Download or read book Persephone in America written by Alison Townsend and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2009-02-25 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Persephone in America, Alison Townsend deftly weaves autobiography with myth in this reinvention of the tale of Demeter and Persephone as seen from the modern woman’s perspective. Fraught with emotional honesty, this captivating collection of lyrical and narrative poems chronicles the struggles of the figurative Persephone in three parts—the abduction, descent to the underworld, and return. Townsend turns a shrewd eye to her own experiences, as well as to the lives of other women, to offer an unflinching yet deeply compassionate exploration of such themes as girlhood and the vulnerability of the motherless; the demons of depression, addiction, and abuse; as well as passion, aging, and celebration of the natural world. Although the poems traverse dark emotional territory at times, the picture that emerges ultimately is one of revelation and wisdom. Persephone in America is above all a journey of the soul, following the narrator as she explores what it means to be a woman in America, at times descending into darkness, only to emerge into redemption and realize “time’s sweet and invincible secret—that everything repeats—and we watch it.” Townsend’s candid portrait of female loss and discovery seeks to illuminate the truths inherent in myth, and the awakenings that hide in our darkest moments. Persephone, Pretending (Madison, Wisconsin) When the news says that the girl who had been missing almost four days, only to be found in a marshy area at the edge of our medium-sized city, was faking it all along, I wondered what made her do it. I'd seen her face—bright smile, dark eyes— on a flier masking-taped to a pillar at the airport the week before, felt the involuntary frisson of the curious, then only fear at the thought of a girl abducted in this place once voted "America's most livable city." She must have wanted something she couldn't name, that good girl with good grades who looks like so many girls in my own classes, but who keeps changing her story. It happened here; no, it happened there; no, I really just wanted to be alone. Then she turns her face away, tired of telling her tale, not sure what to make up next or where invention will take her. “Fictitious victimization disorder,” Time magazine claims, but I wonder what else, imagining her in the marsh, cold, unrepentant, powerless, her mind gone muddy with lack of sleep, no way out of this lie she almost believes, or the lies ahead, nothing but memory of the rope, duct tape, cough medicine, and knife she bought at the PDQ with her own cash, wanting to be taken by someone so badly, she takes us, she does it to herself.
Download or read book Demeter and Other Poems written by Alfred Tennyson Baron Tennyson and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Persephone in the Late Anthropocene written by Megan Grumbling and published by Acre Books. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change. In this poetry collection, the goddess of spring now comes and goes erratically, drinks too much, and takes a human lover in our warming, unraveling world. Meanwhile, Persephone's mother searches for her troubled daughter, and humanity is first seduced by the unseasonable abundance, then devastated by the fallout, and finally roused to act. This ecopoetic collection interweaves the voices of Persephone, Demeter, and a human chorus with a range of texts, including speculative cryptostudies that shed light on the culture of the "Late Anthropocene." These voices speak of decadence and blame, green crabs and neonicotinoids, mysteries and effigies. They reckon with extreme weather, industrialized plenty, and their own roles in ecological collapse. Tonally, the poems of this book range between the sublime and the profane; formally, from lyric verse and modern magical-realist prose poems to New Farmer's Almanac riddles and pop-anthropology texts. At the heart of this varied and inventive collection is story itself, as Demeter deconstructs "whodunits," as the chorus grasps that mythmaking is an act of "throwing their voices," and as their very language mirrors the downward spiral of destruction. Together, the collected pieces of Persephone in the Late Anthropocene form a narrative prism, exploring both environmental crisis and the question of how we tell it.
