After the Body

After the Body PDF Author: Cleopatra Mathis
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448613
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
From her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, Cleopatra Mathis has given us poems that somehow manage to be elegant and visceral at once. What has changed in the progression of the six collections since then—in poetry addressing marriage, the mystery of animals, the delicate and indelible bonds of family, illness, and mortality—is that the visceral quotient has steadily increased, though the elegance remains undiminished. For Mathis, the natural world no longer provides the affirmation and solace it once did; the navigation of a darkened hallway at night is a perilous expedition. After the Body charts the depredations of an illness that seems intent on removing the body, piece by piece. Through close and relentless observation of her own physical being, Mathis shows us how miniscule ambition, planning, and a sense of control over our own bodies are—things we so blithely take as real and solid when healthy. Her many publications, awards, and praise from peers testify that she is a lyric poet of the highest order. This expansive new book reflects a brilliant career, and is a necessary addition to any collection.

After the Body

After the Body PDF Author: Cleopatra Mathis
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448613
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
From her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, Cleopatra Mathis has given us poems that somehow manage to be elegant and visceral at once. What has changed in the progression of the six collections since then—in poetry addressing marriage, the mystery of animals, the delicate and indelible bonds of family, illness, and mortality—is that the visceral quotient has steadily increased, though the elegance remains undiminished. For Mathis, the natural world no longer provides the affirmation and solace it once did; the navigation of a darkened hallway at night is a perilous expedition. After the Body charts the depredations of an illness that seems intent on removing the body, piece by piece. Through close and relentless observation of her own physical being, Mathis shows us how miniscule ambition, planning, and a sense of control over our own bodies are—things we so blithely take as real and solid when healthy. Her many publications, awards, and praise from peers testify that she is a lyric poet of the highest order. This expansive new book reflects a brilliant career, and is a necessary addition to any collection.

Coming Back to the Body

Coming Back to the Body PDF Author: Joyce Sutphen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
A gathering of work by a prize-winning poet that confirms her status as a significant new voice.

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved PDF Author: Gregory Orr
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320649
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
“The heart of Orr’s poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry.”—San Francisco Review This book-length sequence of ecstatic, visionary lyrics recalls Rumi in its search for the beloved and its passionate belief in the healing qualities of art and beauty. Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved is an incantatory celebration of the “Book,” an imaginary and self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics—both poems and songs—ever written. Each poem highlights a distinct aspect of the human condition, and together the poems explore love, loss, restoration, the beauty of the world, the beauty of the beloved, and the mystery of poetry. The purpose and power of the Book is to help us live by reconnecting us to the world and to our emotional lives. I put the beloved In a wooden coffin. The fire ate his body; The flames devoured her. I put the beloved In a poem or song. Tucked it between Two pages of the Book. How bright the flames. All of me burning, All of me on fire And still whole. There is nothing quite like this book—an “active anthology” in the best sense—where individuals find the poems and songs that will sustain them. Or the poems find them. Gregory Orr is the author of eight books of poetry, four volumes of criticism, and a memoir. He has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975 and was, for many years, the poetry editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Seeing the Body: Poems

Seeing the Body: Poems PDF Author: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 132400567X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry An elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness "bodies" of grief and healing. Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss. In radiant poems—set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics—Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss. A photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body’s internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.

Whitman's Poetry of the Body

Whitman's Poetry of the Body PDF Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his "new historicist" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry and prose by considering the textual history of Leaves of Grass and other works. Killingsworth demonstrates that Whitman's "poetry of the body" derives its radical power from the transformation of conventional attitudes toward sexuality, traditional poetics, and conservative politics. The sexual relation, with its promise of unity, love, equality, interpenetration, and productivity for partners, becomes a metaphor for all political and social relationships, including that of poet and reader. The effect of the poems is protopolitical, an altering of consciousness about the body's relation to other bodies, a shifting of the categories of knowledge that foretells political action. Killingsworth traces the interplay in Whitman's poetry between sexual and textual themes that derive from Whitman's political response to the historical turbulence of mid-century America. He describes a subtle shift in Whitman's prose writings on poetics, which turn from a view of poetry in the early 1850s as morally and politically efficacious to a chastened romanticism in the postwar years that frees the poet from responsibility for the world outside his poems. Later editions of Leaves of Grass are marked by the poet's deliberate repression of erotic themes in favor of a depoliticized aestheticism that views art not as a motivator of political and moral action but as an artifact embodying the soul of the genius.

