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This book is a major source for scholars of the latest American poetry. These exciting essays comprise energy and documented discussions on experimentalism, multiculturalism, hyperspace, and gender. Anthologies and little magazines form the matrix for this exploration on conceptual issues surrounding language. The author widens the perspective in which a great deal of writing forced the limits of poetry in this kind of publications. At the same time, he analyzes new contexts and enters into conversation with other sources for inspiration found through other disciplines such as social theory, philosophy, linguistics, and art generated at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Reflective, taut with alertness, and exploding the postmodern concept of word/object as a liberating experience, this book becomes a driving force to address poetry and challenging political issues with admirable depth.
Ignacio Matus is a public school history teacher in Monterrey, Mexico, who gets fired because of his patriotic rantings about Mexico’s repeated humiliations by the United States. Not only did Mexico’s northern neighbor steal a large swath of the country in the Mexican-American War, but according to Matus it also denied him Olympic glory. Excluded from the 1924 Olympics, Matus ran his own parallel marathon and beat the time of the American who officially won the bronze medal. After spending decades attempting to vindicate his supposed triumph and claim the medal, Matus seeks an even bigger vindication—he will reconquer Texas for Mexico! Recruiting an army of “los iluminados,” the en...
A remarkable collection of poems first published in Cuba in 2012, Of Such a Nature/ Índole is a bilingual edition translated into English by Peter Boyle. Boyle also provides an extensive introduction, placing Kozer's work in a critical context. The Spanish word "índole" can be translated as "a type," "a sort," or "that sort of thing." The title, Índole, suggests that the poems gathered in this collection are all instances of specific situations, things, or experiences. Kozer's poems concern everyday life--cleaning one's dentures, a woman leaning over a bowl of oatmeal, a salamander glimpsed while eating breakfast--but always with mortality close at hand. The poems address subjects as varied as Kozer's Jewish heritage; his Cuban childhood and ongoing connection to the Island; Buddhist and East Asian traditions of spiritual practice; his everyday life in Florida with his wife, Guadalupe; aging; illness; and the shadow of death. Irony and humor are here as well, and to read these poems is to be in the presence of the full seriousness of poetry and its playfulness, its ability to undercut all pretensions--back cover.
Crossroads! Intersections physical and/or metaphorical demand processes of consideration, determination, decision and commitment. Stasis is no longer an option where convergence is poised before the unknown. Where categories such as gender, culture, ethnicity, socio-economic status, philosophy and religion clash, the multivariate process can reach such complexity that literary, sociological and psychological tools can have differing interpretations. Real-life intersections range from the mundane (choosing among food items on a menu according to taste preferences) to survival-determinants (evaluating the efficacy of various medical procedures). But such intersections are at the two ends of a ...
The dispassionate intellectual examination of the concepts of death & dying contrasts dramatically with the emotive grieving process experienced by those who mourn. Death & dying are binary concepts in human cultures. Cultural differences reveal their mutual exclusiveness in philosophical outlook, language, and much more. Other sets of binaries come into play under intellectual consideration and emotive behavior, which further divide and shape perceptions, beliefs, and actions of individuals and groups. The presence or absence of religious beliefs about life and death, and disposition of the body and/or soul, are prime distinctions. Likewise the age-old binary of reason vs. faith. To many ob...
“Make It True meets Medusario brings together poets from divergent languages, cultures, and aesthetics to create a...conversation...a fertile meeting place for ongoing ideas about poetry that might trouble the all too-easy academic labels and the subsequent segregation those aesthetic and political divisions cause within the larger, global poetry community.” -From the book’s introduction by Matthew Trease This collaboration, spawned by two previous anthologies, includes the Spanish language poets of the Neobarroco school, as organized by José Kozer, a Cuban Neobarroco poet, together with poets from the Cascadia bioregion, arranged by Paul E Nelson, founder of the Seattle Poetics Lab (...
This book addresses the connection between political themes and literary form in the most recent Argentine poetry. Ben Bollig uses the concepts of “lyric” and “state” as twin coordinates for both an assessment of how Argentinian poets have conceived a political role for their work and how poems come to speak to us about politics. Drawing on concepts from contemporary literary theory, this striking study combines textual analysis with historical research to shed light on the ways in which new modes of circulation help to shape poetry today.
Philosophers have contemplated the meaning of life, the who & the why, since nascent self-consciousness of the evolving hominid species. Yet practical efforts, i.e., control of life, have always transcended the philosophical: how to dominate what happens to the physical body itself, how to control the environment, and the interaction therefrom. Thus are born rites, rituals & religions. A rite can be a prescribed religious or other solemn ceremony or act it can be a social custom or practice, or even a mundane conventional act. A ritual can be the established form for a ceremony, the order of words used for example; a ritual observance can be either a system of ceremonial acts or actions, or ...