Author: Richard Blanco
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807025917
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
A timely and moving collection from the renowned inaugural poet on issues facing our country and people—immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more. Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, Richard Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all. Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive. The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.
Author: Shara Lessley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997099416
Category : Place (Philosophy) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essay. In thirty innovative essays, THE POEM'S COUNTRY: PLACE & POETIC PRACTICE considers how the question of place shapes contemporary poetry. Responding from cities and rural communities across the United States, the contributors of THE POEM'S COUNTRY thoughtfully and passionately explore issues of politics, personal identity, ecology, the Internet, war, sexuality, faith, and the imagination. Essential reading for students of poetry at every level, THE POEM'S COUNTRY examines the connection between lyric and geographical constraint, as well as how place challenges, enchants, and helps clarify the intersections between language and the world. "This remarkable and exciting gathering of prose on contemporary poetry is international and generational at once -- this is important because it represents the imaginations and insights of emerging poets writing across a spectrum of taste, 'place and poetic practice.' Yet the critical nature of the writing is more testimony than theory, more personal than panoramic, which means that the individual essays are that much more alive, more in touch, and more unique. Overall, THE POEM'S COUNTRY resists tradition even more than it replaces it." --Stanley Plumly "THE POEM'S COUNTRY demonstrates that poetry isn't limited to the landscapes we inhabit but by the scope of the imagination itself. In these ravishing essays, the next generation of poets explores the influence of place on contemporary poetry, and a diverse reimagining of place emerges that both grounds and lifts us up." --Quan Barry
Author: Robert Sund
Publisher: Pleasure Boat Studio
ISBN: 9780912887357
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Poetry. Originally published by Shoemaker & Hoard, Pleasure Boat Studio is re-releasing this collection by esteemed NW poet Robert Sund. Sund is frequently compared to Gary Snyder, William Carlos Williams, Basho, and other poets. Snyder seems his closest kin because of the sensitivity to nature and eastern philosophy.
Author: Robert Mezey
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0375414592
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
In this provocative and thoughtful anthology, many voices join in illuminating the remarkably vast and varied American West. The verse collected here ranges from American Indian tribal poems to old folk songs like “The Streets of Laredo,” from country-western lyrics to the work of such foreign poets as Bertolt Brecht and Zbigniew Herbert. Here is the West in all its rich variety–the harsh life of farms and ranches; man’s destructive invasion into forest and desert solitudes; the bars and bistros of San Francisco and Hollywood; Pacific surf and endless highways; the ghost towns, the poverty, and the legendary world of cowpunchers and gunslingers. From Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific” to Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” from Fred Koller’s “Lone Star State of Mind” to Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets”–the West is evoked in all its incarnations, both actual and mythic.
Author: Gary Snyder
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811222802
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
“A reaffirmation of a back country of the spirit."—Kirkus Reviews This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"—poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"—poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"—poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back"—poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the "backward" countries, and the “back country" of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.
Author: Suji Kwock Kim
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128725
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96
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Book Description
Offers poems of family, history, love, and vision.
Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Counterpoint
ISBN: 9781619021082
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
First published in 1971, The Country of Marriage is Wendell Berry's fifth volume of poetry. What he calls "an expansive metaphor" is "a farmer's relationship to his land as the basic and central relation of humanity to creation." "Similarly, marriage is the basic and central community tie; it begins and stands for the relation we have to family and to the larger circles of human association. And these relationships are in turn basic to, and may stand for, our relationship to God and to the sustaining mysteries and powers of creation." Each of the thirty–five poems in this collection is concerned with this metaphor. The long sequence that is itself entitled "The Country of Marriage," perhaps the finest single work in the book, is a grave, moving, and beautifully wrought love poem. But the shorter lyrics have an equal grace and beauty—writing that contains the exhilarating lucidity of mountain spring water. And there are most notably, several more poems about the "Mad Farmer," who advises us here to 'every day do something that won't compute.' Berry has here perfected a work that is immediately accessible but that becomes, as we read it again, always more satisfying, reverberant with manifold meanings.
Author: Arielle Greenberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781945588433
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"Sexually explicit poems that address the radical possibilities of a woman's pleasure and the endless varieties of human desire. Arielle Greenberg's I Live in the Country & other dirty poems exploits and undoes the stereotype of the "wholesome country life." Here, the speaker moves to the country ("where the animals are") in order to live a whole life, one in which she can live honestly and openly in a non-monogamous marriage. Her book is a visceral, erotic celebration of the cornucopia of sexual pleasures to be had in that rural life-in the muck of a pasture in spring or behind the bins of whole-wheat pastry flour at the local Co-op. Greenberg hauls out what has previously been stored under dark counters and labeled deviant-kink, fetish, and bondage- and moves it into the sunshine of sex-positivity and mutual consent. In doing so, she forges new literary territory-a feminist re-visioning of the Romantic pastoral poems of seduction. "I am trying to turn my eye toward joy," she writes. "My heart toward bliss.""--
Author: Amanda Gorman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 059346527X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 34
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Book Description
The instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 USA Today bestseller Amanda Gorman’s electrifying and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. “Stunning.” —CNN “Dynamic.” —NPR “Deeply rousing and uplifting.” —Vogue On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special gift edition, perfect for any reader looking for some inspiration. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this remarkable keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.
Author: Austin Smith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691181578
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.
