Download or read book There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce written by Morgan Parker and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017 One of Oprah Magazine's "Ten Best Books of 2017" "This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood. . . . These exquisite poems defy categorization." —The New Yorker The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.
Download or read book Magical Negro written by Morgan Parker and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner! From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood. "Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read—both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." —TIME Magazine A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, the Star Tribune, AVClub, and more. A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more. Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
Download or read book Other People s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night written by Morgan Parker and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night—the book that launched the career of one of our most important young American poets—is back in print. The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she’s become one of the most beloved writers working today. Her command of language is on full display. Parker bobs and weaves between humor and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television. She collapses any foolish distinctions between the personal and the political, the “high” and the “low.” Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night not only introduced an essential new voice to the world, it contains everything readers have come to love about Morgan Parker’s work.
Download or read book Who Put This Song On written by Morgan Parker and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unflinchingly irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreakingly honest." —Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X In the vein of powerful reads like The Hate U Give and The Poet X, comes poet Morgan Parker's pitch-perfect novel about a black teenage girl searching for her identity when the world around her views her depression as a lack of faith and blackness as something to be politely ignored. Trapped in sunny, stifling, small-town suburbia, seventeen-year-old Morgan knows why she's in therapy. She can't count the number of times she's been the only non-white person at the sleepover, been teased for her "weird" outfits, and been told she's not "really" black. Also, she's spent most of her summer crying in bed. So there's that, too. Lately, it feels like the whole world is listening to the same terrible track on repeat--and it's telling them how to feel, who to vote for, what to believe. Morgan wonders, when can she turn this song off and begin living for herself? Loosely based on her own teenage life and diaries, this incredible debut by award-winning poet Morgan Parker will make readers stand up and cheer for a girl brave enough to live life on her own terms--and for themselves. "Morgan Parker put THIS song on--and I hope it never turns off." —Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and Odd One Out “A triumphant first impression in the YA space.” —Entertainment Weekly “An incredibly heartfelt, deep story about a girl's coming of age.” —Refinery29
Download or read book So Far So Good written by Ursula K. Le Guin and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ursula K. Le Guin, loved by millions for her fantasy and science-fiction novels, ponders life, death and the vast beyond in So Far So Good, an astute, charming collection finished weeks before her death in January, 2018. Fans will recognize some of the motifs here—cats, wind, strong women — as well as her exploration of the intersection between soul and body, the knowable and the unknown. The writing is clear, artful and reverent as Le Guin looks back at key memories and concerns and looks forward to what is next: 'Spirit, rehearse the journey of the body/ that are to come, the motions/ of the matter that held you.'"―Washington Post "Le Guin’s farewell poetry collection, contains all that created her reputation for fiction—sharp insight, restless imagination, humor that is both mordant and humane, and, above all else, that connection to all creation, that 'immense what is'."—New York Journal of Books “It’s hard to think of another living author who has written so well for so long in so many styles as Ursula K. Le Guin.” —Salon “She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is.” —Margaret Atwood “There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le Guin’s.” —Grace Paley Legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her ground- breaking science fiction novels, but she began as a poet, and wrote across genres for her entire career. In this clarifying and sublime collection—completed shortly before her death in 2018—Le Guin is unflinching in the face of mor- tality, and full of wonder for the mysteries beyond. Redolent of the lush natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, with rich sounds playfully echoing myth and nursery rhyme, Le Guin bookends a long, daring, and prolific career. From “How it Seems to Me”: In the vast abyss before time, self is not, and soul commingles with mist, and rock, and light. In time, soul brings the misty self to be. Then slow time hardens self to stone while ever lightening the soul, till soul can loose its hold of self . . . Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of over sixty novels, short fiction works, translations, and volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her books continue to sell millions of copies worldwide. Le Guin died in 2018 in her home in Portland, Oregon.
Download or read book Mr West written by Sarah Blake and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.
Download or read book A Dream of a Woman written by Casey Plett and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Casey Plett’s 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award (Canada). Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, and in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days. In “Hazel and Christopher,” two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In “Perfect Places,” a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In “Couldn’t Hear You Talk Anymore,” the narrator reflects on past trauma and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman. An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Download or read book What Would Beyonc Do written by Luisa Omielan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You know when you find yourself approaching thirty and your dreams are broken? You've got a temping career going nowhere, a student debt that’s mounting and you've just had to move back into your mum’s house. Then to top it all off, you get absolutely annihilated with heartbreak because of an ex, who is just ‘not ready’ but then manages to be ready, a week later, with someone else. And it is here, at your lowest point, that one of your best friends decides to remind you that you are the same age as Beyoncé. FML. Luisa Omielan is a stand-up comedian who turned her life around after she answered the mantra every person needs in their life: What Would Beyoncé Do?! Hilariously funny, wonderfully uplifting and brutally honest, Luisa's memoir shows us all that there is no situation in which Bey can’t save the day.
Download or read book Impolite Conversations written by Cora Daniels and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When was the last time you said everything on your mind without holding back? In this no-holds-barred discussion of America’s top hot-button issues, a journalist and a cultural anthropologist express opinions that are widely held in private—but rarely heard in public. Everyone edits what they say. It’s a part of growing up. But what if we applied tell-it-like-it-is honesty to grown-up issues? In Impolite Conversations, two respected thinkers and writers openly discuss five “third-rail” topics—from multi-racial identities to celebrity worship to hyper-masculinity among black boys—and open the stage for honest discussions about important and timely concerns. Organized around five subjects—Race, Politics, Sex, Money, Religion—the dialogue between Cora Daniels and John L. Jackson Jr. may surprise, provoke, affirm, or challenge you. In alternating essays, the writers use reporting, interviews, facts, and figures to back up their arguments, always staying firmly rooted in the real world. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don’t, but they always reach their conclusions with respect for the different backgrounds they come from and the reasons they disagree. Whether you oppose or sympathize with these two impassioned voices, you’ll end up knowing more than you did before and appreciating the candid, savvy, and often humorous ways in which they each take a stand.
