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Three long poems illuminate broken and violated things, using Bach, Kandinsky, and "Botticelli" as raw material for poetic musing. Winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. (Poetry)
Poetry. Subtly incorporating myth, history, landscape, pop culture, and aesthetics as possible solaces within the labyrinth of grief, THE TANGLED LINE explores the fragile circumstances of family and fatherhood. These poems remind us that when we try to possess, literally or figuratively, materially or metaphorically, legally or lyrically, we create the possibility of violence to ourselves, others, and the world—often injuring that which we hold most dear. "Father-son. Bodies. Seeing. Conventions of sentences. Grace. Distrust. Guilt. Souped-up engines. Sorrow. Love. Process. Hunger. Elk hair. Celebrities. Topeka. Arkansas. Tennessee. Spokane. A myth. The new you. A chicken-necked Daedalus. A pale cavefish. Red berries. If you're looking for a poet who can 'describe Breton to the Enlightenment,' look no further"—Gillian Conoley.
Since the publication of From the Abandoned Cities in 1983, Donald Revell has been among the more consistent influencers in American poetry and poetics. Yet, his work has achieved the status it has—his honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and awards from the PEN Center USA and American Poetry Review—in a manner that has often tended to belie its abiding significance. This collection of essays, reviews, and interviews is designed to ignite a more wide-ranging critical appraisal of Revell’s writing, from his fourteen collections of poems to his acclaimed translations of French symbolist and modernist poets to his artfully const...
In the foreword to Li-Young Lee’s first book, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, “What characterizes Li-Young Lee’s poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.” Poetry lovers agree! Rose has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country’s most beloved poets. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for ...
The central subject in Julie Carr's debut poem collection is marriage. Intimacy is examined, not only in terms of the erotic, the quotidian, and the contractual, but also in terms of the intertextual: the pact between reader and writer and the blending of texts that results. Motherhood also figures as a kind of marriage-a bond that includes affective, legal, and sensual elements. Using a variety of poetic structures--prose poems, stanzaic forms, concrete poems, fractured lyrics, direct dialogue, and discursive modes--Carr simultaneously embraces and breaks from the expected and the known, revealing the precarious balance between our desire for narrative, sequence, drama, and resolution, on the one hand, and rupture, fragment, and fracturing, on the other.
Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the “art of living.” Atkins’s readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language--and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of the form, including Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Transcendentalist wr...
“Anguished and unblinking . . . Accomplished poetry that will move those who have sorrowed—that is, everyone.” —Library Journal “The thin knife that severed your tumor,” writes Brooke Matson in these poems, “it cleaves me still.” What to do when a world is split—terribly, wholly—by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time? Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional natur...
In Jennifer K. Dick's first book, Fluorescence, very real places--Paris, Massachusetts, Colorado, Iowa, Morocco--mix into the imagined, into Breughelian villages where there's "a persimmon in the corner knitting." These places are inhabited by varied but always very real bodies, stretching outward from their own edges and encountering, or engendering, a certain luminescence in the process. What happens when we exceed ourselves? When fragments of dream are lifted to the surface and through to something beyond? Clues, keys, indications--all that once seemed certain slips off into code. These poems use language to crack it.
The Kiss ("When the Sun with amorous beams")