Nine Gates

Nine Gates

Author: Jane Hirshfield

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 1998-08-26

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0060929480

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A Gate Enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays. Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. in between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory and the importance of the shadow to good art. A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Delving into the nature of poetry, Jane Hirshfield also writes on the nature of the human mind, perception and experience. Nine Gates is about the underpinnings of poetic craft, but it is also about a way of being alive in the world -- alertly, musically, intelligently, passionately, permeably. In part a primer for the general reader, Nine Gates is also a manual for the working writer, with each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow a poem to convey meaning and emotion with clarity and force. Above all, Nine Gates is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our fundamental consciousness of what can be known when a person is most fully alive.


Time and Materials

Time and Materials

Author: Robert Hass

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0061754226

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The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise. His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time. The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czeslaw Milosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surpris­ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every­thing else, into his poetry." Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.


History and Other Poems

History and Other Poems

Author: Brenda Marie Osbey

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781568091792

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Poetry. African American Studies. HISTORY AND OTHER POEMS takes as its task nothing less than an examination and mapping of the never-ending evil of history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the still-palpable effects of European and American colonialism some seven centuries after the making of the New World. Making, breaking and rebuilding language and languages to suit the needs of her characters and the worlds they struggle to survive in and against, Brenda Marie Osbey has created a compelling study of human will and the determination to wrest life and liberty from destinies long ago written out of history as we know it. Aided by an extensive glossary and notes, this volume takes the reader on a series of gruesome journeys across the Americas, from Columbus's first encounter with the Guanahani Indians to the author's native New Orleans, trailing violence, destruction and oppression with every step, marking the geography of evil on the map of this New World. HISTORY AND OTHER POEMS moves from present to past and back again to reveal the trauma of hearts and lives broken even as it underscores the heroic endurance, resilience and agency of the enslaved and their descendants.


80!

80!

Author: Karen Joy Fowler

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781933500430

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This volume of the WisCon Chronicles celebrates, challenges, and discusses the varied faces of WisCon 33. Its contributors include a mix of writers, scholars, and fans, among whom number Nisi Shawl, Nancy Jane Moore, Andrea Hairston, Jennifer Pelland, JoSelle Vanderhooft, MJ Hardman, and Beverly Friend. It also, notably, includes a handful of short stories. And as with previous volumes, it does not shy away from controversy.


The Book of the Sultan's Seal

The Book of the Sultan's Seal

Author: Youssef Rakha

Publisher: Interlink Books

Published: 2015-03-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781566569910

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A PROFOUNDLY ORIGINAL DEBUT FROM HIGHLY ACCLAIMED EGYPTIAN WRITER Youssef Rakha’s extraordinary The Book of the Sultan’s Seal was published less than two weeks after then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, following mass protests, in February 2011. It’s hard to imagine a debut novel of greater urgency or more thrilling innovation. Modeled on a medieval Arabic manuscript in the form of a letter addressed to the writer’s friend, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal is made up of nine chapters, each centered on a drive our hero, Mustafa Çorbaci, takes around greater Cairo in the spring of 2007. Together these create a portrait of Cairo, city of post-9/11 Islam. In a series of dreams and visions, Mustafa Çorbaci encounters the spirit of the last Ottoman sultan and embarks on a mission the sultan assigns him. Çorbaci’s trials shed light on the contemporary Arab Muslim’s desperation for a sense of identity: Sultan’s Seal is both a suspenseful, erotic, riotous novel and an examination of accounts of Muslim demise. The way to a renaissance, Çorbaci’s journeys lead us to see, may have less to do with dogma and jihad than with love poetry, calligraphy, and the cultural diversity and richness within Islam. With his first novel, Rakha has created a language truly all his own—an achievement that has earned international acclaim. This profoundly original work both retells canonical Arabic classics and offers a new version of “middle Arabic,” in which the formal meets the vernacular. Now finally in English, in Paul Starkey’s masterful translation, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal will astonish new readers around the world.


Autobiography of Red

Autobiography of Red

Author: Anne Carson

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0345807014

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The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present. Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje "This book is amazing--I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing." --Alice Munro "A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." --The New York Times Book Review "A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." --The Village Voice


Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

Author: Jesse Graves

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2022-04-20

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 1680032682

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Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition First released in 2011, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine was the debut poetry collection from Tennessee poet Jesse Graves and was awarded the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College, the Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association, and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. The poems in Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine take part in many of the traditions of lyric poetry, including elegies for lost loved ones, odes to the beauty of family and the natural world, expressed through a range of poetic forms and techniques. The 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition includes twelve new poems and an introduction by Matthew Wimberley. from “Emissaries” Some mornings when I’m reading early, no light yet but the table lamp, my left hand will run through scales along the spine of the open book. My hands keep their own remembrance buried in fine grooves of flesh. The fingers turn over ignitions, faucets, always attuned to their proper force, knuckles never breaking things unless my brain overpowers them. They’ve discovered spectacular terrains, soft enclosures I can never enter again. I send them ahead as scouts for survey, emissaries that flip the lights in every dark hallway of the future.


Silence

Silence

Author: Jane Brox

Publisher: Mariner Books

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0544702484

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Offers a history of silence as a powerful shaper of the human mind, specifically in Eastern State Penitentiary and the monastic world of Medieval Europe.


Having Everything Right

Having Everything Right

Author: Kim Stafford

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1940436419

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A collection of essays first published in 1986, Having Everything Right revolves around the history, folklore, and physical beauty of the Pacific Northwest. In terms of genre the book comes closest to books like Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow or the essay collections of Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry, books that blend personal vision and regional evocation. Stafford's essays in this tradition range from the direct exploration of "A Walk in Early May" to the abstract meditation of "Out of This World with Chaucer and the Astronauts," to the familial and social reflections of "The Great Depression as Heroic Age." Animating them all is the sense that there is joy in knowing the world–and the belief that true knowing brings, as Stafford says, "a change of heart." Stafford writes poetic and evocative prose as he reflects on such subjects as Indian place names, bears, and local eccentrics.