Download or read book i shimmer sometimes too written by Porsha Olayiwola and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Porsha Olayiwola’s debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands into the fabric of black womanhood and revel in it. Shimmer establishes Olayiwola firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, celebrating the work done by generations of poets from Audre Lorde to Danez Smith. Each poem is a gentle breaking and an inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self and community-care―in pursuit of building a world that will not only keep you alive but will keep you joyful. Advance praise for i shimmer sometime, too In Porsha Olayiwola’s capable hands, language becomes elastic, becomes kaleidoscopic. i shimmer sometimes, too is cinematic, is magic, and graceful education in the possibilities of form -Safia Elillo, Author Of The January Children In language that is both pungent and poignant, Porsha Olayiwola plumbs a dispora of resilience, rich in ringshouts and inner-city blues chanted to the sky. i shimmer sometimes, too is luminous indeed. -Jabari Asim, Author of We Can’t Breathe Each poem is a lesson, a story, a mirror that Olayiwola holds up to ensure we pay attention to that which we may have overlooked. -Clint Smith, Author of Counting Descent

Download or read book Patricide written by Dave Harris and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dave Harris's stellar debut takes a nuanced look at the complexities of black masculinity. Patricide weighs those complexities and how they impact a lineage of black boys who fight to become men in the image of their fathers. More than just a book about fear or death centered on being black in America, Patricide illuminates the internal struggle to be the best man possible with the shadow of other men at your back. Through poems on loss, music, college, and family strife, Harris examines how time shifts and changes, despite so much of a life’s architecture staying the same. Ultimately, Patricide opens itself up to reveal a story of many threads, one that finds a way to tie together in unexpected and joyful ways.

Download or read book Autopsy written by Donte Collins and published by Button Poetry. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written after the death of his mother, Donte Collins’s Autopsy establishes the poet as one of the most important voices in the next generation of American poetry. As the book unfolds, the reader journeys alongside the author through grief and healing. Named the Most Promising Young Poet in the country by the Academy of American Poets, Collins's work has consistently wowed audiences. Autopsy propels that work onto the national stage. In the words of the author, the book is a spring thaw -- the new life alongside the old, the good cry and the release after.

Download or read book SINK written by Desireé Dallagiacomo and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desireé Dallagiacomo's debut book grapples with the intersections of family and mental health. Sink asks and answers hard questions about grief, lineage, death and all manner of inheritance. What is one left with when they come from a family that has nothing to its name but loss? Throughout, Dallagiacomo weighs the cost of what it is to be alive and a woman in a landscape that makes being alive and a woman uninviting. Sink approaches grief and depression not as a tourist, but instead with the power and nuance of someone who has survived and made the most of their survival.

Download or read book Blood Percussion written by Nate Marshall and published by Button Poetry. This book was released on 2020-01-04 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nate Marshall was paying close attention when Chuck D said, 'Rap is CNN for Black people.' In his hard-hitting chapbook, BLOOD PERCUSSION, Marshall takes the Hard Rhymer's words and masterfully applies them to poetry, turning his eye toward gun play, free lunches, skull caps, prayers, and praise songs. With wit and fierce music, these poems take on the subjects that can't find a space on the evening news, reminding the reader again and again that there is power and grace in truth- telling even when those truths are difficult to hear."—Adrian Matejka

Download or read book Black Movie written by Danez\ Smith and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2014 Button Poetry Prize Winner "These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make 'a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.' That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way–saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."–Marcus Wicker "Danez Smith's BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America."–Rain Taxi

Download or read book A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters written by Sam Sax and published by Button Poetry. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Forgive my bluntness, but...Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems. Devastating, comic, inventive, weird, dangerous, smart as hell. I could talk about the diction sometimes glass and sometimes bouquet. Or the syntax jagged here, balletic there. Or the metaphors, good lord. But the bottom line is that when reading the poems in A GUIDE TO UNDRESSING YOUR MONSTERS, one after the next, I kept saying to myself, probably twisting my face a little bit or squirming in my seat, "Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems." Ross Gay

