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"At the edge of a field a thought waits," writes Cassie Donish, in her collection that explores the conflicting diplomacies of body and thought while stranding us in a field, in a hospital, on a shoreline. These are poems that assess and dwell in a sensual, fantastically queer mode. Here is a voice slowed by an erotics suffused with pain, quickened by discovery. In masterful long poems and refracted lyrics, Donish flips the coin of subjectivity; different and potentially dangerous faces are revealed in turn. With lyricism as generous as it is exact, Donish tunes her writing as much to the colors, textures, and rhythms of daily life as to what violates daily life--what changes it from within and without.
Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. ON THE MEZZANINE is a lyrical, intertextual work that explores an unfolding relationship between the unnamed narrator and her lover, C., to whom the writing is addressed. The lives of the two characters are thrown into upheaval as they interrogate issues of gender and sexuality, and as C. goes through a divorce and struggles with mental illness. The narrator writes through her own mounting confusion and desire as she attempts to play multiple roles: new partner, counselor, caregiver, and friend. She draws on other sources, from poetry to philosophy to film, in an attempt to understand her experiences of eros and queerness. As the situation intensifies, both characters grapple with the complex relationships between socially determined narratives, identity, and agency.
Written in the devastating aftermath of a partner’s suicide, this unprecedented collection is a restorative memorial act, an exploration of queer time, and a powerful expression of nonbinary and trans love in the wake of traumatic loss. “suddenly a brilliant red-tailed star / flew across the sky, a sun reversing time, / I crossed one world to another / I stood with her in the other world” In Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved m...
Poetry. "This is a book of boundaries, objects, intersections. A book of multiple selves caught in the midst of self-definition. A book of conflagrations ('my hair / yesterday's / fire caught / in a disaster'). A book inhabited by all the poets who came right up to the edge over which this book falls ('I consider any verge / a haunting'). A book by a daughter of Dickinson but of this moment. This book is not afraid to address abstractions: What is the beloved? What is a body? What is knowledge? This book barrels toward showing us what can't be told."--Mary Jo Bang
""What will be possible / when I'm no longer sorry?" asks the speaker of THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING after the sudden death of a parent. "What do lost daughters burst into?" In this debut collection by Emily Pittinos, the speaker is tasked with relearning the ways of loneliness, family, sex, and wilderness as a person who feels thoroughly and abruptly without. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING is a journey across landscapes of mourning where "in [the] periphery, every shadow / is a new dead thing." The light of these poems takes on the tint of grief, and through that light the speaker reexamines what remains: her changed self, her desire, the midwestern flora, the unyielding snow. Interior and exterior ecologies blur until loss becomes a place of its own, and the only inevitability. "Doesn't it hurt," Pittinos writes, "to be human. I'm so human, I could die.""--
In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.
Merging the spirits of Don Quixote, Shakespearean fools, Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, and the Marx Brothers, Zach Savich’s first book does more than showcase the innovative fluency of its roving forms and moods: these poetic hybrids are not hothouse blossoms but minotaurs. With ebullient intelligence and high-stakes insistence on the panic, lust, and suffering of the sensual world, Full Catastrophe Living uses the self as an instrument to investigate art, love, and the hardest honesty. In meditations, songs, slapstick sequences, sonnets, narratives, and tightly carved fragments, Savich explores the conflicts between romance and reality, between inventing a new world and staying true to this one. Relishing both traditional and experimental poetics, he takes refreshing, ecumenical risks to show the “strange grace / of bells that ring with a rag’s polishing.” Like a Fourth of July band conductor guiding planes to land, his poetic wit alters what’s real. This book will change the ways that readers think about poetry, language’s expressive capacity, and the robust world around us.
In this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy. A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.” Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.
Growing Up LGBTQ explores what life is like for adolescents in the LGBTQ community, including topics like coming out, bullying and discrimination in school, and mental health. It also examines the creation of community and found family for LGBTQ people. Features include a glossary, further readings, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
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