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Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "This book is a record of my thinking and feeling during my mid-to-late-twenties. Like any record, it is incomplete and imperfect--I do not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own. I think of this collection as a bildungsroman of sorts: the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode."--Jameson Fitzpatrick
These poem grapple with issues of how relationships are defined and what we gain or lose from them, including same-sex and opposite-sex relationships alike. The poem reflect on the experience not only of the poet, but also of wives throughout history, particularly as represented in classic literary texts from Geoffrey Chaucer to Joan Didion. For example, Fitzpatrick's "The Genius of Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With" is inspired by a paragraph in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The fragments of the central poetry sequence, "Mr. &," draw their language, respectively, from the final chapters of Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontË, The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, Fr...
Straight James / Gay James, actor James Franco’s new chapbook of poems, explores the facets of his public and private personas. Straight James / Gay James is a poetic bildungsroman—raw, candid, and uninhibited. James Franco writes about life as an actor, sexuality, questions of identity, gender, family, Gucci, Lana Del Rey, James Dean, Hollywood, and more. His poetic style varies from the imagistic to the prosaic. The chapbook also contains an interview of “Gay James” conducted by “Straight James.” Yes, Straight James asks the question: “Let’s get substantial: are you f*****g gay or what?”
In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” Taking seriously Du Bois’s allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? Du Bois’s Tel...
A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters is attentive to the sorts of mutual aid and possibility that appear in moments of state failure. As such it maps long and complicated equations, moving from Katrina to the prisoners at Riker's Island as they await Sandy. It understands disaster as a collective system, the state as precarious, and community as necessary.
Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Michael Broder's moving and lucid poems have heart, music, audacity and they give a quiet, lasting pleasure, like an ancient Greek torso reshaped for the space age. THIS LIFE NOW is full of salt, sex, TV, and other riveting varieties of poised explosiveness, to which his lucky reader blissfully surrenders." Wayne Koestenbaum "Dare I confess that this wise and sassy and heartbreaking collection made me scour YouTube for past episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Such are the subtle, ethereal, and playful gifts of Michael Broder's poems that a reader won't want to miss any allusion. No matter how bittersweet or fleeting, these poems, which span more than thirty years of an emerging queer consciousness, chart an unflinching poetics for the missing and unaccounted for. The book makes so many foundational moments and episodes of a thriving culture reappear and cohere, with such grim acceptance and celebration, that it takes our breath away." Peter Covino"
A powerful call to end American gun violence from celebrated poets and those most impacted Focused intensively on the crisis of gun violence in America, this volume brings together poems by dozens of our best-known poets, including Billy Collins, Patricia Smith, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman, Natasha Threthewey, Robert Hass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Juan Felipe Herrera, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Each poem is followed by a response from a gun violence prevention activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams; Senator Christopher Murphy; Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts; survivors of the Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston Emmanuel AME, and Virginia Tech shootings; and Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir, and Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis. The result is a stunning collection of poems and prose that speaks directly to the heart and a persuasive and moving testament to the urgent need for gun control.
A coming-of-age debut collection from a Bulgarian immigrant as he explores desire, longing, and growing up gay in America
A rollicking, sexy memoir of a young poet making his way in 1960s New York City When he graduated from Columbia in 1958, John Giorno was handsome, charismatic, ambitious, and eager to soak up as much of Manhattan's art and culture as possible. Poetry didn't pay the bills, so he worked on Wall Street, spending his nights at the happenings, underground movie premiers, art shows, and poetry readings that brought the city to life. An intense romantic relationship with Andy Warhol—not yet the global superstar he would soon become—exposed Giorno to even more of the downtown scene, but after starring in Warhol's first movie, Sleep, they drifted apart. Giorno soon found himself involved with Rob...
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. A new collection six years after Nicholas Wong won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, BESIEGE ME opens with a timely mocking tone that confronts the tension between China and Hong Kong. Poems in the book speak queerly of urban existences crushed by political and economic powers--"What cities & bodies deny a sometime-crisis, / not knowing they're a series of which?" Behind the portrayals of the speaker, his parents, his home city, and domestic migrant workers there, the collection boldly outlines the vulnerability of entrapment and its masochistic pleasures. BESIEGE ME seeks for a redefinition of transcultural poetics with its linguistic playfulness.