Download or read book When Rap Spoke Straight to God written by Erica Dawson and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book-length poem navigating belief, black lives, the tragedies of Trump, and the boundaries of being a woman. "When Rap Spoke Straight to God is utterly transporting. In language both elevated and slangy, saucy and tender, Dawson lovingly weaves the reader around her finger.” —Jennifer Egan When Rap Spoke Straight to God isn’t sacred or profane, but a chorus joined in a single soliloquy, demanding to be heard. There’s Wu-Tang and Mary Magdelene with a foot fetish, Lil’ Kim and a self-loving Lilith. Slurs, catcalls, verses, erasures—Dawson asks readers, “Just how far is it to nigger?” Both grounded and transcendent, the book is reality and possibility. Dawson’s work has always been raw; but, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is as blunt as the answer to that earlier question: “Here.” Sometimes abrasive and often abraded, Dawson doesn’t flinch. A mix of traditional forms where sonnets mash up with sestinas morphing to heroic couplets, When Rap Spoke Straight to God insists that while you may recognize parts of the poem’s world, you can’t anticipate how it will evolve. With a literal exodus of light in the book’s final moments, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is a lament for and a celebration of blackness. It’s never depression; it’s defiance—a persistent resistance. In this book, like Wu-Tang says, the marginalized “ain’t nothing to f--- with.”
Download or read book Tin House 77 Poison written by Rob Spillman and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning quarterly, Tin House started in 1999, the singular love child of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Our fall issue will be packing stories, essays, and poems inspired by poison pens, poison pills, and general-use poisons. But don't worry, reading is the antidote, too. Featuring Elisa Albert, Melissa Febos, Ethan Rutherford, Shane McCrae, Deb Olin Unferth, and more.
Download or read book One House Down written by Gianna Russo and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The candid poems in Gianna Russo's One House Down are grounded in experiences of ambivalence and oneness, not unlike those we sometimes find in true love. Russo ruminates on the past and scrutinizes the present in her hometown of Tampa with honest affection, concern, anger and delight. She asks an essential question: How can we treasure a place whose history and values have sometimes supported injustice? And if those wrongs are still evident today--then what? With family roots in Tampa that go back over a century, Russo skillfully pursues an answer in these inventive, surprising poems.
Download or read book Big eyed Afraid written by Erica Dawson and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Big-Eyed Afraid' is a fast-paced, breathlessly witty and illuminating riff on the multiple effects of race, sex, biology and social pressure on who we are and how we see ourselves. Dawson's dazzling rhymes, her perfect pitch for an array of idioms ranging from the smutty to the sacred, and her extraordinary combination of metrical control and jazz-like syntactical elaboration make her work feel at one and the same time chiselled and improvised, traditional and utterly distinct. Brilliantly alert to multiple influences yet irreducibly tied to this particular poet at this particular moment in our collective history, Big-Eyed Afraid is one of the most compelling and entertaining books of poetry I've read in I don't know how long.'- Alan Shapiro 'Erica Dawson is the most exciting younger poet I've seen in years. What drive and verve! Even in lines under tight control, she can sound reckless. Her dazzling wit informs poem after poem, making each seem like a stiff drink with a dash of bitters. 'Big-Eyed Afraid' is a sensational debut. I can't recall finding this much energy between two covers since Ariel.- X. J. Kennedy Erica Dawson was born in Columbia, Maryland in 1979. After earning her Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 2006, she moved to the University of Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and Comparative Literature as the Elliston Fellow in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Blackbird, Sewanee Theological Review, Southwest Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, including the Academy of American Poets Prize at Ohio State University. She also took second place in the 2004 Morton Marr Poetry Prize.
Download or read book Alligator Zoo park Magic written by C. H. Hooks and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Is Jeffers an Alligator Zoo-Park magician or the Messiah? Two friends live unapologetically on the edge of poverty in the rugged, un-decorous part of the South. Jimmy, a single father with an addict ex, and Jeffers, a magician whose tricks are closer to miracles--both are immersed in a place where trailers and Hot Pockets dominate the landscape, and alligators roam free. When Jimmy witnesses "losing" his best friend to his biggest trick gone awry, he reflects on their lifelong friendship and what it really means to escape. "C.H. Hooks' mesmerizing novel, ALLIGATOR ZOO-PARK MAGIC, hovers in the boundaries between city boys and country boys, businessmen and truck drivers, a van named NAILR and a radiator-busting deer drinking beer. The world is both nature untamed and twisted in a theme park of mermaids and crispy-fried reptile bites. Yet, Hooks does so much more than create a new spin on the mystical, mythical South. This fascinating debut delves into the true nature of the heart: everyone's need to belong to someone, to some place, and, most importantly, to oneself."--Erica Dawson "Mr. Hooks has produced a magic show of the highest order."--Jensen Beach "I've died and been born anew! C.H. Hooks is a damned wizard, and ALLIGATOR ZOO-PARK MAGIC is a holy hell of a book."--Harrison Scott Key "AZPM is in the best tradition of Southern literature--it's fast and funny, dark and desperate."--Shane Hinton "Draw a direct line from Larry Brown and Harry Crews to Chris Hooks."--Jeff Parker
Download or read book Shrapnel Maps written by Philip Metres and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.
