Author: Kelly Cherry
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807165069
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
“Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.”—Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry the life and times of one of America’s best-known scientists, the father of the atomic bomb who later lobbied for containment of nuclear weaponry. In brief, elegant stanzas, Kelly Cherry examines Oppenheimer’s inspirations, dreams, and values, visiting the events, places, and people that inspired him or led him to despair. She finds his place among scientists of his own time, such as Alan Turing and Albert Einstein, as well as his connections with historical and mythological figures from John Donne to Persephone. “Of course he had blood on his hands. Who did not?” says Cherry, in “The Nature of War.” Again and again in the course of this remarkable poem, Cherry’s narration of Oppenheimer’s life compels her readers to contemplate the vagaries of science, guilt, and our responsibilities to each other. “Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer is a book length poem in which the architect of the atom bomb comes to embody America and the West’s Faustian control of nature and the paradoxical helplessness and guilt which that control entailed. Oppenheim is marvelous, complicated, flawed and admirable character, and these poems read like chapters in a novel without in any way abandoning the intensities of feeling and image or delight in language we associate with lyric poetry. A terrific achievement and a compelling read.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Life Pig and Reel to Reel
Author: Kelly Cherry
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807165042
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
“Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.”—Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry the life and times of one of America’s best-known scientists, the father of the atomic bomb who later lobbied for containment of nuclear weaponry. In brief, elegant stanzas, Kelly Cherry examines Oppenheimer’s inspirations, dreams, and values, visiting the events, places, and people that inspired him or led him to despair. She finds his place among scientists of his own time, such as Alan Turing and Albert Einstein, as well as his connections with historical and mythological figures from John Donne to Persephone. “Of course he had blood on his hands. Who did not?” says Cherry, in “The Nature of War.” Again and again in the course of this remarkable poem, Cherry’s narration of Oppenheimer’s life compels her readers to contemplate the vagaries of science, guilt, and our responsibilities to each other. “Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer is a book length poem in which the architect of the atom bomb comes to embody America and the West’s Faustian control of nature and the paradoxical helplessness and guilt which that control entailed. Oppenheim is marvelous, complicated, flawed and admirable character, and these poems read like chapters in a novel without in any way abandoning the intensities of feeling and image or delight in language we associate with lyric poetry. A terrific achievement and a compelling read.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Life Pig and Reel to Reel
Author: Kelly Cherry
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807165050
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
“Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.”—Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry the life and times of one of America’s best-known scientists, the father of the atomic bomb who later lobbied for containment of nuclear weaponry. In brief, elegant stanzas, Kelly Cherry examines Oppenheimer’s inspirations, dreams, and values, visiting the events, places, and people that inspired him or led him to despair. She finds his place among scientists of his own time, such as Alan Turing and Albert Einstein, as well as his connections with historical and mythological figures from John Donne to Persephone. “Of course he had blood on his hands. Who did not?” says Cherry, in “The Nature of War.” Again and again in the course of this remarkable poem, Cherry’s narration of Oppenheimer’s life compels her readers to contemplate the vagaries of science, guilt, and our responsibilities to each other. “Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer is a book length poem in which the architect of the atom bomb comes to embody America and the West’s Faustian control of nature and the paradoxical helplessness and guilt which that control entailed. Oppenheim is marvelous, complicated, flawed and admirable character, and these poems read like chapters in a novel without in any way abandoning the intensities of feeling and image or delight in language we associate with lyric poetry. A terrific achievement and a compelling read.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Life Pig and Reel to Reel
Author: Kelly Cherry
Publisher: UW-Madison Libraries Parallel Press
ISBN: 1934795429
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
Kelly Cherry wrestles with the complicated figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, both the “father of the atomic bomb” and the flesh-and-blood man, from his early upbringing to his work with the Manhattan Project. Her poems explore his formation and education, coming inevitably to rest with his best-known achievement: “The atom would reveal / a power incommensurate with its size. / The skies would open their doors, the firmament shift. / A man would find and lose and find himself.” Kelly Cherry has previously published twenty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, eight chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. She was the first recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work. Other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bradley Major Achievement (Lifetime) Award, a USIS Speaker Award (The Philippines), a Distinguished Alumnus Award, three Wisconsin Arts Board fellowships, the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Award for Distinguished Book of Stories in 1999 (2000), The Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and selection as a Wisconsin Notable Author. Poet Laureate Emerita of Virginia and a member of the Electorate of Poets Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, she is also Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She and her husband live in Virginia.
Author: Kelly Cherry
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171840
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 87
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Book Description
In Observing the Invisible, Kelly Cherry crafts poems that explore the ever-evolving realm of modern physics, confronting the invisibilities and mysteries of the material world. She leverages challenging ideas into a space of contemplative wonder as the book moves from external observation into an increasingly inward space of personal reflection and expression. Throughout, Observing the Invisible remains deliberate in its concentration on what cannot be, almost as if the poems are being erased even as they are being written. Acknowledging that such contradictions cannot sustain themselves for long, Cherry seeks out these difficulties and ultimately finds resolutions.
