Download or read book The Poetry of Strangers written by Brian Sonia-Wallace and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry — when it meets them where they are. Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life. In The Poetry of Strangers, Brian tells the story of his cross-country journey in a series of heartfelt and insightful essays. From Minnesota to Tennessee, California to North Dakota, Brian discovered that people aren’t so afraid of poetry when it’s telling their stories. In “dying” towns flourish vibrant artistic spirits and fascinating American characters who often pass under the radar, from the Mall of America’s mall walkers to retirees on Amtrak to self-proclaimed witches in Salem. In a time of unprecedented loneliness and isolation, Brian’s journey shows how art can be a vital bridge to community in surprising places. Conventional wisdom says Americans don’t want to talk to each other, but according to this poet-for-hire, everyone is just dying to be heard. Thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening, The Poetry of Strangers is an unforgettable portrait of America told through the hidden longings of one person at a time, by one of our most important voices today. The fault lines and conflicts which divide us fall away when we remember to look, in every stranger, for poetry.
Download or read book Strangers written by Rob Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this." In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, "a revelation in words by means of the words." The epiphany here is not only the poet's. It's ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together--to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an "unspoken / Stranger no longer."
Download or read book A Country of Strangers written by D. Nurkse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories. D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.
Download or read book Stranger by Night written by Edward Hirsch and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his seventieth year, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains him. Beginning with "My Friends Don't Get Buried," the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self "don't write elegies/anymore," Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy. He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldn't yet know the tragedy of her burning spirit; the radiance of an autumn day in Detroit when his students smoked outside, passionately discussing Shelley; the day he got off late from a railyard shift and missed an antiwar demonstration. There are direct and indirect elegies to lost contemporaries like Mark Strand, William Meredith, and, most especially, his longtime compatriot Philip Levine, whom he honors in several poems about daily work in the late midcentury Midwest. As the poet ages and begins to lose his peripheral vision, the world is "stranger by night," but these elegant, heart-stirring poems shed light on a lifetime that inevitably contains both sorrow and joy.
Download or read book Sea of Strangers written by Lang Leav and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This completely original collection of poetry and prose will not only delight her avid fans but is sure to capture the imagination of a whole new audience. With the turn of every page, Sea of Strangers invites you to go beyond love and loss to explore themes of self-discovery and empowerment as you navigate your way around the human heart.
Download or read book Strangers to Their Courage written by Alice Derry and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her startling new collection of poetry, Alice Derry contemplates an awkward, even taboo, subject -- the persecution and suffering of the German population before, during, and after World War II. Sparked by her desire to capture in verse the torment of her German cousins, who had survived the horrors of war only to be separated by the division of Germany, Derry composed these poems over a quarter century, ultimately chronicling the anguish of an entire people who "deserved" their lot, a people permanently tainted by the horrifying events of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. "Before I realized that I was becoming part of a contaminated language and people, I was part of them", writes Derry in her powerful introductory essay, an eloquent discussion of racism, ethnic prejudice, and learned hatred. Indeed, Derry's intensely personal poems have an immediacy that approaches documentary. She divides the poems into two sections, the first telling the stories of her German relatives trapped behind the Iron Curtain, often from their point of view. "When I felt our first son move inside me . . . / I walked into the cold, muddy spring, / the rubbled streets, and took my place / in the food lines". The second section ponders the distinct experiences of German Americans. By giving voice to a group that Americans and others have been given permission to hate, Derry eloquently reveals a subtle truth about blame and guilt -- in the end we are all implicated, all human suffering is a part of each of us.
Download or read book Red Mother written by Laurel Radzieski and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Red Mother Laurel Radzieski weaves a love story told from the perspective of a parasite. This series of short poems explores the intimacy we all experience by following the sometimes tender, often distressing relationship that emerges between a parasite and its host. Radzieski's poetry is playful, though often with sinister undertones.
