Half/Life: New & Selected Poems

Half/Life: New & Selected Poems PDF Author: Jeffrey Thomson
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 194857960X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
“The quirky and macabre [ninth] book from Thomson is rich with breathtaking juxtaposition. ... These elegant poems are full of surprising and moving revelations.” —Publishers Weekly

Half/Life: New & Selected Poems

Half/Life: New & Selected Poems PDF Author: Jeffrey Thomson
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 194857960X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
“The quirky and macabre [ninth] book from Thomson is rich with breathtaking juxtaposition. ... These elegant poems are full of surprising and moving revelations.” —Publishers Weekly

A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function

A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function PDF Author: Eric Gansworth
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815609001
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
Echoing the muscular rhythms of the heart beat, the poems in this stunning collection alternate between contraction and expansion. Eric Gansworth explores the act of enduring, physically, historically, and culturally. A member of the Haudenosaunee tribe, Gansworth expresses the tensions experienced by members of a marginalized culture struggling to maintain tradition within a much larger dominant culture. With equal measures of humor, wisdom, poignancy, and beauty, Gansworth’s poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective loss and recovery. Fourteen paintings punctuate his poetry, creating an active dialogue between word and image steeped in the tradition of the mythic Haudenosaunee world. A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function is the most recent addition to Gansworth’s remarkable body of work chronicling the lives of upstate New York’s Indian communities.

Half of the World in Light

Half of the World in Light PDF Author: Juan Felipe Herrera
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816527032
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
Includes an audio CD of the author reading! For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected. Through a variety of stages and transformations, Herrera has evolved more than almost any other Chicano poet, always re-inventing himself into a more mature and seasoned voice. Now, in this unprecedented collection, we encounter the trajectory of this highly innovative and original writer, bringing the full scope of his singular vision into view. Beginning with early material from A Certain Man and moving through thirteen of his collections into new, previously unpublished work, this assemblage also includes an audio CD of the author reading twenty-four selected poems aloud. Serious scholars and readers alike will now have available to them a representative set of glimpses into his production as well as his origins and personal development. The ultimate value of bringing together such a collection, however, is that it will allow us to better understand and appreciate the complexity of what this major American poet is all about.

Half-light

Half-light PDF Author: Frank Bidart
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715181
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 737

Get Book Here

Book Description
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience. Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.” Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.

Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine

Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine PDF Author: Jean Valentine
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 1949944328
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
Multi-award winner, including a National Book Award, Jean Valentine published twelve full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime, and all of them—plus an entirely new, unpublished manuscript—can be found in this masterful collection of her life’s work. The new poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind. The poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth. In her later years, Jean would write poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn't be lost. Even Jean's therapist transcribed a poem that she spoke in one of their sessions—a poem that can be found in this new work. Jean was always writing poetry wherever inspiration struck her, even through the struggle of her declining health. It was Jean's wish that her work landed back at her first home, Alice James Books—back to her origin point as a writer, coming full circle. In these last prayerful poems, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is "leaving all worlds behind." Love doesn't disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living, from a dying cricket to her living and lost friends, Valentine is full of gratitude for this world, writing: "This is happiness. Old life,/ I'm glad, all my rubbed life/ I was found,/ I was written on a wall in air." The reader too is full of gratitude for these moving last missives from a great poet. Ada Limon states, “The extraordinary poems of Jean Valentine have often existed in the between spaces, the caves, the secret rooms of the mind. They are gorgeous wonders and curiosities that bring us a new kind of light. The Collected Poems of Jean Valentine will no doubt serve as an essential handbook for anyone looking to lean into the knotty questions of human existence.”

The Half-Life of Deindustrialization

The Half-Life of Deindustrialization PDF Author: Sherry Lee Linkon
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047212370X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
Starting in the late 1970s, tens of thousands of American industrial workers lost jobs in factories and mines. Deindustrialization had dramatic effects on those workers and their communities, but its longterm effects continue to ripple through working-class culture. Economic restructuring changed the experience of work, disrupted people’s sense of self, reshaped local landscapes, and redefined community identities and expectations. Through it all, working-class writers have told stories that reflect the importance of memory and the struggle to imagine a different future. These stories make clear that the social costs of deindustrialization affect not only those who lost their jobs but also their children, their communities, and American culture. Through analysis of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, film, and drama, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization shows why people and communities cannot simply “get over” the losses of economic restructuring. The past provides inspiration and strength for working-class people, even as the contrast between past and present highlights what has been lost in the service economy. The memory of productive labor and stable, proud working-class communities shapes how people respond to contemporary economic, social, and political issues. These stories can help us understand the resentment, frustration, pride, and persistence of the American working class.

The Half-Finished Heaven

The Half-Finished Heaven PDF Author: Tomas Transtromer
Publisher:
ISBN: 1555977839
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description
The contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has a prestigious worldwide reputation-- many expect that he will someday win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Tranströmer’s, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Tranströmer’s poems to create this collection.

Half a Life

Half a Life PDF Author: Jill Ciment
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1101905484
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Get Book Here

Book Description
Jill Ciment weaves an unforgettable tale of survival, compassion, and courage, in this haunting recollection of a child surrounded by confusion and madness, and her struggle to find an identity. Half a Life traces Jill Ciment's family from Toronto to the California desert—a landscape and culture so alien to her father that the last vestiges of sanity leave him. As madness engulfs him he becomes increasingly brutal and the family, grasping at survival, throws him out the door. Having no understanding that he has done anything wrong, he first lives in his car at the end of the driveway, waiting to be invited back in, before exiting completely from their lives. Poor and fatherless, Ciment spends the years from age fourteen to seventeen, as a gang girl, a professional forger, a stripper, a corporate spy, and finally, a high school dropout who by age eighteen has seduced her art teacher, a man nearly three decades her senior and bluffed her way into college in an effort to shape a future. Ciment is cutting, insightful and clearly unapologetic as she details the confusion and bravado of a child heroine whose dreams and tenacity allow her finally, to create the life she has been so desperately seeking.

New and Collected Poems

New and Collected Poems PDF Author: Richard Wilbur
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156654913
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection including six earlier volumes of Wilbur's poetry, twenty-seven new poems, and a cantata.

Unearth

Unearth PDF Author: Chad Davidson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 080933772X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 79

Get Book Here

Book Description
“What if the end were as colorless as real / estate?” the speaker asks in Unearth. Poet Chad Davidson’s latest collection takes a hard look at our world as it collapses under numerous trials and tribulations. Fashioned mostly of elegiac poems, Unearth charts the way in which personal grief ripples out to meet and mirror larger systems of loss. The first section deals with local traumas and bereavements—the loss of pets, the disintegration of a friends’ marriage. These tragedies combine with more ominous, larger breakdowns in the second section until, in the final section, grief roils over into historical wickedness, institutionalized violence, and state-sanctioned wrath. Ultimately, “Even the mouth / of a volcano, from far away, / is beautiful.” The poetry itself offers us vessels into which we can pour out our despair. To understand the failing earth, Davidson’s speaker cajoles us to see the pain at its roots. From the opening poem—a reluctant elegy for a mother—to the final eschatological survey, an ode to maddening violence and destruction on a global scale, this collection imagines a world in which private and public terrors feed on each other, ultimately growing to a fever pitch. An act of resistance, this collection gives voice to our deep-seated emotional pain and offers us constructive ways to deal with it.