BiblioVault - Books about Poems

Velvet

Poems

William Fargason

Northwestern University Press, 2024

An exposed and exposing collection of poetry on inherited trauma, chronic illness, and the American South

Velvet, the second full-length collection from award-winning poet William Fargason, explores chronic illness, patriarchal abuse, intergenerational trauma, and racial inequality in the American South. Its speaker moves through the generations that preceded him to understand himself, and to heal from traumas both inherited and lived. As part of that heritage, the speaker confronts a family history of participation in racist ideologies and organizations to make sense of his own place within, and responsibility to, this history. In the titular lyric essay, “Velvet,” Fargason braids scientific research and YouTube videos in an attempt to forge paths for healing while contending with an inherited chronic disease. Ultimately, Velvet argues against traditional forms of toxic masculinity and suggests that vulnerability, soft and bleeding as the velvet on a deer’s antlers, offers one solution to it.

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Violin Playing Herself in a Mirror

Poems

David Kutz-Marks

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

The first book of poetry from David Kutz-Marks. Guided by long and musical lines with quickly shifting forms of discourse and reference, these poems challenge our identities, our thoughts, and our quarrels with each other as they dart back and forth between interior spaces and real human relationships.

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The VITAL SYSTEM

Poems

CM Burroughs

Tupelo Press, 2012

The Vital System is the first published book by a poet already setting off sparks among readers across the globe. In these poems, the body is always at stake — vulnerable — and the poet dares to try and illuminate what she has called “the protective capability of violence.” Burroughs’s compression of phrasing, subverted syntax, and ability to release a story through cinematically sequenced images allow her to expose particular tensions that are gendered and racial as well as essentially human.

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The Voices of Hope

Poems, Stories, and Drawings by the Children of La Esperanza, Guatemala

Edited and Translated by Carolyn Alessio. Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea

Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Collected and translated by Carolyn Alessio, this bilingual anthology of poems, stories, memories, and philosophies was written and illustrated by the children of La Esperanza, Guatemala. Drawing upon the fortitude of their mothers, who began hand-sewing crafts to sell in the United States in order to survive the hardships of this war-torn impoverished country, Alessio’s students, aged four to sixteen, reveal amazing survival skills, fertile imaginations, and dreams of attaining better lives. The resulting work is a collection of poems and drawings that are terse, funny, sometimes sad, but always humanly, gloriously alive.

As Alessio explains, “At first, I thought I might be imagining the echoes of magical realism, but as I continued to read the students’ writing and study their drawings, I found similar themes. Witches killed children who didn’t respect the spirits; women abused by their husbands sought refuge in trees with magical doors. People who didn’t have money or jobs lived on the road and in forests, where they alternately fought and partied with the animals.”

The volume features a foreword from Luis Alberto Urrea,author of Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border and By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border.

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