) that so many of us feel even if we can’t express it. . . . Her latter-day poems arrive . . . like effusions, Whitmanic gusts of words, as if she’s channeling a sort of emergency scripture. Runaway feels as though it has been written for right now...but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on.” — New York Times Book Review "Jorie Graham’s poetry uniquely portrays the struggle to do the right thing, and above all to find meaning in the world’s “rich concentrate”. Her characteristically questioning work previously engaged with physics, history and personal morality, now turns its attention to accelerating planetary crisis. Runaway was completed before the pandemic, but its capacious understanding makes it as able to speak to this as to climate breakdown and global suffering. Graham juxtaposes individual experience with an almost incomprehensible scale of disaster with an urgency and an attention so exceptional it comes out as tenderness.” — The Guardian "Graham (Fast) begins her fifth decade of publishing with a bravura performance that probes the present for what the future will bring...Through her signature urgent questioning, Graham makes plain the psychic and physical cost to humans of wrecking the Earth." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Download or read book Be Holding written by Ross Gay and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Award Winner, 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry Winner, 2022 Indiana Author Award in Poetry Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.
Download or read book The Tradition written by Jericho Brown and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic—no, it's precision, and honesty—Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."—Craig Morgan Teicher, “'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview” for NPR “A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem.“—Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown’s “Dark” (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019) “Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.”—O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2019” One of Buzzfeed’s “66 Books Coming in 2019 You’ll Want to Keep Your Eyes On” The Rumpus poetry pick for “What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner” One of BookRiot’s “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019” Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
Download or read book Floaters Poems written by Martín Espada and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love. Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry. Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I’m 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love—even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise. The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl’s gently racist question. Whether celebrating the visionaries—the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets—or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father’s Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.
Download or read book Living Nations Living Words An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry written by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.
Download or read book Nepantla written by Christopher Soto and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United States In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!