Foreign Bodies: Poems

Foreign Bodies: Poems PDF Author: Kimiko Hahn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 132400522X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
A striking, shapeshifting volume from "one of the most fascinating female poets of our time (BOMB)." Inspired by her encounter with Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of ingested curiosities at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection investigates the grip that seemingly insignificant objects exert on our lives. Itself a cabinet of curiosities, the collection provokes the same surprise, wonder, and pangs of recognition Hahn felt upon opening drawer after drawer of these swallowed, and retrieved, objects—a radiator key, a child’s perfect attendance pin, a mother-of-pearl button. The speaker of these moving poems sees reflections of these items in the heartbreaking detritus of her family home, and in her long-dead mother’s Japanese jewelry. As Hahn remakes the lyric sequence in chains reminiscent of the Japanese tanka, the foreign bodies of the title expand to include the immigrant woman’s trafficked body, fossilized remains, a grandmother’s Japanese body. She explores the relationship between our innermost selves and the relics of our vanished past, making room for meditation on grief and the ephemeral nature of the material world, for the account of a nineteenth-century female fossil hunter, and for a celebration of the nautilus. Foreign Bodies investigates the power of possession, replete with Hahn’s electric originality and thrilling mastery of ever-changing forms.

Celestial Bodies

Celestial Bodies PDF Author: Sidney Wade
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128251
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description


The Body's Question

The Body's Question PDF Author: Tracy K. Smith
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555978657
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
The debut collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States * Winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize * You are pure appetite. I am pure Appetite. You are a phantom In that far-off city where daylight Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone. --from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y" The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."

God Had a Body

God Had a Body PDF Author: Jennie Malboeuf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253047250
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
A debut collection of poetry exploring themes of religion, human behavior, identity, marriage, family, and loss. The mind and the body. The heavens and earth. God and animal. The speaker in God had a body considers how the image of a higher power is presented to her, beginning with a Catholic upbringing in Kentucky. Speckled with stars and peopled with creatures, these poems employ a trinity of sequences that address a present, past, and possible future—from a troubled reckoning with belief to loss and promise still ahead. In this debut collection from Jennie Malboeuf, we observe undercurrents of violence and power, the dynamics of memory, gender, marriage, and miscarriage. At times, God is brutal. At times, delicate. Through true stories of animal savagery, God had a body unravels human behavior and undoes the opaque and cryptic mysteries of faith. “There is a fierce spirituality and mordant wit in God had a body, Jennie Malboeuf’s first book of poems. Here is a poet with a transformative vision of divine and earthly enterprise as well as a sharp eye for the repercussions of physical detail. Malboeuf’s use of enactments and embodiments—actions and images—startle and awaken the reader to a powerful new voice in American poetry. What a glorious debut collection.” —Stuart Dischell “Salient and provoking, sensuous and cerebral, Jennie Malboeuf’s poems locate holiness in the living, dead, partial and whole creations of this planet. . . . I relish these poems and will return to them for their stories, their humor, and the ways they intertwine language and life.” —Lisa Williams

The Blood-Hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts

The Blood-Hungry Spleen and Other Poems about Our Parts PDF Author: Allan Wolf
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 9780763638061
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
More than three dozen poems describe individual parts of the body and what they do for us and for some parts, such as the face, the verses describe how we communicate nonverbally with other people. Reprint.