A Life Above Water is a cycle of poems that examines both the natural and human worlds and explores the boundaries between the two. The manuscript is concerned with personal ecologies and mythologies the ways that things are interconnected and the stories that we create to explain those connections. The manuscript is arranged in three concentric sections, each subsequent division nesting within the previous one. The reader is drawn into the broad, inclusive view of All These Indigestible Parts with its focus on the animals of the forest and birds of the air, the apparent cruelty of the natural world and that which is human about the animal through Fellowship and Baked Goods which looks at peopled communities and the ways we interact with one another, to the tighter, more personal focus of The Great Slowing and its themes of loss, shortcoming and redemption. The poems are individually free-standing and complete, but taken as a whole form a broad yet detailed portrait of the world around us and our place within it. By turns analytical, scientific, lyrical, whimsical and spiritual, A Life Above Water is a book that fits neatly into the canon of contemporary poetry while offering a unique, fresh and accessible perspective.
The poems in Morning Glories possess a gracefulness, like the flower itself, taking on their own life Seeds, Planters, Growing, Blossoms. For Brooke Bognanni, the process of writing becomes spiritual, a meditation for which the purpose varies; often it is about the natural cycle of the things of this earth, and about saying good-bye. The book, in turn, becomes a marker of epiphanal self-discovery.
Fifty years from now, historians will be identifying the criminality of the George W. Bush Administration. As these academics document their task they will be dependent on authors who were \u0022in his face\u0022 at the time of these international crimes. Blase Bonpane believes that silence is complicity. Civilization is Possible identifies the crimes at the very time they were being committed. Aside from the weekly commentaries of Blase Bonpane, this volume also includes his personal interviews with like minded observers of the disastrous Bush years: Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast and Peter Laufer. These are voices crying in the wilderness of rampant militarism, torture and collateral damage (murder). This toxic mix was nurtured by literally hundreds of lies coming from a failed administration that blatantly abused the sacred trust of our citizens.These commentaries would have never been permitted by the rigid corporate media censorship which marks the Iraq War years. This exercise of free speech in Civilization is Possible was only made possible by \u0022fiercely independent\u0022 KPFK radio Los Angeles (listener supported and \u0022powered by the people\u0022) for the Pacifica Network.Civilization is Possible completes a trilogy of Blase Bonpane's books published by Red Hen Press. His previous books were: Guerrillas of Peace; Pacifica Radio Commentaries and Peace Reports from the Office of the Americas, second printing, 2002, and Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century, 2004, which in addition to his radio commentaries includes interviews with the Reverend James Lawson, Jonathan Schell and Chalmers Johnson.By selecting The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the preface to Civilization is Possible, Blase Bonpane gives a hint about how his title might become a reality.
Physical and emotional pain, internal scarring, and explorations of social illness color the poems of this collection with hauntingly honest accounts, simultaneously filling readers with both a sense of hope and of surrender.
"Ron Koertge can elevate the ordinary places of America?-the backyard, the classroom, the mall-?into scenes of mock-epic significance. He can just as easily lower the mythic worlds of Superman, Ozymandias and Cinderella to a level just a few inches above the bathetic. And he does all this with a charming combination of wit and empathy, satire and sweetness."-Billy Collins"I would think a poem entitled Getting Tough with John Ruskin,? ?Ozymandias and Harriet,? or ?Teen Jesus? would be enough to entice any reader. But permit it to be known that Koertge also carries around a lexicon that includes locutions such as ?snazzy,? a word I haven?t heard since my last Canasta game in 1959. We all know who said that poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom, but Koertge might have said it because his poems are delight and wisdom all the way through. They are also very funny, the way the truly serious often is. This is a snazzy book, also a beautiful one, and I strongly urge you to buy it."-?B.H. Fairchild
Blending features of speculative fiction, the occult, and the spiritual quest, Paper Crown details an unusual story of initiation. Traumatized by the mysterious circumstances of his mother's death, Chuck runs away from his Southern California home and lands in Colorado Springs where he becomes involved with Frank Posner and his mother, Lyuba. Leaders of an ancient and highly secretive family of travelers who have incredible powers, they take Chuck on a psychological journey in which he must face his disturbing past and confront a frightening and uncertain future. With a cast of vivid and sometimes bizarre characters, Paper Crown unfolds a classic story of loss, struggle, and renewal.
