A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY127 start with G start with G
Tolson eventually attempted to incorporate the technical achievements of T.S. Eliot and the New Criticism into a complex modern poetry which would accurately represent the extraordinary tensions, paradoxes, and sophistication, both highbrow and lowbrow, of modern Harlem. As a consequence his position in literary history is problematical. The publication of this earliest of his manuscripts will help clarify Tolson's achievement and surprise many of his readers with its readily accessible, warmly human poetic portraiture.
Praise for Lawrence Joseph:
"Poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness… Joseph gives us new hope for the resourcefulness of humanity, and of poetry."
---John Ashbery
"Like Henry Adams, Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know."
---David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review
"The most important lawyer-poet of our era."
---David Skeel, Legal Affairs
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
Essays on poetry by the most important poet-lawyer of our era
The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose presents works by prominent poet and lawyer Lawrence Joseph that focus on poetry and poetics, and on what it is to be a poet. Joseph takes the reader through the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, a lineage that includes Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, switching critical tracks to major European poets like Eugenio Montale and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and back to American masters like James Schuyler and Adrienne Rich.
Always discerning, especially on issues of identity, form, and the pressures of history and politics, Joseph places his own poetry within its critical contexts, presenting narratives of his life in Detroit, where he grew up, and in Manhattan, where he has lived for 30 years. These pieces also portray Joseph’s Lebanese, Syrian, and Catholic heritages, and his life as a lawyer, distinguished law professor, and legal scholar.
Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.
This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.
“Everyone who loves the true power of games will benefit from the treasure trove of insights in Game Poems.” — Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design
“Magnuson shines a sensitive and incisive light on small, often moving, videogames.” — D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Professor of Digital Media, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, MIT
“[Game Poems] tells a new story about games— that games can be lyrical, beautiful, emotionally challenging—to inspire creators and critics alike.” —Noah Wardrip-Fruin, author of How Pac-Man Eats
“Even as the news swells with impending doom for creativity, writing, and text itself, this literate and crafty book pursues poetry not through implacable algorithms but in concrete and personal play. It should be an indispensable guide for anyone who aims to maintain the true, human promise of technical poetics.”—Stuart Moulthrop, coauthor of Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives
“For far too long videogames have flourished – and commanded both capital and attention – in a kind of counterculture that they seem to have created as if ex nihilo for themselves and their players. But we are these players, and their culture has always been integrated with all of our own. In this evenhanded artist-scholar’s ars poetica Jordan Magnuson respects the material cultural specificity of videogames while regarding them through the ‘lens of poetry’ in order to discover – and help create – a practice and an art of Game Poems within the wider field. Magnuson formally, int(erv)entionally embraces this art as lyrically poetic.”—John Cayley, Brown University
“In Game Poems, Magnuson listens carefully to videogames, and hears them speak to questions of art, language, and meaning that connect our written past to our software future. Read this book and you will hear it too.”—Frank Lantz, Director, NYU Game Center
“Jordan Magnuson has created a work that ties together the worlds of poetry and videogames in a deep and enlightening way. For those of us who care about the potential of poetic games, Jordan greatly improves the language of how we talk about them and expands our ability to see what this unique form can become. This is one of my favorite books on game design and I apologize in advance to those whom I will end up cornering and not being able to stop talking to about it.”—Benjamin Ellinger, Game Design Program Director, DigiPen Institute of Technology
“A groundbreaking and accessible book that helps us think about games as poems. With patient tenacity, Magnuson teases out what he felt for years as he engaged in his own practice of making videogames. His mission to help us apply a ‘lyric reading’ to games so that our engagement with, and appreciation of, games can be enhanced feels deeply personal. Drawing from a wide range of games and computational media scholars, poetry scholars, game creators, and poets, Magnuson provides a rigorous, balanced, and unique interdisciplinary contribution. A must-read for videogame scholars, practicing game makers, and anyone interested in the potential of ‘game poems.’”—Susana Ruiz, University of California, Santa Cruz
“This book tenaciously wrenches videogame hermeneutics from the insatiable maws of rhetoric and narratology—to the cheers of poets everywhere. In elucidating the lyric characteristics of the "game poem," Magnuson demonstrates not just that poetry is a useful lens for understanding videogames, but also that videogames can be a useful lens for understanding poetry. A rewarding text for scholars, game designers, poets, and anyone in between.”—Allison Parrish, Interactive Telecommunications Program and Interactive Media Arts, NYU
“A concise, passionate articulation - and defense! - of an artistic space between poems and videogames. If game scholars wish to prove that they are not engaged merely in an apologetics for violent pornography, they need only to teach this book.”—Chris Bateman, author of Imaginary Games and 21st Century Game Design
“I feel I've found a kindred spirit in Jordan Magnuson and his practical recommendations for creating distilled, compelling, personal videogames – throw out the conventions of game design one at a time? Yes, please! The revelation for me in this book, however, is the heat and power of the language of poets and poetry brought close to videogame design. There's much in here worth pursuing to kindle the fires of new and exciting videogame poems, and Jordan is a capable and delightfully humble guide.”—Pippin Barr, author of How to Play a Video Game and The Stuff Games Are Made Of
“With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson lays to rest any last vestige of the notion that the implicit limits of games are as ‘entertainment products’. By taking games seriously as successors of the lyric poetry tradition, he opens up new avenues for how game designers can think about what they do, how critical game theorists can approach their many-faceted object of study, and how players can more fully engage with videogames.”—Soraya Murray, author of On Video Games
“Game Poems shines an important light on a neglected area of videogame theory and provides unique guidance for those interested in exploring the poetic potential of videogames.”—Jenova Chen, designer of Flow, Flower, Journey, and Sky: Children of the Light
