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These evocative poems move from the icon of Alice in Wonderland to the imagined figure of Alice out of Wonderland--on a Vancouver beach with the poet, underground with Persephone, in Memphis with Elvis. But first they explore the life of the real Alice Liddell (1852-1934), who sat still for Charles Dodgson's camera and inspired the Alice books that prompted his rise to fame as Lewis Carroll. In this powerful sequence, the emotional life of Alice Liddell as girl and woman is depicted in brilliant narrative juxtapositions. Presented is Alice the creation and Alice the person in a cultural context that, on one level, reexamines cognition and dissociation and on another, liberates the poetic sequence from the monotony of story and closure.
"Complicated histories that parents pass on to their children."--
No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
I would love to say that you make me weak at the knees, but to be quite upfront and completely truthful, you make my body forget it has knees at all. One day, while browsing an antique store in Helena, Montana, photographer Tyler Knott Gregson stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter for sale. Standing up and using a page from a broken book he was buying for $2, he typed a poem without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything. He fell in love. Three years and almost one thousand poems later, Tyler is now known as the creator of the Typewriter Series: a striking collection of poems typed onto found scraps of paper or created via blackout method.Chasers of the Light features some of his most insightful and beautifully worded pieces of work-poems that illuminate grand gestures and small glimpses, poems that celebrate the beauty of a life spent chasing the light.
This is an outlandish, quirky exposure of one woman's fix on God--his surrealistic depravities, her own lusts and horrors, their vital marriage. A Nun's Diary expresses a poetic theology that has as much to do with contemporary morality and love as it does with the institutions and traditions of Christianity. It is very funny--the humor both bawdy and black--and brilliant in its perceptions of what women, if they departed from conventional assessments, might think of men.
Siren, Kateri Lanthier's astonishing second book, calls us to attention. In her search for what she calls "compelling melancholy," Lanthier's new poems not only draw on the ghazal's history as love poetry but remind readers of the dangerous and alluring quality of the ancient form itself. The siren was a lethal yet seductive figure, and that sense of power--and as well as her fast-taking bemusement at her own reputation--is present in lines that marry unnerving dream logic to emotional fearlessness. Siren is an uncompromising achievement: an original style at once mysterious, witty and musical that refines and clarifies the world in consistently surprising ways." Call it playing with fire. Call it connect-the-dots lightning."
The sixth anthology from acclaimed poet Susan Glickman, this work reveals her, once again, as a truth-teller of the first order. Whether it's a brilliantly sustained elegy to her late father or a gripping and often disquieting sequence on the art of gardening, these new poems are marked by the abiding virtues of her celebrated career--effortless musicality, sparkling mischief, and uncompromising insight.
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Searching for Signal is a long poem that bears witness to the quotidian, disorienting shifts of grief as a father makes his way toward his death over 3 seasons. This is mourning conducted in situ, the gift of observing one man quietly taking his leave and the impacted hole it leaves behind. The language is mix of narrative lyric and fragmentary breath-spaced verse; the silences are his private silences, alluding to memory, family trauma and shame. The hunter, the gatherer who never stopped trying for epiphanies, a daughter engaged in the same effort, frankly facing the span of a swift human lifetime that may pass without revelation or resolution. If there is redemption it is in the daughter bringing clarity to the physical condition of living and dying and the emotional intricacies of existence.