Download or read book Paddle for a Purpose written by Barb Geiger and published by eLectio Publishing. This book was released on with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You want to what?" Barb regards her husband with incredulity at the prospect of paddling down the entire length of the mighty Mississippi River in their recently completed tandem kayak. Paddle for a Purpose sweeps the reader into a journey of faith and personal discovery, as Barb and Gene feel called to volunteer with charity organizations in quaint river towns along one of the most scenic and powerful river systems in America. Against a backdrop of picturesque settings and the river's changing moods, exciting and often humorous accounts of adventure and mishap intermingle with inspiring stories of healing, renewal, beauty, compassion and trust in God.

Download or read book Eye Level written by Jenny Xie and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera For years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette. Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date. Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse. I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight, my overreactive motion sickness. 9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine. Voices outside the door come to a soft boil. —from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season” Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here—colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes—bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception—both to the tangible world and to “all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.”

Download or read book Mississippi s Best Emerging Poets 2019 written by Z Publishing House and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-07 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this small but influential state, its residents combine friendliness with a rich history all its own. The Mississippi Delta is known as the birthplace of blues music, one of the most American of art forms. And this earthy, deeply felt music has reverberated across the state and throughout the world. Native writers like William Faulkner have extolled the state's virtues, and it's easy to see why poetry is so abundant here. In Mississippi's Best Emerging Poets 2019, 13 up-and-coming poets share their own words. Covering a wide array of topics ranging from love and heartbreak, family and friendship, the inherent beauty of nature, and so much more, these young talents will amaze you. Containing 1-5 poems per poet, this anthology is a compelling introduction to the great wordsmiths of tomorrow.

Download or read book Monument written by Natasha D. Trethewey and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2018 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry " Trethewey's poems] dig beneath the surface of history--personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago--to explore the human struggles that we all face." --James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress Layering joy and urgent defiance--against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone--Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey's first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love. In this setting, each section, each poem drawn from an "opus of classics both elegant and necessary,"* weaves and interlocks with those that come before and those that follow. As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poet's remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future. *Academy of American Poets' chancellor Marilyn Nelson

Download or read book The Grace of Distance written by Matthew Thorburn and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Grace of Distance, his poignant, far-traveling new collection of poems, Matthew Thorburn explores the ways in which we try to close the distances we experience in modern life—between doubt and faith, between cultures, between ourselves and those we love. He seeks to name, and find, that elusive, essential sense of connection humanity hungers for. In one poem, a boy places a bell in the hollow of a tree so someone might find it. In others, an overworked baker wishes for an annunciation of her own, while a man calls down into a well until another voice calls back. Set in China and America, in the present and the distant past, Thorburn’s poems examine both Eastern and Western ideas of spirituality, looking closely at the ways we can lose faith, then sometimes find it again. The poems also confront the unbridgeable distances we must live with and the perhaps surprising grace they can provide—a greater sense of perspective, understanding, and peace—even as our lives move in the only direction they can, away from the past.

Download or read book Down to the Dark River written by Philip C. Kolin and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sweetbitter written by Stacey Balkun and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stacey Balkun's debut full-length collection, Sweetbitter, is an examination of youth, gender, sexuality, and yearning at an atomic level. The collection reads like a fever dream as Balkun uncovers the radioactive darkness that hides beneath the earth's surface and how it seeps into the lives of those who come near. The speaker takes us with them into the wilderness, wanting the world to be perceived differently, begging to be seen as more. From sapphic longing and poisoned baptisms to contaminated bodies and the gendered erosion of autonomy, Sweetbitter is the product of a restless coming-of-age story. In it, puberty is swimming in a toxic pond and recklessness is disguised as control. With Balkun's hazy, dream-like storytelling, the speaker is a wild creature challenging the social confines of being human, being girl. Sweetbitter is a gripping, sometimes suspenseful, poetry collection that leaves you hungry for more.

Download or read book The Best American Poetry 2019 written by David Lehman and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry—“one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets)—now guest edited by Major Jackson, award-winning poet and poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, “The poems...have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today…While readers may question some of the selections—an annual sport with this series—most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology.” The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it—to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, “makes poems that rumble and rock” (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year’s most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.

Download or read book Writing Your Name on the Glass written by Jim Whiteside and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. WRITING YOUR NAME ON THE GLASS reckons with the duration of memory and the peculiarities of the present, tackling what it means to be both beloved and also subject to love's grasp. Joining the poetics of the queer south, Jim Whiteside furthers the conversation about identity, place, and desire in contemporary queer relationships. These elegant and precise poems document the process of reassembling broken pieces and finding one's voice again.