"Camille Dungy has a garden of verses that spring up with the sunshine or hide with you in the dusk. "Cleaning" best sums up What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, an amazing poetry collection, when Dungy pens "understanding clearly/what is fatal to the body./I only understand too late/what can be fatal to the heart." Take an ice tea and sit on the veranda or take a glass of wine and prop up in bed but whatever way you like your poetry, this book is a must."-Nikki Giovanni, author of The Collected Poems of Nikki Giovanni and Black Feeling, Black Talk"The sorrow here is ironic and unsentimental and yet Camille Dungy's vision is all joy. Even as anti-psalms, these poems are pure transcendence."-Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Dog Woman"Camille Dungy shares with us in this manuscript her sharp, clear and honest ear and her unswerving commitment to the voice of life. She is a brave poet writing true poems and I salute the music and courage of her work."-Lucille Clifton, author of Blessing the Boats and Mercy
"Volando bajito is a strong, raw, transparent book that makes us tremble. Readers can feel every poem with their entire body, their entire soul. Alicia Partnoy had to fly low, otherwise she couldn't have tracked down all that blood, all those scattered bones, all those spirits left hanging from the windmills' sails. It is a book of testimonial poems that forces us to remember that tender girl who always waits for us, a girl called Solidarity." -Claribel Alegría "The terse sensuality of these poems - their gentleness and unflinching courage in the face of devestation, of genocide - is so much more than instructive. It is poetry with the subtlety and insight of our greatest resources, intelligence and compassion." -Gail Wronsky
In Fault, Katharine Coles continues to explore her abiding interest in the intersections of science, culture, and history, but the book is perhaps best described as an extended meditation on love. Ranging across time and continents, Coles addresses such figures as Newton, Kepler, and Vesalius, not only with intellectual rigor but also with a humor, intimacy, and buoyant optimism that render her subjects-the figures and the science-accessible within the capacious intellectual, emotional, and physical landscapes of the poems.
Letters To Guns represents a collection of poems that examine the para-physical natures of love and history, at times re-imagining both. As the poems progress, eight letters arrive written by non-human addressees (a nightgown, a grove of trees, a wooden spoon, others) at random points over the last 2,200 years. They are messages from home and pleas for understanding, warnings and promises of change. These in turn ignite other poems and themes which anticipate the next arrival. Taken together, the letters form an armature, a living skeleton fleshed by real and metaphenomenal experience. Throughout, a variety of styles appear and no single approach to poetry pervades. Singly, these poems should challenge and entertain. As a group they must transform and evolve our experience of sitting down with a book of poems.
Unending Nora is a love story, though not in the ordinary sense. Having retreated to the streets of the east San Fernando Valley amidst an intense heat wave, Nora Yano, who has lived the first 29 years of her life as a devout Christian and an outcast, strikes up a relationship with a stranger and experiences sexual intimacy for the first time. When Nora mysteriously disappears, her best and only friends Caroline and Melissa, each with their own lives to consider, must decide what they\u2019re willing to risk to find her. The complications that ensue, along with an unexpected arrival home, set this novel in motion. Beneath the stories of four compelling women, Shigekuni creates in Unending Nora web of ideas concerning the after effects of wartime internment. Fresh out of the camps, a displaced and emotionally scarred generation clustered together to form a community; they even took on a religion in order to adapt to the society that oppressed them. Now their offspring, four young women coming of age in their thirties, must carve their own path. Unending Nora is a story about finding love through adversity. In an ambitious examination of faith, shame, and desire, Julie Shigekuni takes up where John Okada left off over fifty years ago with his masterpiece No-No Boy—to tell the story of a community ready to mark its place in the larger world.
love belongs to those who do the feeling-an exciting collection of new and selected poetry by Judy Grahn. The book contains selections from Judy's entire body of poetic work from The Work of a Common Woman, The Queen of Wands and The Queen of Swords, to new poems written between 1997 and 2008. Judy's poetry is rangy and provocative. It has been written at the heart of so many of the important social movements of the last forty years that the proper word is foundational-Judy Grahn's poetry is foundational to the spirit of movement. People consistently report that Judy's poetry is also uplifting-an unexpected side effect of work that is aimed at the mind as well as the heart. Judy continues to insist that love goes beyond romance, to community, and that community goes beyond the everyday world, to the connective worlds of earth and spirit.
Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert's first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives-failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems ("My love, we know how species run extinct"), satires ("The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy"), elegies ("The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut"), and songs of sorrow ("Seasons start slowly. They end that way too"). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence--ABCABCDEFDEFGG--allows the author to dust off of the Italian "little song" and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona ("We'll head out, you and me, have a pint"), at times in the voice of both male and female characters ("I'm sorry I left you that day at MoMA"), at times across historical gulfs ("Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone"), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing "the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored."
In his first collection of poetry, We Generous, Sebastian Matthews illustrates black culture and music through soulful verse and poignant emotion. With poems reflective of the smooth rhythms of jazz, Matthews captures the essence and beauty of love, desire, and daily life.
The poems in Water & Salt travel across borders between cultures and languages, between the present and the living past.
"The poems in Elise Paschen's Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world," praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or "Book of Beasts," the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn - the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers' eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives - marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age - and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life. Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance - from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.
Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.