Download or read book Strangers written by David Ferry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1983-09 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Ferry must have had something up his sleeve when he called his book "Strangers," because his is a poetry of intimacy and familiarity. More than that, Mr. Ferry's short, sparse lyrics are as perfectly and simply composed as Japanese haiku—a rare accomplishment in poetry written in English."—Andy Brumer, New York Times Book Review "Strangers is a remarkably good book for a reader sufficiently attentive to hear its quiet power, to let it work in its distinctive way."—Boston Globe "The poems of David Ferry's Strangers are in fact one book, and it is a splendid one. There is the same austere and poignant voice throughout, asking the unanswerable things, speaking of all that is withheld from us, confronting the unknownness that dwells even in the familiar and dear. Painful and touching, the book offers a distinctive vision which is at the same time inescapably true."—Richard Wilbur
Download or read book Other Fugitives and Other Strangers written by Rigoberto González and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A brilliant poet of two nations, he is a treasure found."-Sandra McPherson A testimony of sexuality in times of violence, this journey into the intimate language of the male body is freighted with danger and desire and expressed through a dark eroticism reminiscent of Garcia Lorca and Cavafy. "Breads That Hunger" Acirc; I make love to a man with a button fetish. Correction: a man makes love to my shirt. He yanks each piece of plastic with his teeth and swallows it, then inserts the cusp of his tongue into the buttonhole. I slip out of the sleeves and off the bed and he scarcely notices. Later, he comes looking for me; my shirt slumped across his shoulder. It looks as if I have shed my skin-the fantasy of meeting the train on the rusty tracks comes to life. Buttonless, I have been stripped of everything that holds me together. He tells me he can replace the shirt. I tell him he can keep me.
Download or read book The Kindness of Strangers written by Tom Lutz and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once again, Tom Lutz takes us to seldom-traveled corners of the world—the small towns of western Madagascar, the terraced rice fields in northern Luzon, the scattered homesteads on the Mongolian steppe, the hilltop churches on Micronesian islands, the riverside docks of Dhaka, Ethiopian weddings in Gondar, funeral pyres in Nepal, traditionalist karaoke bars in Bhutan—to bring us random reports of human kindness. You may never visit these places, but Tom Lutz will do it for you. And while global media may serve up a steady diet of division, violence, oppression, hatred, and strife, The Kindness of Strangers shows that people the world over are much more likely to meet strangers with interest, empathy, welcome, and compassion.
Download or read book Love the Stranger written by Jay Deshpande and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Top Debut Collection of 2015, Poets and Writers. "This is a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty. This is a poet of intensifying linguistic gift and of terrible suspicion regarding that gift. Is there, yet, an Auto-Voyeuristic school of poetry? If not, then Jay Deshpande's troubling and gorgeous LOVE THE STRANGER 'watch yourself grow muscle in your failures / and hate it' could be the founding document." Josh Bell "Deshpande tracks those moments when we become strange to ourselves, when indecision and failure wrench us open. He writes with a kind of glowing, dreamlike clarity about desire, distraction, regret the ways we rush past ourselves, the ways we hurt each other. This book is full of searching and light." Joanna Klink "Elegant, dreamy, and hauntingly charismatic, Deshpande's poems captivate the way the recordings of their patron saint Chet Baker do, insisting time after time that exceptional artistry can spin even radical loneliness and excruciating sensitivity into music that radiates and affirms. Provoking 'a hunger become so animal' then tranquilizing it with 'orchestrated moonlight, ' LOVE THE STRANGER is a book, a shady neighborhood, and a mood that readers will return to again and again." Timothy Donnelly"
Download or read book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers written by Bhanu Kapil Rider and published by Kelsey Street Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Asian American Studies. THE VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS blends the narratives of the travelog and the coming of age novel. It is written by a young Indian woman whose travels take her between homes in two countries, India and England, and through parts of the United States. These short pieces reveal new ways of belonging in the world and possibilities for an art grounded in a localized cosmopolitan culture.