Download or read book Instructions for Seeing a Ghost written by Steve Bellin-Oka and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This poetry collection is the record of an American’s return home after a decade abroad, an exile imposed solely because he loved another man. In a virtuoso display of lyric and formal inventiveness, Bellin-Oka’s poems meditate on the myriad losses engendered by diaspora: of home, family and sexual identity, and spiritual certainty. “Steve Bellin-Oka’s poems hold in balance an intensified language and a passionate voice that bring together the struggles of the inner life with stark realities. This is a book of arresting authenticity.”—Peter Balakian, Pulitzer-Prize winner and judge

Download or read book New Suns 2 Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color written by Tananarive Due and published by Rebellion Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Octavia E. Butler said, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” New Suns 2 brings you fresh visions of the strange, the unexpected, the shocking—breakthrough stories, stories shining with emerging truths, stories that pierce stale preconceptions with their beauty and bravery. Like the first New Suns anthology (winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, IGNYTE, and British Fantasy awards), this book liberates writers of many races to tell us tales no one has ever told. Many things come in twos: dualities, binaries, halves, and alternates. Twos are found throughout New Suns 2, in eighteen science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories revealing daring futures, hidden pasts, and present-day worlds filled with unmapped wonders. Including stories by Daniel H. Wilson, K. Tempest Bradford, Darcie Little Badger, Geetanjali Vandemark, John Chu, Nghi Vo, Tananarive Due, Alex Jennings, Karin Lowachee, Saad Hossain, Hiromi Goto, Minsoo Kang, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Malka Older, Kathleen Alcalá, Christopher Caldwell and Jaymee Goh with a foreword by Walter Mosley and an afterword by Dr. Grace Dillon.

Download or read book The New Testament written by Jericho Brown and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honored as a "Best Book of 2014" by Library Journal NPR.org writes: “In his second collection, The New Testament, Brown treats disease and love and lust between men, with a gentle touch, returning again and again to the stories of the Bible, which confirm or dispute his vision of real life. 'Every last word is contagious,' he writes, awake to all the implications of that phrase. There is plenty of guilt—survivor’s guilt, sinner’s guilt—and ever-present death, but also the joy of survival and sin. And not everyone has the chutzpah to rewrite The Good Book.”—NPR.org "Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry."—Rain Taxi "To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius."—Claudia Rankine In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing—and the truth is coming on fast. Fairy Tale Say the shame I see inching like steam Along the streets will never seep Beneath the doors of this bedroom, And if it does, if we dare to breathe, Tell me that though the world ends us, Lover, it cannot end our love Of narrative. Don’t you have a story For me?—like the one you tell With fingers over my lips to keep me From sighing when—before the queen Is kidnapped—the prince bows To the enemy, handing over the horn Of his favorite unicorn like those men Brought, bought, and whipped until They accepted their masters’ names. Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. He currently teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Download or read book Danger Days written by Catherine Pierce and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Catherine Pierce's new Danger Days celebrate our planet while also bearing witness to its collapse. In poems steeped deep in the 21st century, Pierce weaves superblooms and Legos, gun violence and ghosts, glaciers and contaminant masks, urging us to look closely at both the horror and beauty of our world. As Pierce writes in "Planet," "I'm trying to see this place even as I'm walking through it."

Download or read book Biloxi A Novel written by Mary Miller and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Miller seizes the mantle of southern literature with Biloxi, a tender, gritty tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take. Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller transports readers to this delightfully wry, unapologetic corner of the south—Biloxi, Mississippi, home to sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr. Louis has been forlorn since his wife of thirty-seven years left him, his father passed, and he impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. These days he watches reality television and tries to avoid his ex-wife and daughter, benefiting from the charity of his former brother-in-law, Frank, who religiously brings over his Chili’s leftovers and always stays for a beer. Yet the past is no predictor of Louis’s future. On a routine trip to Walgreens to pick up his diabetes medication, he stops at a sign advertising free dogs and meets Harry Davidson, a man who claims to have more than a dozen canines on offer, but offers only one: an overweight mixed breed named Layla. Without any rational explanation, Louis feels compelled to take the dog home, and the two become inseparable. Louis, more than anyone, is dumbfounded to find himself in love—bursting into song with improvised jingles, exploring new locales, and reevaluating what he once considered the fixed horizons of his life. With her “sociologist’s eye for the mundane and revealing” (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Miller populates the Gulf Coast with Ann Beattie-like characters. A strangely heartwarming tale of loneliness, masculinity, and the limitations of each, Biloxi confirms Miller’s position as one of our most gifted and perceptive writers.

Download or read book Meet My Mississippi written by Patricia Neely-Dorsey and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: EXPANDED SCHOOL EDITION 10 ADDITIONAL LOCATION ILLUSTRATIONS MORE EXTENSIVE STUDY GUIDE/LESSON PLAN SECTION Expanded Edition is an EXCELLENT EDUCATIONAL TOOL AND FUN LITERARY TOUR GUIDE FILLED WITH INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT MISSISSIPPI.

Download or read book Forever War written by Kate Gaskin and published by . This book was released on 2020-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Best American Poetry 2019 written by David Lehman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry—“one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets)—now guest edited by Major Jackson, award-winning poet and poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, “The poems...have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today…While readers may question some of the selections—an annual sport with this series—most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology.” The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it—to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, “makes poems that rumble and rock” (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year’s most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.