The Book of Anna

The Book of Anna PDF Author: Joy Ladin
Publisher: Eoagh Books
ISBN: 9781792307225
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Poetry. Fiction. Jewish Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. THE BOOK OF ANNA is written in the voice of Anna Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jew who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and now lives in 1950s Prague answering phones for the secret police. This genre-defying book of prose diary entries and autobiographical poems offers intimate glimpses of Anna's present --her writing process, relationships with neighbors, obsessive sexual behavior, chain-smoking, and idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition --while the poems recount her unsparing efforts to reckon with horror, survival, and their aftermath. Written in the midst of Joy Ladin's gender transition, this book asks provocative questions about the meaning of trauma, gender, suffering and empathy that speak to our current historical moment in haunting and indelible ways. This second edition of a classic text of trans literature features a new afterword by the author, "Anna and Me," reflecting on this book's pivotal importance for the development of the author's poetics and identity. "Part novel, part shattering lyric sequence, THE BOOK OF ANNA presents itself as the work of Anna Asher, a Holocaust survivor living in 1950s Prague who looks back on her pre-war love of a Heidegger-reading yeshiva bocher, on the women who saved her life in Barracks 10 (The Rebbetzin, The Physicist, The Whore), and on the Biblical 'song made of songs' where 'God is so utterly absent that the rabbis decided --what else could they do? --to see Him everywhere.' A stunning, sometimes shocking mix of Jewish learning and daring, THE BOOK OF ANNA was Ladin's breakthrough volume, and scarred, sardonic Anna is an unforgettable contribution to Jewish American poetry." --Eric Selinger "It's nearly impossible to capture the magnificence that is Joy Ladin's THE BOOK OF ANNA, what it begins and what it foretells. There is something deeply familiar in the text. I feel as if I am suddenly sitting on the yellow plastic-covered couch in my grandmother's living room, listening to the conversations while she and her friends play bridge or mahjong. The women speak Yiddish or Hungarian, and their talk is filled with cigarettes, gossip, and the kind of dry side-eyed humor that belies their own survival and the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, entire families, in the genocide that occurred not two decades before in the villages and towns of their birth. These were women trying to live. Through poems and accounts of a friendship with another survivor, Ladin follows Anna's efforts to find some sign that will allow her to go on living. 'And something shaped like a woman / As you are shaped like a man / Waiting in the middle of the Charles Bridge / For death or truth / To make her breathe again.' In the end, Ladin's Anna chooses to breathe, and we are grateful for her journey in all of its reckoning, and for this prescient and gorgeous book of becoming." --Samuel Ace

The Book of Anna

The Book of Anna PDF Author: Carmen Boullosa
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895855
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

Talking to My Body

Talking to My Body PDF Author: Anna Świrszczyńska
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Anna Swir's poetry is featured in the best-selling anthologies Ten Poems to Set You Free and Risking Everything Anna Swir (1909-1984) famously said "A poet should be as sensitive as an aching tooth." Swir was one of Poland's most distinguished poets, and she was open in her feminism and eroticism, with poetry that explored the life of the female body--from the agonizing depths of wartime to delirious sensual delight. The New York Times wrote that Swir's poetry pointed toward a "ferocious internal life." A member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation and a military nurse in a makeshift hospital during the Warsaw Uprising, Swir once waited an hour fully expecting to be executed. Affected deeply by her experience, she wrote a poetry which rejected the grand gestures of war in favor of a world cast in miniature, a world in which the body and individual survive. Co-translated by Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan, with an introduction by Milosz, who writes: "What is the central theme of these poems? Answer: Flesh. Flesh in love and ecstasy, in pain, in terror, flesh afraid of loneliness, giving birth, resting, feeling the flow of time or reducing time to one instant. By such a clear delineation of her subject matter, Anna Swir achieves in her sensual, fierce poetry a nearly calligraphic neatness." Reviews: "The poems delight in all things physical, painting a passionate picture of the soul as a reified, pulsating entity that argues with the body."--San Francisco Review "Talking to My Body is an extremely rewarding book... Her best poems are so original as to deliver that mild shock we've come to recognize as real poetry."--Boston Book Review

