Download or read book No Shape Bends the River So Long written by Monica Berlin and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE, Selected by CAROLYN FORCHÉ | Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson | “What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not one—Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni—plus whatever third spirit they’ve invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the country’s longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who ‘think like a glacier or a stone, sand . . . years / like consistent rain.’ The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work. ‘Wake to any weather & know that / long ago there also was.’ I’ll take that as rare solace.” —MARIANNE BORUCH
Download or read book No Shape Bends the River So Long written by Monica Berlin and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE, Selected by CAROLYN FORCHÉ | Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson | “What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not one—Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni—plus whatever third spirit they’ve invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the country’s longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who ‘think like a glacier or a stone, sand . . . years / like consistent rain.’ The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work. ‘Wake to any weather & know that / long ago there also was.’ I’ll take that as rare solace.” —MARIANNE BORUCH
Download or read book Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air written by Elizabeth Jacobson and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Over the past few years, Elizabeth Jacobson has become one of my favorite American poets. Her work is original, deep, serious, and sensuous in ways that surprise me repeatedly. In the way of true inquiry, Jacobson’s poems unearth genuinely new feelings and knowledge in a clean, mature and fully achieved style. These poems carry heavy water, fetched from deep nature, in human hands. I love this book.” —TONY HOAGLAND | “This wild, remarkable book begins in painstaking definition, via what isn’t—to strange and dazzling discoveries of the natural world, to instinct and melancholia and surprise. This poet wanders through a range of poetic architecture—an eight-sectioned poem which begins with a woman removing her body parts, epistolary poems, prose poems, small strange lyrics of love and bewilderment. Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems.” —MARIANNE BORUCH | “Snakes, birds, insects, and all manner of strange encounters: Elizabeth Jacobson is a true observer immersed in the natural world. These poems arise out of a deep questioning; they are puzzles, tangled road maps we can’t help but follow. It takes some wisdom to abide, as Jacobson’s work does, so effortlessly in paradox. I am moved to wonder, to breathe and slow down, experiencing how, as she says—the whole world is in me. Through her love of the particular a great expanse opens within us. These are the poems we need and long for right now.” —ANNE MARIE MACARI | Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker’s intimacy with nature and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson’s poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions.
Download or read book Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live written by Monica Berlin and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monica Berlin’s Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live resides at the turbulent confluence of relentless news cycles and the repeated rending of our interior lives. In Berlin’s poetry sorrow makes its own landscape—solitary, intimate, forward-looking. Whether we attempt to traverse it or choose bypass, her poems show us where we live, how we carry on. These poems notice the day in the wind, the night tucked up to the train tracks, and a slipping-in of yesterday, memory-laden, alongside the promise of a more hopeful tomorrow. Here is the Midwest, vibrant and relic, in the ongoing years of collapse and recovery. Here the constant companionship of weather lays claim to its own field of vision. Here, too, devastation: what’s left after. Berlin reminds us we are at the mercy of rivers, oceans, earth, wind, rain, blizzard, drought, and each other. “Maybe what I mean / to say is that I’ve come to see all the names we might / recognize destruction by,” Berlin’s speaker discovers. “We might / sometimes, stupidly, call it love.” On her familiar prairie of lyricism and tumult, beauty and ruin, Berlin’s poems insist, plead, and seek to reassure. In a collection both mournful and urgent, both a “little book of days” and a song, this poet meditates on loss, wonder, and always the consolations of language.
Download or read book Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow written by Shim Bo-Seon and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many younger Korean poets, SHIM BO-SEON writes in an allusive, indirect style about topics that are in themselves familiar, eating rice, taking off clothes, living in an apartment block, struggling with human relationships. He captures some sparkling moments of joys and sorrows, hopes and frustrations that have been concealed in daily life in rather modest and witty words. The circular movements of concealment and revelation of the mystery that an individual experiences are evoked in turn, always lightly. As a poet-critic, Shim fills his lines with the melodies of plain speech, with subtle thoughts about relationships in the world. Shim made his poetic debut in 1994, but he only published his first collection fourteen years later in 2008. FIFTEEN SECONDS WITHOUT SORROW is a translation of that first volume, containing the poet’s earliest, freshest poems.
