Download or read book The Caiplie Caves written by Karen Solie and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray [. . .] – she is the one by whom the language lives’. – Michael Hofmann, LRB The Canadian Karen Solie is rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most important poets at work today. Her fifth book of poetry, The Caiplie Caves, is a profound and timely consideration of the nature of crisis: at its heart is the figure of St Ethernan, a seventh-century Irish missionary to Scotland who retreated to the caves of the Fife coast in order to decide whether to establish a priory on May Island or pursue a life of solitude. His decision would have been informed by realities of war, misinformation and power; Solie imagines this crisis also complicated by grief, confusion – and a faith placed under extreme duress. Woven through Ethernan’s story are poems that orbit the caves’ geographical location, and range through the recurring violences of history and myth, of personal and public record. In poems of the utmost lyric subtlety and argumentative strength, Solie addresses how we might distinguish self-delusion from belief, belief from knowledge – and how, in the frailty of our responses, we can find the courage to move forward.

Download or read book The Caiplie Caves written by Karen Solie and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning poet Karen Solie’s striking fifth collection of poetry blends the story of a seventh-century monk with contemporary themes of economic class, environmentalism, and solitude in an ever-connected world if one asks for a sign must one accept what’s given? Ethernan, an Irish missionary in the seventh century, retreated to the Caiplie Caves on the eastern coast of Scotland to consider life as a hermit. In The Caiplie Caves, Karen Solie’s fifth collection of poems, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Solie inhabits a figure inspired by Ethernan, a man torn between the communal and the contemplative. His story is remarkable for the mysticism embedded in the ordinary; as Solie writes in her preface, Ethernan is not known for supernatural feats, but “is said to have survived for a very long time on bread and water.” Interwoven with the voice of this figure are poems whose subjects orbit the physical location of the caves and join the sharply contemporary to the mythic past: the fall of a coal-fired power station; a “druid shouting astrology” outside a liquor store, putting “the Ambien in ambience”; seabirds “frontloaded with military tech”; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle. These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today’s most gifted poetic voices.

Download or read book The Caiplie Caves written by Karen Solie and published by . This book was released on 2019-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book F ckface written by Leah Hampton and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of 2020 by Slate, Electric Literature, and PopMatters F*ckface is a brassy, bighearted debut collection of twelve short stories about rurality, corpses, honeybee collapse, and illicit sex in post-coal Appalachia. The twelve stories in this knockout collection—some comedic, some tragic, many both at once—examine the interdependence between rural denizens and their environment. A young girl, desperate for a way out of her small town, finds support in an unlikely place. A ranger working along the Blue Ridge Parkway realizes that the dark side of the job, the all too frequent discovery of dead bodies, has taken its toll on her. Haunted by his past, and his future, a tech sergeant reluctantly spends a night with his estranged parents before being deployed to Afghanistan. Nearing fifty and facing new medical problems, a woman wonders if her short stint at the local chemical plant is to blame. A woman takes her husband’s research partner on a day trip to her favorite place on earth, Dollywood, and briefly imagines a different life. In the vein of Bonnie Jo Campbell and Lee Smith, Leah Hampton writes poignantly and honestly about a legendary place that’s rapidly changing. She takes us deep inside the lives of the women and men of Appalachia while navigating the realities of modern life with wit, bite, and heart.

Download or read book The Curious Thing Poems written by Sandra Lim and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness. Truthful, sensuous, and intellectually relentless, the poems in The Curious Thing are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. Sandra Lim’s poetry displays stinging wit and a tough-minded approach to her own experiences: She speaks with Jean Rhys about beauty, encounters the dark loneliness that can exist inside a relationship, and discovers a coiled anger on a hot summer day. An extended poem sequence slyly revolves the meanings of finding oneself astray in midlife. A steely strength courses through the volume’s myriad discoveries—Lim’s lucidity and tenderness form a striking complement to her remarkable metaphors and the emotional clamor of her material. Animated by a sense of reckoning and a piercing inwardness, these anti-sentimental poems nevertheless celebrate the passionate and empathetic subjective life.

Download or read book Midwood Poems written by Jana Prikryl and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Midwood makes clear and unmistakable the increasing singularity of [Jana Prikryl’s] artistry.” —Nathan Blansett, Los Angeles Review of Books Midwood is a restless and intimate volume from a poet James Wood has called “one of the most original voices of her generation.” In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl’s careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.

Download or read book Surge written by Jay Bernard and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Winner of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award** Jay Bernard's extraordinary debut is a fearless exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in which thirteen young black people were killed. Dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain. Tracing a line from New Cross to the 'towers of blood' of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice. A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism - both political and personal, witness and documentary - Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment. 'The verse has anger and political purpose, but a rare lyrical precision, too. The combination is powerful' Sebastian Faulks, Spectator, Books of the Year 2020 *Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry* *Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award; T.S. Eliot Prize; Forward Prize for Best First Collection; Dylan Thomas Prize; RSL Ondaatje Prize; John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize* *Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2020*

Download or read book A Wee Guide to the Picts written by Duncan Jones and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pocket-sized guide that describes what is known about the history of the Picts, listing the best symbol stones and museums to visit with many illustrations and maps.

Download or read book Life in a Field written by Katie Peterson and published by Omnidawn. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time. A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson's slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California--with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn't wish for? A narrator's voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of "the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth."

Download or read book No Great Mischief written by Alistair MacLeod and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family’s mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in “the land of trees,” where his descendents became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, exile, and of the blood ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came.

Download or read book Guide to the East Neuk of Fife written by David Hay Fleming and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Darling written by Jackie Kay and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Darling' brings together many favourite poems from Kay's four collections, 'The Adoption Papers, 'Other Lovers', 'Off Colour' and 'Life Mask', as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers.

Download or read book The Living Option written by Karen Solie and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen Solie won the Canadian Griffin Prize with only her third collection, Pigeon, in 2010, and has quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive and unsettling voices in Canadian poetry, a 'sublime singer of existential bewilderment'. Her poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, desire, and the eros of danger, constantly exposing the fragility of the basis of trust on which modern humanity relies. They are double-edged, tense and tender, an edgy blend of irony and guts, of snarl and praise, of sharp intelligence and quizzical ambiguity. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Download or read book The east neuk of Fife its history and antiquities c written by Walter Wood and published by . This book was released on 1862 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Goldenrod written by Maggie Smith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR ??“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time “A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life. With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​ Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

Download or read book The Air Year written by Caroline Bird and published by Carcanet Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air"--Provided by publisher

Download or read book Short Haul Engine written by Karen Solie and published by London, Ont. : Brick Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short Haul Engine is a tough-minded, original, unyielding first collection. Although the subject matter is often back roads fever, that dead-end dreaminess, the poems are shot through with a smashing energy and a willingness to say just about anything, no matter how risky or wild. Karen Solie is a unique blend of irony and guts, of snarl and praise. She is so talented that even her darkest poems dazzle. --Brick Brooks.