The Poetry of Strangers

The Poetry of Strangers PDF Author: Brian Sonia-Wallace
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062870246
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry — when it meets them where they are. Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life. In The Poetry of Strangers, Brian tells the story of his cross-country journey in a series of heartfelt and insightful essays. From Minnesota to Tennessee, California to North Dakota, Brian discovered that people aren’t so afraid of poetry when it’s telling their stories. In “dying” towns flourish vibrant artistic spirits and fascinating American characters who often pass under the radar, from the Mall of America’s mall walkers to retirees on Amtrak to self-proclaimed witches in Salem. In a time of unprecedented loneliness and isolation, Brian’s journey shows how art can be a vital bridge to community in surprising places. Conventional wisdom says Americans don’t want to talk to each other, but according to this poet-for-hire, everyone is just dying to be heard. Thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening, The Poetry of Strangers is an unforgettable portrait of America told through the hidden longings of one person at a time, by one of our most important voices today. The fault lines and conflicts which divide us fall away when we remember to look, in every stranger, for poetry.

The Poetry of Strangers

The Poetry of Strangers PDF Author: Brian Sonia-Wallace
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062870246
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry — when it meets them where they are. Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life. In The Poetry of Strangers, Brian tells the story of his cross-country journey in a series of heartfelt and insightful essays. From Minnesota to Tennessee, California to North Dakota, Brian discovered that people aren’t so afraid of poetry when it’s telling their stories. In “dying” towns flourish vibrant artistic spirits and fascinating American characters who often pass under the radar, from the Mall of America’s mall walkers to retirees on Amtrak to self-proclaimed witches in Salem. In a time of unprecedented loneliness and isolation, Brian’s journey shows how art can be a vital bridge to community in surprising places. Conventional wisdom says Americans don’t want to talk to each other, but according to this poet-for-hire, everyone is just dying to be heard. Thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening, The Poetry of Strangers is an unforgettable portrait of America told through the hidden longings of one person at a time, by one of our most important voices today. The fault lines and conflicts which divide us fall away when we remember to look, in every stranger, for poetry.

Strangers

Strangers PDF Author: Rob Taylor
Publisher: Biblioasis
ISBN: 1771964200
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 76

Get Book

Book Description
“It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this.” In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, “a revelation in words by means of the words.” The epiphany here is not only the poet’s. It’s ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”

A Country of Strangers

A Country of Strangers PDF Author: D. Nurkse
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593321405
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book

Book Description
In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories. D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.

Sea of Strangers

Sea of Strangers PDF Author: Lang Leav
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449494943
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
This completely original collection of poetry and prose will not only delight her avid fans but is sure to capture the imagination of a whole new audience. With the turn of every page, Sea of Strangers invites you to go beyond love and loss to explore themes of self-discovery and empowerment as you navigate your way around the human heart.

Stranger by Night

Stranger by Night PDF Author: Edward Hirsch
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525657789
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Get Book

Book Description
"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Copyright page.

Stranger's Notebook

Stranger's Notebook PDF Author: Nomi Stone
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810125099
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Get Book

Book Description
Stone's moving debut collection of verse is inspired by her encounter with perhaps the last cohesive, traditional Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa. According to their story of origin, a handful of exiles arrived on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, in 586 B.C., carrying a single stone from the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Drawing from this cosmology, the poems follow a stranger who arrives into an ancient community that is both at home and deeply estranged on the island. Its people occupy the uneasy space of all insular communities, deciding when to let the world in and when to shut it out. The poems are about the daily lives and deeper cosmos of the Jews of Djerba as well as the Muslims next door. In her exploration, Stone sees vivid recurring images of keys, stones, homes, the laughter of girls, the eyes of men, the color blue, and the force of blood or bombs. With this journey of faith, doubt, longing, and home, Stone has brought readers a rare look into a story that resonates powerfully with questions of cultural preservation and coexistence.

Strangers

Strangers PDF Author: David Ferry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226244709
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 64

Get Book

Book Description
"David Ferry must have had something up his sleeve when he called his book "Strangers," because his is a poetry of intimacy and familiarity. More than that, Mr. Ferry's short, sparse lyrics are as perfectly and simply composed as Japanese haiku—a rare accomplishment in poetry written in English."—Andy Brumer, New York Times Book Review "Strangers is a remarkably good book for a reader sufficiently attentive to hear its quiet power, to let it work in its distinctive way."—Boston Globe "The poems of David Ferry's Strangers are in fact one book, and it is a splendid one. There is the same austere and poignant voice throughout, asking the unanswerable things, speaking of all that is withheld from us, confronting the unknownness that dwells even in the familiar and dear. Painful and touching, the book offers a distinctive vision which is at the same time inescapably true."—Richard Wilbur

Red Mother

Red Mother PDF Author: Laurel Radzieski
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781630450540
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
In Red Mother Laurel Radzieski weaves a love story told from the perspective of a parasite. This series of short poems explores the intimacy we all experience by following the sometimes tender, often distressing relationship that emerges between a parasite and its host. Radzieski's poetry is playful, though often with sinister undertones.

Love the Stranger

Love the Stranger PDF Author: Jay Deshpande
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781936919338
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Poetry. Top Debut Collection of 2015, Poets and Writers. "This is a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty. This is a poet of intensifying linguistic gift and of terrible suspicion regarding that gift. Is there, yet, an Auto-Voyeuristic school of poetry? If not, then Jay Deshpande's troubling and gorgeous LOVE THE STRANGER 'watch yourself grow muscle in your failures / and hate it' could be the founding document." Josh Bell "Deshpande tracks those moments when we become strange to ourselves, when indecision and failure wrench us open. He writes with a kind of glowing, dreamlike clarity about desire, distraction, regret the ways we rush past ourselves, the ways we hurt each other. This book is full of searching and light." Joanna Klink "Elegant, dreamy, and hauntingly charismatic, Deshpande's poems captivate the way the recordings of their patron saint Chet Baker do, insisting time after time that exceptional artistry can spin even radical loneliness and excruciating sensitivity into music that radiates and affirms. Provoking 'a hunger become so animal' then tranquilizing it with 'orchestrated moonlight, ' LOVE THE STRANGER is a book, a shady neighborhood, and a mood that readers will return to again and again." Timothy Donnelly"

Strangers to Their Courage

Strangers to Their Courage PDF Author: Alice Derry
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807127216
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Get Book

Book Description
In her startling new collection of poetry, Alice Derry contemplates an awkward, even taboo, subject -- the persecution and suffering of the German population before, during, and after World War II. Sparked by her desire to capture in verse the torment of her German cousins, who had survived the horrors of war only to be separated by the division of Germany, Derry composed these poems over a quarter century, ultimately chronicling the anguish of an entire people who "deserved" their lot, a people permanently tainted by the horrifying events of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. "Before I realized that I was becoming part of a contaminated language and people, I was part of them", writes Derry in her powerful introductory essay, an eloquent discussion of racism, ethnic prejudice, and learned hatred. Indeed, Derry's intensely personal poems have an immediacy that approaches documentary. She divides the poems into two sections, the first telling the stories of her German relatives trapped behind the Iron Curtain, often from their point of view. "When I felt our first son move inside me . . . / I walked into the cold, muddy spring, / the rubbled streets, and took my place / in the food lines". The second section ponders the distinct experiences of German Americans. By giving voice to a group that Americans and others have been given permission to hate, Derry eloquently reveals a subtle truth about blame and guilt -- in the end we are all implicated, all human suffering is a part of each of us.