Download or read book Elsewhere That Small written by Monica Berlin and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2020-01-25 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sit and stay a while in the strangely familiar rooms and landscapes that Monica Berlin’s Elsewhere, That Small constructs for us. Let Berlin stop the clock, just for a few seconds, so we can take stock of “the ordinary seen & seen / -through” of our day: a doorframe warped by humidity or an over-pruned tree. Here, we weather cycles of loss and recovery; here, we dwell in the contrary senses of belonging and longing to be elsewhere. Berlin’s beautifully structured and incisive poems ask us to face—and to marvel at—the brute force of the world’s ongoingness. More so, Elsewhere, That Small offers a lesson on how to region here—that is, how to accept, how to endure.” —EMILY ROSKO | “The contingency in Elsewhere, That Small is embodied by the sonnet form, its propensity to turn from abstract to concrete, map to memory “heavy-shaded by green.” It’s in the rhythm of Monica Berlin’s language, in iambs that sometimes strike in a clear pattern sturdy as a chair back before shifting “like some trick of maybe.” And yet: what is contingent in the form is inescapable in the fact of our being human. In these poems, we occupy spaces, patches of ground and perspectives that we may be so bold as to call our own. What a gift to be reminded of the view from where we’re standing, and how fleeting it is when the time comes to turn.” —BETH MCDERMOTT | “This sequence of poems makes me consider the solitary expanse of the sonnet, how the span of fourteen lines opens up a zone through which a thought can travel nimbly its avenues. Intimate, contemplative, seeking out the smallest folds of language, Berlin’s verse leads us through estrangements and dismantlings, whose phrases disclose their “beautiful, hardness, their sharp edges & / sharper heave of near-careless care.” This book makes palpable a certain kind of nearness, an almost, an about-to-rise, like orchestral instruments tuning up. Reader, bring your listening.” CAROLINA EBEID
Download or read book This History That Just Happened written by Hannah Craig and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hannah Craig's This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers. Every word here is earned. And little, if anything, escapes this poet's heart, mind, or eye. History works through a keen imagination. These poems make us feel and listen differently, and images coalesce line by line and dare us to reside where fierce empathy and beauty abide."—Yusef Komunyakaa
Download or read book Alias written by Eric Pankey and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alias is Eric Pankey’s second collection of prose poems from Free Verse Editions. The first, Dismantling the Angel, won the New Measure Poetry Prize. Pankey continues to investigate the flexibility and possibility of this literary genre, the prose poem, which Hermaine Riffaterre says has “an oxymoron for a name.” H. L. Hix has praised Pankey’s prose poems for their “elusive and luminous sentences” and how they “take the shape of fire.” Kevin Prufer has celebrated their meditations “on mystery, human sympathy, and the divine.” Cynthia Marie Hoffman says of these new poems, “One has the sense that Pankey sees beyond the visible, or sees both the visible and the invisible at once.”
Download or read book The Republic of Song written by Kelvin Corcoran and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic of Song is a journey to discover the place of that name, moving through abhorrence to vision. The political chicanery of barely believable figures is excoriated and set against a world where Orpheus holds sway, friendship outstares death, Nina Simone is happy and Jack Spicer sends us a message about daddy Zeus president. In The Republic of Song everything is changed and the lyric states its claim in the face of exile. The Republic of Song is also that place where having a drink with a friend in a bar in Brussels can unlock part of the story and prompt the freedom of seeing things for what they are. In the conclusive poem, “The Museum of the Sea,” the supposedly distant past is alive in the present and deep time is now, Odysseus is at sea with the victims of the migrant crisis, everything is new and nothing is new.
Download or read book Empire written by Tracy Zeman and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracy Zeman’s first full-length collection of poems, Empire, examines the European settlement and ecological devastation of the North American prairie. Her ecology-based serial poems employ collage, borrowed text and fractured narrative to probe the connections of humans to the natural world through the lens of culture, history and personal experience. Zeman uses image, juxtapositio,n and fragment to tell the story of a savage and intricate landscape, once conquered and now imperiled by forces such as climate change, invasive species and contemporary agricultural and land practices. Empire is a journey through an endangered world where beauty is enshrined and the lost, human and animal, is elegized.
