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Lyrical and rife with utterance, Salt Body Shimmer asks of the violence we inherit: who speaks from "the threshold throat" inside "the dark's dark"? Interior driven and intimately political, the poems in this stunning debut coax and trouble form, traversing the landscape of trauma and survival with a deft musicality of time, family, and slippery memory. At the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Foreman makes a song of the body-it's howl and jubilation-and invites us to confront our interior lives in the listening. Bold in its quest for knowledge and refuge, Salt Body Shimmer articulates a contemporary American experience, aware of the histories unsaid and unfaced, where women can inhabit their lives fully and freely, knowing safety is fragile and must be grabbed by whatever thread we can find.
Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry “Sometimes,” Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.” In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refus...
"A slide show in poems documenting the ruin wrought by war and inequality on those who defy the status quo. In Guidebooks for the Dead, Cynthia Cruz returns to a familiar literary landscape in which a cast of extraordinary women struggle to create amidst violence, addiction and poverty. For Marguerite Duras, evoked here in a collage of poems, the process of renaming herself is a "Quiet death," a renewal she envisions as vital to her evolution. In "Duras (The Flock)," she is "high priestess" to an imagined assemblage of women writers for whom the word is sustenance and weapon, "tiny pills or bullets, each one packed with memory, packed with a multitude of meaning." Joining them is the book's speaker, an "I" who steps forward to declare her rightful place among "these ladies with smeared lipstick and torn hosiery . . . this parade of wrong voices." Guidebooks for the Dead is both homage to these women and a manifesto for how to survive in a world that seeks to silence those who resist"--
"Winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry"--Cover.
C. Russell Price's debut collection is a somatic grimoire exploring desire, gender, and sexuality. It asks: What is radical vengeance? Does true survivorship from sexual trauma exist only in fantasy, or is it an attainable reality?
Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of ...
"'Write a little every day, without hope, without despair," said Isak Dinesen, and her advice was mostly sound. But writers who participate in The Grind have come to accept that both the hope and the despair are necessary conditions of the writing process, and if we wait for the days when we can acquit ourselves of either of both, we'll never get much writing done at all. If The Grind could modify what Dinesen said to read, "Write something every day, despite hope, despite despair," that'd be about right."--P. 4 of cover.
The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured. Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons o...
"Borderland Apocrypha is centered around the collective histories of Mexican lynchings following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the subsequent erasures, traumas, and state-sanctioned violences committed towards communities of color in the present day. Cody's debut collection responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories via an experimental poetic that invents and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book's axis in a resistance, a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. Part autohistoria, part docupoetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha exhumes the past in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and future- building"--
With candor and wit, Upkeep examines the curious ceremonies of human maintenance, especially in the wake of loss.