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 Lorine Niedecker written by Margot Peters and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lorine Niedecker (1903–70) was a poet of extraordinary talent whose life and work were long enveloped in obscurity. After her death in 1970, poet Basil Bunting wrote that she was “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced . . . only beginning to be appreciated when she died.” Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home in Wisconsin that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to Niedecker’s enigmatic reputation. Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker’s life out of the shadows in this first full biography of the poet. She depicts Niedecker’s watery world on Blackhawk Island (near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin), where she was born and spent most of her life. A brief college career cut short by family obligations and an equally brief marriage were followed in 1931 by the start of a life-changing correspondence and complicated thirty-five-year friendship with modernist poet Louis Zukofsky, who connected Niedecker to a literary lifeline of distant poets and magazines. Supporting herself by turns as a hospital scrubwoman and proofreader for a dairy journal, Niedecker made a late marriage to an industrial painter, which gave her time to write and publish her work in the final decades of her life. During her lifetime, Niedecker’s poetry was praised by a relatively small literary circle, including Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levetov, and Allen Ginsberg. Since her death much more of her surviving writings have been published, including a comprehensive edition of collected works and two volumes of correspondence. Through Margot Peters’s compelling biography, readers will discover Lorine Niedecker as a poet of spare and brilliant verse and a woman whose talent and grit carried her through periods of desperation and despair. Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Download or read book The World s Best Poetry written by Bliss Carman and published by New York : Bigelow, Smith. This book was released on 1904 with total page 1022 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Velocity of Love written by Kathryn Gahl and published by . This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kathryn Gahl's THE VELOCITY OF LOVE is a poetic memoir about wonder, loss, and longing. The direct subject in this collection of poems is the untimely death of a child. And therein lies Gahl's magic, transforming unimaginable grief into everlasting grace.
Download or read book Walden West written by August Derleth and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of anecdotes, reflections, and prose poetry describing the author's childhood in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin.
Download or read book The Late Wisconsin Spring written by John Koethe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Koethe's] new collection is that rarity, a book of poems with a genuine philosophical dimension and an elegant but conversational poise."--The New York Times Book Review "Solemn and playful, John Koethe's poems lock themselves gradually but firmly into one's memory. His new collection offers in his own words, 'happiness, for myself and strangers.'"--John Ashbery Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Fireside Encyclop dia of Poetry Comprising the best Poems of the Most Famous Writers English and American written by Henry Troth Coates and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-05-01 with total page 1102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.
Download or read book Hope is the Thing written by B. J. Hollars and published by Wisconsin Historical Society. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 2020, as a pandemic began to ravage our world, writer and professor B. J. Hollars started a collaborative writing project to bridge the emotional challenges created by our physical distancing. Drawing upon Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Hollars called on Wisconsinites to reflect on their own glimpses of hope in the era of COVID-19. The call resulted in an avalanche of submissions, each reflecting on hope’s ability to persist and flourish, even in the darkest times. As the one hundred essays and poems gathered here demonstrate, hope comes in many forms: a dad dance, a birth plan, an unblemished banana, a visit from a neighborhood dog, the revival of an old tradition, empathy. The contributors are racially, geographically, and culturally diverse, representing a rough cross section of Wisconsin voices, from truck driver to poet laureate, from middle school student to octogenarian, from small business owner to seasoned writer. The result is a book-length exploration of the depth and range of hope experienced in times of crisis, as well as an important record of what Wisconsinites were facing and feeling through these historic times.
Download or read book The World s Best Poetry written by and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book About Crows written by Craig Blais and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unsentimental and at times disquieting first collection, the poems of About Crows excavate self, family, race, location, sex, art, and religion to uncover the artifacts of a succession of traumas that the speaker does not always experience firsthand but carries with him to refashion into some new importance. This is a book of half-states, broken affiliations, and dislocation. The speaker leads the reader through the fragments of a flooded town that grows increasingly elusive the more one looks for it; through a succession of Seoul "love motels" that further displace the outsider to unclaimed margins transformed into sites of creative invention; through "galleries" of artwork, where movement, color, and image are renewed through ekphrasis; and through the world of the metatextual long poem "The Cult Poem," where good and bad moral binaries tangle into a rat's nest of our best and worst spiritual ambitions. The poems and sequences of About Crows are marked by their artistic balance of the sublime and the profane, of polyphony, syntactical complexity, clashing images, cagey humor, and unsettling sincerity, all trying desperately to connect.
