Download or read book Beautiful Pointless written by David Orr and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

Download or read book A Socially Acceptable Breakdown written by Patrick Roche and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 Eric Hoffer Awards - Poetry Finalist A poetry collection pulling from the author's personal narrative to take the reader on a journey through family, mental health, grief, pop culture, body image, queer identity, love, joy, memory, myth, and magic. The collection follows a trajectory of 1) exploring identity, avoidance, escapism, and shame, then 2) facing and confronting fears, shame, grief, and self-image, and finally 3) breaking down stigma, searching for joy, finding self-acceptance, and the value of storytelling and sharing as a tool to connect, love, and choose progress.

Download or read book Hey Black Child written by Useni Eugene Perkins and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six-time Coretta Scott King Award winner and four-time Caldecott Honor recipient Bryan Collier brings this classic, inspirational poem to life, written by poet Useni Eugene Perkins. Hey black child, Do you know who you are? Who really are?Do you know you can be What you want to be If you try to be What you can be? This lyrical, empowering poem celebrates black children and seeks to inspire all young people to dream big and achieve their goals.

Download or read book Songs of Ourselves written by Joan Shelley Rubin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.

Download or read book American Political Poetry in the 21st Century written by M. Dowdy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dowdy uncovers and analyzes the primary rhetorical strategies, particularly figures of voice, in American political poetry from the Vietnam War-era to the present. He brings together a unique and diverse collection of poets, including an innovative section on hip hop performance.

Download or read book Three Poems written by Hannah Sullivan and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Poems, Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection, which won the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize, reinvents the long poem for a digital age. “You, Very Young in New York” paints the portrait of a great American city, paying close attention to grand designs as well as local details, and coalescing in a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. “Repeat Until Time” shifts the scene to California and combines a poetic essay on the nature of repetition with an enquiry into pattern-making of a personal as well as a philosophical kind. “The Sandpit After Rain” explores the birth of a child and death of a father with exacting clarity.

Download or read book A Little History of Poetry written by John Carey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books of 2020 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

Download or read book The Hill We Climb written by Amanda Gorman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 USA Today bestseller Amanda Gorman’s electrifying and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. “Stunning.” —CNN “Dynamic.” —NPR “Deeply rousing and uplifting.” —Vogue On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special gift edition, perfect for any reader looking for some inspiration. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this remarkable keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.

Download or read book The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English written by Paula Burnett and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-11-03 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last few decades Caribbean writers - performance poets, newspaper poets, singer-songwriters - have created a genuinely popular art form, a poetry heard by audiences all over the world. At the same time, even at its most literary, Caribbean poetry shares the vigour of the oral tradition. Writers like Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and many other exciting new voices, are exploring ways of capturing the vitality of the spoken word on the page. Both of these traditions are represented in this lively anthology, which traces Caribbean verse from its roots to the present.

Download or read book Counting Descent written by Clint Smith and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America * Winner, 2017 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award * Finalist, 2017 NAACP Image Awards * "One Book One New Orleans" 2017 Book Selection * Published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, New Republic, Boston Review, The Guardian, The Rumpus, and The Academy of American Poets "So many of these poems just blow me away. Incredibly beautiful and powerful." -- Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow "Counting Descent is a tightly-woven collection of poems whose pages act like an invitation. The invitation is intimate and generous and also a challenge; are you up to asking what is blackness? What is black joy? How is black life loved and lived? To whom do we look to for answers? This invitation is not to a narrow street, or a shallow lake, but to a vast exploration of life. And you’re invited. -- Elizabeth Acevedo, Author of Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths "These poems shimmer with revelatory intensity, approaching us from all sides to immerse us in the America that America so often forgets." -- Gregory Pardlo "Counting Descent is more than brilliant. More than lyrical. More than bluesy. More than courageous. It is terrifying in its ability to at once not hide and show readers why it wants to hide so badly. These poems mend, meld and imagine with weighted details, pauses, idiosyncrasies and word patterns I've never seen before." -- Kiese Laymon, Author of Long Division Clint Smith's debut poetry collection, Counting Descent, is a coming of age story that seeks to complicate our conception of lineage and tradition. "Do you know what it means for your existence to be defined by someone else’s intentions?" Smith explores the cognitive dissonance that results from belonging to a community that unapologetically celebrates black humanity while living in a world that often renders blackness a caricature of fear. His poems move fluidly across personal and political histories, all the while reflecting on the social construction of our lived experiences. Smith brings the reader on a powerful journey forcing us to reflect on all that we learn growing up, and all that we seek to unlearn moving forward.

