Author: Dessie Bey
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1105769615
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 87
Book Description
Three Rivers Run Deep A Pittsburgh Poet's Anthology
Author: Dessie Bey
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1105769615
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 87
Book Description
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1105769615
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 87
Book Description
Confluence
Author: Samantha Deflitch
Publisher: Broadstone Books
ISBN: 9781937968779
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 64
Book Description
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. The confluence in the title of this debut collection from Samantha DeFlitch describes the meeting of three rivers, the Monongahela and Allegheny which come together at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio. The three sections of her book are named for these rivers, and there are many poems of place here, the author's home turf, its backroads and bridges, state lines, amusement parks, a town called Zelienople, even Pittsburgh itself, depicted most provocatively as a city of "accidental lesbians." But as a gas station attendant says when she answers where she is from, "Nobody lives in Pittsburgh," an observation that shifts the register from the physical to the psyche, and to a different sort of confluence, the way in which we are all products of everything that has come before and come together to form our lives. DeFlitch depicts this in the construction of her poems. There are many recurring images and motifs, of oranges and blackbirds, dogs, pierogis, gas stations, concern over the aging of parents, of aging herself, of a "boy named John" who "put a bullet in his head" because he didn't want to grow old--and of folding chairs that turn up everywhere, such a brilliantly efficient exemplar of the temporary. She repeats words, lines, even nearly entire poems, and in this manner her poems resemble merging waters, full of ripples, eddies, swirls, back currents of detritus, endlessly forming and reforming over time and space. The book opens with a striking and disturbing dreamlike scene of peeling an orange to find within it an endless succession of rotten oranges, a surreal suggestion of a world composed of decay, giving way to a swirl of blackbirds over a horizon, a lake overflowing a dam, a chaos of interwoven imagery. That unsettled and unsettling vision informs this entire collection, a confluence of currents which DeFlitch must navigate in her life journey from "today-woman to someday-woman." "Tell me," she asks at one point, "am I holy / or just alone?" The answer, of course, for her and for us all, is both. But the final poem begins with the equally arresting fact that a pig cannot raise its head to see the sky unassisted, which prompts DeFlitch to conclude "Earthbound is probably / better. We all start / getting ideas when we / look up, and the pigs, / they always seemed so / pleased where they were, / rooting in soft earth. / No need to look up for God / when the holy was there, / beneath their trotters..." What begins in chaos ends in hope: we have, and we are, all that we need. "I have what it takes to be average," she declares. Perhaps; but not where her poetry is concerned--in that, she is exceptional.
Publisher: Broadstone Books
ISBN: 9781937968779
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 64
Book Description
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. The confluence in the title of this debut collection from Samantha DeFlitch describes the meeting of three rivers, the Monongahela and Allegheny which come together at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio. The three sections of her book are named for these rivers, and there are many poems of place here, the author's home turf, its backroads and bridges, state lines, amusement parks, a town called Zelienople, even Pittsburgh itself, depicted most provocatively as a city of "accidental lesbians." But as a gas station attendant says when she answers where she is from, "Nobody lives in Pittsburgh," an observation that shifts the register from the physical to the psyche, and to a different sort of confluence, the way in which we are all products of everything that has come before and come together to form our lives. DeFlitch depicts this in the construction of her poems. There are many recurring images and motifs, of oranges and blackbirds, dogs, pierogis, gas stations, concern over the aging of parents, of aging herself, of a "boy named John" who "put a bullet in his head" because he didn't want to grow old--and of folding chairs that turn up everywhere, such a brilliantly efficient exemplar of the temporary. She repeats words, lines, even nearly entire poems, and in this manner her poems resemble merging waters, full of ripples, eddies, swirls, back currents of detritus, endlessly forming and reforming over time and space. The book opens with a striking and disturbing dreamlike scene of peeling an orange to find within it an endless succession of rotten oranges, a surreal suggestion of a world composed of decay, giving way to a swirl of blackbirds over a horizon, a lake overflowing a dam, a chaos of interwoven imagery. That unsettled and unsettling vision informs this entire collection, a confluence of currents which DeFlitch must navigate in her life journey from "today-woman to someday-woman." "Tell me," she asks at one point, "am I holy / or just alone?" The answer, of course, for her and for us all, is both. But the final poem begins with the equally arresting fact that a pig cannot raise its head to see the sky unassisted, which prompts DeFlitch to conclude "Earthbound is probably / better. We all start / getting ideas when we / look up, and the pigs, / they always seemed so / pleased where they were, / rooting in soft earth. / No need to look up for God / when the holy was there, / beneath their trotters..." What begins in chaos ends in hope: we have, and we are, all that we need. "I have what it takes to be average," she declares. Perhaps; but not where her poetry is concerned--in that, she is exceptional.
Monthly Bulletin of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Author: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classified catalogs (Dewey decimal)
Languages : en
Pages : 800
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classified catalogs (Dewey decimal)
Languages : en
Pages : 800
Book Description
Gun/Shy
Author: Jim Daniels
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814348793
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Book Description
Poems that seek stability in family and community while coping with a country full of conflict and change. The poems in Gun/Shy deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Jim Daniels's poems measure the wages of love in a changing world with its vanishing currency. He explores the effects of family work—putting children to bed, leading parents to their final resting places—and what is lost and gained in those exertions. Childhood and adolescence are examined, through both looking back on his own childhood and on that of his children. While his personal death count rises, Daniels reflects on his own mortality. He finds solace in small miracles—his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with "hamburger surprise" and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins. Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, "Gun/Shy," centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared. Throughout, he seeks connection in likely and unlikely places: a river rising after spring rain and searchlights crossing the night sky. Comets and cloudy skies. Cement ponds and the Garden of Eden. Adolescence and death. Wounds physical and psychic. Disguises and more disguises. These are the myths we memorize to help us sleep at night, those that keep us awake and trembling. Daniels's accessible language, subtlety, and deftness make this collection one that belongs on every poetry reader's shelf.