Download or read book From Outlaw to Classic written by Alan Golding and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1995-05-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Outlaw to Classic presents a sweeping history of the forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the American poetry canon. Students, scholars, critics, and poets will welcome this enlightening and impressively documented book. Recent writings by critics and theorists on literary canons have dealt almost exclusively with prose; Alan Golding shows that, like all canons, those of American poetry are characterized by conflict. Choosing a series of varied but representative instances, he analyzes battles and contentions among poets, anthologists, poetry magazine editors, and schools of thought in university English departments. The chapters: • present a history of American poetry anthologies • compare competing models of canon-formation, the aesthetic (poet-centered) and the institutional (critic-centered) • discuss the influence of the New Critics, emphasizing their status as practicing poets, their anti-nationalist reading of American poetry, and the landmark textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren • examine the canonizing effects of an experimental “little magazine,” Origin • trace how the Language poets address, in both their theory and their method, the canonizing institutions and canonical assumptions of the age.
Download or read book Famous Wisconsin Authors written by James P. Roberts and published by Badger Books Inc.. This book was released on 2002-04 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Aldo Leopold to Zona Gale, here are the profiles of 35 Famous Wisconsin Authors. Meet Native American authors as well as poets, novelists, and contemporary authors.
Download or read book Places everyone written by Jim Daniels and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Daniels, in his first book of poems, draws upon his experiences in living and working in his native Detroit to present a start, realistic picture of urban, blue-collar life. Daniels, his brothers, his father, and his grandfather have all worked in the auto industry, and that background seeps into nearly all these poems. The first of the book's three sections sketches out this background, then moves into a neighborhood full of people whose lives are so linked to the ups and downs of the auto industry that they have to struggle to find their own lives; in "Still Lives in Detroit, #2," Daniels writes, "There's a man in this picture. / No one can find him." The second section contains the "Digger" poems, a series on the lives of a Detroit auto worker and his family which tries to capture the effects of the work on life outside the factory. Here, we listen to Digger think, dream, wander on psychological journeys while he moves through his routines, shoveling the snow, mowing the lawn, and so forth. In section three, the poems move into the workplace, whether that be a liquor store, a hamburger joint, or a factory. These poems, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, concentrate on the efforts of workers to rise above the often depressing work of blue-collar or minimum-wage jobs, to salvage some pride and dignity. The poems in this book try to give a voice to those who are often shut out of poetry. They are important. These lives are important, and the poems, more than anything, say that.
Download or read book Wisconsin in Story and Song B Selections from the Prose and Poetry of Badger State Writers written by Charles Ralph Rounds and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Really Big Lunch written by Jim Harrison and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection from “the Henry Miller of food writing” and New York Times–bestselling author of The Raw and the Cooked (The Wall Street Journal). Jim Harrison was beloved for his untamed prose and larger-than-life appetite. Collecting many of his most entertaining and inspired food pieces for the first time, A Really Big Lunch “brings him roaring to the page again in all his unapologetic immoderacy, with spicy bon mots and salty language augmented by family photographs” (NPR). From the titular New Yorker article about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to essays on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison’s aperçus and delight in the pleasures of the senses. Between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades. Including articles that first appeared in Brick, Playboy, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, and more, as well as an introduction by Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch offers “sage and succulent essays” for the literary gourmand (Shelf Awareness, starred review).
Download or read book Chambers s Journal of Popular Literature Science and Arts written by and published by . This book was released on 1833 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Complete Poetry of Catullus written by Catullus and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2002-07-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catullus’ life was akin to pulp fiction. In Julius Caesar’s Rome, he engages in a stormy affair with a consul’s wife. He writes her passionate poems of love, hate, and jealousy. The consul, a vehement opponent of Caesar, dies under suspicious circumstances. The merry widow romances numerous young men. Catullus is drawn into politics and becomes a cocky critic of Caesar, writing poems that dub Julius a low-life pig and a pervert. Not surprisingly, soon after, no more is heard of Catullus. David Mulroy brings to life the witty, poignant, and brutally direct voice of a flesh-and-blood man, a young provincial in the Eternal City, reacting to real people and events in a Rome full of violent conflict among individuals marked by genius and megalomaniacal passions. Mulroy’s lively, rhythmic translations of the poems are enhanced by an introduction and commentary that provide biographical and bibliographical information about Catullus, a history of his times, a discussion of the translations, and definitions and notes that ease the way for anyone who is not a Latin scholar.
