Armored Hearts

Armored Hearts PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321076
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Armored Hearts, combining new poems and a selection from previous volumes, offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. "It is refreshing to read a poet who is not obliquely vague, who tells a story cleanly and convincingly, and yet who will not close down mysterious and complicated things about life that simply defy such closure."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Armored Hearts

Armored Hearts PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321076
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Armored Hearts, combining new poems and a selection from previous volumes, offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. "It is refreshing to read a poet who is not obliquely vague, who tells a story cleanly and convincingly, and yet who will not close down mysterious and complicated things about life that simply defy such closure."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

We Almost Disappear

We Almost Disappear PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320460
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
"An exquisite storyteller."—The Southern Review "David Bottoms's poems just get better and better."—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "One finds here what one expects in a book of good Southern poems: clear narratives . . . evocative images, searching irony, and meditative poise." —Library Journal Rooted in the customs of Southern families and peopled with undertakers, bluegrass musicians, daughters practicing karate, and elderly parents, David Bottoms' poems are generous, insightful, and lean headlong into familial wisdom. Past and present interweave with grandmothers spitting tobacco juice, ponds "filled with construction runoff," and the boyhood home-site paved over for a KFC. This is Bottoms' most personal and heartbreaking book. From "My Daughter Works the Heavy Bag": A bow to the instructor, then fighting stance, and the only girl in karate class faces the heavy bag. Small for fifth grade—willow-like, says her mother— sweaty hair tangled like blown willow branches. The boys try to ignore her. They fidget against the wall, smirk, practice their routine of huff and feint. Circle, barks the instructor, jab, circle, kick, and the black bag wobbles on its chain. Again and again, the bony jewels of her fist jab out in glistening precision, her flawless legs remember arabesque and glissade. Kick, jab, kick, and the bag coughs rhythmically from its gut. The boys fidget and wait . . . David Bottom, Georgia's Poet Laureate, was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. He teaches at Georgia State University and co-edits Five Points magazine. He lives in Marietta, Georgia.

Waltzing Through the Endtime

Waltzing Through the Endtime PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
In these 14 poems, David Bottoms waltzes through the "Christ-haunted South" and highlights how and where the afterlife intersects our daily lives. In a strong and musical voice, Bottoms, the poet laureate of Georgia, modernizes the narrative traditions of the American South. He encounters the ghosts of musicians and recounts strange instances of religious visitation: From "Vigilance": Like my neighbor again who grew a yellow rose wilted with the sign of the cross, or his sister in Biloxi who once saw the virgin swimming in a bowl of vegetable soup. Accolades, yes, to Ramona Barreras of Phoenix, Arizona, who pulled from her oven in 1977 a tortilla scorched with the face of Christ, which may or may not have been the face that appeared some ten years later in Bras D'Or on an outside wall of a Tim Horton's Restaurant, though both made the papers and drew their share of pilgrims. "What does it mean," Bottoms asks, "that God keeps stamping his image on pastry and French toast, on biscuits lightly burned around the edges?" At the core of this book is a seeker, a person trying to make sense out of an unintelligible world, confronting the darkest dimensions of human nature, and writing a gorgeous, meta-physically charged poetry. David Bottoms, the Poet Laureate of Georgia, teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the author of four books of poems and founding editor of Five Points magazine. His work has been featured on National Public Radio and on The Southern Voice, a television series profiling Southern writers.

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher: William Morrow &Company
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description


Under the Vulture-tree

Under the Vulture-tree PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
Robert Penn Warren, in a recent introduction given at the Library of Congress, wrote that in the work of David Bottoms "we find a strong and original new poet. Underlying all his work is the simple and unusual conviction that the world we see is trying to tell us something." In the thirty new poems collected in Under the Vulture-Tree, the world speaks to David Bottoms in startling and disturbing ways. Again, with uncompromising realism, Bottoms explores the wilderness we thought we'd civilized, the wilderness the world proves daily is alive in the human heart. Unusual, often startling situations, coupled with the poet's powerful narrative voice, create a drama that is extraordinary in poetry today, but it is his rare talent for revealing the universal in the specific that makes his vision true witness to our common struggle.

Vagrant Grace

Vagrant Grace PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Bottoms has a breathtaking ability to capture human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty in a single line. His poems, set primarily in the American South, witness people in their moments of failure, as their fantasies and families collapse around them. Like Faulkner and Dickey, Bottom blurs the distinction between good and evil, while exploring the violent underbelly of our national history.