A Disturbance in Mirrors

A Disturbance in Mirrors PDF Author: Pamela J. Annas
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This new, uncluttered study of Sylvia Plath's poetry offers a calculated balance between feminist theory and the old heritage of the New Criticism. The apparent thematic peg here is Plath's fascination with mirrors in her life and in her work. . . . This is a very solid work; it is the most readable of the recent books on Plath, and, among the recent works this reviewer knows of, none is comparable. Choice Much of Sylvia Plath's poetry springs from her attempts to recognize and reconcile her own paradoxes: the ones she found inside herself and the ones she faced in the world in which she lived. Like the work of a number of twentieth-century women poets, her poetry can be characterized as a search not so much for definition of self as for redefinition of self. This penetrating study traces, through the internal dialectics that structure poems, the evolution of Plath's imagery, and examines the way the poems embody the tension between images of self and images of world. A developmental study of Plath's poetry, A Disturbance in Mirrors considers various aspects of her work: the social implications of mythic imagery in her early poems; the relationship between language, imagery, and sexual/social context in the poems of the middle period; the connections between aesthetic and biological creativity in a bureaucratic, depersonalized world; the internalized conflict of self and society within the poet; and Plath's attempts, metaphorically and within the poems, to narrate the possibilities for a transformed self reborn into a transformed world.

Anna's Blizzard

Anna's Blizzard PDF Author: Alison Hart
Publisher: Holiday House
ISBN: 1561459275
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
When a fierce blizzard suddenly kicks up on a mild winter day, a young Nebraska girl must find the courage and strength to lead others to safety in this novel inspired by the true story of the 1888 School Children's Blizzard. Twelve-year-old Anna loves life on the Nebraska prairie where she lives with her parents and four-year-old brother in a simple sod house. She doesn't mind helping out with chores, especially when she is herding sheep with her beloved pony, Top Hat. On the open prairie, Anna feels at home. But at school she feels hopelessly out of place. Arithmetic is too hard, her penmanship is abysmal, and stuck-up Eloise Baxter always laughs at her mistakes. When a unexpected blizzard traps Anna, her schoolmates, and their young teacher in the one-room schoolhouse, Anna knows they must escape before it is too late. Does she have the courage and strength to lead her class through the whiteout to safety? Alison Hart offers young readers a dramatic story of rescue and survival featuring a plucky, determined protagonist. An author's note provides more information about prairie life in the late nineteenth century and about the School Children's Blizzard.

Made in China

Made in China PDF Author: Anna Qu
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220358
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant's journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family's garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life. Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work. Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'an to New York, Made in China is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.

The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

The Poetry of Sylvia Plath PDF Author: Claire Brennan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231124263
Category : Women and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This collection of reviews of the writing of Sylvia Plath is arranged in sections on reviews of The Colossus and Ariel, unifying strategies and early feminist readings of the 1970s, cultural and historical readings, feminist and psychoanalytic strategies, and new directions. Brief excerpts by nume

Identity Poetics

Identity Poetics PDF Author: Linda Garber
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231506724
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
"Queer theory," asserts Linda Garber, "alternately buries and vilifies lesbian feminism, missing its valuable insights and ignoring its rich contributions." Rejecting the either/or choice between lesbianism and queer theory, she favors an inclusive approach that defies current factionalism. In an eloquent challenge to the privileging of queer theory in the academy, Garber calls for recognition of the historical—and intellectually significant—role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian identity and activism. The connections, Garber shows, are most clearly seen when looking at the pivotal work of working-class lesbians/lesbians of color whose articulations of multiple, simultaneous identity positions and activist politics both belong to lesbian feminism and presage queer theory. Identity Poetics includes a critical overview of recent historical writing about the women's and lesbian-feminist movements of the 1970s; discussions of the works of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa; and, finally, a chapter on the rise and hegemony of queer theory within lesbigay studies.

Exiling the Poets

Exiling the Poets PDF Author: Ramona Naddaff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226567273
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Underscoring not only the repressive but also the productive dimension of literary censorship, Naddaff brings to light Plato's fundamental ambivalence about the value of poetic discourse in philosophical investigation. Censorship, Nadaff argues, is not merely a mechanism of silencing but also provokes new ways of speaking about controversial and crucial cultural and artistic events. It functions philosophically in the Republic to subvert Plato's most crucial arguments about politics, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Naddaff develops this stunning argument through an extraordinary reading of Plato's work. In books 2 and 3, the first censorship of poetry, she finds that Plato constitutes the poet as a rival with whom the philosopher must vie agonistically. In other words, philosophy does not replace poetry, as most commentators have suggested; rather, the philosopher becomes a worthy and ultimately victorious poetic competitor. In book 10's second censorship, Plato exiles the poets as a mode of self-subversion, rethinking and revising his theory of mimesis, of the immortality of the soul, and, most important, the first censorship of poetry. Finally, in a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the myth of Er, Naddaff explains how Plato himself censors his own censorships of poetry, thus producing the unexpected result of a poetically animated and open-ended dialectical philosophy.

Words of Her Own

Words of Her Own PDF Author: Maroona Murmu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199098212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.