Download or read book The Half God of Rainfall written by Inua Ellams and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning poet and playwright behind Barber Shop Chronicles, The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic story and a lyrical exploration of pride, power and female revenge.

Download or read book Why Poetry written by Matthew Zapruder and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

Download or read book Poetry Unbound 50 Poems to Open Your World written by Pádraig Ó. Tuama and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

Download or read book Don t Read Poetry written by Stephanie Burt and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

Download or read book How to Read a Poem written by Terry Eagleton and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucid, entertaining and full of insight, How To Read A Poemis designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends thesubject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personalpossession of the students and the general reader. Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and its relationto content. Takes a wide range of poems from the Renaissance to the presentday and submits them to brilliantly illuminating closesanalysis. Discusses the work of major poets, including John Milton,Alexander Pope, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson,W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H.Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon,and many more. Includes a helpful glossary of poetic terms.

Download or read book The Discovery of Poetry written by Frances Mayes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with basic terminology and techniques, Mayes shows how focusing on one aspect of a poem can help you to better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the reading and writing experience.

Download or read book The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry written by Ilya Kaminsky and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable anthology, introduced and edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, poetic visions from the twentieth century will be reinforced and in many ways revised. Here, alongside renowned masters, are internationally celebrated poets who have rarely, if ever, been translated into English.

Download or read book How To Read A Poem written by Edward Hirsch and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 1999-03-22 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet and critic: “A lovely book, full of joy and wisdom.” —The Baltimore Sun How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry, feeling, and human nature. In language at once acute and emotional, Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including work by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, among many others, Hirsch discovers the true meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts. “Hirsch has gathered an eclectic group of poems from many times and places, with selections as varied as postwar Polish poetry, works by Keats and Christopher Smart, and lyrics from African American work songs . . . Hirsch suggests helpful strategies for understanding and appreciating each poem. The book is scholarly but very readable and incorporates interesting anecdotes from the lives of the poets.” —Library Journal “The answer Hirsch gives to the question of how to read a poem is: Ecstatically.” —Boston Book Review “Hirsch’s magnificent text is supported by an extensive glossary and superb international reading list.” —Booklist “If you are pretty sure you don’t like poetry, this is the book that’s bound to change your mind.” —Charles Simic, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The World Doesn’t End

Download or read book Deaf Republic written by Ilya Kaminsky and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award • Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award • Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award • Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize • Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

Download or read book A Poetry Handbook written by Mary Oliver and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1994 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built-meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. "Stunning" (Los Angeles Times). Index.

Download or read book The Rattle Bag written by Seamus Heaney and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-03-17 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of more than 400 hundred poems from all around the world.

Download or read book Solving the World s Problems written by Robert Lee Brewer and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "World" in Robert Lee Brewer's Solving the World's Problems is a slippery world ... where chaos always hovers near, where we are (and should be) "splashing around in dark puddles." And one feels a bit dizzy reading these poems because (while always clear, always full of meaning) they come at reality slantwise so that nothing is quite the same and the reader comes away with a new way of looking at the ordinary objects and events of life. The poems are brim-full of surprises and delights, twists in the language, double-meanings of words, leaps of thought and imagination, interesting line-breaks. There are love and relationship poems, dream poems, poems of life in the modern world. And always the sense (as he writes) of "pulling the world closer to me/leaves falling to the ground/ birds flying south." I read these once, twice with great enjoyment. I will go back to them often. -Patricia Fargnoli, former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and author of Then, Something

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 The Hatred of Poetry written by Ben Lerner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

Download or read book How to Read Poetry Like a Professor written by Thomas C. Foster and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles. No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree—a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history—and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers: How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning. The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries. How to listen for a poem’s secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up. How to hear the music in poems—and the poetry in songs! With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.

Download or read book Poetry 180 written by Billy Collins and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2003-03-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling new anthology of 180 contemporary poems, selected and introduced by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Inspired by Billy Collins’s poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, Poetry 180 is the perfect anthology for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that are an immediate pleasure. A 180-degree turn implies a turning back—in this case, to poetry. A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance. With poems by Catherine Bowman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Frances Mayes, Paul Muldoon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Charles Simic, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, and many more.

Download or read book Write About Poetry written by Steven Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we read poetry, compare poems, or generate observations into a thoughtful response? Write About Poetry is an invaluable reference book and skills guide for students of poetry. Featuring model essays, a glossary of technical terms, and additional practice for student engagement, this volume provides students with a clear and concise guide to: • reading unseen poems with confidence • developing general observations into formal, structured written responses • fostering familiarity with some of the great poets and poems in literary history Drawing on years of teaching experience, Steven Jackson delivers the background, progressive methodology, and practical essay writing techniques essential for understanding the fundamental steps of poetry analysis.