Download or read book The Widening Spell of the Leaves written by Larry Levis and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2013-08-09 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Establishes Levis indisputably and once and for all as one of the younger masters." --North American Review "In this book, Levis descends through memory and history with bravery and authority. He seems to be writing the poems we all need to read right now." --Antioch Review Larry Levis was born in Fresno, California, in 1946. His first book of poems, Wrecking Crew, won the United States Award from the International Poetry Forum, and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1972. His second book, The Afterlife, won the Lamont Award from the American Academy of Poets in 1976. In 1981, The Dollmaker's Ghost was a winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. Among his other awards were three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Larry Levis died in 1996.
Download or read book The Selected Levis written by Larry Levis and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2003-01-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives.” Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife (1976), The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981), Winter Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). “It is not an exaggeration to say that the death of Larry Levis in 1996—of a heart attack at 49—sent a shock wave through the ranks of American poetry. Not only was Levis a good friend to many poets (not simply of his own generation but of many poets older and younger as well), his poetry had become a kind of touchstone for many of us, a source of special inspiration and awe. With Larry Levis’ death came the sense that an American original had been lost. . . . It is not at all paradoxical that he saw both the most intimate expressions of poetry and the grandest gestures of art, of language, as constituting individual acts of courage. One can only hope that, like such courage, Larry Levis’s remarkable poems will continue to live far into our literature.”—from the Afterword, by David St. John
Download or read book The Darkening Trapeze written by Larry Levis and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became A darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves. --from "Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It" The Darkening Trapeze collects the last poems by Larry Levis, written during the extraordinary blaze of his final years when his poetry expanded into the ambitious operatic masterpieces he is known for. Edited and with an afterword by David St. John and published twenty years after Levis's death, this collection contains major unpublished works, including final elegies, brief lyrics, and a coda believed to be the last poem Levis wrote, a heart-wrenching poem about his son. The Darkening Trapeze is an astonishing collection by a poet many consider to be among the greatest of late-twentieth-century American poetry.
Download or read book Winter Stars written by Larry Levis and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 1985-03-15 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a “representative life” of our time.
Download or read book The Gazer Within written by Larry Levis and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A posthumous collection of essays, reviews, and interviews by Larry Levis
Download or read book Black Freckles written by Larry Levis and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication in 1971 of his first book of poems, Wrecking Crew, Larry Levis at age twenty-five immediately established himself as a literary talent to watch. Since then, four more books and a host of prestigious awards--including the Lamont prize in 1976 for The Afterlife and a National Poetry Series selection in 1981 for The Dollmaker's Ghost--have solidified his reputation as one of our finest contemporary poets. In Black Freckles, his first collection of fiction, Levis switches genres with his dazzling stylistic powers intact. In these eight vivid and unforgettable stories, Levis explores the nature of beauty and loss, and how sometimes they are inextricably connected. Combining a dreamlike sense of time with images startling for their visceral immediacy, Levis's prose astonishes with its imaginative force and linguistic brilliance. In the title story, set in Belgrade, a young man's disturbing ruminations on the world around him depict the injuries a politically repressive society can inflict on the processes of love and memory. "A Divinity in its Fraying Fact" examines the events surrounding the drowning of a young priest, recalled by the boy whose mother discovered the corpse in the family's swimming pool. In "An Illustration of the Castle" Levis reaches across history to present a timeless monologue from a deposed emperor whose conquests ultimately leave him with a sense of loss and futility. Black Freckles pushes the accepted boundaries of the possible in narrative fiction. Each of these stories possesses the same nostalgia-tinged intelligence and lyric energy that has made Larry Levis one of the most widely read and respected poets of our time.
Download or read book A Condition of the Spirit written by Christopher Buckley and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews, essays, and interviews by American poets affected by Larry Levis, as well as essays by Levis.
Download or read book The Afterlife written by Larry Levis and published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reissuing of The Afterlife, poetry by Larry Levis.
Download or read book The Dollmaker s Ghost written by Larry Levis and published by Carnegie Mellon Classic Contem. This book was released on 1997-10 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reissuing of The Dollmaker's Ghost, poetry by Larry Levis.
Download or read book Elegy written by Larry Levis and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus's ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden - the horses, the migrant workers - are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work./ It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, /Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't".
Download or read book Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Download or read book The Judas Ear written by Anna Journey and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-03-02 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Journey’s The Judas Ear resurrects a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that seem as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous shape-shifting vistas of folktale or myth. Journey’s music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Like the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, the poems in The Judas Ear can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory.
Download or read book The Carrying written by Ada Limón and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Exquisite . . . A powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them." --WASHINGTON POST
Download or read book Hurricane Season written by Fernanda Melchor and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers Winner of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute's Tanslation Prize Longlisted for the National Book Award Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis New York Public Library Best Books of 2020 Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters—inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable—forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.
Download or read book The Spell of the Sensuous written by David Abram and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.
Download or read book Bringing the Shovel Down written by Ross Gay and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2011-01-23 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing the Shovel Down is a re-imagination of the violent mythologies of state and power. "These poems speak out of a global consciousness as well as an individual wisdom that is bright with pity, terror, and rage, and which asks the reader to realize that she is not alone--that the grief he carries is not just his own. Gay is a poet of conscience, who echoes Tomas Transtromer's 'We do not surrender. But want peace.'" --Jean Valentine "Ross Gay is some kind of brilliant latter-day troubadour whose poetry is shaped not only by yearning but also play and scrutiny, melancholy and intensity. I might be shocked by the bold, persistent love throughout Bringing the Shovel Down if I wasn’t so wooed and transformed by it." --Terrance Hayes
Download or read book Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne written by Paul Hamilton Hayne and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