Download or read book A Village Life written by Louise Glück and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A dreamlike collection from the Nobel Prize-winning poet A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place: All the roads in the village unite at the fountain. Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees— The fountain rises at the center of the plaza; on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub. —from "tributaries" Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed. Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

Download or read book Bright Dead Things written by Ada Limón and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year. I'm thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, Bright Dead Things considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth and falls in love. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limón's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' (New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.

Download or read book The After Party written by Jana Prikryl and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A truly moving book." —John Ashbery Jana Prikryl’s The After Party journeys across borders and eras, from cold war Central Europe to present-day New York City, from ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl’s ambitious experimentation with style. “Thirty Thousand Islands,” the second half of the collection, presents some forty linked poems that incorporate numerous voices. Rooted in one place that fragments into many places—the remote shores of Lake Huron in Canada, a region with no natural resources aside from its beauty—these poems are an elegy that speaks beyond grief. Penetrating, vital, and visionary, The After Party marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.

Download or read book Acts of Poetry written by Heidi R. Bean and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American poets’ theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets’ theater’s key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets’ Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets’ theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience’s role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.

Download or read book Introducing George The Poet written by George the Poet and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘The title is Search Party – the idea being that we’re all out here looking for something, and my poems are my way of finding myself.’ A young black poet blending spoken word and rap; an inner city upbringing with a Cambridge education; a social consciousness with a satirical wit and infectious rhythm – George The Poet is the voice of a new generation. Search Party is a thought-provoking and deeply autobiographical collection. From the overtly political ‘Go Home’ to the deeply personal ‘Full-time’; the narrative poems that offer vivid and unapologetic snapshots of inner-city life, such as ‘His Mistakes’, ‘Believer’ and the anthemic ‘My City’; to the provocative social commentary in ‘Lazy Dog’ and ‘YOLO’; to the inspiring, idea-driven pieces such as ‘The Power of Collaboration’ and ‘School Blues’, George takes poetry into new territories and to new audiences, offering a different way to talk about the things that matter, to explore his own experience and ideas, and encourage others explore theirs. George The Poet’s mesmerising and unforgettable live performances have earned him critical acclaim. From sell-out headline gigs and YouTube hits, to recording his own music, and now his first collection of poetry, George uses his work to speak truth to power and challenge our preconceived ideas about the society we’re living in. Whether you’re searching for yourself, for answers, for change – join the search party.

Download or read book The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk written by Henry Weinfield and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-03 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Oppen (1908–1984), born into a prosperous German Jewish family, began his career as a protégé of Ezra Pound and a member of the Objectivist circle of poets; he eventually broke with Pound and became a member of the Communist party before returning to poetry more than twenty-five years later. William Bronk (1918–1999), by contrast, a descendant of the first European families in New York, was influenced by the works of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the work of the New England writers of the American Renaissance. Despite differences in background and orientation, the two men formed a deep friendship and shared a similar existential outlook. As Henry Weinfield demonstrates in this searching and original study, Oppen and Bronk are extraordinary thinkers in poetry who struggled with central questions of meaning and value and whose thought acquires the resonance of music in their work. These major writers created poetry of enduring value that has exerted an increasing influence on younger generations of poets. From his careful readings of Oppen’s and Bronk’s poetry to his fascinating examination of the letters they exchanged, Weinfield provides important aesthetic, epistemological, and historical insights into their poetry and poetic careers. In bringing together for the first time the work of two of the most important poets of the postwar generation, The Music of Thought not only illuminates their poetry but also raises important questions about American literary history and the categories in terms of which it has generally been interpreted.

Download or read book Chimes of a Lost Cathedral written by Janet Fitch and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young Russian woman comes into her own in the midst of revolution and civil war in this "brilliant" novel set in "a world of furious beauty" (Los Angeles Review of Books). After the loves and betrayals of The Revolution of Marina M., young poet Marina Makarova finds herself alone amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War -- pregnant and adrift, forced to rely on her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child and eventually make her way back to her native city, Petrograd. After two years of revolution, the city that was once St. Petersburg is almost unrecognizable, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been, its streets teeming with homeless children. Moved by their plight, though hardly better off herself, she takes on the challenge of caring for these orphans, until they become the tool of tragedy from an unexpected direction. Shaped by her country's ordeals and her own trials -- betrayal and privation and inconceivable loss -- Marina evolves as a poet and a woman of sensibility and substance hardly imaginable at the beginning of her transformative odyssey. Chimes of a Lost Cathedral is the culmination of one woman's s journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century -- the epic story of an artist who discovers her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.