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In Darwin's Mother, curious beasts are excavated in archeological digs, Charles Darwin's daughter describes the challenges of breeding pigeons, and a forest of trees shift and sigh in their sleep. With a keen sense of irony that rejects an anthropocentric worldview and an imagination both philosophical and playful, the poems in this collection are marked by a tireless curiosity about the intricate workings of life, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe.
Designed as a turn of the century women's magazine and combining memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, The Bird Hat Wearer's Journal explores women's complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. Originating in the bird-hat controversy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which coincided with both the women's suffrage and budding American conservation movements, and extending through time and cultures in multiple directions from Freya and Philomela to Britney Spears and Alexander McQueen, this polyvocal book also follows one woman's enculturation into the world of bird-women and its inherent violence. What might we learn about gender from the birds?
Selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets Emily Skaja’s debut collection is a fiery, hypnotic book that confronts the dark questions and menacing silences around gender, sexuality, and violence. Brute arises, brave and furious, from the dissolution of a relationship, showing how such endings necessitate self-discovery and reinvention. The speaker of these poems is a sorceress, a bride, a warrior, a lover, both object and agent, ricocheting among ways of knowing and being known. Each incarnation squares itself up against ideas of feminine virtue and sin, strength and vulnerability, love and rage, as it closes in on a hard-won freedom. Brute is absolutely sure of its capacity to insist not only on the truth of what it says but on the truth of its right to say it. “What am I supposed to say: I’m free?” the first poem asks. The rest of the poems emphatically discover new ways to answer. This is a timely winner of the Walt Whitman Award, and an introduction to an unforgettable voice.
2020 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist in Poetry A stark, visceral collection of free verse and prose poetry, Skin Memory scours a wild landscape haunted by personal tragedy and the cruel consequences of human acts in search of tenderness and regeneration. In this book of daring and introspection, John Sibley Williams considers the capriciousness of youth, the terrifying loss of cultural identity and self-identity, and what it means to live in an imperfect world. He reveals each body as made up of all bodies, histories, and shared dreams of the future. In these poems absence can be held, the body’s dust is just dust, and though childhood is but a poorly edited memory and even our well-intentioned gestures tend toward ruin, Williams nonetheless says, “I’m pretty sure, everything within us says something beautiful.”
In Mentor and Muse, a collection of twenty-nine insightful essays by some of today’s leading poetic minds, editors Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa have brought together an illuminating anthology that draws upon both established and emerging poets to create a one-of-a-kind resource and unlock the secrets of writing and revising poetry. Gathered here are numerous experts eager to share their wisdom with other writers. Each author examines in detail a particular poetic element, shedding new light on the endless possibilities of poetic forms. Addressed within are such topics as the fluid possibilities of imagery in poetry; the duality of myth and the personal, and the power of ...
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP is a memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. Alternately wise and wild, humorous and moving, Savich writes of illness and illness narratives, the present moment, pain, memory, desire, and poetry's oft-debated capacity to matter: Justify why you have an eye. How come nursery rhymes, how come tulips and clouds, fear and bread, insight without immediate application. In the tradition of previous poet-teacher treatises--Mary Ruefle's MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY, Richard Hugo's Triggering Town--this book's inquiry embraces the reader as correspondent, collaborator, and confidant. DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP, Savich's second book o...
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In his evocative debut novel Carl Nordgren weaves an ambitious tale about the power of dreams, the hope of new beginnings, and the dangers of ghosts who haunt our past.In The 53rd Parallel, book one of the River of Lakes series, Brian Burke emigrates from 1950s West Ireland to the wilderness of Northwest Ontario with his partner Maureen O’Toole. He’s been exiled from his village, and she is running from her IRA past.The dreams of an Ojibway clan elder bring the Irish to the sacred place on the River, where they build The Great Lodge of Innish Cove. The dreams tell of a white man who will destroy the River and another who will protect it. While the Ojibway believe Brian and Maureen are th...
Finalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize In a voice at times electrified by caustic cynicism, at other times stripped bare by grief, Casey Thayer’s Rational Anthem offers wry tribute to “the greatest country God could craft with the mules he had / on hand.” In seeking to tell the story of the ragged world around him, Thayer examines the links among flag-waving populism, religious fervor, and toxic masculinity. Here male intimacy—among childhood friends, between father and son, and in the tenuous bonds between young adults—generally finds acceptance only when expressed through a shared passion for guns and hunting: “I helped my father clean his hands with field grass, / convinc...
Granata was a thousand miles from home when he received shocking news that his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home. Devastated by the grief of losing his mother, Granata was also consumed by the act itself, so incomprehensible that it overshadows every happy memory of life growing up in a seemingly idyllic middle-class family. He decides to examine the disease that irrecoverably changed his family's destiny and piece together his brother's story. In the painstaking process of recovering the image of his remarkable mother and salvaging the love for his brother as Tim faces trial for their mother's murder, Granata provides a powerful and reaffirming portrait of loss and forgiveness. -- adapted from jacket