Аннотация

Author’s poems have been widely published in Best New Poets 2015, Copper Nickel, Sycamore Review, and New Poetry from the Midwest 2017 Blurbs from breakout poets include Victoria Chang (prize judge), Alison Joseph, Matt Rasmussen, and Sara Eliza Johnson Book’s engagement with toxic masculinity (and more compassionate alternatives), violence, and rural landscapes/flyover country provides opportunities for wider coverage and crossover into larger markets The 2018 (and inaugural) Jake Adam York Prize winner was Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin , which was reviewed in the New York Times , was featured on PBS NewsHour and NBC News, and went into a pre-publication second printing

Аннотация

In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.<br><br>
This is the story of the Mayan <i>Popol Vuh</i>, “the book of the woven mat,” one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose—and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett—this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only <i>Where did you come from?</i> but <i>How might you live again?</i> A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as “the phonetic rendering of a living pulse.”

Аннотация

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family&#8217;s roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion &#151; both toward and away from us&#151;and it is also full of risk: from sharks unexpectedly lurking beneath estuarial rivers to the dangers of New York City, where, as Lim&#243;n reminds us, even rats find themselves trapped by the garbage cans they&#8217;ve crawled into. In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Lim&#243;n suggests that we must cleave to the world as it &#147;keep[s] opening before us,&#8221; for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each person&#8217;s mouth &#147;is the same / mouth as everyone&#8217;s, all trying to say the same thing.&#8221; For Lim&#243;n, it&#8217;s the saying&#151;individual and collective &#151; that transforms each of us into &#147;a wound overcome by wonder,&#8221; that allows &#147;the wind itself&#8221; to be our &#147;own wild whisper.&#8221;

Аннотация

Seamlessly bridging the material and spiritual worlds, Seedlip and Sweet Apple takes the reader into the mind of a true visionary: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religion in colonial America. With astonishingly original poems inspired by extensive historical research, Arra Lynn Ross creates a collection linked thematically through the voice and story of the woman who was believed by her followers to be Christ incarnate. Broadly and inclusively spiritual, this remarkable debut captures the ineffable experience of ecstatic vision, activating the progression from literal reality to heightened perception. Simultaneously, this journey delves into the manifold issues of gender and religion, public image, and charismatic leadership, as well as the line between cult and commune and the tenuous bond between faith and behavior. Written in an impressive cornucopia of forms &#151; including iambic quatrains, free verse, and prose poems &#151; Seedlip and Sweet Apple honors a complex figure startlingly relevant to contemporary life, pointing to a revolutionary way to work at living &#151; and to live in working &#151; that promises simplicity, peace, and joy.

Аннотация

In her second collection, Karen Leona Anderson transforms apparently prosaic documents &#151; recipes and receipts &#151; into expressions of human identity. From eighteenth-century cookbooks to the Food Network, the recipe becomes a site for definition and disclosure. Like a theatrical script, the recipe directs action and conjures characters. Grace Kelly at a party. In these poems, the pie is a cultural artifact and Betty Crocker, icon of domesticity, looms large. From the little black dress ($49.99 Nordstroms) to an epidural ($25.00 co-pay), Anderson reveals life in the twenty-first century to be equally hampered and enabled by expenditures. Amidst personal and domestic economies, wildness proliferates &#151; bats, deer, ocelots, and fungus &#151; reminding the reader that not all can be assimilated, eaten, or spent.Receipt is like the lovechild of Anne Sexton and Adam Smith, illuminating the ways in which our lives are both constrained by pieces of paper, and able to slip through the crevices of cultural detritus down to the rich current of animal feeling beneath.

Аннотация

Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like &#147;a knife you don&#8217;t see coming.&#8221; A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos. Poems about Shark Week and college football sit beside Roman Polanski and biting critiques of modern war. A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because after all, &#147;Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are.&#8221;

Аннотация

Influenced by both the &#147;gray, sinister sea&#8221; that came ashore where her artist parents were sent during the Cultural Revolution, and the beauty of the sea in the books she read as a child, Sea Summit is a collection of paradox and questioning. The sea is an impossible force to the poet: It is both a destructive force that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go, to be put &#147;by an ancient rattan chair,&#8221; so we can watch &#147;it&#8217;s waves toss&#8221; from above. Exploring the current ecological crisis and our complicated relationship to the wildness around us, Yi Lu finds something more complicated than a traditional nature poet might in the uneasy connection between herself and the forces of nature represented by the boundless ocean.Translated brilliantly by the acclaimed poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain, this collection of poems introduces a major contemporary Chinese poet to English-language readers.

Аннотация

&#147;What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?&#8221; Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankey&#8217;s ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel&#8217;s Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor&#8217;s Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio&#8217;s series of severed heads, and James Turrell&#8217;s experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out «the songbird in every thorn thicket» of the artist's work. Short bursts of lyrical beauty burn away &#147;like coils of incense ash,&#8221; bodies in the light of a cave flicker, coalesce and disappear. By capturing the ephemeral beauty of life in these poems, Crow-Work seeks not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.

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The eighteenth-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song&#151;which was once thought to induce insanity&#151;wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female &#147;hysterics&#8221; and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic&#151;from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud&#8217;s famed patient Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonica&#8217;s rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contact&#151;of hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric&#8217;s &#147;locked jaws.&#8221; Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Dunham&#8217;s stunning third collection is &#147;lush yet septic&#8221; (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.

Аннотация

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick&#8217;s Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the &#147;emotional core of the self,&#8221; and central to the process of memory. In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what was lost by fashioning a dreamlike reality. Odessa, &#147;roof of the underworld,&#8221; a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city. In image-packed lines bearing shades of Classical heroism, Kirkpatrick delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension.