Download or read book So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until it Breaks written by Rigoberto González and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astonishing new talent, Rigoberto González writes with a clarity of the senses that pulls the reader into a marvelous and unfamiliar world. The sidewalk preacher, the umbrella salesman, the nurse on the graveyard shift, the professional mourner-- all allow González a clandestine glimpse of their lives. Crackling with the dry electricity of the desert and flashing with the brilliant colors of Mexico, González's poems are rooted in the fertile soil beneath poverty's dust, the border's violence, and longing's desolation.
Download or read book Arts of a Cold Sun written by G. E. Murray and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these poems, G. E. Murray blends the colors of the soul with those of the world it brushes up against, exploring the ways in which art, both as possession and possessor, informs perception. Viewing his subjects sometimes from airplane altitude, sometimes from the intimacy of a shared restaurant table, Murray crafts “true stories about color,” narratives of dislocation and belonging that invite readers to question their own relationship to art. Included in this volume is a long sequential poem titled “The Seconds,” which Murray composed across the second days of thirteen months. The rhythms of this diary-as-poem seize the tensions of shifting times and locales, capturing the essences of moments that are at once chosen and arbitrary. “Codes toward an Incidental City,” the sequence that closes the book, is a confederacy of forty poems that delve into the concrete familiarities and mythologies of urban landscapes, illuminating the ecstasies of city life.
Download or read book Barter written by Ira Sadoff and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ira Sadoff’s new volume of poems opens with a quotation from Rilke: “But because truly being here is so much; because everything here / apparently needs us, the fleeting world, which in some strange way / keeps calling us. . . .” The poetry collected here is a response to this call. Rooted firmly in the “fleeting world,” Sadoff’s poems find epiphanies of meaning in unexpected and even unpleasant experiences and emotions. The poems in Barter delve deeply into the past, the personal past of regret, travel, love, divorce, and bereavement, as well as the global past of Beethoven, Vietnam, and the fall of communism. Each poem is offered up by Sadoff as a barter, something to be traded for a little more time, a little more understanding. The poems in Barter comment on the power of culture to interject itself into our desire for an idealized self, the way our inner and outer lives lack correspondence, harmony, and integration. They also talk about commerce, the trading of bodies, the way we as a nation “use” and exchange and appropriate -- and like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, try to bargain with and evade the urgency of our time on earth. In the poem “Self-Portrait with a Critic,” Sadoff makes what could be a succinct statement of purpose: “And inside, let’s not make it pretty, / let’s save the off-rhyme and onomatopoeia / / for the concert hall, let’s go to the wormy place / where the problematic stirs inside his head.”
Download or read book The House of Song written by David Wagoner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a recipient of Poetry's Levinson Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize and a nominee for the American Book Award and National Book Award, David Wagoner is one of this country's most celebrated poets. In The House of Song, he offers a hundred new poems in six parts. At turns elegiac, comic, and nostalgic, these poems venture to the seemingly infinitesimal points where people, legends, and culture collide with nature, memory, and action. With characteristic wit and brevity, Wagoner chronicles the material invasions of the natural world, reconsidering Thoreau amid ruminations on voyeurs and destroyers, slug watchers and moth collectors. The House of Song asserts Wagoner's place among the finest of American poets, past and present.
Download or read book American Ghost Roses written by Kevin Stein and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first book as the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein shoulders an array of poetic forms, blending pathos, humor, and social commentary. These poems--ranging from meditative narratives to improvisational lyrics--explore art's capacity to embody as well as express contemporary culture. Stein embraces subjects as various as his father's death, magazine sex surveys, Kandinsky's theory of art, the dangling modifier, Jimi Hendrix's flaming guitar, racial bigotry, and a teacher's comments on a botched poem. Presiding over this miscellany are ghosts of a peculiarly American garden of dreamers and beloved misfits, those redeemed and those left fingering the locked gate.
Download or read book Creole Echoes written by M. Lynn Weiss and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Creole poets have always eluded easy definition, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of highly accomplished verses. The first major collection of its kind, Creole Echoes contains over a hundred of these poems by more than thirty different poets, presented by M. Lynn Weiss in their original French alongside new English translations by Norman R. Shapiro.The poems gathered here were all composed in French by Louisiana residents of European, African, and Caribbean origin. Their themes range from love and history to nightmare and childhood recollection. In these pages somber elegies meet whimsical surprises, and rhyming animal fables meet political panegyrics. "
Download or read book Good Morning and Good Night written by David Wagoner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By continually discovering what's new in each day without forgetting yesterday's surprises, David Wagoner has succeeded in constantly expanding his range in a career that spans more than fifty years. In Good Morning and Good Night, this range includes his usual rich forays into nature and personalities, and poetry for all ages, young and old, amidst a vivid array of memories and explorations. Readers will find homages to the poets that have inspired him, as well as the bountiful lyricism that has made Wagoner's poetry one of our most enduring sources of delight and joy. Good Morning and Good Night features poems previously published in American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, New Letters, The New Republic, Poetry, Shenandoah, Southern Review, The Yale Review, and other leading literary journals.