Author: Susan Naramore Maher
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149620283X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
In response to the growing scale and complexity of environmental threats, this volume collects articles, essays, personal narratives, and poems by more than forty authors in conversation about “thinking continental”—connecting local and personal landscapes to universal systems and processes—to articulate the concept of a global or planetary citizenship. Reckoning with the larger matrix of biome, region, continent, hemisphere, ocean, and planet has become necessary as environmental challenges require the insights not only of scientists but also of poets, humanists, and social scientists. Thinking Continental braids together abstract approaches with strands of more-personal narrative and poetry, showing how our imaginations can encompass the planetary while also being true to our own concrete life experiences in the here and now.
Author: Romeo Garcia
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822989018
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
Decolonial projects can end up reinforcing dominant modes of thinking by shoehorning understandings of Indigenous and non-Western traditions within Eurocentric frameworks. The pluralization of literacies and the creation of so-called alternative rhetorics accepts that there is a totalizing reality of rhetoric and literacy. This volume seeks to decenter these theories and to engage Indigenous contexts on their own terms, starting with the very tools of representation. Language itself can disrupt normative structures and create pluriversal possibilities. The volume editors and contributors argue for epistemic change at the level of the language and media that people use to represent meaning. The range of topics covered includes American Indian and Indigenous representations, literacies, and rhetorics; critical revisionist historiography and comparative rhetorics; delinking colonial literacies of cartographic power and modernity; “northern” and “southern” hemispheric relations; and theorizations of/from oceanic border spaces.
Author: the late Abraham Pais
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199883203
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
The late Abraham Pais, author of the award winning biography of Albert Einstein, Subtle is the Lord, here offers an illuminating portrait of another of his eminent colleagues, J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the most charismatic and enigmatic figures of modern physics. Pais introduces us to a precocious youth who sped through Harvard in three years, made signal contributions to quantum mechanics while in his twenties, and was instrumental in the growth of American physics in the decade before the Second World War, almost single-handedly bringing it to a state of prominence. He paints a revealing portrait of Oppenheimer's life in Los Alamos, where in twenty remarkable, feverish months, and under his inspired guidance, the first atomic bomb was designed and built, a success that made Oppenheimer America's most famous scientist. Pais describes Oppenheimer's long tenure as Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, where the two men worked together closely. He shows not only Oppenheimer's brilliance and leadership, but also how his displays of intensity and arrogance won him powerful enemies, ones who would ultimately make him one of the principal victims of the Red Scare of the 1950s. J. Robert Oppenheimer is Abraham Pais's final work, completed after his death by Robert P. Crease, an acclaimed historian of science in his own right. Told with compassion and deep insight, it is the most comprehensive biography of the great physicist available. Anyone seeking an insider's portrait of this enigmatic man will find it indispensable.
Author: Tina Schumann
Publisher: Red Hen Press
ISBN: 1597096180
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
A collection of poetry with “resilience throughout and an awareness of the common world that both comforts and devastates” (Dorianne Laux, award-winning author of Only As the Day Is Long). From Tina Schumann, recipient of the American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal and a Pushcart Prize nominee, comes a full collection of fifty-six poems reflecting on the concept of self, loss, fragility, and the constructs we must create in order to face the transient nature of life. Praising the Paradox was named a finalist in the National Poetry Series, The New Issues Poetry Prize, The Four Way Books Intro Prize, and others. It was also listed as a “remarkable work” in the Tupelo Press open submission period. “A rich guidebook for a life—a grand companion. These deeply satisfying poems, with their lush images and fluid sound movements, unfold in elegance, settling the spirit. In every stanza, Schumann’s honest voice feels compelling and humble . . . Nothing forced, nothing labored. What a treat.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist “Tina Schumann’s stunning new collection is extraordinary in its intelligence. She has organized her poems by locating the innumerable paradoxes in our lives, in our minds, in the world. Her book is brilliantly unique and, I dare say, unrepeatable; she owns this territory. And what is so important about a paradox? The answer is that paradox is what the world is made of. The other (necessary) ingredient here is feeling. Praising the Paradox will make you feel, think, and reflect. Schumann’s lines will resonate in your heart. They will resonate in mine forever.” —Kelly Cherry, author of Observing the Invisible
Author: Mark Wolverton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429953284
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
A Life in Twilight reveals the least-known and most enigmatic period of J. Robert Oppenheimer's life, from the public humiliation he endured after the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission's investigation into his alleged communist leanings and connections to his death in 1967. It covers Oppenheimer's continued work as a scientist and philosopher and head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, his often controversial public appearances, as well as parts of his private life. What emerges is a portrait of a man who was toppled from the highest echelons of politics and society, had to see his honor and name blackened, but succeeded in maintaining his dignity and rebuilding a shattered life, although he never truly recovered from the McCarthy-inspired persecution he suffered. Previously unpublished FBI files round out the picture and cast a sinister cloud over Oppenheimer's final years, during which he remained under occasional surveillance. Mark Wolverton has succeeded in presenting an evenhanded and very well- researched account of a life that ended in twilight. It reads like a written version of the acclaimed film Good Night, and Good Luck, and indeed Murrow's interview with Oppenheimer is one of the central elements of the story. A Life in Twilight is an important exploration, not only of a prominent scientist and philosopher, but also of an unforgettable era in American history.
