Author: Anders Nilsen
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770465898
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
New and formally inventive work from a New York Times notable author In Poetry is Useless, Anders Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. Page after page gives way under Nilsen’s deft hatching and perfectly placed pen strokes, revealing his intellectual curiosity and wry outlook on life’s many surprises. Stick people debate the dubious merits of economics. Immaculately stippled circles become looser and looser, as craters appear on their surface. A series of portraits capture the backs of friends’ heads. For ten or twenty pages at a time, Poetry is Useless becomes a travel diary, in which Nilsen shares anecdotes about his voyages in Europe and North America. A trip to Colombia for a comics festival is recounted in carefully drawn city streets and sketches made in cafés. Poetry is Useless reveals seven years of Nilsen’s life and musings: beginning in 2007, it covers a substantial period of his comics career to date, and includes visual reference to his works, such as Dogs & Water, Rage of Poseidon, and the New York Times Notable Book Big Questions. This expansive sketchbook-as-graphic-novel is exquisitely packaged with appendices and a foreword from Anders Nilsen himself.
Poetry Is Useless
Author: Anders Nilsen
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770465898
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
New and formally inventive work from a New York Times notable author In Poetry is Useless, Anders Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. Page after page gives way under Nilsen’s deft hatching and perfectly placed pen strokes, revealing his intellectual curiosity and wry outlook on life’s many surprises. Stick people debate the dubious merits of economics. Immaculately stippled circles become looser and looser, as craters appear on their surface. A series of portraits capture the backs of friends’ heads. For ten or twenty pages at a time, Poetry is Useless becomes a travel diary, in which Nilsen shares anecdotes about his voyages in Europe and North America. A trip to Colombia for a comics festival is recounted in carefully drawn city streets and sketches made in cafés. Poetry is Useless reveals seven years of Nilsen’s life and musings: beginning in 2007, it covers a substantial period of his comics career to date, and includes visual reference to his works, such as Dogs & Water, Rage of Poseidon, and the New York Times Notable Book Big Questions. This expansive sketchbook-as-graphic-novel is exquisitely packaged with appendices and a foreword from Anders Nilsen himself.
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770465898
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
New and formally inventive work from a New York Times notable author In Poetry is Useless, Anders Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. Page after page gives way under Nilsen’s deft hatching and perfectly placed pen strokes, revealing his intellectual curiosity and wry outlook on life’s many surprises. Stick people debate the dubious merits of economics. Immaculately stippled circles become looser and looser, as craters appear on their surface. A series of portraits capture the backs of friends’ heads. For ten or twenty pages at a time, Poetry is Useless becomes a travel diary, in which Nilsen shares anecdotes about his voyages in Europe and North America. A trip to Colombia for a comics festival is recounted in carefully drawn city streets and sketches made in cafés. Poetry is Useless reveals seven years of Nilsen’s life and musings: beginning in 2007, it covers a substantial period of his comics career to date, and includes visual reference to his works, such as Dogs & Water, Rage of Poseidon, and the New York Times Notable Book Big Questions. This expansive sketchbook-as-graphic-novel is exquisitely packaged with appendices and a foreword from Anders Nilsen himself.
Poetry and Uselessness
Author: Robert Archambeau
Publisher: Among the Victorians and Modernists
ISBN: 9780367207366
Category : Aestheticism (Literature)
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
W.H. Auden famously claimed "poetry makes nothing happen." That may or may not be the case, but the idea that poetry makes nothing happen has, itself, been extremely influential, and has made a great deal happen in the world. This book examines several of the main currents in literary history as that influential idea flows through poetry and into the wider world. Since the invention of the idea, it has influenced theories of education; helped legitimize the entry of the middle class into political life; spawned ideas of symbolism that are still with us; formed a bulwark protecting literary culture from the commercial world; helped create the artistic subculture of bohemia; informed queer discourse and identity; and helped create both contemporary literary taste and the institutions that support it. Through chapters on figures from Coleridge and Tennyson to Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, we see how maintaining that poetry has no use in the world has been and remains a very powerful--and useful--idea.