"With these poems¿sparsely worded, richly lived¿Geri Digiorno reminds us again just how entangled the delicate roots and tendrils of family and 'individual' identity can become. Her lovingly subjective subjects include family, neighborhood, coming of age, friendship, betrayal, initiation, baptism, masquerade, transformation, sexual discovery and conquest. Sketching poetically, Digiornöat heart a realist unafraid to risk sentimentality¿relives a working-class life begun in San Francisco's Noe Valley. In clipped, lower-case memoir-vernacular, she tells all, serving up clues to the meaning of life worldwide."¿Al Young"The poems in Geri Digiorno's White Lipstick explode with passion and power. Unforgettable and moving, these poems, rooted in pop culture, are ones you will return to again and again. In fearless poems about survival, Digiorno tells the story of an extraordinary woman's life and tells it with humor and grace."¿Maria Mazziotti Gillan"These direct and open-hearted poems speak with humor and insight of one woman's life in the American West. Geri Digiorno's clear voice draws us directly into the center of her world."¿Diane Di Prima
This collection of poetry, prose, and translations explores Latinx and queer identity through homage to the great Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario.After Ruben unfolds a decades-long journey braiding together the personal, the political and the historical. Throughout the text, acclaimed poet Francisco Aragon intersperses English-language translations and riffs of the Spanish-language master Ruben Dario. Whether it's biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragon has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua.Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short, After Ruben presents a complex and fascinating conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas-above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.
';Utterly unique... examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.' Ms. MagazineSelected as a Staff Pick by The Paris ReviewSilver Medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards in Multicultural Fiction Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and treachery by her sister, a Latina anthropologist named Claudia takes refuge in Neah Bay, a Native whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of a spirited hoarder named Maggie. Instead, she stumbles into Maggie's prodigal son Peter, who, spurred by his mother's failing memory, has returned seeking answers to his father's murder. Claudia helps Peter's family convey a legacy delayed for decades by that death, but her presence, echoing centuries of fraught contact with indigenous peoples, brings lasting change and real damage. Through the ardent collision of Peter and Claudia, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their shared hope of finding solace and community on the Makah Indian Reservation. An intimate tale of stunning betrayals, Subduction bears witness to the power of stories to disruptand to heal.';Young beautifully and vividly renders the Pacific Northwest, particularly the unique world of Neah Bay. Subduction is at once a thought-provoking meditation on the geography and geology of the natural world and a generous exploration of the natural shifts and movements that shape her characters.' Jonathan Evison, New York Times-bestselling author of Legends of the North Cascades
"e;Brilliant . . . Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is . . . dedicated to grieving the world as we know it."e; -Ada Limon, author of The CarryingThis collection of poems traces literal and metaphoric fault lines-rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Tess Taylor's hometown-an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault-these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment.Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic violence against our world's current unsteadinesses-mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink-equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious-a fearsome tremor of a book."e;Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts."e; -Publishers Weekly"e;Unearthing and sifting the seismic layers of her own East Bay locale, she's created a haunting American elegy."e; -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective
Against the backdrop of the rising commercial fishing industry in an Alaska Native village, Under Nushagak Bluff is a powerful mid-century tale of women, love, loss, resilience, and the unexpected strength found in storytelling.
The stories in The Girl with Two Left Breasts focus on a new generation of African-Americans, who, having had access to the education their parents could only dream of, now face the challenges of living in an insane postmodern world. Readers will encounter stories shaped and styled for the new millennium as image and metaphor are taffy-stretched and virtually collapsed in order to depict how, at this unique juncture barely beyond our century¿s turn, cultures, genders, and points of view collide as characters struggle with issues of race, identity, sex and addiction in an unforgiving urban milieu. Publisher Fiction Collective 2 calls Glenn¿s work ¿An important new voice speaking to us throughout the stories in an array of vivid, unusual tongues, all of them full of intellect, passion and poetry. Moreover, the collection strikes one as having been written by someone whose literary sensibility is already fully formed.¿ This is fiction that is sometimes darkly humorous or humorously dark, deftly sidestepping facile categorization and often, like a koan, unfolding with a lyrical sort of dissonance.
Douglas uses poetry to explore the personal and professional struggles of soul legend Donny Hathaway.
Orlando White explores language from a Dine (Navajo) perspective. One idea that interests him, inspires him to think and write, is the idea of the English language as a forgotten language. Imagine if we as a people, all people in the United States, are speaking an Indigenous language rather than English; that the English language e
Suicide Hotline Hold Music is a collection of poems (mostly short ones) and poetry comics (poorly-drawn mostly-text sometimes-funny things). A human pretends to be a machine in order to provide comfort anonymously. We are made to consider the epic meaning of middle school pantsing. Hearts are broken and mended. Children play with My Little Robot Pony. A troll keeps a food diary. Everyone's hair has a sound effect.
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