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In the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, one young woman recognizes the malleability of her reality. From her adolescence in the flat, hot Floridian landscape to a tectonic Missouri adulthood, a girl shaped by grief is compelled to create and manipulate her image of the world. As her dreams become indistinguishable from daily life, she begins to question memory, identity, and the function of love. Employing photography as its central metaphor, Darkroom tackles the tangled relationship between memory and mourning by exploring an artist’s impossible attempt to re-create the object of loss.
Hive is a remarkable debut collection of poems about brutality, exaltation, rebellion, and allegiance. Written in the voice of a teenage Mormon girl, these poems wrestle with the widening gulf between her impulse toward faith and her growing doubts about the people who claim to know God's will.
Winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye The word “tyrant” carries negative connotations, but in this new collection, Joanne Diaz tries to understand what makes tyranny so compelling, even seductive. These dynamic, funny, often poignant poems investigate the nature of tyranny in all of its forms—political, cultural, familial, and erotic. Poems about Stalin, Lenin, and Castro appear beside poems about deeply personal histories. The result is a powerful exploration of desire, grief, and loss in a world where private relationships are always illuminated and informed by larger, more despotic forces. Winner, Midwest Book Award for Poetry, Midwest Independent Publishers Association
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Winner, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Narcissus Americana sings and scraps and wrestles its way across various landscapes—abandoned quarries, art museums, lavish homes, and tar pits—in a quest to attain a more complex vision of what it means to be upwardly mobile. These poems question the usefulness of wealth and ownership as markers of success. Taking wine fridges and fake flowers as emblems of capitalism’s failure to assuage human loneliness, the speakers in these poems find joy in shared meals and glasses of wine, and use moments of mutual attention to challenge notions of class in America. Intimacy is on display in “Cruising Altitude,” where the speaker finds a sublime comm...
Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord. The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers’s “To the Measures Fall” is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical “The Sleep,” Caitlin Horrocks puts her fictional prairie town to bed—the inhabitants hibernate through the long winter as a form of escape—while in Steve Millhauser’s imagined town, the citizens are visited by ghostlike apparitions in “Phantoms....
Poetry. If you—your charismatic, beautifully erotic self—had died young, your ghost would count itself fortunate to have lived, loved, and flamed-out in the company of the wildly imaginative author of VOW. But it's not just ghosts who find themselves envisioned, en-fabled, sometimes horrifically, in these poems: An ex-husband, ex-lovers, and dear friends also populate these questioning, often darkly humorous lyrics. Like them, the future unsettles you because you have taken vows, too, and broken them. Take heart, you hold in your hands the poetic manual for how to proceed.
Ekphrasis, the description of pictorial art in words, is the subject of this bibliography. More specifically, some 2500 poems on paintings are catalogued, by type of publication in which they appear and by poet. Also included are 2000 entries on the secondary literature of ekphrasis, including works on sculpture, music, photography, film, and mixed media.
Karankawa is a collection that explores some of the ways in which we (re)construct our personal histories. Rich in family narratives, myths, and creation stories, these are poems that investigate passage—dying, coming out, transforming, being born—as well as the gaps that also reside in our stories, for, as Rocha suggests, the opportunity to create myths is provided by great silences. Much like the Karankawa Indians whose history works in omissions, Karankawa reconfigures such spaces, engaging with the burden and freedom of memory in order to rework and recontextualize private and public mythologies. First and last, these are poems that honor our griefs and desires, for they keep alive the very things we cannot possess.