Publisher: Among the Victorians and Modernists
ISBN: 9780367207366
Category : Aestheticism (Literature)
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
W.H. Auden famously claimed "poetry makes nothing happen." That may or may not be the case, but the idea that poetry makes nothing happen has, itself, been extremely influential, and has made a great deal happen in the world. This book examines several of the main currents in literary history as that influential idea flows through poetry and into the wider world. Since the invention of the idea, it has influenced theories of education; helped legitimize the entry of the middle class into political life; spawned ideas of symbolism that are still with us; formed a bulwark protecting literary culture from the commercial world; helped create the artistic subculture of bohemia; informed queer discourse and identity; and helped create both contemporary literary taste and the institutions that support it. Through chapters on figures from Coleridge and Tennyson to Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, we see how maintaining that poetry has no use in the world has been and remains a very powerful--and useful--idea.
Useless Magic
Author: Florence Welch
Publisher: Crown Archetype
ISBN: 0525577165
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Lyrics and never-before-seen poetry and sketches from the iconic musician of Florence and the Machine Songs can be incredibly prophetic, like subconscious warnings or messages to myself, but I often don't know what I'm trying to say till years later. Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic.
Publisher: Crown Archetype
ISBN: 0525577165
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Lyrics and never-before-seen poetry and sketches from the iconic musician of Florence and the Machine Songs can be incredibly prophetic, like subconscious warnings or messages to myself, but I often don't know what I'm trying to say till years later. Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic.
Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
Author: D. A. Powell
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555976958
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, now in paperback D. A. Powell's fifth book of poetry, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, explores the darker side of divisions and developments, the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, and bar. With witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates Powell's exhilarating range.
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555976958
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, now in paperback D. A. Powell's fifth book of poetry, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, explores the darker side of divisions and developments, the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, and bar. With witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates Powell's exhilarating range.
Beautiful and Useless
Author: Min Jeong Kim
Publisher: Moon Country Korean Poetry
ISBN: 9781939568366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
In Beautiful and Useless, Kim Min Jeong exposes the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance. She uses slang, puns, cultural referents, and 'naughty, unwomanly" language in order to challenge readers to expand their ideas of not only what a poem is, but also how women should speak. In this way Kim undermines patriarchal authority by displaying the absurd nature of gender expectations. But even larger than issues of gender, these poems reveal the illogical systems of power behind the apparent structures that govern the logic of everyday life. By making the source of these antagonisms and gender transgressions visible, they make them less powerful. This skillful translation from Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, brings the full playfulness and intelligence of Kim's lyricism to English-language readers.
Publisher: Moon Country Korean Poetry
ISBN: 9781939568366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
In Beautiful and Useless, Kim Min Jeong exposes the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance. She uses slang, puns, cultural referents, and 'naughty, unwomanly" language in order to challenge readers to expand their ideas of not only what a poem is, but also how women should speak. In this way Kim undermines patriarchal authority by displaying the absurd nature of gender expectations. But even larger than issues of gender, these poems reveal the illogical systems of power behind the apparent structures that govern the logic of everyday life. By making the source of these antagonisms and gender transgressions visible, they make them less powerful. This skillful translation from Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, brings the full playfulness and intelligence of Kim's lyricism to English-language readers.
Beautiful & Pointless
Author: David Orr
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062079417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159
Book Description
"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062079417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159
Book Description
"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.
