Bitter Language
Bitter Language

Author: Elka Cloke

Publisher:

Published: 2010-08-01

Total Pages: 66

ISBN-13: 9781590213216

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Readers will find themselves transported to a hidden world by the verses of Elka Cloke's first poetry collection. Lush language and evocative words yield a blend of the fantastic-within-the-mundane.

Bitter English
Bitter English

Author: Ahmad Almallah

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 022664264X

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Imagine you are a Palestinian who came to America as a young man, eventually finding yourself caught between the country you live in with your wife and daughter, and the home—and parents—you left behind. Imagine living every day in your nonnative language and becoming estranged from your native tongue, which you use less and less as you become more ensconced in the United States. This is the story told by Ahmad Almallah in Bitter English, an autobiography-in-verse that explores the central role language plays in how we construct our identities and how our cultures construct them for us. Through finely crafted poems that utilize a plainspoken roughness to keep the reader slightly disoriented, Almallah replicates his own verbal and cultural experience of existing between languages and societies. There is a sense of displacement to these poems as Almallah recounts the amusing, sad, and perilous moments of day-to-day living in exile. At the heart of Bitter English is a sense of loss, both of home and of his mother, whose struggle with Alzheimer’s becomes a reflection of his own reality in exile. Filled with wit, humor, and sharp observations of the world, Bitter English brings a fresh poetic voice to the American immigrant experience.

Bitter
Bitter

Author: Akwaeke Emezi

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0593309065

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From National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi comes a companion novel to PET that explores both the importance and cost of social revolution--and how youth lead the way. Bitter is an aspiring artist who has been invited to cultivate her talents at a special school in the town of Lucille. Surrounded by other creative teens, she can focus on her painting--though she hides a secret from everyone around her. Meanwhile, the streets of Lucille are filled with social unrest. This is Lucille before the Revolution. A place of darkness and injustice. A place where a few ruling elites control the fates of the many. The young people of Lucille know they deserve better--they aren't willing to settle for this world that the adults say is "just the way things are." They are protesting, leading a much-needed push for social change. But Bitter isn't sure where she belongs--in the art studio or in the streets. And if she does find a way to help the Revolution while being true to who she is, she must also ask: what are the costs? Acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi looks at the power of youth, protest, and art in this timely and provocative novel, a companion to National Book Award Finalist Pet. Praise for PET: "The word hype was invented to describe books like this." --Refinery29 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST "[A] beautiful, genre-expanding debut. . . . Pet is a nesting doll of creative possibilities." --The New York Times "Like [Madeleine] L'Engle, Akwaeke Emezi asks questions of good and evil and agency, all wrapped up in the terrifying and glorious spectacle of fantastical theology." --NPR

Bitter Orange
Bitter Orange

Author: Claire Fuller

Publisher: Tin House Books

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1947793160

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An NPR Best Book of the Year "Unsettling and eerie, Bitter Orange is an ideal chiller." —Time Magazine From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange is a seductive psychological portrait, a keyhole into the dangers of longing and how far a woman might go to escape her past. From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them—Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she’s distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors' private lives. To Frances’s surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled. But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don’t quite add up, and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.