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814348793
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Book Description
Poems that seek stability in family and community while coping with a country full of conflict and change. The poems in Gun/Shy deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Jim Daniels's poems measure the wages of love in a changing world with its vanishing currency. He explores the effects of family work—putting children to bed, leading parents to their final resting places—and what is lost and gained in those exertions. Childhood and adolescence are examined, through both looking back on his own childhood and on that of his children. While his personal death count rises, Daniels reflects on his own mortality. He finds solace in small miracles—his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with "hamburger surprise" and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins. Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, "Gun/Shy," centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared. Throughout, he seeks connection in likely and unlikely places: a river rising after spring rain and searchlights crossing the night sky. Comets and cloudy skies. Cement ponds and the Garden of Eden. Adolescence and death. Wounds physical and psychic. Disguises and more disguises. These are the myths we memorize to help us sleep at night, those that keep us awake and trembling. Daniels's accessible language, subtlety, and deftness make this collection one that belongs on every poetry reader's shelf.
Among Our Books
Author: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classified catalogs (Dewey decimal)
Languages : en
Pages : 800
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Classified catalogs (Dewey decimal)
Languages : en
Pages : 800
Book Description
The Delicacy and Strength of Lace
Author: Leslie Marmon Silko
Publisher: Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 140
Book Description
"The Delicacy and Strength of Lace" "Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright" This moving, eighteen-month exchange of correspondence chronicles the friendship-through-the-mail of two extraordinary writers. Leslie Marmon Silko is a poet and novelist. James Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his "Collected Poems." They met only twice. First, briefly, in 1975, at a writers conference in Michigan. Their correspondence began three years later, after Wright wrote to Silko praising her book "Ceremony." The letters begin formally, and then each writer gradually opens to the other, venturing to share his or her life, work and struggles. The second meeting between the two writers came in a hospital room, as James Wright lay dying of cancer. The "New York Times" wrote something of Wright that applies to both writers-- of qualities that this exchange of letters makes evident. "Our age desperately needs his vision of brotherly love, his transcendent sense of nature, the clarity of his courageous voice."
Publisher: Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 140
Book Description
"The Delicacy and Strength of Lace" "Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright" This moving, eighteen-month exchange of correspondence chronicles the friendship-through-the-mail of two extraordinary writers. Leslie Marmon Silko is a poet and novelist. James Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his "Collected Poems." They met only twice. First, briefly, in 1975, at a writers conference in Michigan. Their correspondence began three years later, after Wright wrote to Silko praising her book "Ceremony." The letters begin formally, and then each writer gradually opens to the other, venturing to share his or her life, work and struggles. The second meeting between the two writers came in a hospital room, as James Wright lay dying of cancer. The "New York Times" wrote something of Wright that applies to both writers-- of qualities that this exchange of letters makes evident. "Our age desperately needs his vision of brotherly love, his transcendent sense of nature, the clarity of his courageous voice."
Spirit and Flame
Author: Keith Gilyard
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815627302
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
An outline to the African American poetic conversation of the 1990s, Spirit and Flame is the first intergenerational volume of African American poetry with an expressly contemporary focus since the numerous and influential black poetry anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s. A collection of numerous forms (jazz stylings to haiku) and topics (middle passage to 0. J.), this present gathering of fifty-three significant poets, among them Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Ruth Forman, Haki Madhubuti, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, and Patricia Smith, illustrates both the vibrancy of the African American experience and the talented and current poetic response that is part and parcel of it.
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815627302
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
An outline to the African American poetic conversation of the 1990s, Spirit and Flame is the first intergenerational volume of African American poetry with an expressly contemporary focus since the numerous and influential black poetry anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s. A collection of numerous forms (jazz stylings to haiku) and topics (middle passage to 0. J.), this present gathering of fifty-three significant poets, among them Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Ruth Forman, Haki Madhubuti, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, and Patricia Smith, illustrates both the vibrancy of the African American experience and the talented and current poetic response that is part and parcel of it.
A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now
Author: Aliki Barnstone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 612
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 612
Book Description
African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930: Volume 9
Author: Miriam Thaggert
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108834167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
This book analyses historical, literary, and cultural shifts in African American literature from the 1920s-1930s.
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108834167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
This book analyses historical, literary, and cultural shifts in African American literature from the 1920s-1930s.
The Heiress of Pittsburgh
Author: Ken Gormley
Publisher: Milford House Press
ISBN: 9781620065242
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Ken Gormley delivers a powerful courtroom drama about the decent, largely-forgotten qualities that once were the bedrock of the simple towns that built America. The Heiress of Pittsburgh reawakens hope that the precious qualities of past generations can be reimagined to create a dazzling new future. But only if success is boldly redefined.
Publisher: Milford House Press
ISBN: 9781620065242
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Ken Gormley delivers a powerful courtroom drama about the decent, largely-forgotten qualities that once were the bedrock of the simple towns that built America. The Heiress of Pittsburgh reawakens hope that the precious qualities of past generations can be reimagined to create a dazzling new future. But only if success is boldly redefined.