The Spectral Wilderness

The Spectral Wilderness PDF Author: Oliver Bendorf
Publisher: Wick Poetry First Book
ISBN: 9781606352113
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Mark Doty, Judge "It's a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category." --Mark Doty, from the Foreword "Bendorf's collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because "what we used to be matters" in the way that language matters--however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be." --Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography "What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf's poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. 'Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open, ' he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book." --Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down

The Spectral Wilderness

The Spectral Wilderness PDF Author: Oliver Bendorf
Publisher: Wick Poetry First Book
ISBN: 9781606352113
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Mark Doty, Judge "It's a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category." --Mark Doty, from the Foreword "Bendorf's collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because "what we used to be matters" in the way that language matters--however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be." --Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography "What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf's poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. 'Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open, ' he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book." --Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down

Advantages of Being Evergreen

Advantages of Being Evergreen PDF Author: Oliver Baez Bendorf
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781880834008
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. "Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf's remarkable ADVANTAGES OF BEING EVERGREEN is an essential book for our time and for all time...Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate...This is a book of the earth's abiding wonder. And the body's unbreakable ability to bloom."--Gabrielle Calvocoressi "This book...offers a topography of the body--each poem, a dropped pin, locating across a broad intricate landscape: memory, hunger, tenderness, grief, and fear. To read these poems is to trust the momentum of tributaries or the distance traveled when the trail is full of switchbacks. This work is an exercise of faith."--Amaud Jamaul Johnson "Written from and with death, the poems in ADVANTAGES OF BEING EVERGREEN offer elegies; they utter prayers that ask our dead to stay; they come as breath constrained and animated by a form that narrates an excess of natures, an excess of rivers that interrupt this book as the poet ponders the impossible question of what it means to be home. Here the body is a shared condition. The body is language. It changes. It resists. It mourns. It reincarnates with the 'teeth of our dead around our neck.'"--Daniel Borzutzky

A Wilderness of Error

A Wilderness of Error PDF Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123696
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Soon to be an FX Docuseries from Emmy® Award-Winning Producer Marc Smerling (The Jinx) featuring the author Errol Morris! Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris examines one of the most notorious and mysterious murder trials of the twentieth century In this profoundly original meditation on truth and the justice system, Errol Morris—a former private detective and director of The Thin Blue Line—delves deeply into the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. MacDonald, whose pregnant wife and two young daughters were brutally murdered in 1970, was convicted of the killings in 1979 and remains in prison today. The culmination of an investigation spanning over twenty years and a masterly reinvention of the true-crime thriller, A Wilderness of Error is a shocking book because it shows that everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable and that crucial elements of case against MacDonald are simply not true.

The Hospital Suite

The Hospital Suite PDF Author: John Porcellino
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
ISBN: 1770462473
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A mini-comics master's poetic musings on illness & the art of getting by The Hospital Suite is a landmark work by the celebrated cartoonist and small-press legend John Porcellino—an autobiographical collection detailing his struggles with illness in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 1997, John began to have severe stomach pain. He soon found out he needed emergency surgery to remove a benign tumor from his small intestine. In the wake of the surgery, he had numerous health complications that led to a flare-up of his preexisting tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Hospital Suite is Porcellino’s response to these experiences—simply told stories drawn in the honest, heart-wrenching style of his much-loved King-Cat mini-comics. His gift for spare yet eloquent candor makes The Hospital Suite an intimate portrayal of one person’s experiences that is also intensely relatable. Porcellino’s work is lauded for its universality and quiet, clear-eyed contemplation of everyday life. The Hospital Suite is a testimony to this subtle strength, making his struggles with the medical system and its consequences for his mental health accessible and engaging.

The Spectral Arctic

The Spectral Arctic PDF Author: Shane McCorristine
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.

A Prayer Journal

A Prayer Journal PDF Author: Flannery O'Connor
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374709696
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. "I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You." O'Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted," she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story." As W. A. Sessions, who knew O'Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative Christian meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

The Live Goat

The Live Goat PDF Author: Cecil Dawkins
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
An impressive allegory set in a spectral mid-19th century wilderness which exposes and refracts freedom, corruption and the loss of innocence. Led by Alabian Eustace, father of the dead Eily, a group of Scottish settlers from Alabama moves through 500 miles of frontier to capture and return to "justice" one Isaac, a half-wit boy accused of her murder. Isaac, who greets them with joy, is roped, beaten and tortured. Then the journey "homefree" takes on a dream dimension when, through the swamps, woods, quicksand, rivers and rain, they confront cruelty and horror, feeling the weight of evil both in the threatening land and in themselves. Patient animals die, an Indian woman is raped, a slave is flogged, a tribe of alligators advance: early-on the group passed a hill of neat and waiting graves. But for Toliver, the philosopher, freedom lies beyond acceptance of evil in a common humanity. His final understanding comes from the "free" slave Lottie -- "I was free before I became free." Starved and ragged, the group returns to hang Isaac in spite of the preacher's wild warning: "You ought to have left the live goat in the wilderness. He's your innocence." Studded with symbolism (the young boy passes a hut where women are spinning) and sustained by a lyrical intensity, this is reciprocally demanding and rewarding.

Night Talks

Night Talks PDF Author: Elisabeth Rynell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999261385
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Translated by Rika Lesser. Written after the tragic and unexpected loss of her young husband, this spare and startling collection by celebrated Swedish poet and novelist Elisabeth Rynell offers a raw elegy in which everything lived--a visit with a therapist, a memory of lovemaking, a venture into the wilderness--becomes an expression of grief. Unflinching in their refusal of irony, these poems are elegantly rendered in Rika Lesser's translation, which is the first appearance of Rynell's verse in English. "Rika Lesser's fine translation recreates the demanding original with sympathetic resonance and perfect pitch." --Richard Howard "Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks--which can be read as either one long poem or a cycle of shorter poems--spirals around a woman who experiences the abrupt death of a husband still young. With its concise, intense lines, spare but far from simple, Night Talks oscillates between stark grief and memories of lush sensuality. American poet Rika Lesser brings Rynell's requiem into English with unerring sensitivity. . . . In Rika Lesser's skilled hands, Elisabeth Rynell is revealed as a poet of startling depth coupled with a firm and unpretentious humanness." --Susanna Nied " Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks, translated from the Swedish by Rika Lesser, is an essential work for the twenty-first century. In poems naked as flames, the book confronts a death and its sequel: 'out of this despair / grows a force / more than human. . . .' Night Talks is visceral, broken, adamant; Lesser's translation is seamless."--D. Nurkse Poetry. Women's Studies.

Beast Meridian

Beast Meridian PDF Author: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781934819654
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. BEAST MERIDIAN narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at- risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, it survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinxs in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer--another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities--and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle--a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma--is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history.

How a Poem Moves

How a Poem Moves PDF Author: Adam Sol
Publisher: Misfit Book
ISBN: 9781770414563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
How a Poem Moves is a collection of 35 short essays that walk readers through an array of contemporary poems. Sol is a dynamic teacher, and delivers essays that demonstrate poetry's range and pleasures through encounters with individual poems that span traditions, techniques, and ambitions.