Download or read book The Insistence of Beauty Poems written by Stephen Dunn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-03-17 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An evocation of beauty's often-surprising manifestations; even in the face of tragedy. "Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair;" So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning. The title poem, perhaps emblematic of the book as a whole, is evocative of beauty's often surprising manifestations even in the light of tragedy; as on that terrible day "when those silver planes came out of the perfect blue." Because beauty jars us, makes us look twice, it is as startling as a good poem, and as insistent. Fortunately, it is never too late to search for the right words for what we've seen, felt, endured. With quiet authority Dunn enacts what it feels like to be a particular man at a particular juncture of his life; struggling not to deny, but to name, then rename.
Download or read book Insistence written by Ailbhe Darcy and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Ailbhe Darcy's second collection relate to love, hope, home and children in a world under threat politically and environmentally. Insistence won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2019, the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and the Pigott Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and T.S. Eliot Prize.
Download or read book The Book of More Delights written by Ross Gay and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, and St. Louis Public Radio** The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with exactly the book we need in these unsettling times. Margaret Roach of The New York Times says, “Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight.” In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.
Download or read book The Volcano and After written by Alicia Suskin Ostriker and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry. From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth . . . crack in her mind,” from brilliant evocations of art and music to mother-daughter wrestlings, Ostriker’s poetry rings with insistence on beauty and truth. Drawing from six of her previous books, and highlighting a sequence of bold new poems exploring the challenges and absurdities of aging, The Volcano and After is a masterpiece for our time. OLD WOMAN AT THE RIVER On the bank of the river I slide inside my sleeping bag sleep is good if I am not kept awake by coughing the sound of the water soothes time passes and does not pass when I am better I will sit and meditate for a while there may be birds to listen to then I will step down the bank and put my naked foot in the water which will shock at first, being so cold, so swift.
Download or read book The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965 2010 written by Lucille Clifton and published by BOA Editions, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-06-20 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965–1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.
Download or read book On Earth We re Briefly Gorgeous written by Ocean Vuong and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times Bestseller • Nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!
Download or read book I Live in a Hut written by S. E. Smith and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by Matthea Harvey. The poems in S. E. Smith's debut collection are caffeinated, wildly comic, assured maximalist performances introducing such characters as three slutty bears, a horse thief named Dirk, Becky Home-ecky, and a pony of darkness. Divided into sections appropriately titled "Parties," "Beauty," and "Devastation," Smith's book is at once free-spirited, metaphysically inquisitive, and romantically exuberant: "If god wanted us to be strangers, why would he place us / next to each other in the movie theater and make us think / our knees are touching when they're really a few inches / apart? Looking at Anita Ekberg's breasts, we can see / the future. It is soft, pink, and frolics in a fountain / where the sea gods bathe their weary feet."
Download or read book My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree written by Yi Lei and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of China’s most significant contemporary poets, co-translated by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith Yi Lei published her poem “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim—and with outrage—for her frank embrace of women’s erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, the poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree celebrate the joys of the body, ponder the miracle of compassion, and proclaim an abiding reverence for the natural world. Presented in the original Chinese alongside English translations by Changtai Bi and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, this collection introduces American readers to a boundless spirit—one “composing an explosion.”
Download or read book The Room and the World written by Laura McCullough and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn is the first book of its kind to explore and unpack the Pulitzer-winning poet’s oeuvre. Including twenty-four essays, a foreword by poet and essayist Dave Smith, and an introduction by Laura McCullough, this anthology illuminates Dunn’s development as a writer, his thematic obsessions, and his strategies and maneuvers on the page; it also locates him in the pantheon of essential American poets. Philosophical, funny, and founded on the juxtaposition of ideas with masterful tonal layering and texture, Dunn’s poems are considered some of the best of his generation. The contributing poets and scholars, including Dunn’s contemporaries and former students, highlight Dunn’s meditations on freedom and constraint, sexuality and sorrow, sound and sense, and the mystery in the dailiness of living. Fans will find this a crucial text that reveals the complexities of Dunn’s poetry and much about the man himself.
Download or read book Crazy Brave written by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir from the Native American poet describes her youth with an abusive stepfather, becoming a single teen mom, and how she struggled to finally find inner peace and her creative voice.