Download or read book Black Hibiscus written by John Wharton Lowe and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Simone A. James Alexander, José Felipe Alvergue, Valerie Babb, Pamela Bordelon, Taylor Hagood, Joyce Marie Jackson, Delia Malia Konzett, Jane Landers, John Wharton Lowe, Gary Monroe, Noelle Morrissette, Paul Ortiz, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Genevieve West, and Belinda Wheeler The state of Florida has a rich literary and cultural history, which has been greatly shaped by many different ethnicities, races, and cultures that call the Sunshine State home. Little attention has been paid, however, to the key role of African Americans in Floridian history and culture. The state’s early population boom came from immigrants from the US South, and many of them were African Americans. Interaction between the state’s ethnic communities has created a unique and vibrant culture, which has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on southern, national, and hemispheric life and history. Black Hibiscus: African Americans and the Florida Imaginary begins by exploring Florida’s colonial past, focusing particularly on interactions between maroons who escaped enslavement, and on Albery Whitman’s The Rape of Florida, which also links Black people and Native Americans. Contributors consider film, folklore, and music, as well as such key Black writers as Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Gwendolyn Bennett, Colson Whitehead, and Edwidge Danticat. The volume features Black Floridians’ role in the civil rights movement and Black contributions to the celebrated Florida Writers’ Project. Contributors include literary scholars, historians, film critics, art historians, anthropologists, musicologists, political scientists, artists, and poets.
Download or read book Hell of Birds written by Kimberly Povloski and published by Driftwood Press. This book was released on 2019-03 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "hell of birds is ferocious in its energy and acrobatics. With arresting images and unexpected enjambment, the poems twist and turn, often coming to a halt so surprising, you're left reeling in the white space, out of breath. Kimberly writes, "One day the world will sing through your blood." After reading this collection, you'll feel the earth in your bones." -Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God "You've not read a collection like hell of birds before. This is wild new work by a poet with a vision and a voice-and with wings. The rapture is contagious: it's our lives. These poems net all of it-the heaven and the hell of it in these fearless and music-filled poems." -Laura Kasischke, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
Download or read book Shook One written by Charlamagne Tha God and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlamagne Tha God, New York Times bestselling author of Black Privilege and always provocative cohost of Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, reveals his blueprint for breaking free from your fears and anxieties. Being “shook” is more than a rap lyric for Charlamagne, it’s his mission to overcome. While it may seem like he’s ahead of the game, he is actually plagued by anxieties, such as the fear of losing his roots, the fear of being a bad dad, and the fear of being a terrible husband. In the national bestseller Shook One, Charlamagne chronicles his journey to beat those fears and shows a path that you too can take to overcome the anxieties that may be holding you back. Ironically, Charlamagne’s fear of failure—of falling into the life of stagnation or crime that caught up so many of his friends and family in his hometown of Moncks Corner—has been the fuel that has propelled him to success. However, even after achieving national prominence as a radio personality, Charlamagne still found himself paralyzed by anxiety and distrust. Here, in Shook One, he is working through these problems—many of which he traces back to cultural PTSD—with help from mentors, friends, and therapy. Being anxious doesn’t serve the same purpose anymore. Through therapy, he’s figuring out how to get over the irrational fears that won’t take him anywhere positive. Charlamange hopes Shook One can be a call to action: Getting help is your right. His second book “cements the radio personality’s stance in making sure he’s on the right side of history when it comes to society’s growing focus on mental health, while helping remove the negative stigma” (Billboard).
Download or read book Summer of the Cicadas written by Chelsea Catherine and published by Red Hen Press. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fast-paced, stirring narrative about loss and unrequited love” set amid a destructive cicada swarm in West Virginia (Publishers Weekly). In a West Virginian town, a brood of Magicicadas emerges for the first time in seventeen years. The cicadas damage crops and trees, and swarm locals. Jessica, a former cop whose entire family was killed in a car crash two years earlier, is deputized during the crisis. At the same time, she is dealing with her feelings for her sister’s best friend, Natasha, a town council member—and the two-year anniversary of the car crash that killed her family is approaching. As all this descends, a sudden, devastating loss will change everything . . . “A bright, raw, original new voice in American fiction. Her prose is electric. And Summer of the Cicadas was a novel I couldn't put down.” —Thomas Christopher Greene, author of The Perfect Liar
Download or read book The Lice written by William Stanley Merwin and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiftieth Anniversary edition of a revolutionary book that still stuns with its prophetic, political, and stylistic force
Download or read book Rap and Religion written by Ebony A. Utley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-06-11 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an enlightening, representative account of how rappers talk about God in their lyrics—and why a sense of religion plays an intrinsic role within hip hop culture. Why is the battle between good and evil a recurring theme in rap lyrics? What role does the devil play in hip hop? What exactly does it mean when rappers wear a diamond-encrusted "Jesus" around their necks? Why do rappers acknowledge God during award shows and frequently include prayers in their albums? Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta's God tackles a sensitive and controversial topic: the juxtaposition—and seeming hypocrisy—of references to God within hip hop culture and rap music. This book provides a focused examination of the intersection of God and religion with hip hop and rap music. Author Ebony A. Utley, PhD, references selected rap lyrics and videos that span three decades of mainstream hip hop culture in America, representing the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South in order to account for how and why rappers talk about God. Utley also describes the complex urban environments that birthed rap music and sources interviews, award acceptance speeches, magazine and website content, and liner notes to further explain how God became entrenched in hip hop.
