How Does It Hurt?
How Does It Hurt?

Author: Stephanie de Montalk

Publisher: Victoria University Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1776560043

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In How Does It Hurt?, acclaimed poet and biographer Stephanie de Montalk tells the story of the chronic pain that has invaded her life for more than 10 years. She considers how her early experiences have been cast into fresh relief by what she has endured, then goes back in time to investigate the lives and works of three writers who also lived with and wrote about pain: "the consolator," English social theorist Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), "the vendor of happiness," French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897), and "the imago," Polish poet Aleksander Wat (1900–1967). Through these explorations de Montalk confronts the paradox of writing about suffering: where we can turn when the pain is beyond words? A unique blend of memoir, imaginative biography, and poetry, How Does It Hurt? is a groundbreaking contribution to the understanding of chronic pain and a spellbinding literary achievement.

Diane di Prima
Diane di Prima

Author: David Stephen Calonne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1501342916

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions reveals how central di Prima was in the discovery, articulation and dissemination of the major themes of the Beat and hippie countercultures from the fifties to the present. Di Prima (1934--) was at the center of literary, artistic, and musical culture in New York City. She also was at the energetic fulcrum of the Beat movement and, with Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), edited The Floating Bear (1961-69), a central publication of the period to which William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Frank O'Hara contributed. Di Prima was also a pioneer in her challenges to conventional assumptions regarding love, sexuality, marriage, and the role of women. David Stephen Calonne charts the life work of di Prima through close readings of her poetry, prose, and autobiographical writings, exploring her thorough immersion in world spiritual traditions and how these studies informed both the form and content of her oeuvre. Di Prima's engagement in what she would call “the hidden religions” can be divided into several phases: her years at Swarthmore College and in New York; her move to San Francisco and immersion in Zen; her researches into the I Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah of the mid-sixties; and her later interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions is the first monograph devoted to a writer of genius whose prolific work is notable for its stylistic variety, wit and humor, struggle for social justice, and philosophical depth.

Compass Bearing
Compass Bearing

Author: Per Wästberg

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781934851463

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Hildred Crill. Per Wästberg's poems move through landscape and memory recreating neighborhoods, houses and docks in sharp detail while at the same time contemplating invisible forces: Time's bones are brittle and the cold bath house in a deplorable state. Insurance for longhorn beetle not paid. The cuckoo calls from a large saucepan. Under a thinned sky we dip into sweetness of overripe fruit. The self-analytical shadows pass over the spirit level's blind eye. The poems track the interior of the self as well as imagined lives of others through time, through childhood, youth, love and death. Yet they give no easy determination of place, no simplistic discovery of direction. Even the process of dying is closely and slowly observed in advance, both the physicality ("Like when you let go of a load of wood and pull off an icy glove") and the ineffable ("But the alphabet still glows, like asteroids over the expanses of snow"). COMPASS BEARING presents twenty of Wästberg's poems in translation selected from his 2004 collection, Tillbaka i tid (Back in Time), poems that span more than five decades.

The Biplane Houses
The Biplane Houses

Author: Les A. Murray

Publisher: Black Inc.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 1863952144

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is Les Murray's first new volume of poems since 2002's Poems the Size of Photographs. In it we find Murray at his near-miraculous best. The collection exhibits both Murray's unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style and genre- there are story poems, word-plays, history - and myth-makings, aphoristic fragments and domestic portraits. The subjects of these poems range from Asperger's Syndrome to Germaine Greer to Japanese sword blades. As ever, Murray's evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness and virtuosity.