Stacks of Wax

Stacks of Wax PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578724812
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
When considering the tapestry of popular-music history that has emerged in the last 40 or so years - a chronicle that shows no signs of abating - there have been critical and enthusiastic studies of not just performers, or the cities in which they arose in any number, but also of the recorded legacy of such cities, i.e. its record labels. Cincinnati, for all its decades of accomplishment in the recorded-music arena, has been heretofore perhaps underserved. Apart from real-time newspaper articles of the 1940s-'70s, a number of fine books have appeared, each of which provides a further tantalizing look at the vast offerings of the Queen City and the Ohio River Valley. This book is the complete document of the subject at hand, and is intended as a bedrock upon which to construct a (hopefully ongoing) library of Cincinnati's record companies, a library that encompasses the aforementioned volumes as well as encourages new efforts from fresh pens. The subject, owing to the stunning breadth and depth of the city's industry and drive, is probably inexhaustible. The book - its targeted collectors and enthusiasts aside - also seeks to advance understanding two specific communities who were substantial parts of the cultural, political and musical milieu of Cincinnati (and indeed, great swaths of the Midwest): African-Americans and Appalachians. The contributions and excitement consistently delivered by these populations greatly enriched the styles and ever-shifting forms of American popular music, especially in the fecund Postwar era, and here the book intends to shed some new light on their conditions, treatment and influence both then and now. Finally, the book is a fond meditation upon a city with strengths and flaws, successes and failures, all of which can be found writ small in the record business of the 20th century. In our accelerating, fraying culture, the analog world of this story is not a lesser place - far from it. That world was one of grit, risk and often-sweet rewards. As it recedes ever further into the past, hopefully the story of its many and varied musical lights will remain engaging and inspiring.

Easter Weekend

Easter Weekend PDF Author: David Bottoms
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Brothers
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
One Easter weekend in Macon, Georgia, two brothers--with big dreams--kidnap a rich college kid for ransom. But a murderous gangster raises the stakes. In this gritty novel of loss, violence, and redemption, a distinguished American poet explores the dark world last seen in the novels of James M. Cain, where death lurks everywhere and a new beginning is always just out of reach. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Surgical Wing

Surgical Wing PDF Author: Kristin Robertson
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 1938584449
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
“In Surgical Wing, you will find yourself in phone booths, county fairs, fishing boats, and among ghosts. Strange birds will enter hospital waiting rooms. You will be seduced by knot-makers. You will witness illness, grief, and healing. Finally, the book itself will become the wings that steer you to a greater understanding of yourself and the world.” —Anna Silver In Surgical Wing, surrealistic poems visit an experimental hospital ward, manifesting visions of winged angels and medical tests, as we bear witness to a doctor’s’ meddling and miracles. Robertson’s poems challenge the internal and external metamorphoses of the human condition and the juxtaposition between death and life by personifying the soul through images of birds. From “You’re About to Fold a Paper Airplane”: Build evidence of air. Pull the results of your blood test from the mailbox. Fold in half: you have wings already. Abnormal? Fold again. You can’t see the inner-workings of an aircraft. And when you’re folding, you can’t study much else. Book your tumor markers a flight to Bora Bora. Vector, Victor. Clearance, Clarence. On any scrap of paper write carry. Write heavenward. Write I choose this over you. Replace this. With flying. With peregrination. Or write I can’t fear you another morning. And fold. Kristin Robertson is a native of East Tennessee, and she graduated with a PhD in creative writing from Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, Third Coast, and Verse Daily, among other journals. Kristin lives outside Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club

Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club PDF Author: Kevin Cantwell
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 0881462519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club includes a poet laureate of Georgia and of the United States¿and the poet who read at President Clinton¿s second inauguration. The oldest was born in 1905 and the two youngest in that ominous year of American history, 1968. The Pulitzer-winning Stanley Kunitz wrote a famous poem about the Indian Mounds. Miller Williams, father of the Grammy winning Lucinda Williams, lived in Macon in the early 1960s and became a friend of Flannery O¿Connor. In the late 1970s, soon after his Mercer days, David Bottoms writes the poems for Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump and wins the Walt Whitman Award. Jud Mitcham wins the Devins Award for his first book, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, and Seaborn Jones is doing his stint with Mister Rogers¿ Neighborhood and would later connect, in San Francisco, to one of the last pure lines of surrealism in American expression. Several poets came out of Macon or arrived in Macon soon after. Between Mercer University and Macon State College the activity of poetry in Macon thrived. Adrienne Bond wrote her seminal poems and started up the Georgia Poetry Circuit. Judith Ortiz Cofer passed through Macon State at the brink of her position at the University of Georgia and in American letters as an important artistic spokesperson for women¿s experience. From Bruce Beasley and his hybrid poetics, to Stephen Bluestone and his learned craft in the lyric poem, this book presents a selection for all students of Southern Literature some of the best poems of other poets, too, like Anya Silver, Amanda Pecor, Marjorie Becker, and the late Reginald Shepherd who was as well-known at his early death as any poet of his generation. Many of these poets studied with and knew the important poets of their time. The poems, nevertheless, speak for themselves.