Download or read book Averno written by Louise Glück and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ravishing collection by Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Averno is a small crater lake in southern , regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence. Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
Download or read book Mother Love written by Rita Dove and published by W W Norton & Company Incorporated. This book was released on 1996 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers poems that recast the ancient Greek story of Demeter and Persephone in a variety of settings, from a patio in Arizona to the pyramids in Mexico, as they explore the complex mother-daughter bond
Download or read book Double Persephone written by Margaret Atwood and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dinner with Persephone written by Patricia Storace and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Full of insights, marvelously entertaining . . . haunting and beautifully written." --The New York Review of Books "I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins Patricia Storace's astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with detachment, rapture with clarity, this American poet perfectly evokes a country delicately balanced between East and West. Whether she is interpreting Hellenic dream books, pop songs, and soap operas, describing breathtakingly beautiful beaches and archaic villages, or braving the crush at a saint's tomb, Storace, winner of the Whiting Award, rewards the reader with informed and sensual insights into Greece's soul. She sees how the country's pride in its past coexists with profound doubts about its place in the modern world. She discovers a world in which past and present engage in a passionate dialogue. Stylish, funny, and erudite, Dinner with Persephone is travel writing elevated to a fine art--and the best book of its kind since Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi. "Splendid. Storace's account of a year in Greece combines past and present, legend and fact, in an unusual and delightful whole. " --Atlantic Monthly
Download or read book All the Flowers Kneeling written by Paul Tran and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen) Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.
Download or read book Persephone written by Lyn Lifshin and published by . This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like the mythic Persephone, these poems move between worlds of wild light and onyx darkness. Abducted by Hades, Persephone was kept captive in the underworld until her mother, Demeter, consumed with rage and sorrow, refused to let anything live or bloom. Grudgingly, Hades released her but only after she tasted the pomegranate he offered, a fruit that kept her bound to him for three months of the year forever. These poems move between such ecstatic glimpses of love, sex, family and that underworld of pain, loss and dark coldness between parents and children, siblings, lovers and strangers. The blues and despair in her poems, immediate and powerful as the worlds of any woman who moves from darkness and cold into the green world of rebirth, light and flowers, highlights the combination of eros, ebullience and triste, or sadness, a Lifshin trademark. "
Download or read book When Did I Stop Being Twenty written by Judith Viorst and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judith Viorst is known and loved by readers of all ages, for children’s books such as Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day; nonfiction titles, including the bestseller Necessary Losses; and her collections of humorous poetry, which make perfect gifts for birthdays, Mother’s Day, graduation, Christmas, Chanukah, or at any time of year. When Did I Stop Being Twenty and Other Injustices brings together the best of Judith Viorst's witty, insightful poetry, including many favorites from out-of-print collections. Whether she's finding herself or finding a sitter, or contemplating her sex life as she rubs the hormone night cream on her face, Viorst explores the true and funny ironies all women encounter growing up in the modern world. Here is a young single girl from Irvington, NJ, leaving her parents' home for life in the big city ("No I do not believe in free love/And yes I will be home for Sunday dinners," she promises). Here is the aspiring bohemian with an expensive liberal arts education, getting coffee and taking dictation, "Hoping that someday someone will be impressed/With all I know." Here is that married woman, coping with motherhood ("The tricycles are cluttering my foyer/The Pop Tart crumbs are sprinkled on my soul") and fantasy affairs ("I could imagine cryptic conversations, clandestine martinis...and me explaining that long kisses clog my sinuses") and all-too-real family reunions ("Four aunts in pain taking pills/One cousin in analysis taking notes"). And here she is at mid-life, wondering whether a woman who used to wear a "Ban the Bomb" button can find happiness being a person with a set of fondue forks, a fish poacher, and a wok. Every step of the way, Viorst transforms the familiar events of daily life into poems that make you laugh with recognition. When Did I Stop Being Twenty and Other Injustices demonstrates once and for all that no one understands American women coming of age like Judith Viorst.
Download or read book Walking with Persephone written by Molly Remer and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Midlife can be a time of great change - inner and outer. How do we journey through this...and what can we learn in the process? Molly Remer is our personal guide to the unraveling and reweaving required in midlife. She invites us to take a walk with the goddess Persephone, whose story of descent into the Underworld has much to teach us. This book is a journey of soul-rebuilding, of putting the pieces of oneself back together. Walking with Persephone weaves together personal insights and reflections with experiences in practical priestessing, family life, and explorations of the natural world. It advocates opening our eyes to the wonder around us, encouraging the reader to both look within themselves for truths about living, but also to the earth, the air, the animals, and plants we share our lives with. Part memoir, part poetry, part soul guide, Molly's evocative voice is in the great American tradition of sacred nature writing.