“Popular frameworks for video game scholarship consistently fail to account for the most avant-garde and affective works of interactive art. With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson provides not only a lens to understand these diverse and important titles but also a guide to constructing the next generation of personal and incisive games. With numerous examples from decades of experimental games, including Magnuson's own minimalist and insightful work, this book is an excellent introduction to the form for neophytes as well as finally providing words to describe a movement that many experienced game poets previously understood only intuitively.”—Gregory Avery-Weir, creator of The Majesty of Colors and Looming
“Jordan Magnuson is one of a surprisingly small group of artists who see in the technology of videogames a versatile medium capable of expressing much more than conventional games.”—Michaël Samyn, co-founder, Tale of Tales; co-creator of Sunset, The Graveyard, and The Path
“So much has been written about what games are, and yet there’s always a new way of thinking about them. In Jordan Magnuson’s Game Poems we discover that games are also a lyrical form of art; that games can be understood as poetry, and that the making games as poetry creates new modes of artistic expression. Jordan Magnuson’s book is a fascinating exploration of games as poetry, and the poetry of play.”—Miguel Sicart, author of Play Matters, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Playing Software
“In Game Poems, I found a new perspective on the kind of videogames that are dearest to me: short, personal, poetic games. By looking at games through the lens of lyric poetry, Jordan Magnuson puts into focus the workings of that mysterious hodgepodge of audio, visuals, and interactivity: the language of videogames. Both experienced and novice game makers will find approachable, practical advice on the craft of videogames. And anyone who plays short games will find new ways of appreciating and talking about them. I know I will be returning to it for inspiration when making my own small games!”—Adam Le Doux, creator of Bitsy
“As a creator and researcher, Jordan Magnuson has been able to demonstrate through the utmost visual simplicity, by enhancing basic geometric forms, the empathetic capacity of the videogame medium. Game Poems explores this idea and the reconfiguration of the videogame beyond its ludic component, highlighting the artistic and poetic potential of games.”—Antonio César Moreno Cantano, University Complutense of Madrid
“Poems ask us to slow down, pay attention, and take the time to appreciate our experiences. Emerging from Magnuson's need to find ways to talk about his own creative practice, this book is all about discovering ways to do this with videogames. Magnuson explores what it means to view videogames as poetry, and provides insight, as a practitioner, on how to make game poems that enable and encourage this type of reflection. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from literature and philosophy to game studies and game design, this book covers a lot of material, but always remains grounded in concrete examples and solid theory. The book ends with a call to “go make some game poems!” After reading the book, I was keen to do exactly that. I urge you to do the same!”—Alex Mitchell, National University of Singapore
“To many, poetry is a dying – or dead – art form. Few people sit down at night to open their favorite poet’s chapbook with the latest streaming service at hand or their favorite videogame console sitting nearby. Spectacle seems to be the cultural norm, and this can be no more evident than in videogames: when the latest and greatest offers 60+ hours of spine-tingling excitement, why would someone want to launch a smaller-form game about expressions such as love, death, loneliness, or even God? But, as Jordan Magnuson, in his new book Games Poems, shows, poems have always been an integral piece of forming human culture. Poems have the ability to get right to the heart of the matter and, in fact, pierce the heart of the reader. Poems can be a form of cultural resistance, and even launch revolutions. Magnuson’s book highlights what it means to use the medium of game design as poetry. Magnuson presents several examples of the intricacies of poetry in general, as well as work that fuses the ideals of poetry with game design. Magnuson succinctly examines how the imagination, rhythm, intensity, style – and brevity – of poetry can enlighten the game design process in order to form possibility spaces within videogames that are pointed and powerful.”—Tim Samoff, Games and Interactive Media Program Director, Azusa Pacific University
In Foster’s vivid imagination, however, they point to the surprises hidden in the quotidian: a trip to the DMV, a visit to a chain restaurant, and the saintly reflections of the Kansas City Royals’ best closer. A lesser, more faddish writer would then tend toward ironic distance, but Foster fearlessly raises such unfashionable subjects as joy, doubt, gratitude, and grief without losing a sly sense of humor, even (as the sample poem shows) about poetry itself. Given its ambition, The Garbage Eater hardly seems a debut work. Foster’s universal subject matter and approachable style will win fans among both the most experienced poetry readers and those easily intimidated by contemporary verse.
In this first substantial study of Emily Dickinson's devotion to flowers and gardening, Judith Farr seeks to join both poet and gardener in one creative personality. She casts new light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility, and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality.
Gardening, Farr demonstrates, was Dickinson's other vocation, more public than the making of poems but analogous and closely related to it. Over a third of Dickinson's poems and nearly half of her letters allude with passionate intensity to her favorite wildflowers, to traditional blooms like the daisy or gentian, and to the exotic gardenias and jasmines of her conservatory. Each flower was assigned specific connotations by the nineteenth century floral dictionaries she knew; thus, Dickinson's association of various flowers with friends, family, and lovers, like the tropes and scenarios presented in her poems, establishes her participation in the literary and painterly culture of her day. A chapter, "Gardening with Emily Dickinson" by Louise Carter, cites family letters and memoirs to conjecture the kinds of flowers contained in the poet's indoor and outdoor gardens. Carter hypothesizes Dickinson's methods of gardening, explaining how one might grow her flowers today.
Beautifully illustrated and written with verve, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson will provide pleasure and insight to a wide audience of scholars, admirers of Dickinson's poetry, and garden lovers everywhere.
In this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs.
Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus “Buff” Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us.
The Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press’s Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
In this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs.
Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus “Buff” Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us.
The Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press’s Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
Recepient of 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship
Apart from two volumes published in the 1990s, the work of L. S. Asekoff has been winning admirers only among those lucky enough to encounter it in poetry journals and magazines over the last three decades. Now comes a new collection from this startlingly original poet. Astonishing in its variety of forms and subject matter, The Gate of Horn includes a series of monologues in which Asekoff conjures voices as disparate as the Marquis de Sade, an ancient Aztec warrior, an immigrant
Korean woman, a Vietnam vet, and a Holocaust historian. Above all, however, it is Asekoff’s own unmistakable voice that is on display— surreally sensual, intensely lyrical, darkly tragicomic. Through the gates of death and dreams, these wide-ranging, loosely associative poems speak with wit and erudition to the deepest mysteries of language and of life.
To mark the first decade of this pathbreaking project, Gathering Ground presents more than one hundred poems by Cave Canem participants and faculty. It embraces an impressive and eclectic gathering of forms, including sonnets, a bop (a new form created by a Cave Canem faculty member), blues, sestinas, prose poems, centos, free verse, and more. The roster of distinguished contributors includes Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, Sonya Sanchez, Al Young, and many others.
For newcomers and aficionados alike, Gathering Ground assembles in one place the most innovative voices in contemporary African American poetry and boldly attests to the important position it holds in verse-making today.
Toi Derricotte is author of the memoir The Black Notebooks and of four books of poetry: Tender, Captivity, Natural Birth, and The Empress of the Death House. She is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Cornelius Eady is the author of Brutal Imagination, Autobiography of a Jukebox, You Don't Miss Your Water, The Gathering of My Name, and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
“An East Anglian Diptych” explores those parts of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk linked by three rivers and by those ancient paths and tracks known as ley lines which connect locality and locality and time with time. “Facts From an Apocryphal Midwest” explores another group of trails that began as prehistoric paths down which copper from Lake Superior was carried from the early days of the mound-builders. Despite the historical backdrop of these poems, both bring the reader into the present in unexpected ways, preparing him or her for the strange and visionary “A Compostela Diptych,” winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award.
David St. John's foreword speaks eloquently of Levis's enduring legacy: "Of the poets of his generation, Larry Levis spoke most powerfully of what it means to be a poet at this historical moment. With the same majesty he brought to his poetry, Larry Levis engaged his readers with the most subtle and disturbing questions of the self to be found in the prose--essays, reviews or interviews--of any contemporary American poet. Broadly international in his scope and deeply personal in his reflections, Levis addressed poetic concerns that are both immediate and timeless. For many of us who struggle with these issues, Larry Levis's prose on poetry stands as some of the most capacious to be found since Randell Jarrell's."
The late Larry Levis was the author of six volumes of poetry. He was Director of the Creative Writing Program, University of Utah; Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University; and also taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
The Gazer's Spirit focuses on leading examples of ecphrastic poetry, or poems that directly confront particular works of art. Hollander, who is one of the most distinguished contemporary practitioners of the ecphrastic tradition, has crafted a survey of enormous range, taste, and depth, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The heart of the book is its gallery of poems and images set side by side.
There are poems whose presence in this book is all but inevitable, such as Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" paired with Breugel the Elder's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and delightful surprises, such as Edith Wharton's sonnet that casts fresh light on Leonardo's Mona Lisa. Here are Robert Browning and Michelangelo; Walt Whitman and George Inness; and Randall Jarrell and Albrecht Dürer writing and drawing about The Knight, Death and the Devil.
Among the poets are many visually sophisticated writers such as James Merrill, Richard Howard, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur; the visual objects in the book are both celebrated and obscure, as various as a Greek sculplture, a medieval tapestry, a famous Renoir, or a fountain by an anonymous architect. In some cases, obvious affinities, such as a poem by Vicki Hearne on a white horse by Gauguin, produce unexpected poetic results.
In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists.
Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.
At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau’s poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo’s imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau’s poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard.
“Gentefication” nuances Latinidad as not just an immigration question, but an academic one. It deals with Latinx death not as the literal passing
of bodies, but as first tied with language. It asks, what are the hauntings of a tongue that is repeatedly told, ‘one must learn English in order to succeed in this country’? What is the psychological trauma deployed not by right-wing bigots, but of white liberal institutions that give scholarships to Latinx students, but nevertheless prop up white supremacy by viewing their payments as charity? How do Latinx students become complicit in this tokenizing? “Gentefication” wrestles with this ‘survivor’s guilt’ of higher education, of feeling as if you’re the only one among your homies that ‘made it.’ And in an American moment dealing with scandals across multiple universities this work is a timely intervention that advocates for first-generation audiences, for readers of color, and for all those vested in the protracted struggle for our fair shot.
From short, acerbic lyrics to hilarious prose poems about nutty German professors and Dracula’s teenage girlfriend, readers laugh out loud at simple turns of phrase before they are jerked sober by startling insights into the way we live—and Koertge knows how we live.
Nothing in American culture is safe from the scythe of his irony—not Joan Crawford, not Superman, nor Frank Sinatra. He lampoons our literary heroes and historical giants with the gentlest touch, and we find ourselves grinning before we realize that Koertge is redefining what we thought we knew. His poems are alternately funny or poignantly sad because they are always true, and that truth lingers long after the reading is over.
In Geography of the Forehead, Ron Koertge offers us nearly sixty poems, each a brilliant testament to the human condition. “Though he has been writing his influential and highly original poems for many years,” Charles Harper Webb declares, “he is still something of a secret: a poet of dazzling wit, and surprising sweetness. With this collection, however, the secret is out.”
Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 103 million vehicles crossing it in 2016. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.
Intimate and engaging, this revised and expanded edition of Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentalities. This new edition brings new insight since its initial publication in 2008, including a new chapter on the infamous “Bridgegate” Chris Christie-era scandal of 2013, when members of the governor's administration shut down access to the bridge, causing a major traffic jam and scandal and subsequently helping undermine Christie’s candidacy for the US presidency.
Stunning photos, from when the bridge was built in the late 1920s through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.
Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it someday.
.
Intimate and engaging, Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentality. Stunning archival photos, from the late 1920s when the bridge was built through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.
Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it some day.
- First major book on the George Washington Bridge
- Full of amazing facts about the GWB that will surprise even bridge historians
- Includes over 30 spectacular illustrations, ranging from archival photographs of the building of the bridge to those that show it draped in an enormous flag after 9/11
- Includes personal accounts of the author's adventures on the bridge
As an Iranian American poet, Roger Sedarat fuses Western and Eastern traditions to reinvent the classicalPersian form of the ghazal. For its humor as well as its spirituality, the poems in this collection can perhapsbest be described as “Wallace Stevens meets Rumi.” Perhaps most striking is the poet’s use of the ancient ghazal form in the tradition of the classical masters like Hafez and Rumi to politically challenge the Islamic Republic of Iran’s continual crackdown on protesters. Not since the late Agha Shahid Ali has a poet translated the letter as well as the spirit of this form into English, using musicality and inventive rhyme to extend the reach of the ghazal in a new language and tradition.
The finest ghazals of Mir Taqi Mir, the most accomplished of Urdu poets.
The prolific Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810), widely regarded as the most accomplished poet in Urdu, composed his ghazals—a poetic form of rhyming couplets—in a distinctive Indian style arising from the Persian ghazal tradition. Here, the lover and beloved live in a world of extremes: the outsider is the hero, prosperity is poverty, and death would be preferable to the indifference of the beloved. Ghazals offers a comprehensive collection of Mir’s finest work, translated by a renowned expert on Urdu poetry.
Erica Reid’s debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter’s search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, “It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.” Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid’s poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid’s active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.
Ghost Man on Second is the winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman.
The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse provides a new strategy for interpreting the ways in which metrical patterns contribute to the meaning of poems. Annie Finch puts forth the theory of "the metrical code," a way of tracing the changing cultural connotations of metered verse, especially iambic pentameter. By applying the code to specific poems, the author is able to analyze a writer's relation to literary history and to trace the evolution of modern and contemporary poetries from the forms that precede them.
Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and author of Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.
Author bio:
Annie Finch, poet, editor, and critic, has published twenty books of poetry and poetics including Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry, and The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse. Based in New York, Dr. Finch travels widely to teach and perform her poetry and is the founder of PoetryWitchCommunity.org, where she teaches poetry, meter, and more. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.
Elton Glaser’s ninth book of poems is haunted by the loss of his wife, each April bringing back the memory of her death. The opening line confesses the struggle to find a language for this grief: “I’m learning to speak in the accents of adieu.” As the book progresses through the seasons, it evokes the places that remind him of their times together, in the South of their youths, in the Midwest of their long marriage, and in their travels here and abroad. And yet there is also another strain that keeps breaking through, the particulars of joy in family and the natural world, grandsons and “swaggering lilies,” and a swan like “a sullen bride in her white finery.” With an irrepressible wit and a music that enlivens his lines in both celebration and elegy, Glaser never forgets that, as Wallace Stevens said, “Memory without passion would be better lost.”
we are crossing, / we are / crossing, / we are crossing in big salt water, // we are crossing, // crossing under a sky of no guilt / we have left home // though we know we will go back / someday, / see our people / as we knew them . . .
Troupe re-creates the history of lost voices between the waters of Africa, Cuba, and the United States. His daring poetics drenched in new forms-notably the seven-elevens-clench transformative narratives spurred on by a relentless, rhythmic language that mimics the foaming waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. His personae speak quantum litanies within one epic, sermonic-gospel to articulate our most ancient ways of storytelling and survival.
Ghostly Figures contends that this poetics of belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry. Discussing works by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, and a group of poets responding to the AIDS epidemic, Ann Keniston draws on and critically assesses trauma theory and psychoanalysis, as well as earlier discussions of witness, elegy, lyric trope and figure, postmodernism, allusion, and performance, to define the ghosts that clearly dramatize poetics of belatedness throughout the diverse poetry of post–World War II America.
Translated, with introduction and notes by Thomas E. Mussio.
A poetic collage of voices, genres, and time-spaces. A display of power over language and rhythm. A postmodern performance of naked figures hanging in the nebulae of a militarized universe. A new millennium cubist manifesto against decrepit political machines. A mystic song in search of birth and love. In this new collection of poems, Juan Felipe Herrera's natural talent for capturing the raw dimensions of reality merges with his wild imagination and technical prowess.
Things, names, places, histories, herstories, desires, wills, minds, and their effects and progeny are re-mixed, re-mastered, and re-cast into a new narrative theater. Characters in a constant and stubborn rush, appearance, disappearance, and flow—with, against, and for each other—create the fire and give birth to the hallucinatory spotted and leaf-eating, long-necked child. Exciting and original, cutting-edge and risk-taking, Giraffe on Fire is a breathtaking addition to a respected body of work by a poet not afraid to speak out about how poetry reflects the raw beauty and truth of life.
After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.
Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood.
A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.
Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Given considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: “Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells.” Duncan’s poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change.
Interwoven into this thread is the narrator’s miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists amongst the wreckage, and from this debris is a path towards healing our grief.
Given was the winner of 2022 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.
Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate.
Compelling for its insights into the work of four notable poets, this book by a leading critic of poetry is also invaluable for what it has to tell us about the poetic process--about how art copes with the obdurate givens of life, and about the conflict in art between the whim of fate and the artist's will to choose.
Giving their word is what poets do; it is their stock-in-trade, their daily bread. In the hands of the most accomplished, a poet's words are transformed into a kind of window: looking inward toward the territory of memory, dream, personal mythology and opening out onto the landscape of the shared world where life and work are rooted. For each poet there is an intricate relationship between these two realms and poetry's third domain, the language that bridges both experiences and becomes the body of the poem. Giving Their Word shows us that the poet's fidelity to that relationship sustains his or her development over time, urges the writing toward new levels of discovery, and bestows on readers that most prized of commodities: a feeling of the authentic.
