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"With attention to the histories that make and sustain a family-its generations, its roots in certain soils-What Pecan Light exhumes a family's long entwinements in the South and whiteness. Excavating the economic, agricultural, and military roots of the speaker's family tree, the poems of this collection unearth the speaker's complicity in the institutions of whiteness: "I was willing / to love a polluted thing." Against a narrative of innocence, the poems engage the abiding symbol of the Confederate flag, the historical fact of an enslaving, plantation-owner great-grandfather, and the enduring harm of racial violence: 'Bitter collards. Rib bones smoking / against our teeth.'"--
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The Thicket opens into intimate encounters with the more-than-human world—rivers, birds, stones—and with a “you” that is not a person, necessarily, but also not not a person: maybe God, maybe an aspect of the self, maybe neither or both. Often speaking of/to the small or overlooked (weeds by a roadside, an abandoned silo), the poems orient themselves toward edges, transitional spaces like the one where fields shift into woods. Where does one body stop? The Thicket takes an interest in becoming, one thing flowing into something else. Excerpt from “At Cape Henlopen” All night wind insists in the trees, its unsteady hush funneling us down into sleep under the tender shelter the oaks, even leafless, make—all night their trunks creak and sigh and speak. Speak to me—I think the word protect until its edges dissolve, inside the tent that wraps us like another, thinner skin, rocked and chastened by the wind that doesn’t cease . . .
In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat's displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions.
All art constantly aspires, Walter Pater claimed, towards the condition of music. The poems in Tom Snarsky's first full-length collection Light-Up Swan are animated by twin forces: an abiding love of music, and an equal fondness for the ghostly conversation engendered by quotation. With whimsy tempered by obsessive fascination, the author unfolds an open dialogue with a private pantheon of musicians and poets, both living and dead. These spectral encounters are staged on a far-reaching array of settings, from oceans to virtual gamescapes, starry canvases to comedy clubs. The speaker of the poems is by turns assured and uncertain: in one moment explaining a mathematical result from automata t...
Poetry. "A highly original vision, voice, concept, style, language and image all working together to produce a world inside our world. Filled with fire and violence, mystery and magic, the loneliness of laundromats, rented houses, suicide, cornfields, hunger, and ultimately a naked raw survival, 'charred walls pulled back from the frame.'"--Dorianne Laux "The genius of Jessica Cuello's LIAR is signaled by the (mis)spellings. Spelling, capitaliza-tion, and punctuation were not standardized until the eighteenth century, the era of printers and profit. These poems remind us that children, before they are indoctrinated into a world of correctness and pecuniary value, absorb the raw emotions swir...
By publishing serious works that contribute to a global understanding of human affairs from a range of Christian perspectives, University of Saint Katherine College Press in the discovery and dissemination of Inquiry Seeking Wisdom, which is a central purpose of the University of Saint Katherine. The publications of the Press are the Saint Katherine Review and books and other materials that further scholarly investigation, advance interdisciplinary dialogue, stimulate public debate, educate both within and outside the classroom, and enhance cultural life. The Press is committed to increasing the range and vigor of intellectual pursuits within the University and elsewhere.
Poetry. BARNBURNER by Erin Hoover is the winner of the 2017 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. Kathryn Nuernberger, contest judge, had this to say about it: "The epigraph to BARNBURNER is a call to burn it all down: 'According to an old story, there was once a Dutchman who was so bothered by the rats in his barn that he burned down the barn to get rid of them. Thus a barn burner became one who destroyed all in order to get rid of a nuisance.' There is honesty in this epigraph, raw and brutal, like the narrative voices in Erin Hoover's poems. But there's an irony at play here, an irony perhaps borrowing a bit from the ironies of Frost's 'Mending Wall': these poems don't burn down the cruelt...
Finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Poetry Book Prize.The poems of Kelly Cressio-Moeller's Shade of Blue Trees offer up an intimate surrealism, earth-born, deeply shaded, and tinted the deep blue of solitude, memory, and myth, turning "yearning's blue fire/into a dreamscape fugue." Nowhere is Cressio-Moeller's virtuosity more apparent than in the sequence of "panels." These pieces function as lyric poems, language-paintings, fairy tales, and compressed novels, somehow removed from time, with a lushness that reminds me of Flaubert-without the meanness. For instance: "A wall-eyed jay cracks a cherry's/skull against the cheekbone of dusk," and "Cornflower satin, heels on parquetry-she ord...
In Are You There, Indiana poet Samantha Fain refracts contemporary melancholia into iridescent lyricism. Fain delights in breaking rules, the serendipity of autocorrect incantations, testing how far, in space and time, a connection will travel, and where it ends—quoting sources including Schrödinger, Ask Jeeves and Kim Kardashian. In Fain's haunting poetics, grief, mania, pop culture, faith, quantum physics and digital relationships collide, alive with the spiky humour of brutal self-awareness, aglow with startling new language. "These poems are like Neosporin; they sting and they heal." Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Creator of Bojack Horseman. "The most lyrically provoking debut I've ever read. Samantha Fain articulates the complex contemporary manifestations of grief and desire, while still giving us possibility instead of foreclosure." C.T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking