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Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival. The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between pa...
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a feminist classic, a haunting critique of the isolation treatment for female hysteria wrapped up in a superb psychological horror story. Over a century later women are still battling gender bias in the treatment of mental illness. Here are 15 stories of very different women who have in common the fact that they are fighting for control of their worlds and of their minds. Traci Orsi's "Waiting for Jordan" finds Julia hallucinating at home when her husband is shipped off to Iraq. Leah Chaffin's "Last Caress" delves into the sad and savage story of a rare female serial killer while in "An Obedient Girl" Amy Bridges relates her experienc...
A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, The Clearing, a “lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech” (Claudia Rankine). Aster of Ceremonies asks what rites we need now and how poetry, astir in the asters, can help them along. What is the relationship between fleeing and feeling? How can the voices of those who came before—and the stutters that leaven those voices—carry into our present moment, mingling with our own? When Ellis writes, “Bring me the stolen will / Bring...
Equilibrium searches for that point where there is a balance, even as the poems display a consciousness and self-awareness that belie that balance. The poems negotiate the colossal movement of hearts figuring and being figured by history.
A radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, from an essential voice in world literature. Winner of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature • Finalist for the PEN Literary Award for Translation and the Strega Europeo Published a decade before his International Booker Prize–winning Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow has become an underground cult classic. Finding strange solace in the myth of the Minotaur, a man named Georgi reconstructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. With profound wit and empathy, he catalogues curious instances of abandonment, spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene; recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgaria, spent mostly in a basement; and charts a bizarre run-in with an eccentric flaneur named Gaustine. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, and exhibiting his signature audacious style, this expansive work affirms Gospodinov as “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).
The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United States In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!
Traditional histories of war have typically explored masculine narratives of military and political action, leaving private, domestic life relatively unstudied. This volume expands our understanding by looking at the relationships between mothers and children, and the varied roles both have assumed during periods of armed conflict.
We Will be Shelter, edited by poet and activist Andrea Gibson, is an anthology of contemporary poems that addresses issues of social justice. Unique to this anthology is its focus on creating positive social change through gorgeous, gusty poetry. Alongside and embedded in featured poems are concrete ways to address social and political issues raised. The goal of We Will be Shelter is to raise awareness, encourage critical self-reflection, and call readers to action.
Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.
In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.