Download or read book Shimmer and Burn written by Mary Taranta and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To save her sister’s life, Faris must smuggle magic into a plague-ridden neighboring kingdom in this exciting and dangerous start to a brand-new fantasy duology. Faris grew up fighting to survive in the slums of Brindaigel while caring for her sister, Cadence. But when Cadence is caught trying to flee the kingdom and is sold into slavery, Faris reluctantly agrees to a lucrative scheme to buy her back, inadvertently binding herself to the power-hungry Princess Bryn, who wants to steal her father’s throne. Now Faris must smuggle stolen magic into neighboring Avinea to incite its prince to alliance—magic that addicts in the war-torn country can sense in her blood and can steal with a touch. She and Bryn turn to a handsome traveling magician, North, who offers protection from Avinea’s many dangers, but he cannot save Faris from Bryn’s cruelty as she leverages Cadence’s freedom to force Faris to do anything—or kill anyone—she asks. Yet Faris is as fierce as Bryn, and even as she finds herself falling for North, she develops schemes of her own. With the fate of kingdoms at stake, Faris, Bryn, and North maneuver through a dangerous game of magical and political machinations, where lives can be destroyed—or saved—with only a touch.

Download or read book Enough to Say It s Far written by Chaesam Pak and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-23 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English translation of selected poems by one of the most important and unusual modern poets of South Korea. In contrast to the strident political protests found in the poetry of many of his contemporaries, Pak Chaesam's work is characterized by intimate portraits of place, nature, childhood, and human relationships, and by indirection, nostalgia, and reflectiveness. Often focused upon the border of this world and some other, Pak writes with a spareness of presentation but a cornucopia of imagery, meticulously exploring objective and subjective realms of existence and memory. Encouraging the reader to see and listen, and to allow the sensory to reshape the analytical, Pak's poetry opens up new realms of experience. A fellow Korean poet described Pak's poetry as being "the most exquisite expression of the Korean sense of han," or melancholy.

Download or read book Shimmer written by Sarah Schulman and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory portrait of McCarthy-era Manhattan—back in print! It is 1948 in Manhattan. Aspiring reporter Sylvia Golubowsky pays her dues in the steno pool at the tabloid New York Star, along with sixteen other girls whose eyes are on the back of the chair in front of them, the next step up the ladder. At the rival paper across town, gossip columnist Austin Van Cleeve rules New York and Washington with his venomous pen. In the Village, Columbia University graduate Cal Byfield is stuck flipping burgers to support his dream of a Negro theater on Broadway. Against the backdrop of post–World War II New York City and under the growing shadow of the Red Scare, these three indelible characters collide with one another amidst the larger drama of the historical moment. In a fresh re-interpretation of the McCarthy era, Sarah Schulman reframes our understanding of the “blacklist” to show how racial and sexual discrimination create their own ongoing exclusions and how the politics of treachery affect the most intimate relationships. First published in 1998, Shimmer draws parallels between the McCarthy era and contemporary American life and upends the tropes of film noir, pulp fiction, and set pieces of midcentury America by positioning a Black man and a queer Jewish woman as emblematic Americans. In a story set before the advent of the collective revolutionary movements of the 1960s, Cal and Sylvia learn the hard way that the American Dream was not available to them. This new edition of Shimmer includes a postscript by the author.

