The Curious Thing: Poems

The Curious Thing: Poems PDF Author: Sandra Lim
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867900
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 71

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness. Truthful, sensuous, and intellectually relentless, the poems in The Curious Thing are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. Sandra Lim’s poetry displays stinging wit and a tough-minded approach to her own experiences: She speaks with Jean Rhys about beauty, encounters the dark loneliness that can exist inside a relationship, and discovers a coiled anger on a hot summer day. An extended poem sequence slyly revolves the meanings of finding oneself astray in midlife. A steely strength courses through the volume’s myriad discoveries—Lim’s lucidity and tenderness form a striking complement to her remarkable metaphors and the emotional clamor of her material. Animated by a sense of reckoning and a piercing inwardness, these anti-sentimental poems nevertheless celebrate the passionate and empathetic subjective life.

The Curious Thing: Poems

The Curious Thing: Poems PDF Author: Sandra Lim
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867900
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 71

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness. Truthful, sensuous, and intellectually relentless, the poems in The Curious Thing are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. Sandra Lim’s poetry displays stinging wit and a tough-minded approach to her own experiences: She speaks with Jean Rhys about beauty, encounters the dark loneliness that can exist inside a relationship, and discovers a coiled anger on a hot summer day. An extended poem sequence slyly revolves the meanings of finding oneself astray in midlife. A steely strength courses through the volume’s myriad discoveries—Lim’s lucidity and tenderness form a striking complement to her remarkable metaphors and the emotional clamor of her material. Animated by a sense of reckoning and a piercing inwardness, these anti-sentimental poems nevertheless celebrate the passionate and empathetic subjective life.

The Wilderness

The Wilderness PDF Author: Takeichi Moritake
Publisher: Rose Books
ISBN: 9784947713001
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Here, available for the first time in an English translation, is The Wilderness by Moritake Takeichi, who is known, along with Iboshi Hokuto and Batchelor Yaeko, as one of the "Three Great Ainu Poets". This seminal work should be considered must reading for anyone interested in Ainu culture and history, and Japanese literature in general. These poems provide an especially poignant insight into the intense pressures experienced by the Ainu people after Hokkaido was annexed by Japan in 1879, when assimilation became synonymous with survival. Moritake, whose Ainu name was Itakunoto was born in the fishing village of Shiraoi in southwestern Hokkaido in 1902, the eldest son of Ehechikari (father) and Otehe (mother). His father passed away when he was still an infant and he grew up in extreme poverty. He started working in the local fishery at the age of 9 to help support his family. His formal education ended in 1915 at the age of 12 when he graduated from elementary school, after which he left Shiraoi to work as a migrant laborer in the herring fisheries at Ishikari, Atsuta, Usuya (Obiracho) and Rumoi. At the age of 20, after a period of intense self-study, he took and passed the exam to become a full-time employee of the National Railway, an astonishing feat for someone with only a primary school education. He gave up this position 1935 to devote himself to the service of his Ainu brethren. Moritake's life spanned a period of rapid and intense change. A few decades before his birth Japan was still run by samurai warriors. Within the period of his lifetime Japan transformed itself from an isolated collection of feudal states into a modern industrial nation. Great progress was achieved, but for the Ainu in particular this progress came at great cost. As one reads this collection of poems one is struck by the uninhibited and eclectic nature of his work. The first section of the book consists of verse poems in a variety of metrical styles. Some, influenced by classical Chinese patterns, are reminiscent of western romantic poetry in their use of figures such as nymphs and naiads to convey a wistful view of traditional Ainu life in ancient times, while others paint a brutally realistic picture of the desperate challenges that faced the new generation of Ainu in his day. Moritake, in the preface to this volume, described his work as follows: "Nowadays the Ainu people have the opportunity to receive a proper education, and their religious beliefs are gradually becoming modernized. Their sensibilities are being refined through exposure to newspapers, magazines and all the other instruments of modern civilization, and the old religious ceremonies and legends that have been passed on by word of mouth since time immemorial are being forgotten. Once the elders living today have passed from this world, many of the elements of our ancient heritage will be lost forever. As one who was born during this period of transition, on the one hand I am excited when I think of the opportunities for progress that assimilation into Japanese society will bring, but on the other I find myself overwhelmed by an indescribable sense of loss. It was nostalgia for this ancient heritage that inspired me to begin visiting the elders from time to time. I listened to them tell the old stories, and asked them about the ways of life, manners and customs of the Ainu in the old days. I made sure to participate in all of the old ceremonies so that I could experience them for myself, and in this collection of poems I have tried not only to describe these more traditional aspects of Ainu life, but I have also attempted to paint a frank and unvarnished picture of the feelings and experiences of the younger generation of Ainu, surrounded, as they are, by the excitement and distractions of modern society." (1937) A facsimile bilingual version is available from Rose Books.