For poets, students of poetry, and that far-flung community of readers for whom the contemporary poem still provides a journey worth taking, this book will present a host of pleasures. Giving Their Word enlarges the frame through which we view the poet's text and yields significant insights into the craft and character of each of these writers.
At the center of the book, the eighteen-part title poem “Glaciology” takes readers to the core of misunderstandings as it juxtaposes the work of a glaciologist with fractured language, misread cues, and a literalness that defies conventional explanation. The lives of the glaciers are reported with a careful, scientific language that keeps readers emotionally at bay from the effects of their demise, and the speaker comments, “I consider language / mistreated these days, asked to explain itself / to justify at the same time it bears / meaning, to own up / to creation at the moment of use / only, and only that meaning.”
Biographer Allan Seager interviewed a number of Roethke’s friends and fellow writers, and he had access to the voluminous notes the poet left behind. Seager reveals the Theodore Roethke who existed behind the public persona – a complex, self-contradictory, gentle, often disturbed mysterious, and ruthlessly honest man. One of the book’s most moving passages is the defense of the poet’s role within the university, written by a colleague when Roethke was faced with the threat of dismissal. A committed teacher himself, Seager succeeds in doing justice to an often neglected aspect of Roethke’s achievement, his remarkable power as a teacher, and his unusual and committed teaching style.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection. Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim’s fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making. His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures. They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithetical to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns. After all, like LGBTQ+ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence. Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyun’s form. Glory Hole invites readers into a very queer world.
This book brings together abbreviated editions of these two book-length poems—unfinished and unpublished at the time of the author’s death—comprised of selections that capture their visionary and mystical essence. The poems are accompanied by an introduction framing them within the author’s experience as an exile and tracing their publication history.
Victor Hugo is one of the most important figures in the history of French literature, and this beautifully rendered translation brings two of his lesser-known works deservedly to the forefront.
"I count Sandra McPherson as one of the dozen or so truly outstanding
American poets who write brilliantly in the Romantic tradition. . . .
The God of Indeterminacy brings together a group of exciting poems
showing the vital influence of her interest in the blues tradition and
in African-American quiltmaking. They are brilliant testimonials to this
fruitful wedding of the musical, the visual, and the literary."
-- Clarance Major
The God of Love’s Letter (1399), Christine de Pizan’s first defense of women, is arguably her most succinct statement about gender. It also rebukes the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose and anticipates Christine’s City of Ladies. The Tale of the Rose (1402) responds to the growth in chivalric orders for the defense of women by arguing that women, not men, should choose members of the “Order of the Rose.” Both poems are freshly edited here from their earliest manuscripts and each is newly translated into English.
Building upon the scholarship of an earlier volume, Dionysus Reborn, Spariosu her continues to draw on Dionysus—the “God of many names,” of both poetic play and sacred power—as a mythical embodiment of the two sides of the classical Greek mentality. Combining philosophical reflection with close textual analysis, the author examines the divided nature of the Hellenic mentality in such primary canonic texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, the most well-known of the Presocratic fragments, Euripides’ Bacchae, Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Plato’s Republic and Laws, and Aristotle’s Poetics and Politics.
Spariosu’s model illuminates the many of the most enduring questions in contemporary humanistic study and addresses modern questions about the nature of the interrelation of poetry, ethics, and politics.
Starting with the idea that the human experience is the universe looking back at itself, godhouse takes the notion a few steps further by centering cosmology within a raced and gendered body. Ruth Ellen Kocher’s poems envision this body as a union of god and soul that, within our material world, encompasses love and hate, joy and despair. The body is a site of divine presence made mortal, electrified with the resonance of both the infinite and the human. In godhouse, we encounter the body as a site where the universe is made personal and celebratory, where the celestial endure the complications of flesh and friction forms between the glorious and the monstrous aspects of personhood.
But that is not all. Poch as a well-established and regarded poet, turns his eye to contemporary poetry and vindicates its function in a “created and creative world.” Today many have abandoned the genre as a wasteland of misguided voice that really has nothing to say. The poet is a truth-teller, and Poch as devoted writer, teacher, and believer sends out a renewed call to turn to verse as a means of seeing oneself as God’s poeima, or poem (Letter to Ephesians). The depth of self-knowing relates directly to an aptitude to engage the category of poetry at some level. A tragic void is filled with Poch’s effort to exhort the reader to patiently reconnect with poetry even though it has been hijacked by persons who want to be heard more than speak well. (This book is essential, therefore, for aspiring poets.)
For faithful readers or those seeking to return, Poch is a place to begin to understand contemporary writers worth knowing and which poets of the past must remain with us. In Virgilian fashion, he can see the panorama behind him and that which lies immediately ahead and instills a recovered love of an eternal medium that will be restored to a state of coherency and enlightened perspective. If Poch has faith in poetry it is because poetry is indeed a source of faith. If Justin Martyr claimed that everything that is true belongs to Christians, Poch shows us that everyone who speaks truth is to some degree a poet. Even God with his revealed wisdom chooses poetry as medium par excellence. It is essential to know how poetry works. “Great poems that we consider literature give us what we never expected. They go beyond the usefulness of conveying a feeling and unveiling beauty; and they tell us who we are.”
In September of 1838, a few months after Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his controversial Divinity School address, a twenty-five-year-old tutor and divinity student at Harvard named Jones Very stood before his beginning Greek class and proclaimed himself “the second coming.” Over the next twenty months, despite a brief confinement in a mental hospital, he would write more than three hundred sonnets, many of them in the voice of a prophet such as John the Baptist or even of Christ himself—all, he was quick to claim, dictated to him by the Holy Spirit.