Download or read book Day Night written by Aram Saroyan and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 1998 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In late August of 1975 when my wife Gailyn and I and our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter arrived in Bolinas, I was almost 29 years old and had become known for writing minimal poetry sometimes consisting of a single word", Aram Saroyan writes in his introduction to Day and Night. "A young writer's ego is a delicate matter, subject as it is to routine battery and assault. When I wrote the first section of a long poem called 'Lines for My Autobiography' one afternoon on the typewriter in the poet Joanne Kyger's house. I was both exhilarated and uneasy. After all, it was two and a half pages long and I'd never before written a poem of even half its length. I ended up throwing it in the waste basket, but Gailyn fished it out, read it, and told me it was the best thing I'd ever written and to go on writing it". That poem and many others like it -- limpid, direct, revealing, open-hearted essays toward a first-person life story -- make up Saroyan's very appealing book about "big-city boys...becoming farmers" in an eccentric, idealist, crackpot-utopian California beach town in the 1970s. This is an unashamedly youthful book, starry-eyed in its approach to family-starting and community-founding, innocently celebrative of the simple wonders of a life lived close to nature. Glancing back at a glamorous but troubled childhood spent among the bright lights of Manhattan and the luxuriant palms of Beverly Hills, the young Saroyan experiences this new world with a freshness of vision.

Download or read book The January Children written by Safia Elhillo and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The January Children depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home. The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan's history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several of the poems speak to the late Egyptian singer Abdelhalim Hafez, who addressed many of his songs to the asmarani--an Arabic term of endearment for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. Elhillo explores Arabness and Africanness and the tensions generated by a hyphenated identity in those two worlds.

Download or read book Ain t Never Not Been Black written by Javon Johnson and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2021 Midwest Book Award Finalist 2021 In The Margins Book Awards - Nonfiction Recommendation List Ain't Never Not Been Black foregrounds Black pleasure Black pain and Black love in unflinchingly Black ways. Engaging with themes of masculinity, racism, love, and joy, Johnson is at once critical and creative. His spoken word performance transfers effortlessly to the page, with poems that will encompass you. This is a book about blackness and survival, and how in America these are inseparable. In a world of individualism, who can you hold close? In a world of danger, what makes you feel safe? From a poem written in the form of a syllabus, to another about the time his grandmother literally saved his life, Johnson's creative expression is constantly enacting the feminist mantra, “the personal is political."

Download or read book A Peculiar People written by Steven Willis and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2023 The Black Caucus of the American Library Association - Poetry Winner 2022 Heartland Bookseller Awards Finalist A Peculiar People creates an entire microcosm within these poems. Steven Willis crafts a cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, & underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the reader to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author's life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

Download or read book Birthright written by George Abraham and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Birthright is a book that balances the weight of place. The pride and shame and worth of homeland. Palestine, a homeland under siege and under scrutiny from a world that doesn't occupy its borders. It is a book of immense nuance, pulling together all corners of the author's pride in home, but also a desire to understand the violent cycles of the American machinery of war.

Download or read book Blind Date with Cavafy written by Steve Fellner and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Gay & Lesbian Studies. "Steve Fellner's poetry is spunky, raw, immediate, and utterly compelling. BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY serves up hilarious pathos and devastating humor. Bleak, deadpan, enthusiastic, earnest: Steve Fellner's book is all of these things, sometimes all of these things in one poem, sometimes all of these things in one line. His 'Self-Portrait' at the center of the book pushes the conventions of the post-confessional, transgressive impulse. The poems in BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY shimmer with vulnerability, leaps, and dizzying riffs"--Denise Duhamel. "Steve Fellner's poems have a wonderful innocence and playfulness that so many of us lose, or forget that we have. They sneak up on you--while you're laughing and admiring their wit and sparkle, they'll swoop down and kick your ass"--Jim Daniels.

Download or read book So Forth written by Rosanna Warren and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical new volume from a poet “beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets” (Harold Bloom). With irony, in mourning tinged with eros, one of our most extraordinary poets blends the personal and the political to meditate on damage, aging, and injustice. The poems in So Forth surge back in memory, pondering guilt and forgiveness. Consciousness flows from singular to plural; identity in these poems does a round dance with other personae, with formidable women artists of the past in the powerful sequence “Legende of Good Women,” with pre-Socratic philosophers, and with lovers, children, and strangers—the strangest of whom is the face in the mirror. In response to griefs both historical and contemporary, So Forth contemplates the quest for the holy and traditions of the sacred.