Download or read book Lake Life written by David James Poissant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Starling family is scattered across the country. Parents Richard and Lisa live in Ithaca, New York, and work at Cornell University. Their son Michael, a salesperson, lives in Dallas with his elementary school teacher wife, Diane. Michael's brother, Thad, an aspiring poet, makes his home in New York City with his famous painter boyfriend, Jake. For years they've travelled to North Carolina to share a summer vacation at the family lake house. That tradition is coming to an end, as Richard and Lisa have decided to sell the treasured summer home and retire to Florida. Before they do, the family will spend one last weekend at the lake. But what should to be a joyous farewell takes a nightmarish turn when the family witnesses a tragedy that triggers a series of dramatic revelations among the Starlings-alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy, and a secret the parents have kept from their sons for over thirty years. As the weekend unfolds, relationships fray, bonds are tested, and the Starlings are forced to reckon with who they are and what they want from this life.
Download or read book Gone Til November written by Lil Wayne and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Transfixing…[Wayne’s] prison diary is, above all, a testament to the irrepressibility of his charisma—his is a force that can never go dormant, even when it’s not plainly on display.” –The New Yorker From rap superstar Lil Wayne comes Gone ’Til November, a deeply personal and revealing account of his time spent incarcerated on Rikers Island for eight months in 2010. In 2010, recording artist Lil Wayne was at the height of his career. A fixture in the rap game for more than a decade, Lil Wayne (aka Weezy) had established himself as both a prolific musician and a savvy businessman, smashing long-held industry records, winning multiple Grammy Awards, and signing up-and-coming talent like Drake and Nicki Minaj to his Young Money label. All of this momentum came to a halt when he was convicted of possession of a firearm and sentenced to a yearlong stay at Rikers Island. Suddenly, the artist at the top of his game was now an inmate at the mercy of the American penal system. At long last, Gone ’Til November reveals the true story of what really happened while Wayne was behind bars, exploring everything from his daily rituals to his interactions with other inmates to how he was able to keep himself motivated and grateful. Taken directly from Wayne’s own journal, this intimate, personal account of his incarceration is an utterly humane look at the man behind the artist.
Download or read book Sonata Mulattica written by Rita Dove and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book-length lyric narrative inspired by history and imagination, a much celebrated poet re-creates the life of a 19th-century virtuoso violinist.
Download or read book A Brush of Darkness written by Allison Pang and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The man of her dreams might be the cause of her nightmares. Six months ago, Abby Sinclair was struggling to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. Now, she has an enchanted iPod, a miniature unicorn living in her underwear drawer, and a magical marketplace to manage. But despite her growing knowledge of the OtherWorld, Abby isn’t at all prepared for Brystion, the dark, mysterious, and sexy-as- sin incubus searching for his sister, convinced Abby has the key to the succubus’s whereabouts. Abby has enough problems without having this seductive shape-shifter literally invade her dreams to get information. But when her Faery boss and some of her friends vanish, as well, Abby and Brystion must form an uneasy alliance. As she is sucked deeper and deeper into this perilous world of faeries, angels, and daemons, Abby realizes her life is in as much danger as her heart—and there’s no one she can trust to save her.
Download or read book Notorious C O P written by Derrick Parker and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his career, Derrick Parker worked on some of the biggest criminal cases in rap history, from the shooting at Club New York, where Derrick personally escorted Jennifer Lopez to police headquarters, to the first shooting of Tupac Shakur. Always straddling the fence between "po-po" and NYPD outsider, Derrick threatened police tradition to try to get the cases solved. He was the first detective to interview an informant offering a detailed account of Biggie Smalls's murder. He protected one of the only surviving eyewitnesses to the Jam Master Jay murder and knows the identity of the killers as well as the motivation behind the shooting. Notorious C.O.P. reveals hip-hop crimes that never made the paper—like the robbing of Foxy Brown and the first Hot 97 shooting—and answers some lingering questions about murders that have remained unsolved. The book that both the NYPD and the hip-hop community don't want you to read, Notorious C.O.P. is the first insider look at the real links between crime and hip-hop and the inefficiencies that have left some of the most widely publicized murders in entertainment history unsolved.
