Download or read book Home Is Not a Country written by Safia Elhillo and published by Make Me a World. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “Nothing short of magic.” —Elizabeth Acevedo, New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X From the acclaimed poet featured on Forbes Africa’s “30 Under 30” list, this powerful novel-in-verse captures one girl, caught between cultures, on an unexpected journey to face the ephemeral girl she might have been. Woven through with moments of lyrical beauty, this is a tender meditation on family, belonging, and home. my mother meant to name me for her favorite flower its sweetness garlands made for pretty girls i imagine her yasmeen bright & alive & i ache to have been born her instead Nima wishes she were someone else. She doesn’t feel understood by her mother, who grew up in a different land. She doesn’t feel accepted in her suburban town; yet somehow, she isn't different enough to belong elsewhere. Her best friend, Haitham, is the only person with whom she can truly be herself. Until she can't, and suddenly her only refuge is gone. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen—the name her parents meant to give her at birth—Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows. And the life Nima wishes were someone else's. . . is one she will need to fight for with a fierceness she never knew she possessed.

Download or read book How to Love a Country written by Richard Blanco and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely and moving collection from the renowned inaugural poet on issues facing our country and people—immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more. Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, Richard Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all. Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive. The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.

Download or read book If I Should Say I Have Hope written by Lynn Melnick and published by Yesyes Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. "The title of Melnick's stunning book is a microcosm of the poems within—the uncertainty of 'if I should say' followed by the defiance of 'I have hope.' Her poems follow moments of unmooredness ('I am best / when I dabble in consciousness and a soundly / spinning room') with blinding insight ('You wouldn't know happy if it kissed you on the mouth')—tiptoeing followed by a kick to the head. On the melancholy-go-round of these poems, there's a swan-seat for sadness but also a tiger called Beauty and a horse called Hope. The unexpected music and syntax of Melnick's work will make you want to ride/read it again and again."—Matthea Harvey "Lynn Melnick's poems are a series of swift kicks knocking over whatever a lot of Boys think it's like to be a Girl. They're also the bruises afterward. IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE teems with very small and much larger devastations, crackling throughout with fierceness and stealth and wry intelligence. 'There's some kind of crazy on the way,' she says. Those of us who've seen that crazy coming need this book. Those of us who haven't need it more."—Mark Bibbins "Lynn Melnick's poems in IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE recall the raw power of Anne Sexton and read like Lynchian dreams. The voice of these poems proves consistent and potent, steeping the book in weather and worry, in impulse and flesh, sometimes in blood. Most of the poems in IF I SHOULD SAY I HAVE HOPE are formal in structure and tone, built mostly in couplets, sometimes tercets and quatrains, and all demand recognition of truth, of human details we might rather deny. If I should say I have hope, the speaker suggests, I need to say all of these things first. She confesses, 'I'll wreck it if it's good.' Calling attention to our often-destructive tendencies, the poet admits fallibility and imperfection, while quietly offering refuge to a thing with feathers."—Melinda Wilson, Coldfront Magazine's Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012

Download or read book Country Music written by Charles Wright and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet's career. Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.

Download or read book Up Country written by Maxine Kumin and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems about the inner and outer realities of creatures, plants, houses, lovers, and others in the New England landscape.

Download or read book A Country of Strangers written by D. Nurkse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories. D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.

Download or read book Flyover Country written by Austin Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.

Download or read book Poem a Day written by Academy of American Poets, Inc. and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 80 years, the Academy of American Poets has been one of the most influential and respected champions of contemporary American poetry. Through their successful Poem-a-Day online program, the Academy continues to celebrate verse by delivering poems to thousands of e-mail subscribers each morning. Now for the first time, the poems selected by the Academy for this program are available in book form so that they can be collected and savored. Loosely organized according to the flow and themes of the seasons (for example, the month of February includes poems on love, lust, and heartache), this substantial volume is designed to encourage the daily practice of reading poetry. A thematic index is included so that poems can be sought out for popular occasions such as marriage, graduation, and holidays, or enjoyed any day of the year.

Download or read book Of No Country I Know written by David Ferry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-11-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Represents David Ferry's poetry and his translations of other poems by Holderlin, Goethe, Montale, Catullus, a Babylonian hymn, Ronsard, Guillen, Baudelaire, Rilke, Goliardic, Gilgamesh, the odes of Horace, the eclogues of Virgil, and two epistles of Horace,.