Befriended by the major figures of the Transcendentalist movement, Very strove to convert, among others, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and most significantly, Emerson himself. Though shocking to some, his message was simple: by renouncing the individual will, anyone can become a “son of God” and thereby usher in a millennialist heaven on earth. Clark Davis’s masterful biography shows how Very came to embody both the full radicalism of Emersonian ideals and the trap of isolation and emptiness that lay in wait for those who sought complete transcendence.
God’s Scrivener tells the story of Very’s life, work, and influence in depth, recovering the startling story of a forgotten American prophet, a “brave saint” whose life and work are central to the development of poetry and spirituality in America.
The Gods We Worship Live Next Door is the 2005 prizewinning volume selected by this year's judge, Grace Schulman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.
In this beautiful little book, renowned Goethe scholar Siegfried Unseld considers what this episode means to our estimation of a writer many consider nearly godlike in stature. Unseld begins by exploring the botanical and medical lore of the ginkgo, including the use of its nut as an aphrodisiac and anti-aging serum. He then delves into Goethe's writings for the light they shed on his relationship with Marianne. Unseld reveals Goethe as a great yet human being, subject, as any other man, to the vagaries of passion.
Blending humor and pathos, Bond examines the absurdities of contemporary life: “The modern air so full of phantom wires, / hard to tell the connected from the confused / who yak out loud to their beleaguered angels.” At other times, his intricately crafted lyrics weave together myth and history to explore the various roles music and art play in the human experience, as when Bond’s poems meditate on Orphean themes, descending to the underworld of loneliness, commercialism, or death and emerging with hard (and hard-won) truths.
Addressing broadly ranging topics—from a retelling of the story of Artephius, the fabled father of alchemy, to a meditation on a fashion ad’s wind machine—Bond’s voice is always penetrating in its examination, yet wondering in the face of beauty, conjuring for the reader a world where music has “the power / to move stones, not far, but far enough.”
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
—Claudia Rankine in the New York Times
The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.
An array of writers—including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets.
This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks’s daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks’s legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.
“Throughout this anthology, more than 60 other well-known Brooks poems can be read the same way, with lines from ‘The Mother’ and ‘The Bean Eaters’ tripping down the right-hand side of the page. The anthology ends with ‘Non-Brooks Golden Shovels’ and ‘Variations and Expansions on the Form.’ The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.”
—Claudia Rankine, The New York Times, August 2017
“The editors, including tireless poetry advocate Kahn, of this unique, new addition to the Gwendolyn Brooks legacy put together a richly diverse set of poets working with the most unusual and fertile new poetic form created in recent years. National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes invented the Golden Shovel, which he illuminates in his stirring foreword, writing, “Because where do poems come from if not other poems?” In a Golden Shovel poem, the last words in each line are taken from a Brooks poem. A veritable who’s who of contemporary poets tried their hands at this encoded homage, including Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Joy Harjo, Billy Lombardo, Sharon Olds, Alberto Ríos, Tracy K. Smith, and Timothy Yu. Beautifully introduced by Patricia Smith, this is a beguiling and mind-expanding anthology shaped by formal expertise and deep appreciation for the complexity and resonance of Brooks’ work and profoundly nurturing influence. In all, a substantial and dynamic contribution to American literature.”
—Booklist, May 2017
"Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry back in 1950. A new book honors her work in using a form called the golden shovel, developed by poet Terrance Hayes. In The Golden Shovel Anthology, poets select a line from a poem of Brooks’s and use it as the closing line or lines in a poem of their own. The result is an expansive and extraordinary assemblage edited by poets Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe, March 2017
The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.
The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks’s original. An array of writers—including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Nikki Giovani, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets.
The poems found here will inspire a diversity of readers, teachers, and writers of poetry while at the same time providing remarkable access for newcomers, making it ideal for classrooms. The Golden Shovel Anthology will also honor Brooks with publication in 2017, the centenary of her birth.
In Gondal’s Queen, Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford presents a cycle of eighty-four poems by Emily Jane Brontë, for the first time arranged in logical sequence, to re-create the “novel in verse” which Emily wrote about their beloved mystical kingdom of Gondal and its ruler, Augusta Geraldine Almeda, who brought tragedy to those who loved her.
Thanks to previous publications by Ratchford, the imaginative world of Gondal is well known not only to Brontë scholars but also to general readers. Only in the present book, however, with Emily’s lovely poems restored to the setting which gave them being, can the full impact of this extraordinary literary creation be realized.
The life story of Gondal’s Queen, from portentous birth to tragic death, is set in a world compounded of dark Gothic romance and Byronic extravagance; yet out of it emerges not only a real country of wild moor sheep and piercingly beautiful nights but also the portrait of a real woman, whose doom was wrought not by the stars but by the clashing complications of her own nature.
In A.G.A. (the appellation most usually applied to the Queen), Emily Brontë created a personality, not a puppet reciting lovely lines. And Ratchford, in reconstructing her story, has re-affirmed the dignity, beauty, and richness of Emily’s poetry.
Gondal’s Queen is the end of a long trail of research and literary detection which has led Ratchford to all known Brontë documentary sources. This quest was originally stimulated by curiosity over a tiny booklet signed, “C. Brontë, June 29th, 1837,” in the Wrenn Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Ratchford’s intense and astonishingly fruitful interest in the Brontës had its origin in her attempt to unravel the fascinating puzzle presented by this little book, which seemed to be merely a series of childish vignettes held together by “a shadow of a common character” and a “tendency toward a unified plot.”
Bit by bit, Ratchford assembled clues from manuscripts and obscure publications until the significance of the play world of the Brontë children began to emerge. In spite of the fact that the Brontës had been the subject of the liveliest literary speculation since their deaths, it remained for Ratchford to establish the importance of their juvenile writings to the later writings of Charlotte. In successive publications she presented the accumulating evidence. For a time her curiosity was centered on Charlotte and the group, but it finally became focused on Emily through a manuscript journal fragment which fortunately came to hand.
