"I want to talk about some of the things I'm after when I write, my sense of the American predicament, and what I hope for poetry and for people in relation to words...I believe poetry can be proof that dynamic awareness is alive and kicking, a constant reminder to ourselves and to our fellow citizens that being alert, both inwardly and outwardly, rewards each person with more life. Doesn't a good poem bring that electric sense of things, that edgy vitality that can't be laughed off or shopped away? I think being fully human demands this, demands poetry." -- Open Letter by the author.
Poetry. African American Studies. "From the 'sweet scat' and 'jump rope hymns' of wonder and wistfulness to the transformational, lithe, sexually charged energy of jazz, HURDY-GURDY earnestly explores the differences between what we want, what we get, and what we must be willing to pursue at any cost. This is an exciting book at once fluid, shapely, and steady as stone whose tensions lead us to an authentic meditative wholeness." Mark Cox "This is not a poetry of the highfalutin violin nor the somber cello, but a melody you heard somewhere that followed you home. Elegant and silly, irreverent, fun and funny, Tim Seibles' poetry celebrates the spirit's little moments of holy joy." Sandra Cisneros"
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "'behold / this litmus of longing,' Shelley Feller begins in the linguistic triumph that is their foray into extending the conversation that Hart Crane began in the last century. With DREAM BOAT, Feller anatomizes, churns, palpitates, then spews onto the page a powerful exorcism of self-loathing that non-cishet, non-binary souls like them have been forced to imbibe and digest all their lives. Feller does what others have not dared. They literally turn upside down, inside out, even metaphorically flip off the gaze of those who come to the page for easy catharsis. Don't expect the sense-making that anesthetizes the pain and suffering you've come to want to see. That Feller's speakers refuse to be anything other than their fleshly, full-bodied selves is the genius of this debut. O how fortunate we are to hold in our hands such a wondrous, hope-filled work of art."--L. Lamar Wilson "What a dream, to be 'sissy-cathected to death!' With generous helpings of cut-throat aplomb, Shelley Feller hacks up the hierophantic hairball of homo sapiens' compulsive language-ing and pokes it with the genius-stick until something falls out: ack. This book is a delirious conveyance to the viscid otherworld that coats the inside of this world's jeans. It's a sticky zipper, a gemmy hologram, and it's truly, truly, truly outrageous."--Joyelle McSweeney "The brine of Shelley Feller's textual seas is teeming with emergent queer life, post life, and glorious, grotesque effulgence."--Tim Jones-Yelvington "In DREAM BOAT, the sea is an 'open organ,' frothing with gender possibilities, some toxic, some giddy, but always endlessly recombining damaged pasts and rocking new hereafters. A 'chick-fil-a' pirate, Shelley Feller 'spake[s] sissy' into the entire Anglo-American poetic tradition with lavish oceanic sprays of emojis, taunts, schoolyard chants, pop songs, and campy lore. Sweet, nasty, tender, queer: this work is recklessly inventive. It's like nothing else. It's like the future."--Vidhu Aggarwal
“Dazzling . . . a verbal and visual feast that defies genres.” —The Washington Post From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.
In 1996, 60-year-old Bob Kelly temporarily lost the use of his legs. That disability was hard to bear for someone who had always been physically active. The following year, while looking for a way to use his upper body strength, he had an idea- to travel solo by kayak from Ottawa to the Atlantic. In 1998, after completing that journey, Kelly faced another loss with the death of Shirley, his beloved wife of 34 years. He decided to continue the kayak trip across Canada as a memorial to her. It was an odyssey that took him some 9,000 kilometres through the most challenging waterways of Canada. In Solo, Kelly tells how he overcame daunting obstacles, brutal weather, serious injuries and setbacks. The story ends on the historic Grand Portage, where Kelly faced the most gruelling test. "Long trips over water and portages are metaphors of life - the wind can be with you or a hurricane in your face. Bob's included physical and emotional obstacles greater than the whims of weather and geography. It spanned more than distance and time and was indeed the journey of an indomitable spirit." -Max Finklestein, author of Canoeing a Continent and Paddling the Boreal Forest.
In the arena of poetry and poetics over the past century, no idea has been more alive and contentious than the idea of form, and no aspect of form has more emphatically sponsored this marked formal concern than the line. But what, exactly, is the line? Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee’s anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, its ecology. The authors included here, emerging and established alike, write from a range of perspectives, in terms of both aesthetics and identity. Together, they offer a dynamic hybrid collection that captures a broad spectrum of poetic practice in the twenty-first century. Rosko and Vander Zee’s introduction offers a generous overview of conversations about the line from the Romantics forward. We come to see how the line might be an engine for ideals of progress—political, ethical, or otherwise. For some poets, the line touches upon the most fundamental questions of knowledge and existence. More than ever, the line is the radical against which even alternate and emerging poetic forms that foreground the visual or the auditory, the page or the screen, can be distinguished and understood. From the start, a singular lesson emerges: lines do not form meaning solely in their brevity or their length, in their becoming or their brokenness; lines live in and through the descriptions we give them. Indeed, the history of American poetry in the twentieth century could be told by the compounding, and often confounding, discussions of its lines. A Broken Thing both reflects upon and extends this history, charting a rich diffusion of theory and practice into the twenty-first century with the most diverse, wide-ranging and engaging set of essays to date on the line in poetry, revealing how poems work and why poetry continues to matter.
Kind is the kind of poetry book that makes you think differently about our world and the beings that inhabit it. Primack explores all facets of our lives with other beings—the beauty, the tragedy, and the absurdity that surrounds her existence. Kind cuts to one’s emotional core to make us think and feel.
A sequel to the award-winning Buffalo Dance offers a dramatic and poetic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark expedition into the unexplored wilderness of the American West in a series of poems that share the narrator York's perspectives on the members of the party and the people and places they encounter along the way. Simultaneous.
