Playful Song Called Beautiful

Playful Song Called Beautiful PDF Author: John Blair
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384008
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In poems that are either formally rhymed and metered or written in syllabically structured three-line stanzas, Blair wanders among universal orders and failures of desire, where the unlikeliness of any of us being who we are, what we are, where we are forces us to consider—and reconsider—the possibilities of belief and meaning. Blair’s poems are elegant and earthy, sometimes profane, and sometimes lovingly playful. From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable.

Playful Song Called Beautiful

Playful Song Called Beautiful PDF Author: John Blair
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384008
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In poems that are either formally rhymed and metered or written in syllabically structured three-line stanzas, Blair wanders among universal orders and failures of desire, where the unlikeliness of any of us being who we are, what we are, where we are forces us to consider—and reconsider—the possibilities of belief and meaning. Blair’s poems are elegant and earthy, sometimes profane, and sometimes lovingly playful. From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable.

The Fix

The Fix PDF Author: Lisa Wells
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609385489
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
Proceeding from Hélène Cixous’s charge to “kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing,” The Fix forges that woman’s reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life. These poems of lyric beauty and unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire—often to darkly comedic effect. In encounters with strangers in dive bars and on highway shoulders, and through ekphrastic engagement with visionaries like William Blake, José Clemente Orozco, and the Talking Heads, this book seeks the real beneath the dissembling surface. Here, nothing is fixed, but grace arrives by diving into the complicated past in order to find a way to live, now. “Woman Seated with Thighs Apart” Often I am permitted to return to this kitchen tipsy, pinned to the fridge, to the precise instant the kiss smashed in. When the jaws of night are grinding and the double bed is half asleep the snore beside me syncs to the traffic light, pulsing red, ragged up in the linen curtain. I leak such solicitous sighs to asphalt, slicked with black ice, high beams speed over my body whole while the drugstore weeps its remedy in strident neon throbs— I doubt I’ll make it out. It’s a cold country. It’s the sting of quarantine. It’s my own two hands working deep inside the sheets.

Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara

Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara PDF Author: William Fargason
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387058
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
2020 Florida Book Award in Poetry, Gold Medal In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.

The Last Unkillable Thing

The Last Unkillable Thing PDF Author: Emily Pittinos
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387643
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
""What will be possible / when I'm no longer sorry?" asks the speaker of THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING after the sudden death of a parent. "What do lost daughters burst into?" In this debut collection by Emily Pittinos, the speaker is tasked with relearning the ways of loneliness, family, sex, and wilderness as a person who feels thoroughly and abruptly without. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING is a journey across landscapes of mourning where "in [the] periphery, every shadow / is a new dead thing." The light of these poems takes on the tint of grief, and through that light the speaker reexamines what remains: her changed self, her desire, the midwestern flora, the unyielding snow. Interior and exterior ecologies blur until loss becomes a place of its own, and the only inevitability. "Doesn't it hurt," Pittinos writes, "to be human. I'm so human, I could die.""--

In Kind

In Kind PDF Author: Maggie Queeney
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388984
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 89

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Book Description
Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney’s In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation.

I Always Carry My Bones

I Always Carry My Bones PDF Author: Felicia Zamora
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387775
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
The poems in I Always Carry My Bones tackle the complex ideation of home—the place where horrid and beautiful intertwine and carve a being into existence—for marginalized and migrant peoples. Felicia Zamora explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging—a belonging inside and outside the flesh. This powerful collection is a message of longing for a sanctuary of self, the dwelling of initial energy needed for the collective fight for human rights.

Lo

Lo PDF Author: Melissa Crowe
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388992
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 89

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Book Description
Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps

In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps PDF Author: Rob Schlegel
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386450
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 77

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Book Description
With calm abandon, Rob Schlegel stands among the genderless trees to shake notions of masculinity and fatherhood. Schlegel incorporates the visionary into everyday life, inhabiting patterns of relation that do not rely on easy categories. Working from the premise that poetry is indistinguishable from the life of the poet, Schlegel considers how his relationship to the creative process is forever changed when he becomes something new to someone else. “The meaning I’m trying to protect is,” Schlegel writes, “the heart is neither boy, nor girl.” In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps is a tender search for the mother in the father, the poet in the parent, the forest in the human.

Chariton Review 40.2

Chariton Review 40.2 PDF Author: Truman State University Press
Publisher: Truman State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
Chariton Review Fall/Winter 2017

High Ground Coward

High Ground Coward PDF Author: Alicia Mountain
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609385454
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Alicia Mountain’s urgent and astonishing debut collection maps a new queer landscape through terrain alive and sensual, defiant and inviting. With a voice that beckons while it howls, Mountain nimbly traverses lyric, confessional, and narrative modes, leaving groundbreaking tracks for us to follow. High Ground Coward offers fists full of soil, leftovers for breakfast, road trip as ritual, twins of lovers and twins of ourselves. This world blooms with hunger-inducing detail, its speakers asking us to consider what it will take to satisfy our own appetites while simultaneously trying to nourish one another. “Ferocious, even the softest part,” Mountain shows us “a way to fall in love with wanting,” leaving us “ravenous, but gradually.” Bearing witness to identity formation in solitude and communion, High Ground Coward is an almanac of emotional and relational seasons. Mountain’s speakers question the meaning of inheritance, illness, violence, mythology, and family architecture. Whether Mountain is at work revealing the divinity of doubt, the entanglement of devotion, or the dominion that place holds over us, High Ground Coward heralds a thrilling poetic debut. From “Scavenger” We three eat food and are in love. This is the easy way to say there are stores beneath the floor. Potatoes and shallots, hard-necked garlic streaked purple, jars beside jars, themselves each staving globes of suction. Preservation, a guardian hunger. In the evening I whisper to the boiled beet, like a naked organ in my flushed hand: You are ground blood, you are new born, you have never been nothing— thawfruit seedflower greenstart rootbulb handpull shedscrub mouthsweet and again.