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Sparrow, a luminous new volume of poetry by acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Carol Muske-Dukes, draws the reader into a mesmerizing world of love and loss. In the wake of personal tragedy, the death of her husband, Muske-Dukes asks herself the questions that undergird all of art, all of elegy. “What is the difference between love and grief?” she asks in a poem, finding no answer beyond the image of the sparrow, flitting from Catullus to the contemporary lyric. Beyond autobiographical narrative, these are stripped-down, passionate meditations on the aligned arts of poetry and acting, the marriage of two artists and their transformative powers of expression and experience. Muske-Dukes has once again shown herself to be, in this profound elegiac collection, one of today’s finest living poets.
“Lies, wishes, fantasies—all the weaponry of compassionate imagination at war with society—deploy with delicious satire in [Muske-Dukes’s] first book.” —Library Journal A poet, novelist, critic, and essayist, Carol Muske-Dukes has established herself as one of the preeminent talents of modern American writing. Birth, loss, imprisonment, and renewal are among the subjects of Camouflage, her first published book of poems. These twenty-eight poems are a young writer’s stream of consciousness set in formal verse. In “Photographer,” Muske-Dukes slides between light and dark. “Salad Days: Nebraska, 1964,” relives a plane ride over the state’s rolling plains. And the tongue-in-cheek yet respectful “Swansong” evokes a childhood ballet class, taught by a faded prima ballerina. Each poem is a skin, a mask, a camouflage meant for survival—a place of regeneration and change.
Fresh out of graduate school, Holly Mattox is a young, newly married, and spirited poet who moves to New York City from Minnesota in the early 1970’s. Hoping to share her passion for words and social justice, Holly is also determined to contribute to the politically charged atmosphere around her. Her mission: to successfully teach a poetry workshop at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, only minutes from Manhattan. Having listened to her mother recite verse by heart all her life, Holly has always been drawn to poetry. Yet until she stands before a class made up of prisoners and detainees–all troubled women charged with a variety of crimes–even Holly does not know the ful...
An Octave Above Thunder presents a collection of poems spanning more than twenty years in the career of Carol Muske, who has won acclaim for work which marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and technical craft. What most distinguishes Carol Muske's poetry is her awareness of the complicated web into which the personal and the political, the familial and the feminist, are woven. Filled with audible contemplation—invocation, echo, dreamsong, dirge—Muske's lyrical precision, assured touch, and exacting clarity make her one of the most talented poets of her generation.
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The author offers essays and observations that explore the frequently uneasy relationship between Los Angeles and literature, discussing topics ranging from freeway billboards spouting Emily Dickinson quotations to show business.
"A poetic relay race across the continent: fifty-four poets responding to ideas of America--and to each other. This is a collaborative journey of impressions--from the election and inauguration of President Obama, through foreclosures, job losses, chords of country music; and bombs in Baghdad, to a poet-soldier's rifle-sight in Afghanistan. The renga itself, in the ancient tradition of Japanese linked verse, provides the form of this historic conversation among the poets, as they meditate, within ten lines, on a moment in America. Crossing State Lines begins with Robert Pinsky's recounting of a line of poetry by Lincoln as fall deepens and 'maples / kindle in the East, ' and ends some five hundred lines later, with Robert Hass's 'greeny April' on the Pacific coast"--Publisher description.
"McHugh remains one of our most important and unusual poets." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
National Book Award Finalist Stay, Illusion, the much-anticipated volume of poems by Lucie Brock-Broido, illuminates the broken but beautiful world she inhabits. Her poems are lit with magic and stark with truth: whether they speak from the imagined dwelling of her “Abandonarium,” or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed “humanely,” or even from the surreal confines of death row, they find a voice like no other—dazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido’s verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a c...
A sophisticated and lyrical new collection from one of today's finest living poets. Carol Muske-Dukes is an acclaimed novelist and poet whose latest collection, Sparrow, a haunting elegy for her late husband, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Twin Cities is an emotionally rich book of poems about how things double-by reflection, by reproduction, by severance. The poems embark from the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, divided by a legendary river, and move on to the parallel histories of a life lived and a life imagined-and the random intersection of the two. Lit by loss, these moving poems navigate between the poles of love and grief, curse and blessing, abandonment and rescue-they are two, and they are one.