Download or read book Mutiny written by Phillip B. Williams and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 American Book Award Finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry Named one of the Best Books of 2021 by The Boston Globe and Lit Hub From the critically acclaimed author of Thief in the Interior who writes with "a lucid, unmitigated humanity" (Boston Review), a startling new collection about revolt and renewal Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.
Download or read book Poems 1962 1997 written by Robert Lax and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of out-of-print and previously unpublished work from a lesser known yet highly influential American poet.
Download or read book Queen Bey written by Veronica Chambers and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FEATURED IN: The New York Times Book Review ("New and Noteworthy") • Essence • Newsweek • People • Bustle • PopSugar • Refinery 29 • HelloGiggles' • PureWow • Newsday • AMNewYork The Ultimate Beyoncé Collectible "Beyoncé fans will eat it up." —People "You don't need to be in the Beyhive to appreciate Queen Bey...Voices including culture critic Luvvie Ajayi and actress and producer Lena Waithe give us a fresh take on Beyoncé, who's arguably the biggest pop star of our time." —Essence Beyoncé. Her name conjures more than music, it has come to be synonymous with beauty, glamour, power, creativity, love, and romance. Her performances are legendary, her album releases events. She is not even forty but she has already rewritten the Beyoncé playbook more than half a dozen times. She is consistently provocative, political and surprising. As a solo artist, she has sold more than 100 million records. She has won 22 Grammys and is the most-nominated woman artist in the history of Grammy awards. Her 2018 performance at Coachella wowed the world. The New York Times wrote: "There's not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year or any year soon." Artist, business woman, mother, daughter, sister, wife, black feminist, Queen Bey is endlessly fascinating. Queen Bey features a diverse range of voices, from star academics to outspoken cultural critics to Hollywood and music stars. Essays include: "What Might a Black Girl Be in This World," an introduction by Veronica Chambers "Beychella is Proof That Beyoncé is the Greatest Performer Alive. I’m Not Arguing." by Luvvie Ajayi "On the Journey Together," by Lena Waithe "What Beyoncé Means to Everyone," by Meredith Broussard with visualizations by Andrew Harvard and Juan Carlos Mora "Jay-Z's Apology to Beyoncé Isn't Just Celebrity Gossip — It's a Political Act" by Brittney Cooper "All Her Single Ladies" by Kid Fury "The Elevator" by Ylonda Gault "The Art of Being Beyoncé" by Maria Brito "Getting, Giving and Leaving" by Melissa Harris Perry and Mankaprr Conteh "Beyoncé the Brave" by Reshma Saujani "Living into the Lemonade: Redefining Black Women’s Spirituality in the Age of Beyoncé" by Candice Benbow "Beyoncé’s Radical Ways" by Carmen Perez "Finding la Reina in Queen Bey" by Isabel Gonzalez Whitaker "Beyoncé, Influencer" by Elodie Maillet Storm "The King of Pop and the Queen of Everything" by Michael Eric Dyson "Style So Sacred" by Edward Enninful "The Beauty of Beyoncé" by Fatima Robinson "Because Beyoncé." by Ebro Darden "King Bey" by Treva B. Lindsey "Meridonial: Beyoncé’s Southern Roots and References" by Robin M. Boylorn "B & V: A Love Letter" by Caroline Clarke
Download or read book Junk written by Tommy Pico and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of the Year From 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico, Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural. The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?
Download or read book Words and Their Meanings written by Kate Bassett and published by North Star Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-09-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gifted writer, seventeen-year-old Anna O’Mally is headed for the stars. Or she was until her uncle Joe died. Anna worshipped the ground Joe walked on ... until she discovers that she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.
Download or read book Dream Work written by Mary Oliver and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly repackaged as a Penguin paperback, an “astonishing” book of poetry from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Primitive and “one of our very best poets” (New York Times Book Review) Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems originally published in 1986, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness, so steadfast and radiant in American Primitive, continues in Dream Work. Additionally, she has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit, to accepting the truth about one’s personal world, and to valuing the triumphs while transcending the failures of human relationships.
Download or read book American Radiance written by Luisa Muradyan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, American Radiance, at turns funny, tragic, and haunting, reflects on the author's experience immigrating as a child to the United States from Ukraine in 1991. What does it mean to be an American? Luisa Muradyan doesn't try to provide an answer. Instead, the poems in American Radiance look for a home in history, folklore, misery, laughter, language, and Prince's outstretched hand. Colliding with the grand figures of late '80s and early '90s pop culture, Muradyan's imagination pushes the reader forward, confronting the painful loss of identity that assimilation brings.
Download or read book Barbie Chang written by Victoria Chang and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous."—Linda Gregerson "Chang's voice is equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified."—American Poets Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie—perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. This energetic string of linked poems is full of wordplay, humor, and biting social commentary involving the quote-unquote speaker, Barbie Chang, a disillusioned Asian-American suburbanite. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that "even silence is not silent." From "Barbie Chang Lives": Barbie Chang lives on Facebook has a house on Facebook street so she can erase herself Facebook is a country with no trees it allows her to believe people love her don't want to cover her Barbie Chang . . . Victoria Chang is the author of three previous poetry books. In 2013, she won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Chang teaches poetry at Chapman University and lives in Southern California.
