294 Ergebnisse - Zeige 61 von 80.

A deeply-sensorial reflection on presence, absence, and the act of losing "What Happens is Neither/ the end nor the beginning. /Yet we're wired to look for signs, " offers the speaker of Angela Narciso Torres' latest collection, which approaches motherhood, aging, and mourning through a series of careful meditations. In music, mantra, and prayer, Torres explores the spaces in and around grief-in varying proximity to it and from different vanta...

The speaker of the poems in The Life Assignment is reviewing his history. As if sorting through a box of photographs, the speaker sorts through relationships, trying to discern what was healthy from what was exploitative. Concepts of love are turned over and over in these poems: romantic love, love of family, love of country, self-love (or lack thereof). Often the speaker finds that what at first appeared to be caring, was insincere all along....

The characters inhabiting Susan Buttenwieser's debut story collection We Were Lucky with the Rain stand at the margin of society, often perched on the knife's edge of economic disaster. Her characters cope with emotional and physical isolation as they try to build, keep, or renew family structures. An older brother drops out of college and tries to keep his youngest sister from ending up like the rest of the family. A father shields his daught...

How does consciousness inhabit liminal spaces? In Jeffrey Harrison's Between Lakes, the death of the speaker's father places him in the ever-shifting zone between the living and the dead while also sending him back into his journey to manhood. Old arguments are reimagined: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a participant in one's life as well as a witness and recorder of the lives of others? The exploration of these questio...

In The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin, poet Charlie Clark interrogates masculinity, the pastoral, the lasting inheritance of one's lineage, and the mysterious every day. His speaker, ever aware of impending ruin, experiences a landscape colored by anxiety. But his speaker is also self-aware, curious and trying to refrain from too much self-judgement: "I am sorry / for this cruel wish, but I want my life to outlast / bitterness." The spe...

Seize, Brian Komei Dempster's follow-up to Topaz, spares no one the highs and lows of fatherhood. The speaker struggles to care for his young and ailing child -- a child whose many medical problems create an obstacle course of moral and emotional dilemmas. How does a father come to terms with the large and unknowable mysteries of a child who cannot communicate in a "normative" way? How does a parent -- especially one who is dependent on langua...

The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey's much anticipated You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers. Half-superhero, half-secret-identity, she encounters side-slipping, speculative realities testing her in poems that appear like the panels of a comic book. Music directs readers...

This new book of poems, a Stahlecker Series selection from Four Way Books, contains works that fiirst appeared in Agni, Crania, Conduit, Forklift, Ohio, Incliner, Kumquat Meringue, Licking River Review, Marlboro Review, The Plastic Tower, Southern Poetry Review, Warren Wilson Review, and in the anthology The Beach Book: A Literary Companion (Sarabande Books, 1999).

A slide show in poems documenting the ruin wrought by war and inequality on those who defy the status quo. In Guidebooks for the Dead, Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty. For Marguerite Duras, evoked here in a collage of poems, the process of renaming herself is a "Quiet death, " a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution....

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 vis...

An examination of a brutal America through the voices of its most vulnerable sons. In his debut collection, Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man's late-night encounter with a police officer - the titular "man in blue" - becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous, erotic fantasy. T...

A powerful meditation on grief and the radiating effects of violence against women. "Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother's name, " Allison Benis White instead writes about five women named Wendy as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author's long-absent mother. A series of epistolary poems addressed to Wendy O. Williams becomes an occasion for the speaker to eulogize as ...

This is the "Age of the Bullet, " Matthew Lippman writes in Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, days in which "bullets sprout other bullets in the bullet garden" and a caricature of a onesie-wearing president sucking on a pacifier appears on the cover of a national magazine. Lippman's poems are wildly inventive yet grounded in the 21st century dailyness of parenting and dinner parties and Dunkin Donuts, all of which serve as launch pads into perenn...

Experiential poems located in an America that is both cross-racial and transracial. The poems in Ed Pavliâc's Let It Be Broke are ignited by sonic memories-from Chaka Khan on the radio to his teenaged daughter singing "Stay" at a local cafâe-that spark a journey into personal and ontological questions. Pavliâc's lyric lines are equal parts introspection and inter-spection, a term he coins for the shared rumination that encourages a collective ...

A writer traces his history-brushes with violence, responses to threat, poetic and political solidarity-in poems of lyric and narrative urgency. John Murillo's second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against African Americans and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father's fists, a workout at an i...

The feel of now lives in John Murillo's Up Jump the Boogie, but it's tempered by bows to the tradition of soulful music and oral poetry. The lived dimensions embodied in this collection say that here's an earned street knowledge and a measured intellectual inquiry that dare to live side by side, in one unique voice. The pages of Up Jump the Boogie breathe and sing, the tributes and cultural nods are heartfelt, and in these honest poems no one ...

Poems of urgent beauty that give voice to a region of people who have been silenced or ignored. The Land of the Dead is Open for Business is an extended elegy for Jacob Strautmann's home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream. Throughout the book, voices rise up from the page to describe a landscape eroded and plundered by runaway capitalism-its mountain tops leveled by fra...

Poems that balance beauty and irony in their interrogation of urgency versus importance.

Poems arising from a profound awareness of the natural world and a deep commitment to family and community.

With candor and wit, Upkeep examines the curious ceremonies of human maintenance, especially in the wake of loss.