The Song Poet

The Song Poet PDF Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1627794956
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This “memorable and moving immigrant story” chronicles the life of the author’s father, a Hmong refugee and keeper of cultural memory (Booklist). Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses. He keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father, Bee Yang, the song poet—a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America’s Secret War. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. The songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a St. Paul housing project and on the factory floor, until, with the death of Bee’s mother, they leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has burnished a life of poverty for his children, polishing their grim reality so that they might shine.

The Song Poet

The Song Poet PDF Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1627794956
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book Here

Book Description
This “memorable and moving immigrant story” chronicles the life of the author’s father, a Hmong refugee and keeper of cultural memory (Booklist). Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses. He keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father, Bee Yang, the song poet—a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America’s Secret War. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. The songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a St. Paul housing project and on the factory floor, until, with the death of Bee’s mother, they leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has burnished a life of poverty for his children, polishing their grim reality so that they might shine.

My Father Was a Poet

My Father Was a Poet PDF Author: Lester Graves Lennon
Publisher: CW Books
ISBN: 9781625490223
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
MY FATHER WAS A POET by Lester Graves Lennon is a ferocious, loving exploration of family, war and fear. His rhythms powerfully establish a poetry of uncompromising ground. "In Lester Graves Lennon's new book personal history and national history become interwoven to remarkable effect. This is a collection of startling contradictions in which love and hate, peace and violence, light and dark not only clash but intermingle. Best of all, these poems feel alive--struggling, weeping, laughing, and loving--just like the vibrant characters they depict."--Dana Gioia "Although Lester Graves Lennon's new collection frequently treats the terrors of contemporary life, his poems about his family and about the larger family of our republic affirm the possibility of social progress and intellectual enlightenment. As when reading Robert Frost, we feel reading Lennon that maybe we can increase--increment by fractional increment, generation by troubled generation, through love and the arts and sciences--our humanity and hold on the planet."--Timothy Steele

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

The Latehomecomer

The Latehomecomer PDF Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566892627
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice. Together with her sister, Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.

Motherhood

Motherhood PDF Author: Carmela Ciuraru
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 9781841597652
Category : Motherhood
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From tenth-century Japan's Izumi Shikibu, colonial America's Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel's Yehuda Amichai, Ireland's Paul Muldoon, and Russia's Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship. Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology, Audre Lorde recalls "How the days went / While you were blooming within me"; Jorie Graham muses on her mother's sewing box; Allen Ginsberg says goodbye in "Kaddish"; and Langston Hughes invokes a mother's empowering example- "Don't you fall now- / For I'se still goin', honey, / I'se still climbin', / And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." From Emily Bronte's "Upon Her Soothing Breast" and Seamus Heaney's "Mother of the Groom" to Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the more than one hundred poems collected here enshrine the miracle of motherhood and the richness of feeling and experience it inspires.

Why We Can't Sleep

Why We Can't Sleep PDF Author: Ada Calhoun
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802147860
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The acclaimed author explores the hidden crises of Gen X women in this “engaging hybrid of first-person confession, reportage [and] pop culture analysis” (The New Republic). Ada Calhoun was married with children and a good career—and yet she was miserable. She thought she had no right to complain until she realized how many other Generation X women felt the same way. What could be behind this troubling trend? To find out, Calhoun delved into housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data. At every turn, she saw that Gen X women were facing new problems as they entered middle age—problems that were being largely overlooked. Calhoun spoke with women across America who were part of the generation raised to “have it all.” She found that most were exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. And instead of being heard, they were being told to lean in, take “me-time,” or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order. In Why We Can’t Sleep, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament. She offers practical advice on how to ourselves out of the abyss—and keep the next generation of women from falling in. The result is reassuring, empowering, and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them.

My Father's Love: Portrait of the poet as a young girl: a memoir

My Father's Love: Portrait of the poet as a young girl: a memoir PDF Author: Sharon Doubiago
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984130405
Category : Poets, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. In this first volume of her two-volume memoir, prize-winning poet Sharon Doubiago writes an extraordinary memoir of growing up in the 1940s and 50s in South Central Los Angeles and the desert mountain town of Ramona. MY FATHER'S LOVE addresses the current controversies of memory and memoir and sets new standards for the genre by adhering to historical records, letters, diaries, interviews, and a drive to know the unfabricated truth, while weaving these, in stunning language and imagery with remembering and reliving. This book attempts to understand her family rooted deep in the history of America, in both its Southern aristocracy and its victims. It looks at the world through the eyes of a child who knows what love is, a girl labeled beautiful, a victim of rape, incest and psychological terrorism, depicting the genesis of an American epic poet. It will change your perspective of the world forever.

Poetic License

Poetic License PDF Author: Gretchen Cherington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631527126
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.

For My Father Falling Asleep at Saint Mary's Hospital

For My Father Falling Asleep at Saint Mary's Hospital PDF Author: Dennis Sampson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
In For My Father Falling Asleep at St. Mary's Hospital, award-winning poet Dennis Sampson writes of the myriad of emotions he experiences while coping with his father's slow death: loneliness, vulnerability, anger, futility -- all explored in unflinching detail. Walking a fine line between an awareness of evil and the promise of the dawn, the poems reflect the idea that real happiness sometimes comes from enduring unhappiness with fortitude. For those who are alone and coping with loss or tragedy, Sampson provides an empathetic voice.

Papa Is a Poet

Papa Is a Poet PDF Author: Natalie S. Bober
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805094075
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 46

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Book Description
Papa Is a Poet: is a picture book about the famous American poet Robert Frost, imagined through the eyes of his daughter Lesley. When Robert Frost was a child, his family thought he would grow up to be a baseball player. Instead, he became a poet. His life on a farm in New Hampshire inspired him to write "poetry that talked," and today he is famous for his vivid descriptions of the rural life he loved so much. There was a time, though, when Frost had to struggle to get his poetry published. Told from the point of view of Lesley, Robert Frost's oldest daughter, this is the story of how a lover of language found his voice.