Download or read book Strangers to Soulmates written by Tigre Pickett and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2018-01-15 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selection of poems and prose between two long distance lovers, Lola and Tigre, during their courtship and romantic beginnings.
Download or read book The Stranger Manual written by Catherine Jeanne Rosemurgy and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catie Rosemurgy's second collection, The Stranger Manual, is a wild rush across the American grain. The poems follow an unlikely character named Miss Peach, an unpredictable, cartoonish shapeshifter, who emerges onto the page dragging the myth of the individual, various gender scripts, and the grand tradition of the poetic persona along with her. She becomes an outsider, a hero, an intruder, a rock star. The town around her, Gold River, is also always in flux—part center and part mirage. The Stranger Manual celebrates the fractious nature of self and society in poems that are fabulist, speculative, and alluring.
Download or read book Fear of The Beast written by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about that transience: of animals, of seasons, even of plants. Like our first book, Fear of the Beast combines Elisabeth Sharp McKetta's poetry with Troy Passey's artwork. But this book is entirely its own animal. Unlike the first, it has a specter of a plot-line as we track a beast (or are tracked by one?) through a forest in the snow. In contrast to the restrained lines in our first book, here the poems shake off their harness and grow longer, at times wending a path over several pages. The art and the words play at the blurred line between ordinary and enchanted, how we inadvertently make myths, and how we are all interrupted by life as we never imagined it would be. Fear of the Beast looks at the idea of the animal--both self and other, human and humane--and examines how our collective fear and longing shapes our perceptions. Like any good book about beasts, our book is intended both for children and for adults. Our relationship with animals is complicated, both primal and mythic, whether we are eating animals, keeping animals as pets, or telling stories about animals that we are too afraid to tell of ourselves.
Download or read book Stranger written by Nyla Matuk and published by Signal Editions. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems that reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder. In Stranger, Nyla Matuk’s provocative, unabashedly sensual voice leads us to revelations about how our lives are increasingly disembodied by social media’s flattened, outward identity markers. In place of this contested sense of self, Stranger reckons with a range of possible states of unknowing. Have we over-determined our identities, and thus diminished our appetites? "I fell asleep between two cold rivers,” Matuk reports, "while the blue shadows of uncomplicated / conifers leaned into their own.” Bold and spontaneous, piling images and ideas on top of each other to create opulent sound patterns, these poems reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.
Download or read book Every Stranger Deserves a Poem written by Alyea Pierce and published by . This book was released on 2013-06-30 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is a birth of a new stranger every 4.4 minutes and a death of a familiar one every 9.1 minutes. Everyone here, in this city, is a stranger who has pockets full of unsaid poems-things strangers desire to say to feel connected, and crave to feel in order to be called human again- but instead, hold their tongue...Each secret held deep in our bones is like a thousand never-ending pages of unsaid stories, which create our life's narration- but no matter how disconnected we are, Love, Life, and Loss, are the three common heartstrings that connect us all. When one of these threads begin to fray, it can mean life or death.Follow Word Smith, an attractive young poet as he takes you along on his most life-changing day when he meets three strangers in New York City. Life, a free spirit struck by illness, is terrified to love another stranger in fear that it may be her last. Love, a workaholic, is unexpectedly hit by love on a Sunday train and now must answer one question, "Does true love knock at the most difficult times to test the pure essence of itself?" Loss is a young woman who misses her first love much more than she has ever loved him and wonders if life is even worth living."...each and every one of us are craving to be connected to someone. Someone that will listen, and not speak. Someone who will speak just enough when the time is right, and make our hearts half full again. Someone who can help us feel alive...And then there is me. I am the kind of stranger who wants a "good" conversation even though the word "good" is subjective. I want to listen to how our lives intertwine. This city is cold, and heartless, and I crave something that can resurrect our hearts." ~Word