Ye Nexte Thynge

Ye Nexte Thynge PDF Author: Eleanor Amerman Sutphen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 68

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Symmetry: Poems

A Symmetry: Poems PDF Author: Ari Banias
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393868141
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 109

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the 2022 Publishing Triangle Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Award A thrilling, discursive second collection from “a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive” (Mark Doty). The poems in Ari Banias’s thrilling and discursive second collection, A Symmetry, unsettle the myth of a benevolently ordered reality. Through uncanny repetitions and elliptical inquiry, Banias contends with the inscriptions of nationhood, language, and ancestral memory in the architectures of daily experience. Refusing the nostalgias of classicism and the trap of authenticity, these poems turn instead to a Greece of garbage strikes and throwaway tourist pleasures, where bad gender means bad grammar, and a California coast where mansions offer themselves to be crushed under your thumb. A piece of citrus hurled into one poem’s apartment window rolls downhill and escapes the narrative altogether in another. Farmers destroy their own olive trees, strangers mesmerize us as they fold sheets into perfect corners, “artists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they “leave politics out of it.’” Climate collapse and debt accelerate, and desire transforms itself in the ruins. From within psychic interiors and iconic sites—the museum, the strip mall, the discotheque, the sea—A Symmetry attends to the intimate, social proportions of our material world and discerns the simmering potential of a present that “can be some other way. And is.”

Loveliest Grotesque

Loveliest Grotesque PDF Author: Sandra Lim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 76

Get Book Here

Book Description
Poetry. "LOVELIEST GROTESQUE is a darkly fascinating book. It's a sweet, shape-shifting creature and a fun postmodern romp. Page after page fills with energetic surprises, keeping the reader intrigued--formal quatrains juxtaposed against prose vignettes... short-line riffs against skinny sonnets against a ballad that spreads across the page against a pantoum with the word "orient" in it. Finally, the slippery slope of too much fun might stop for a nano moment to contemplate an important existential question: "Why were there manatees at all?" Obviously, the answer is this: after 9/11, in the new millennium, all formal discourses must explode, splinter and fragment and coalesce again into a stunning, new voice."--Marilyn Chin

Two Murals

Two Murals PDF Author: Jesús Castillo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781737277514
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book Here

Book Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Through two long poems, Jesùs Castillo's TWO MURALS explores the personal and political sides of love, selfhood, and transformation in a wasteful age. "Variations on Adonis," the first sequence, is filled with music and memorable images, evoking the decline of civilization alongside a desire to live. The second sequence, "A Mural After Darwish," is a love letter to a woman, to nature, and to memory. Castillo's visions span the landscapes of different countries and ages, always questioning and curious. Abundance and destruction are placed side by side in his consideration of language, life, and death. TWO MURALS offers the reader urgent views of love and perseverance despite the traps of the past and the uncertainty of our future. "Jesùs Castillo locates the subtle rhymes between bomb and tomb, plastic and arctic, in these two sweeping sequences that resonate with personal, political, geological and geographical histories. 'I will call this city a sad marionette,' writes Castillo, 'And call the continent's shorelines roving wolves.' This book is a gathering inside one heart of many voices and the silences that divide them, a virtuoso performance, spellbinding, funny and profoundly sad. I am reminded of Brecht's haunting question and response: 'In the dark times / Will there be singing? / Yes, there will be singing / About the dark times.'"--D.A. Powell

A Child's Garden of Verses

A Child's Garden of Verses PDF Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Children's poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book Here

Book Description
The classic book of children's poetry that immortalized "The Land of Counterpane," "The Land of Nod," "My Shadow," and "Foreign Land."

Lucky Wreck

Lucky Wreck PDF Author: Ada Limón
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781938769801
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Get Book Here

Book Description
The poems in Lucky Wreck trace the excitement of plans and the necessary swerving detours we must take when those plans fail. Looking to shipwrecks on the television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, Ada Limón finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks. Open, honest, and grounded, the poems in this collection seek answers to familiar questions and teach us ways to cope with the pain of many losses with earnestness and humor. Through the wrecks, these poems continue to offer assurance. This darkness is not the scary one, it's the one before the sun comes up, the one you can still breathe in. Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Limón's award-winning debut, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and on how her writing practice has developed over time.

Bright Dead Things

Bright Dead Things PDF Author: Ada Limón
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472154576
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year. I'm thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, Bright Dead Things considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth and falls in love. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limón's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' (New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.

The Hatred of Poetry

The Hatred of Poetry PDF Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865478201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 97

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--