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Poetry: Tina Braziel's 'Known by Salt' is very much a book of celebrations. One arc of the book is the move from a life in trailer parks to a house that Tina and her husband build with their own hands, stud by stud, window by window. It is also a celebration of Alabama, with its forests, its rivers and lakes, and its creatures: snakes, deer, birds, lizards. Her observations are so keen - 'herons lift their backward knees' - that they make me laugh out loud in my own celebration. This attention to detail is what Roethke called long looking, and it is everywhere in these well-wrought poems."--C.G. Hanzlicek, 2017 Judge, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
With simultaneous grit and poise, poet/essayist Caronae Howell describes a chaotic adolescence unfolding after 9/11 in this uniquely formatted, alphabetically-arranged novella, Index for September11th.
The poems in Desire Lines, both new and selected, give shape to the desires we must nourish if we are to retain our compassion. The poems collaborate as a series of variations on the theme of desire, much like the way a motif weaves through a piece of music or a thread through a tapestry. Haskins presents autobiographical poems and poems that give voice to other women, both historical and imagined. Lola Haskins has published six full-length poetry collections. A musician and dancer, Haskins shared the title role in Mata Hari, a full-length ballet, whose libretto she wrote for Dance Alive , a touring dance company. She has read her poetry on National Public Radio and BBC radio.
In Steven Kleinman's Life Cycle of a Bear, men are bears, wolves, starfish, and clowns, but they are also fathers, addicts, veterans, failures, and friends. This is not another book about how bad men have it. There are no heroes here. Instead, it is a book of vast imagination and steadfast intimacy, of compassion and clear-eyed dissent, about one locality and thus our world. Kleinman's reckoning with the mythologies and communities born of the violence of men is as tenderly wrought as it is tenacious and true. - Jennifer Chang
READING QUEER: POETRY IN A TIME OF CHAOS, edited by Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton, is a collection of the most subversive, gritty, moving, and courageous writing to come out of the U.S. queer community in recent political times. ¿When we started to solicit material for the anthology in 2015,¿ says Seaton & de la Flor, ¿we didn¿t expect to compile a survival manual. Overnight, the work of these fifty poets became even more crucial. It became sacred.¿ READING QUEER: POETRY IN A TIME OF CHAOS brings the LGBTQI community together in the spirit and solidarity of poetry at its finest and fiercest. ¿It is our gift to all conscious citizens. With love.¿ (Seaton & de la Flor).
A book of inquiry, Mark Irwin's Shimmer queries how the worlds of poverty, terrorism, ecology, species extinction, mortality and race interface and affect one another through electronic reproduction and transmission. Not as spectacles but as events that often seem too familiar, many are featured on YouTube: a horse still alive, dragged to be slaughtered; a homeless mother with an infant; a terrorist disguising a bomb, a Vietnam veteran attempting to commit suicide, a mother, unable to speak, who communicates by drawing different colors. Shimmer explores those places where metropolis and the natural world collide, where virtual technology attempts to convey the spirit. The incursion of electronic communication throughout society as a form of human language, has radically distorted and impacted notions of form and space in contemporary poetry, just as it has impacted the idea of what it means to be human.
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Poetry that addresses the universal quest for human dignity and acknowledgement made specific through the Black experience.
First haircuts, first kisses, firstborn children. Never Before: Poems About First Experiences explores the ways in which the unknown becomes known. These poems evoke a sense of wonder at the world around us, and amazement at our ability to navigate through it, with all of the necessary bumps along the way. The voices of both established and emerging poets include Kim Addonizio, Stephen Dunn, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jennifer Grotz, Kimiko Hahn, Mark Halliday, Edward Hirsch, Meg Kearney, A. Van Jordan, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Thomas Lux, Michael Ryan, and Gerald Stern, among many others. This is a diverse grouping and a generous and lively sampling work is showcased on the pages of this anthology.
"The poems in Copia are about what is and what is almost-gone, what is in limbo and what won't give way, what is almost at rock bottom but still and always brimming with the possibility of miracle."—Rachel Zucker Erika Meitner's fourth book takes cues from the Land Artists of the 1960s who created work based on landscapes of urban peripheries and structures in various states of disintegration. The collection also includes a section of documentary poems about Detroit that were commissioned for Virginia Quarterly Review. Because it is an uninhabited place, because it makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories absorbed back into ghetto palms and scru...