Unlike Charlotte, Emily left no prose works from her childhood. But it is apparent from journal entries and birthday notes written by Emily and Anne (whose shared creation Gondal was) not only that the two younger Brontës lived in and sustained daily an imaginary world which had evolved from the earlier play of the four children together, but also that they had written separately voluminous histories and “novels” about it. Of Emily’s vast Gondal literature, only a small body of verse has survived, poems originally intended for no eye but her own and possibly Anne’s. But it is clear that Gondal was not only Emily Brontë’s childhood dream world but also the major preoccupation of her adult creative life.
Winner of the 2019 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Zachary Asher’s second collection, gone bird in the glass hours, is a play in verse, featuring seven voices. It begins with a rabbi, bewildered and bent by personal grief, guided and beguiled by elusive Blue Postman into the world of “the glass hours” and its inhabitants.
Rooted in magical realism, gone bird in the glass hours experiments with multiple forms from epistles to centos, from fractals to prayers. These poems are brave in their excavations of grief and solace, wonder and rage, collective trauma and, ultimately, transcendence.
Good Morning and Good Night features poems previously published in American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, New Letters, The New Republic, Poetry, Shenandoah, Southern Review, The Yale Review, and other leading literary journals.
Goodbye, Silver Sister, Jeanne Foster’s second collection of poems, opens with a series of poems about a girl coming of age in pre-Katrina New Orleans, informed and haunted by the magic of the city. The powerful Pearl River forms the dividing line between adulthood and other worlds, both geographic and existential: “death, divorce, and the thousand other ways I would lose faith in the breastplate of love.”
The collection is also an elegy for and tribute to the poet’s parents, who met in the WPA Artists’ Project. Through her poems she keeps them alive and is also able to say good-bye. Like the work of her mentor, James Wright, these poems reach far beyond the personal in their willingness to look at the unseemly sides of being human within the context of a profound spiritual search.
"Like a latter-day Whitman, an addict of contraries or its victim, Schwartz sets out to understand that network in as many ways as his imagination allows. Once you get the hang of what Schwartz is tuning into, you can't stop tuning into it yourself. . . .A master of timing."—Robyn Selman, Voice Literary Supplement
"[Schwartz's] poems seem to think in musical structures; he hears those evanescent snatches of conversation that compose our emotional lives, recognizes their fluid importance, and organizes them for us."—Stephen Tapscott, Boston Phoenix
Finalist for the Helen C. Smith Award for the Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2019
Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature in Poetry, 2019
Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, Cyrus Cassells’s sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family.
The first cycle, rooted in the culture of the Gullah people of Charleston and the Sea Islands, celebrates the resilience of the rice- and indigo-working slaves and their descendants who have forged a unique Africa-inspired language and culture. Set against a Mediterranean backdrop, the second cycle explores themes of pilgrimage, love, and loss, concluding with a pair of elegies to the poet’s mother and the many men lost in the juggernaut of the AIDS crisis. Throughout, Cassells invites the reader to consider the duality of grief and love, as well as the shifting connections between past and present.
Cassells’s language is always striking, unpredictable, and beautiful, conjuring a world not only of “placid seagulls perched / in priest-gentle pines / like festive Christmas ornaments” but also one where “Death prevailed, / tireless as a forest partisan.” His poems transport the reader across time, space, and language, searching constantly not just for empathy but also for the human spirit in its triumph, for “our human joy, / laced with an ageless grieving.”
Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.
Grace is John Hodgen’s third book of poetry. He is a poet of extreme contrasts, offering us the dregs of despair, yet instantly recalling hope in the beauty of nature or in a moment in time when all is right, when we realize grace. In “For the Leapers” the narrator relates, “We will fall past the angels, / we will fall from such height, / our tears will lift up from our eyes. / We will fall straight through hell. / And then we will rise.” Hodgen’s poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, on paths that come full circle with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.
Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.
both at the moment they unwed
themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”
Reading Pindar's poems with their public performance in mind, Hilary Mackie suggests that the poet was forced to tread a precarious path: weighing the interests of various groups of audience members against one another, balancing praise of the victorious athlete with praise of the deeds of mythic heroes, and catering at the same time to an uncertain future. Mackie's new approach illuminates apparent contradictions in the poet's pronouncements by bringing to the fore the variety of messages conveyed in his wishes and prayers. Her innovative examination of the moment-to-moment dynamic between Pindar and his audience shows that the poet's performance often contained one message for the victor and his family, and quite another for the gods.
Graceful Errors significantly changes our perspective on Pindar's work, providing a lucid appreciation of Pindaric poetry that takes into account the oral context of these poems' performance. It will be of interest not only to classicists but also to scholars and students interested in oral performance, the social function of poetry, and the role and status of poets in traditional cultures, whether ancient or modern.
Hilary Mackie is Associate Professor of Classics at Rice University.
Christina Pugh’s Grains of the Voice exhibits a pervasive fascination with sound in all its manifestations. The human voice, musical instruments, the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds—all serve at one time or another as both the framework of poems and the occasion for their lightning-quick changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference. The poems are eclectic in their allusiveness, filled with echoes—and sometimes the words themselves—of other poets, but just as often of songs both popular and obscure, of the noise of pop culture, and of philosophers’ writings. But Pugh always wears her learning lightly. Beneath the jewellike surfaces of her poems is a strenuous investigation of the nature of and need for communication and a celebration of the endless variety of its forms.
Grand & Arsenal begins “Bless me I am not myself,” but it is not long before the probability of being blessed is revealed to be as remote as the concept of a whole self. Thus begins the book’s defining struggle, enacted by a multitude of voices which move from rush to stumble and back again—meanwhile using all the tools we as a culture use to hold fear at arm’s length.
