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This collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics. Informed by Brenda Shaughnessy's craft as a poet and her worst fears as a mother, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children (car accidents, falling from a tree) is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.
"Shaughnessy's particular genius . . . is utterly poetic, but essayistic in scope."—The New Yorker "Brenda Shaughnessy's work is a good place to start for any passionate woman feeling daunted by poetry." —Cosmopolitan "Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."—Harvard Review Subversions of idiom and cliché punctuate Shaughnessy's fourth collection as she approaches middle age and revisits the memories, romances, and music of adolescence. So Much Synth is a brave and ferocious collection composed of equal parts femininity, pain, pleasure, and synthesizer. While Shaughnessy tenderly winces at her youthful excesses, we humbly catch glimp...
The award-winning poet weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the ongoing mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss. In this powerful gathering of poems about her own "influencers," as well as poems on Dadaist artist Méret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette, Brenda Shaughnessy dwells in memories of the women who set her on her artistic path. In the title poem, she explores the eternal quality of an intense touchstone relationship with Tanya, about whom she writes, "Everyone's not you to me . . . Worth loving once, why not now?" We all have our own Tanya, and in this book we meet friends, mentors, sisters, lovers, who inhabit a verse classroom where Shaughnessy's passion for literature—forged in her own formative studies, as in the poem "Coursework"—is our teacher. In flowing stair-step tercets, Shaughnessy leads us down into her generative core, exposing moments of spiritual and intellectual awakening, her love of art and the written word, and her sense of the life force itself, which is ignited by the conversation—across time and space—with other women.
In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn—sometimes all at once.
The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. Critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, she presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.
The ways in which the present longs for the past, questions it, tries to get in touch with it, and stretches the power of memory to its limits, are central to this new collection by Helen Dunmore. These are poems and stories of loss and extraordinary rediscovery.
Of an earlier book, Terry Eagleton wrote: 'Philip Gross knows how to make silence and suggestion resonate... he touches an alien, intractable dimension...Gross's poems are about lost bearings and blurred frontiers...a landscape bereft of assured relationships, haunted by the just-missedness of human contact' (Independent on Sunday). These new poems reach towards closer engagement, whether with the realities of Estonia, his father's birthplace - visited for the first time - or with other loves and longings, never uncomplicated but handled even at their most difficult with tenderness and wit, nowhere more so that in the title-sequence about his daughter's struggle with anorexia. In the end, this is a book of life and hope.
Toba Khedoori’s exquisitely crafted and tantalizingly ambiguous drawings and paintings are the subject of this exciting monograph, which accompanies Khedoori’s first retrospective in 15 years. This book documents the artistic development of Toba Khedoori, a MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient who skillfully combines precise draftsmanship with a meditative quality, and who manages to invite viewers inside her works, despite their two-dimensionality. Whether drawing on sheets of paper primed with wax and stapled directly onto the wall or using canvas as physical support, Khedoori creates delicate compositions that are at once intimate and expansive. Over the past decade, she has shifted toward smaller-scale works while continuing to engage elements of drawing, painting, and installation.
A survival guide that shows how bigotry and redemption are mapped on the psyche and on the body
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