You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and Af...
“A soulful reckoning for our twenty-first century, held in focus through echoes of the past and future, but always firmly rooted in now.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry (2018) In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its o...
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Colorado Book Award As a working mother and poet-lecturer, Camille Dungy’s livelihood depended on travel. She crisscrossed America and beyond with her daughter in tow, history shadowing their steps, always intensely aware of how they were perceived, not just as mother and child but as black women. From the San Francisco of settlers’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana, from snow-white Maine to a festive yet threatening bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods, Dungy finds fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, this is an essential guide for a troubled land.
Every day we are forced to integrate the world's news into our personal lives; we all have to decide what parts of the flood of news resonate with us and what we need to turn away from, out of necessity or sensitivity. Obliterations--a collection of erasure poems that use The New York Times as their source texts--springs from that seemingly immediate process of personalizing news information. By cutting, synthesizing and arranging existing news items into new poems, the erasure process creates a link between the authors' poetic sensibilities and the supposedly more "objective" view of the newsmakers. Each author used the same articles but wrote separate erasures without seeing the other's versions, highlighting the wonderful similarities and differences that arise when two works--or any two people with individual tastes and lenses--share the same stories.
A collection from the first ten years of Cave Canem, including work by many leading faculty and the winners of the annual Cave Canem first-book prize
A leading on-line audio archive of contemporary poetry focuses on emerging poets who pay particular attention to the sounds and rhythms of their work. This winning anthology of poems is a festival of verse at its acoustic best.
For readers of Bruce Feiler’s Walking the Bible and Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk comes a powerful exploration of the Bible in translation. Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart—and was therefore surprised when, while getting her MFA at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Old Testament and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation story to a new emphasis on the topic of slavery, the English tr...
Ghost Fishing is the first anthology to focus solely on poetry with an eco-justice bent. A culturally diverse collection entering a field where nature poetry anthologies have historically lacked diversity, this book presents a rich terrain of contemporary environmental poetry with roots in many cultural traditions. Eco-justice poetry is poetry born of deep cultural attachment to the land and poetry born of crisis. Aligned with environmental justice activism and thought, eco-justice poetry defines environment as “the place we work, live, play, and worship.” This is a shift from romantic notions of nature as a pristine wilderness outside ourselves toward recognition of the environment as h...
The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth. Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
This text focuses on the ways in which a people constructed themselves, the institutions they created, and the battle for freedom and equality they waged. Volume two begins with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and finishes in 1965 with the effective stage of the civil rights movement.