Download or read book Persephone s Flowers and Other Poems written by Geoffrey Grigson and published by London : Secker & Warburg. This book was released on 1986 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Persephone written by Jenny Joseph and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Persephone loses her innocence in the Underworld, but finds herself. She is Everywoman coming through darkness, betrayal and disillusion to discover a new life, a new sense of herself. And she is many women in Jenny Joseph's extraordinary novel, which retells the Greek myth of spring and winter, of good and evil.Demeter the earth goddess is every worried mother struggling to understand her daughter. Hades is the reckless man, brutal, possessive, but mellowed by the girl he takes for himself, the woman who goes back to him.In Persephone, Jenny Joseph has created a new kind of novel, a story made up of many stories, our stories, using poetry, narrative, parody and many other kinds of writing. Like the myth itself, Persephone is unforgettable. The book won her the 1986 James Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.
Download or read book Sun in Days Poems written by Meghan O'Rourke and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review, Sun in Days is “O’Rourke’s most ravishing and brilliant collection yet” (Cathy Park Hong). From acclaimed poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke comes a powerful collection about the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. These formally ambitious poems and lyric essays give voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. A Paterson Poetry Prize finalist, Sun in Days is unsentimental yet deeply felt, characterized by O’Rourke’s signature lyric precision and force of observation.
Download or read book This Bright Darkness written by Sarah McKinstry-Brown and published by Black Lawrence Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With heartbreaking insight, Sarah McKinstry-Brown tells of Demeter and Persephone as the story of a mother who has lost her daughter to male violence. These plainspoken, elegant poems give voice to tomboys, girls coming into their sexual power, their mothers and grandmothers, newscasters unspooling the latest version of the 'gone girl' narrative, pregnant women, mothers who miscarry, and flowers who give advice. In crystalline verse, McKinstry-Brown shows us girls like 'peonies / hanging their heads under the weight / of their own blossoming, ' and women who learn that 'the heart becomes offal / when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren.' THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS is the meditation and the medicine we need as we confront male violence in our current moment." -Lisa L. Moore "Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown's THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment. McKinstry-Brown writes of a time 'when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren, warning, a story to be taught.' And isn't this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake." -Stacey Waite
Download or read book Veil and Burn written by Laurie Clements Lambeth and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.
Download or read book Persephone Rises 1860 1927 written by Margot K. Louis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, the figure of Persephone rapidly evolved from what was essentially a decorative metaphor into a living goddess who embodied the most spiritual aspects of ancient Greek religion. In the first comprehensive survey of the Persephone myth in English and American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Margot Louis explores the transformation of the goddess to provide not only a basis for understanding how the study of ancient history informed the creation of a new spirituality but for comprehending the deep and bitter tensions surrounding gender that interacted with this process. Beginning with an overview of the most influential ancient texts on Persephone and references to Persephone in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Romantic period writing, Louis shows that the earliest theories of matriarchy and patriarchal marriage emerged in the 1860s alongside the first English poems to explore Persephone's story. As scholars began to focus on the chthonic Mystery cults, and particularly on the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, poets and novelists explored the divisions between mother and daughter occasioned by patriarchal marriage. Issues of fertility and ritual resonate in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Willa Cather's My Antonia, while the first advance of a neo-pagan spirituality, as well as early feminist critiques of male mythography and of the Persephone myth, emerge in Modernist poems and fictions from 1908 to 1927. Informed by the latest research and theoretical work on myth, Margot Louis's fascinating study shows the development of Victorian mythography in a new light; offers original takes on Victorian representations of gender and values; exposes how differently male and female Modernists dealt with issues of myth, ritual, and ancient spirituality; and uncovers how deeply the study of ancient spirituality is entwined with controversies about gender.