Download or read book Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence written by Jane Hedley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence investigates the ways in which some of our best poets writing in English have used poetic sequences to capture the lived experience of marriage. Beginning in 1862 with George Meredith’s Modern Love, Jane Hedley’s study utilizes the rubrics of temporality, dialogue, and triangulation to bring a deeply rooted and vitally interesting poetic genre into focus. Its twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Lowell, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, Claudia Emerson, Rachel Zucker, and Sharon Olds. In their poetic sequences the flourishing or failure of a particular marriage is always at stake, but as that relationship plays out over time, each sequence also speaks to larger questions: why we marry, what a marriage is, what our collective stake is in other people’s marriages. In the book’s final chapter gay marriage presents a fresh testing ground for these questions, in light of the US Supreme Court’s affirmation of same-sex marriage.
Download or read book This is a Poem that Heals Fish written by Jean-Pierre Siméon and published by Enchanted Lion Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After his mother, hurrying to her tuba lesson, tells him that a poem will cure his pet fish's boredom, a little boy tries to find out what a poem is by asking friends, neighbors, and other members of his family.
Download or read book What Goes On Selected and New Poems 1995 2009 written by Stephen Dunn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant new poems and an expansive gathering from six collections by a Pulitzer Prize winner celebrated as “indispensable.” What Goes On displays the evolving style and sensibility of a major award-winning poet, and a traceable growth that has blossomed into a provocative confrontation with questions of consciousness and existence. Stephen Dunn’s poems probe life’s big questions without ever losing sight of the significance of the mundane.
Download or read book The Beauty written by Jane Hirshfield and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incandescent collection from one of American poetry's most distinctive and essential voices The Beauty opens with a series of dappled, ranging "My" poems--"My Skeleton," "My Corkboard," "My Species," "My Weather"--in which Hirshfield uses materials both familiar and unexpected to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Of her memory, she writes, "Like the small soaps and shampoos / a traveler brings home / then won't use, / you, memory, / almost weightless / this morning inside me." With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield cuts, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability and her contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For Hirshfield, "Zero Plus Anything Is a World." Her recipes for that world ("add salt to hunger," "add time to trees") offer an altered understanding of our lives' losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.
Download or read book September 11 in Popular Culture written by Sara E. Quay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an exploration of the comprehensive impact of the events of September 11, 2001, on every aspect of American culture and society. On Thanksgiving day after September 11, 2001, comic strip creators directed readers to donate money in their artwork, generating $50,000 in relief funds. The world's largest radio network, Clear Channel, sent a memo to all of its affiliated stations recommending 150 songs that should be eliminated from airplay because of assumptions that their lyrics would be perceived as offensive in light of the events of 9/11. On the first anniversary of September 11th, choirs around the world performed Mozart's Requiem at 8:46 am in each time zone, the time of the first attack on the World Trade Center. These examples are just three of the ways the world—but especially the United States—responded to the events of September 11, 2001. Each chapter in this book contains a chronological overview of the sea of changes in everyday life, literature, entertainment, news and media, and visual culture after September 11. Shorter essays focus on specific books, TV shows, songs, and films.
Download or read book Overwhelming Terror written by Robert Knox Dentan and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2008-12-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerful ethnography of a people believed to be the least violent in the world explores how they maintain peaceful relations even under the most dire circumstances. Robert Knox Dentan, the world's foremost scholar of Semai, brings its members vividly to life. His book includes translations of their poetry, dramatized accounts of particular events, and extensive quotations from a wide range of individuals. In a clear, gripping, sometimes novelistic style, Dentan introduces the reader to tortured Nakhoda; beautiful, stubborn Kliy; witty, ironic Grcaangsmother; doomed Rmpent; brutal, alienated Juni; and other memorable Semai. The book opens with the horrific circumstances that the author argues gave rise to Semai peaceability, continues by illuminating their adaptation to those circumstances, and closes by sketching the eventual decline of that adaptation under the pressures of globalization. Unlike many behavioral scientists, Dentan argues that the Semai approach to conflict is a successful Darwinian adaptation. A recurring theme is the importance of psychological "surrender" to maintaining this adaptation. Throughout, the author highlights the mechanisms and costs of peace, underscoring their relevance to everyday life in all societies. Students and scholars of peace studies, conflict resolution, ethnography, and Southeast Asia will find this unique work an invaluable and compelling study. Coda to Chapter 6: "'Surrender,' Peacekeeping, and Internal Colonialism: A Neglected Episode in Malaysian History," by Juli Edo, Anthony Williams-Hunt, and Robert Knox Dentan (PDF)
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.