Download or read book Some Jazz a While written by Miller Williams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here one of our best-loved poets gathers his most representative work from twelve collections and adds some new pieces as well. An American original, Miller Williams involves the readers emotions and imagination with an effective illusion of plain talk, continually rediscovering what is vital and musical in the language we speak and imagine by.
Download or read book Manderley written by Rebecca Wolff and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Robert Pinsky as one of five volumes published in 2001 in the National Poetry Series In the Manderley of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's forbidding haven of mocking ghosts and secrets that refuse to remain buried, nothing is as it seems. So in this stunning debut collection by Rebecca Wolff, cities, partners, mothers, sisters, friends, and perfect strangers all disguise their true faces, while they who seek connection are "transported from one great gaping / hole in the fabric / of our knowledge to another." No passage is too dark, no garden too tangled for the troubled dreamer of Manderley. Wolff turns a quicksilver gaze on a fluid world where both the real and the imaginary are transfigured. Tempering steely candor with a sophisticated delight in wordplay, these poems turn on a dime from the sensual to the eerie, the resigned to the hopeful, the comforting to the shocking. Each poem weaves together layers of dream, remembrance, and fantasy, distilling from romantic excess a gritty, spare language of truth-telling and surprise
Download or read book Spring written by Oni Buchanan and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2009 Massachusetts Book Awards Winner Representing nothing less than a tour-de-force of formal invention and emotional intensity, Oni Buchanan’s Spring encompasses radically contrasting work. Ecstatic, visually intricate rhapsodies are juxtaposed with tight, sonnet-like poems, and wispy columns of verse brush up against large-scale epics and kinetic text. This collection’s point of departure is the paradox of existence as an individual in a political and violent world. All of the formal innovations in this book have in common an urgent need for texture and polyphony, and the poems attempt to discover how to fulfill the individual human responsibility of surviving as a resiliently loving and hopeful living creature. An accompanying multimedia compact disc offers a full Flash-animated version of the printed kinetic work, “The Mandrake Vehicles.”
Download or read book Battles Lullabies written by Richard Michelson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this poignant book of poetry, Michelson weaves together the past and present, seeing within his children his own difficult childhood, within current wars the burning memory of the Holocaust, and within himself, the ghost of his father.
Download or read book The Silent Singer written by Len Roberts and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Poetry Series awards, Len Roberts presents his best past work with a sizable collection of new poems.
Download or read book The Hollow Log Lounge written by R. T. Smith and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is no fairy tale. / It's all fantastic and bizarre and true. / It's my life, a raspy song, that sounds better if you sing along." The men and women who live and work near Opelika, Alabama, gather at the Hollow Log Lounge. There, under the watchful eye of the stuffed fox behind the bar, they unload their gripes and worries, tell their stories, argue, joke, commune, complain, and confess. In this collection of poems, R. T. Smith paints a vividly imagined portrait of the community in this small-town bar, capturing the chorus of the patrons' voices echoing off the knotted wood-paneled walls. Smith's stand-in, Sam Buckhannon, scribbles stories heard and overheard as tongues loosened by liquor spin out monologues in which southern idiom and vernacular seem perfectly at home within the constraints of measured verse.
Download or read book In the Black Window written by Michael Van Walleghen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004-05-12 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title of Michael Van Walleghen's new collection evokes thematic preoccupations that have shadowed him throughout his long career. Appearing as a phrase in the poems themselves, In the Black Window more generally points to Van Walleghen's enduring interest in the intersection between inner and outer worlds of experience--those liminal moments in other worlds where we become aware of ourselves. We live at once in a strictly personal, material dimension but also in a distinctly spiritual one. Yet, when looking from a lighted kitchen into a night-black window on a winter evening, we might perhaps become suddenly aware not only of our own reflection, but also of our complicity in some deeper mystery altogether.
Download or read book Tetched written by Thaddeus Rutkowski and published by Behler Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An edgy, minimalist style, Tetched presents a darkly comedic picture of difficult family life, quirky sexuality and urban dislocation.
Download or read book The Welcome written by David Friedman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fables for the modern age
Download or read book Asian American Poetry written by Victoria Chang and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern poetry anthology that includes the work of a second generation of Asian American poets who are taking the best of the prior generation, but also breaking conventional patterns.
