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Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention comprise this 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets The hollow more than shape is certain. The 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets features Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention to the human and natural worlds. Series judge and critically acclaimed poet Carl Phillips notes, "Osier's is a sensibility unlike any I've encountered before--the poems here are thrilling, and strangely new." In his foreword to the collection, Phillips writes, "Certain mysteries--most of them--remain mysteries in an Osier poem." Despite this, Osier's poetry--distinguished by its brevity, precision, and restraint--offers what Phillips describes as feeling "incongruously (dare I say magically?) like closure, a steady place to land."
Poetry. "As with some singing voices, there are poetic voices of such direct authority and clarity that they capture our deep engagement almost before we are aware that we have begun to listen. Jill Osier's is such a voice. Like Franz Schubert's song-cycle Winterreise, these poems of Osier's take us on a lonely winter-journey through a stripped-down world, in which, as she says, 'all the roads are well worn, all the wagons breaking.' Because the poems, each a small, superb vignette with a different angle of light or insight, comprise a true and transformational sequence, after Osier has performed her winter pageant for us, we are not the same people as when we began. To survive in winter, one must go inside, literally and figuratively, and with aching simplicity and sensuality of voice, that is what Osier does. But as much as she presents winter as 'the correctional, ' a chastening and humbling space-time that every life must eventually experience, inside Osier's ice is fire. Indeed, she feeds the stove of these poems with such wit and feeling that it's warm enough inside to take off your shirt and make love and she does, and we do." Patrick Donnelly"
Poetry. Jill Osier, winner of the 2017 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, returns to Bull City Press with a new chapbook. "These poems shine with the deep intelligence of gentleness and of a quiet, sustained concern. To read them is to be reminded of Robert Creeley's passionate advocacy of Hart Crane, a passion that reached crescendo in the exclamation (in a letter to Charles Olson) 'Dammit, isn't that gentle!' Here is a poet whose primary commitment is to attention, a poet who simultaneously understands and avows that attention is now and ever shall be the vivid prime of Love. I neither blush nor hesitate to say that such avowal is literally angelic. This poet's 'Requiem' gently but unequivocally proposes point-of-view as an angelic imperative, gentle on its very face: 'Try / to remember the smell of sun through it all. It's / a rare courtship.' Love courts attention, and attention in return is both courted and empowered by love. The upshot? 'There was a beating / of silence then, until it was a new quiet...' It is the bright substance of this 'new quiet' I am happy to welcome and to acknowledge. It is surely the peaceable frontier of joy."--Donald Revell
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the tradition of Basho's famous Narrow Road to the Interior. In addition to The Spring of My Life, the translator has included more than 160 of Issa's best haiku and an introduction providing essential information on Issa's life and valuable comments on translating (and reading) haiku.
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"...substantial contribution to African-American Studies and women's studies." --Mississippi Quarterly "A bravura performance by an accomplished scholar... it strikes a perfect balance between insightful literary analysis and historical investigation." --Eighteenth-Century Studies "... an impressive study of a wide range of writers.... Foster's work is both scholarly and accessible. Her prose is economical and direct, making this book enjoyable as well as instructive." --Belles Lettres "... an impressively wide-ranging discussion of texts and contexts... " --Signs "Foster has written a fine book that provides the reader with a context for understanding the importance of the written word for ...
Poetry. Women's Studies. Editors' Selection from the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. THEN WINTER traces one speaker's journey in a psychiatric treatment facility. Faced with the threat of a loss of voice, a silence that seeks to bury her, she turns often to the natural world beyond the facility's windows. The trees, the rain, the birds--these commonplace things become tethering forces of primal, hope-giving importance. As she forms bonds with her fellow patients, some of whom become her unlikely confidants and friends, she discovers the sustaining power of connection and hope. "On the surface, Chloe Honum's chapbook, THEN WINTER, is a powerfully quiet meditation on a speaker's experiences at a psychiatric ward. But the book is really about the power of nature, nature as 'conqueror' in all of its beauty--Honum's unromantic nature is the prism in which the speaker refracts her life, it's a way for the speaker to parse or re-angle pain. Honum's poems and voice are steely, unforgettable, and full of treasures. And her gifts are immensely palpable."--Victoria Chang
In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood—a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart. She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain...
**WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2019** 'Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in...this electrifying new work' Observer This is a book-length poem - a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey - about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters - Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes - who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing. Reading...