Rain on the River
Rain on the River

Author: Jim Dodge

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0802198287

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Chapbooks, musings, poetry, and prose by a folklorist with a “wonderful imagination, eye for detail and command of language” (Publishers Weekly). While Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, his first and abiding passion is poetry. After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and only reading to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a Winter Solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends. Rain on the River contains his work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge’s verse and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction—a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace. “Jim’s words are his gift to the world. His life is his art; his words are merely tokens of appreciation. Reading the poems and short prose . . . makes me happy to be alive. . . . Mine’s a happiness born from the revelation that ‘money and food and poetry [are] ways to live, not reasons,” as Jim puts it” (Sacramento News & Review).

Make Me Rain
Make Me Rain

Author: Nikki Giovanni

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 0062995308

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One of America’s most celebrated poets challenges us with this powerful and deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society while illuminating the depths of her own heart. For more than fifty years, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has dazzled and inspired readers. As sharp and outspoken as ever, she returns with this profound book of poetry in which she continues to call attention to injustice and racism, celebrate Black culture and Black lives, and and give readers an unfiltered look into her own experiences. In Make Me Rain, she celebrates her loved ones and unapologetically declares her pride in her Black heritage, while exploring the enduring impact of the twin sins of racism and white nationalism. Giovanni reaffirms her place as a uniquely vibrant and relevant American voice with poems such as “I Come from Athletes” and “Rainy Days”—calling out segregation and Donald Trump; as well as “Unloved (for Aunt Cleota)” and “”When I Could No Longer”—her personal elegy for the relatives who saved her from an abusive home life. Stirring, provocative, and resonant, the poems in Make Me Rain pierce the heart and nourish the soul.

Rain in Plural
Rain in Plural

Author: Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 069120358X

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The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as "a master of musicality and enlightening allusions." In the wholly original world of these new poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls "creating between liberties." With a moral precision embracing us without eschewing I, she rethinks questions of citizenship, the selections of sensory memory, and, by extension, the tether of word and image to the actual. She writes, "I accept the truth in newspapers / by holding the murder of my friends against my chest. // To each weather forecast I give thanks: / merci for every outdated // dusk/dawn." Agrippina the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, a butoh performance, an unnamed Raku tea bowl—each has a place here. Made whole by time and its alteration in timelessness, synchrony, coincidences, and accidents, Rain in Plural beautifully reveals an elegiac yet ever-evolving inner life.

Fifty Words for Rain
Fifty Words for Rain

Author: Asha Lemmie

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 152474638X

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A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller! From debut author Asha Lemmie, “a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.” —Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Nightingale Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.” Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything. Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.