Crazy Heart
Author: Thomas Cobb
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062325523
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
“A masterpiece. . . . An unforgettable character . . . who proceeds to take you on a roller-coaster ride through his tawdrily tumultuous life.” —Chicago Tribune At the age of fifty-seven—living a life riddled with ex-wives, one night stands, and daily diet of Jack Daniels—Bad Blake is on his last legs. His ticker, his liver, even his pick-up truck are all giving him trouble. A renowned songwriter and “picker” who hasn’t recorded in five years, Bad now travels the countryside on gigs that take him mostly to motels and bowling alleys. Enter Jean Craddock, a young journalist sent to interview him after a beautiful concert, and a tentative romance blooms. Can Bad stop living the life of a country-western song and tie a rope around his crazy heart? “A measure of Thomas Cobb’s talent is that he can make Bad Blake’s story amusing even as we watch him fall.” —New York Times Book Review “[Cobb’s] picture of the scraggly underside of Western music is brutally convincing.” —The New Yorker “Crazy Heart just might be the finest country-western novel ever written, bar none.” —Houston Post “[A] moving, respectful evocation of the world of country music.” —Boston Herald “Thomas Cobb’s marvelous first novel doesn’t just play on your heartstrings, it breaks them.” —San Francisco Examiner “A piercing, keenly observed chronicle of modern Americana.” —Los Angeles Times “Heartfelt.” —Houston Chronicle “A beautiful book. . . . Bad Blake is a man you will not soon forget.” —Washington Times
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062325523
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
“A masterpiece. . . . An unforgettable character . . . who proceeds to take you on a roller-coaster ride through his tawdrily tumultuous life.” —Chicago Tribune At the age of fifty-seven—living a life riddled with ex-wives, one night stands, and daily diet of Jack Daniels—Bad Blake is on his last legs. His ticker, his liver, even his pick-up truck are all giving him trouble. A renowned songwriter and “picker” who hasn’t recorded in five years, Bad now travels the countryside on gigs that take him mostly to motels and bowling alleys. Enter Jean Craddock, a young journalist sent to interview him after a beautiful concert, and a tentative romance blooms. Can Bad stop living the life of a country-western song and tie a rope around his crazy heart? “A measure of Thomas Cobb’s talent is that he can make Bad Blake’s story amusing even as we watch him fall.” —New York Times Book Review “[Cobb’s] picture of the scraggly underside of Western music is brutally convincing.” —The New Yorker “Crazy Heart just might be the finest country-western novel ever written, bar none.” —Houston Post “[A] moving, respectful evocation of the world of country music.” —Boston Herald “Thomas Cobb’s marvelous first novel doesn’t just play on your heartstrings, it breaks them.” —San Francisco Examiner “A piercing, keenly observed chronicle of modern Americana.” —Los Angeles Times “Heartfelt.” —Houston Chronicle “A beautiful book. . . . Bad Blake is a man you will not soon forget.” —Washington Times
Book of Haikus
Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101664886
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy “Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101664886
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy “Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.
Rage of Poseidon
Author: Anders Nilsen
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770465901
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 76
Book Description
A wise and funny collection of modern-day parables about the ties between humans and their gods Imagine you are Poseidon at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The oceans are dying and sailors have long since stopped paying tribute. They just don't don't need you anymore. What do you do? Perhaps, seeking answers, you go exploring. Maybe you end up in Wisconsin and discover the pleasures of the iced latte. And then, perhaps, everything goes wrong. Anders Nilsen, author of Big Questions and Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, explores questions like these in his newest work, a darkly funny meditation on religion and faith with a modern twist. Rage of Poseidon brings all of the philosophical depth of Nilsen’s earlier work to bear on contemporary society, asking how a twenty-first century child might respond to being sacrificed on a mountaintop, and probing the role gods like Venus and Bacchus might have in the world of today. Nilsen works in a unique style for these short stories, distilling individual moments in black silhouette on a spare white background. Above all, though, he immerses us seamlessly in a world where gods and humans are more alike than not, forcing us to recognize the humor in our (and their) desperation. Rage of Poseidon is devastating, insightful, and beautiful hewn; it’s a wry triumph in an all-new style from a masterful artist.
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770465901
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 76
Book Description
A wise and funny collection of modern-day parables about the ties between humans and their gods Imagine you are Poseidon at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The oceans are dying and sailors have long since stopped paying tribute. They just don't don't need you anymore. What do you do? Perhaps, seeking answers, you go exploring. Maybe you end up in Wisconsin and discover the pleasures of the iced latte. And then, perhaps, everything goes wrong. Anders Nilsen, author of Big Questions and Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, explores questions like these in his newest work, a darkly funny meditation on religion and faith with a modern twist. Rage of Poseidon brings all of the philosophical depth of Nilsen’s earlier work to bear on contemporary society, asking how a twenty-first century child might respond to being sacrificed on a mountaintop, and probing the role gods like Venus and Bacchus might have in the world of today. Nilsen works in a unique style for these short stories, distilling individual moments in black silhouette on a spare white background. Above all, though, he immerses us seamlessly in a world where gods and humans are more alike than not, forcing us to recognize the humor in our (and their) desperation. Rage of Poseidon is devastating, insightful, and beautiful hewn; it’s a wry triumph in an all-new style from a masterful artist.
Why Poetry
Author: Matthew Zapruder
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062343092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Book Description
An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062343092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Book Description
An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.