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Having lived part time in Brooklyn for the past several years, Jacob Scheier's new poems are solidly rooted in Jewish New York life and examine love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of "Letter from Brooklyn" is the notion that people understand who they are by where they have been. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner worlds of grief and love to form a poetic dialectic between the familial and the historical. Whether eating in a knish restaurant on the Lower East Side or falling in and then out of love with the Brooklyn Bridge, or even being startled while biking down a prairie road, with depth and originality Scheier confronts the question of where home is and what it means amid private and public loss.
In this virtuoso display of sonnets, free verse, prose poems, villanelles, ghazals, and aphorisms, People’s Poet Robert Priest makes it clear why the Pacific Rim Review has called him “surely the most imaginatively inventive poet in the country.” A profound meditation on love, death, sex, and sickness, If I Didn’t Love the River speaks directly to the polarizations of our time. Priest’s mastery of dark satire, lyric ebullience, erotic verse, and the pithy maxim is as gratifying as it is unique and will appeal to the yearning for poetry which so often goes unsatisfied in the reading public. No emotional territory — from angst, anger, anguish, and despair to whimsical delight — is off-limits here. Intent on releasing reverberations from the full depths and heights of what it is to be human, this is Robert Priest at his protean best.
In these collection of short stories the author explores the space between joy and tragedy, hapiness and despair, sincerity and absurdity.
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Longlisted for the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize • Longlisted for the 2023 Raymond Souster Poetry Prize • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 • Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry Saturated with locutions lifted from the late 19th century, The Day-Breakers deeply conceives of what African Canadian soldiers experienced before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War. "It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the selflessness of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War, of whom hundreds were African-Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their brethren and the dawning of a new day. Brilliantly capturing the rhythms of their voices and the era in which they lived and fought, Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is an homage to their sacrifice and an unforgettable act of reclamation: the restoration of a language, and a powerful new perspective on Black history and experience.
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