Download or read book Home written by Christian Wiman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evocative poems and prose fragments about home, selected by one of the most celebrated poets of our time "This is a book of longing, yes, and also spiritual discernment, political awareness, historical memory, and deep intimacy."--Carolyn Forché In this poignant collection, Christian Wiman draws together one hundred evocative poems and prose fragments about home, exploring home's deep theological, literary, philosophical, historical, political, and social dimensions. Wiman calls home "a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god." It's "a word that disperses into more definitions than one book can contain." The tensions between diffusion and concentration, roaming and rootedness, precarity and security are everywhere in this book, often in the same poem. Ranging from early modernism to the current moment, and from southern Africa to the Arctic Circle, the selections are as diverse as the poets included. Collectively they envision an imaginative home for even the most homeless of modern readers. Completed entirely during quarantine, amid the miseries of separation and isolation, the collection offers a powerful vision of home as both a place and a way.

Download or read book Poems from Ish River Country written by Robert Sund and published by Counterpoint LLC. This book was released on 2004 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the complete poems of poet, painter, and calligrapher Robert Sund focuses on the landscape and lifeways of the Cascade Mountains, Ish River, and Puget Sound region of Washington State.

Download or read book I Live in the Country Other Dirty Poems written by Arielle Greenberg and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sexually explicit poems that address the radical possibilities of a woman's pleasure and the endless varieties of human desire. Arielle Greenberg's I Live in the Country & other dirty poems exploits and undoes the stereotype of the "wholesome country life." Here, the speaker moves to the country ("where the animals are") in order to live a whole life, one in which she can live honestly and openly in a non-monogamous marriage. Her book is a visceral, erotic celebration of the cornucopia of sexual pleasures to be had in that rural life-in the muck of a pasture in spring or behind the bins of whole-wheat pastry flour at the local Co-op. Greenberg hauls out what has previously been stored under dark counters and labeled deviant-kink, fetish, and bondage- and moves it into the sunshine of sex-positivity and mutual consent. In doing so, she forges new literary territory-a feminist re-visioning of the Romantic pastoral poems of seduction. "I am trying to turn my eye toward joy," she writes. "My heart toward bliss.""--

Download or read book A Country Without Borders written by Lalita Pandit Hogan and published by 2Leaf Press. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COUNTRY WITHOUT BORDERS, POEMS AND STORIES OF KASHMIR is the debut collection of Lalita Pandit Hogan, an expatriate Kashmiri scholar and poet who shares with readers the loss of identity and home, culture, migration, womanhood, otherness and exile. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven, evoking a home no longer accessible. A COUNTRY WITHOUT BORDERS is an invaluable collection for all who are interested in cultural remembrance and meditations that reflect postcolonial poetry, and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.

Download or read book Queen of a Rainy Country written by Linda Pastan and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection from a poet long recognized for her unfailing mastery of her medium (New York Times). Linda Pastan writes, the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza. That life is portrayed here, from the poet's earliest childhood memories to the surprises that come with age.

Download or read book Light Magic for Dark Times written by Lisa Marie Basile and published by Fair Winds Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the world around you turns dark, tap into the light. If you’re having a hard time finding that light, facing trauma and division, or want to send healing vibes to a friend, the inspired, easy-to-do spells of Light Magic for Dark Times can assist. Luna Luna magazine’s Lisa Marie Basile shares inspired spells, rituals, and practices, including: A new moon ritual for attracting a lover A spell to banish recurring nightmares A graveyard meditation for engaging with death A mermaid ritual for going with the flow A zodiac practice for tapping into celestial mojo A rose-quartz elixir for finding self-love A spell to recharge after a protest or social justice work These 100 spells are ideal for those inexperienced with self-care rituals, as well as experienced witches. They can be cast during a crisis or to help prevent one, to protect loved ones, to welcome new beginnings, to heal from grief, or to find strength. Whether you’re working with the earth, performing a cleanse with water or smoke, healing with tinctures or crystals, meditating through grief, brewing, enchanting, or communing with your coven, Light Magic for Dark Times will help you tap into your inner witch in times of need.

Download or read book An American Sunrise Poems written by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A nationally best-selling volume of wise, powerful poetry from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.

Download or read book Hollow Palaces written by Kevin Gardner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a genre of poetry, the country house poem was born in the seventeenth century. As English country house society itself grew in prominence, the poem of commemoration diminished in popularity; not until the Edwardian era, when the country house as an institution began to wane, was there a renewed interest in country house poetry. As the power and influence of landed society dwindled, the country house began to haunt the English literary imagination, and our poets found in its dereliction a frequent subject and theme. This is the first book to gather modern and contemporary country house poems into one collection. Poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer a wide variety of perspectives: stately exteriors and interiors, crumbling ruins, gardens both wild and cultivated, and the voices of noble owners, servants, and curious visitors. The dominant note sounded is perhaps unsurprisingly elegiac, yet comic, satiric, and gothic tones appear frequently as well. The common thread is that, in response to the rapid sociological changes of the twentieth century, poets reflect on the country house as an architecturally, politically, socially, and economically potent symbol and institution, both in its heyday and in its eclipse.