Download or read book Cry Baby Mystic written by Daniel Tiffany and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bobbing alongside Margery Kempe—an illiterate medieval mystic who dictated the first autobiography in English—the ragged voice of Cry Baby Mystic finds itself drawn into strange predicaments that are not its own and ferried into abandoned spaces by the gearing of stardom and shame. The revolving sentences overheard by the reader--a muffled chorus of Brechtian aftershocks--survive only as traces of sorrow now craved by all who have known it: sound gossiping the unsound, the excess of the pilgrim. A person climbs out and never comes home.
Download or read book The Visible Woman written by Allison Funk and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Visible Woman, Allison Funk writes of how women often disappear into the roles expected of them, becoming invisible to themselves. To fill in “the thin / chalk outline” of herself that she’s “drawn and erased” for as long as she can remember, Funk returns to the anatomical model of “The Visible Woman” she left unassembled as a child. With poems rather than the kit’s plastic organs and bones, she strives to “create a likeness / to embody herself.” In her efforts at self-representation, the poet is guided by the visual artist Louise Bourgeois— her real-life model of a woman who proved that art gives us a way of recognizing ourselves.
Download or read book Ghost Letters written by Baba Badji and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ghost Letters, one emigrates to America again, and again, and again, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one grows up in America, and attends university in America, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one wrestles with one’s American blackness in ways not possible in Senegal, though one never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; and one sees more deeply into Americanness than any native-born American could. Ghost Letters is a 21st century Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, though it is a notebook of arrival and being in America. It is a major achievement. —Shane McCrae
Download or read book Parallel Resting Places written by Laura Wetherington and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer's After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington's second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into song: "My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void." Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning—for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling. "There is a constant textual drama in the address and voice of Laura Wetherington’s heady poems; a mirror staged. With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition." —Peter Gizzi
Download or read book Small Sillion written by Joshua McKinney and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2018-11-24 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joshua McKinney's fourth collection, Small Sillion, enacts a lyric struggle to perceive the numinous in a world marked by violence. The term sillion, as used by Hopkins in his famous poem, "The Windhover," refers to a furrow turned over by a plough. For McKinney it is both prelude to fertility, and wound, a scarring of the land. Maintaining a tension between the visionary and the mundane, between joy and despair, these poems posit a border between language and the living world; they constitute a personal eco-poetics of skepticism, one that respects language's utility and radiance, while acknowledging that the world's complexity lies beyond the grasp of language
Download or read book Bari s Love Song written by Kang Eun-Gyo and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her early career, Kang Eun-Gyo marked nihilism as the departure of her poetic imagination. In response to the turmoil of the world and modern Korean history full of violence and violations of human rights, the poet struggled to build her poetry in a house of nothingness. With Bari’s Love Song, Kang Eun-Gyo echoes the voice of a sorceress, a female shaman who treats the sadness, suffering, loss, and pain of all people. From the private losses of the poet to the universal songs of losses and love, Bari’s Love Song portrays the modern history of Korea in the forms of songs and recollections of Bari, the princess from Korean folk literature who walked the land in search of hope.
Download or read book Pilgrimage Suites written by Derek Gromadzki and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading itself is travel in Derek Gromadzki’s first book, Pilgrimage Suites, an outing across an insular medieval landscape as rich in its registers of language as in its flora or fauna. This book is neither history nor story, though it retains characteristics of each. Like history, it perpetuates retrograde speculation while maintaining the narrated sequencing of incident that is the common stock and trade of story. In the heyday of medieval pilgrimages, English underwent radical changes. The Latinate speech of Church officialdom ran roughly up against a vernacular with deep Germanic and Brythonic roots. These suites track an imagined journey over the landscape that staged the violence of this conflict, whereon strikingly beautiful monuments stood in the aftermath. To the cultural clashes and assimilations materially manifest in the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals travelers still venerate today, Gromadzki offers an overlooked parallel through creative strife with sound. He uses the momentum generated in running the lexical and rhythmic possibilities of English’s varied sources together to stretch and sustain the lyric over a pastoral background to push each of these two modes past its respective limits.