Against Heaven

Against Heaven PDF Author: Kemi Alabi
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451727
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine. Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions—those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.

Against Heaven

Against Heaven PDF Author: Kemi Alabi
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451727
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 110

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine. Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions—those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.

Refusing Heaven

Refusing Heaven PDF Author: Jack Gilbert
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307543943
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

Heaven & Other Poems

Heaven & Other Poems PDF Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780912516318
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 59

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Book Description
A selection of Jack Kerouac's poems, plus his statements on poetics and letters to an editor.

The Half-Finished Heaven

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

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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.

The City in Which I Love You

The City in Which I Love You PDF Author: Li-Young Lee
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
ISBN: 193816055X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
Contents I. Furious Versionis II. The Interrogation This Hour And What Is Dead Arise, Go Down My Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud For A New Citizen Of These United States With Ruins III. This Room And Everything In It The City In Which I Love You IV. The Waiting A Story Goodnight You Must Sing Here I Am A Final Thing V. The Cleaving

Heaven in Ordinary

Heaven in Ordinary PDF Author: Malcolm Guite
Publisher: Canterbury Press
ISBN: 1786222647
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Poet's Corner is Malcolm Guite's delectable column that appears on the back page of the Church Times each week. This second collection brings together more than seventy columns created from little glimpses and reflections from all corners of the country, the musings of a poet's mind, and the corners and alleyways of our literary heritage. Malcolm's lucid, perceptive and imaginative columns follow a similar pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned, with a sense of development, of a turn or volta part way through, and a sense that the end revisits and re-reads the opening.

The Hound of Heaven

The Hound of Heaven PDF Author: Francis Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Private presses
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description


Shirt in Heaven

Shirt in Heaven PDF Author: Jean Valentine
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321343
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 79

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Book Description
"Jean Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book Review Quietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see. Shirt in Heaven Come upon a snapshot of secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches— come upon letters I thought I'd burned— I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs. I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat down in the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried. He yelled at the aide to get out. His two sons had been your students. —me too, little-knowing— Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Sometimes I Never Suffered

Sometimes I Never Suffered PDF Author: Shane McCrae
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721807
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet I think now more than half Of life is death but I can’t die Enough for all the life I see In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own. Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.

Shadow of Heaven

Shadow of Heaven PDF Author: Ellen Bryant Voigt
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780393324648
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
A follow-up to the author's highly acclaimed Kyrie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, offers an intimate exploration of the obstacles and joys of modern life.