We hear a familiar irony, as in “On a trip West, porn in the hotel room. I can take or leave it. The climax that puts me in the seats? World’s end.” We hear humor, as in “I believed in . . . / . . . a certain apocalypse not so much foretold as crafted / by large-brained monkeys.” We hear understatement, as in “knowing it does not matter / in the grand—she would say scheme, I would say / mishap—.” Most importantly, though, these poems allow for the fleeting triumph of an undefended voice, which appears often to emerge tentatively from a sort of exhausted collapse.
Gravel and Hawk dwells on the physical and cultural landscapes of the Texarkana border region, an area of stark natural beauty and even starker manifestations of its human habitation: oil derricks and pump jacks, logging trucks, chicken houses, come-to-Jesus billboards, and greasy catfish joints, a patchwork of dying farm towns and ragtag municipalities laced together by county roads, state highways, and that treacherous, rust-hued slurry known as the Red River. Gravel and Hawk charts the emotional landscape of a single extended family, its history of loss and gain, and, especially, its encounters with violent death. It is an eminently readable collection, rooted in a distinctly American place and united by a poetic voice that is honest, sophisticated, and persuasive.
"The Great Bird of Love brims with a life so intense that it
must be told quietly. The pages are quirky, full of surprise, variety,
humor, and the sustaining reliable voice of a worthy guide to experience.
These poems come from perception informed by sympathy, and the language
is alive with verbal adventure."
-- William Stafford
A book in the National Poetry Series
Here, for the first time, is a feast for anyone who has ever been beguiled by the trains that formerly thrummed through the landscapes of our lives. This entertaining and evocative anthology presents the amazing variety of poems and songs written about the American railroad in the last century and a half. Comprised of selections from both oral and written traditions, the volume celebrates the historical and cultural significance of this marvel of engineering skills. Hedin's anthology allows all readers, from the most avid railroad buff to anyone who has fond memories of train travel, to enjoy the romance of trains.
Born in Cuba to parents of African and European ancestry, Nicolás Guillén worked in printing presses and studied law before moving into Havana’s literary scene. A virtuosic maker and breaker of forms, Guillén rose to fame by transforming a popular form of Cuban music into poetry that called attention to the experience of Afro-Cuban people, and he continued to interweave his artistic and political commitments as he traveled the world.
Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo is a humorous and biting collection of poems that presents a fantastical bestiary of ideas, social concerns, landscapes, phenomena, and more. The “animals” on view in this menagerie include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, clouds from different countries, a singing guitar, a temperamental atomic bomb, blue-pelted police, a hurricane, the KKK, and the North Star, among many others. Translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen understanding of the contexts of colonial racialization, oppression, and exoticism, this bilingual edition stands as a testament to Guillén’s carnivalesque vision.
A gathering of poetic blossoms.
The Greek Anthology contains some 4,500 short Greek poems in the sparkling and diverse genre of epigram, written by more than a hundred poets and collected over many centuries. To the original collection, called the Garland (Stephanus) by its contributing editor, Meleager of Gadara (first century BC), was added another Garland, by Philip of Thessalonica (mid-first century AD) and then a Cycle by Agathias of Myrina (AD 567/8). In about AD 900 these collections (now lost) and perhaps others (also lost, by Rufinus, Diogenianus, Strato, and Palladas) were partly incorporated and arranged into fifteen books according to subject by Constantine Cephalas; most of his collection is preserved in a manuscript called the Palatine Anthology. A second manuscript, the Planudean Anthology made by Maximus Planudes in 1301, contains additional epigrams omitted by Cephalas.
Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, and Paulus Silentiarius.
This Loeb edition of The Greek Anthology replaces the earlier edition by W. R. Paton, with a Greek text and ample notes reflecting current scholarship. Volume I contains the following: Book 1. Christian Epigrams; Book 2. Description of the Statues in the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus; Book 3. Epigrams in the Temple of Apollonis at Cyzicus; Book 4. Prefaces to Various Anthologies; Book 5. Erotic Epigrams.
A gathering of poetic blossoms.
The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.
The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.
Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.
A gathering of poetic blossoms.
The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.
The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.
Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.
A gathering of poetic blossoms.
The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.
The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.
Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.
A gathering of poetic blossoms.
The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.
The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.
Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.
Theocritus of the third century BCE, born at Syracuse, travelled widely in the Greek world. Having studied poetry at Cos with poet and critic Philitas, he composed poetry under patronage, chiefly perhaps at Syracuse and Cos; and then went to Alexandria in Egypt, whose King Ptolemy II (died 246 BCE), pupil of Philitas, befriended him. Here (and at Cos?) he spent the rest of his life. Most lovable of Greek versemakers, Theocritus was the founder of bucolic or pastoral poetry. Of his so-called Idylls, 'Little forms' or pieces (not all are genuine), ten are about pastoral life real or idealised; several are small epics (three are hymns); two are beautiful 'occasional' poems (one about a country walk, one to accompany a gift of a distaff for the wife of his friend Nicias); six are love-poems; several are mimes, striking pictures of common life; and three are specially expressive of his own feelings. The 24 'Epigrams' were apparently inscribed on works of art.
Moschus of Syracuse, 2nd century BCE, came next. As a grammarian he wrote a (lost) work on Rhodian dialect. Though he was classed as bucolic, his extant poetry (mainly 'Runaway Love' and the story of 'Europa') is not really pastoral, the 'Lament for Bion' not being Moschus's work.
'Megara' may be by Theocritus; but 'The Dead Adonis' is much later.
Bion of Phlossa near Smyrna lived in Sicily, probably late 2nd and early 1st century BCE. Most of the extant poems are not really bucolic, but 'Lament for Adonis' is floridly brilliant.
The so-called Pattern-Poems, included in the bucolic tradition, are found also in the Greek Anthology.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press