2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.
Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a "representative life" of our time.
Huang Xiang 黄翔, the protagonist of this book, was born on 26th December 1941 in Guidong county, Hunan province of central China. After the Communists came to power in 1949, he was imprisoned six times and severely persecuted for his free-spirited writing and his campaigns for human rights. For more than thirty years, this self-educated poet and writer, wrote secretly against the bondage of totalitarian ideology to safe-guard the freedom of speech. According to the author of the book, Huang is a great dark poet who has expressed the painful memories, fears and struggles that haunted his life creating wonderful poetic beauty in the darkness. His poetic creation is a miracle in the history of Chinese contemporary literature. We may say that Huang's identity as an unknown dark poet is conditioned by his personal, emotional and tragic experiences of struggles while facing historical events such as the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the April 5th Movement in 1976, the Democracy Wall Movement in 1978 and the Pro-Democracy Movement in 1989 in China.
-- Gerald Bruns's ground-breaking analysis compares two contrasting functions of language: the hermetic, where language is self-contained and self-referencing, and the Orphic, which originates from a belief in the mythical unity of word and being. Bruns lucidly depicts the distinctions and convergences between these two lines of thought by examining the works of Mallarme, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, and others.
Constituent and Pattern in Poetry is a collection of essays on literature and language. It is built on the assumption that works of literature have existence in the real world and that they may be analyzed in a fashion that is not totally subjective. Using models derived from structural linguistics, Archibald A. Hill presents a number of theoretical contributions to the study of poetry, as well as new ways of looking at specific poems. The book as a whole provides an overview of the tools and ideas Hill has developed for analyzing works of literature, and it is the first time the essays have been gathered together in one volume. The book is divided into three sections: Definition of Literature and Study of Its Patterns, Types of Meaning and Imagery, and Principles for Interpreting Meaning. Each section opens with a theoretical essay, followed by three essays that work analytically with specific poets and poems using the methods defined in the first. In his examination of such poets as Hopkins, Browning, Milton, Blake, Keats, and Dickinson, Hill uses such proposals as the law of least lexical contribution and maximal contextual contribution; the hypothesis that, when possible meanings occur together in a cluster, they support each other; and the idea that it is sometimes possible to recover underlying language sequences from which the author has departed for identifiable reasons. By applying these suppositions to the study of particular poems, Hill shows how the reader may arrive at statements about the relative artistic merit of works of literature.
In A Dialogue between Haizi’s Poetry and the Gospel of Luke Xiaoli Yang offers a conversation between the Chinese soul-searching found in Haizi’s (1964–1989) poetry and the gospel of Jesus Christ through Luke’s testimony. It creates a unique contextual poetic lens that appreciates a generation of the Chinese homecoming journey through Haizi’s poetry, and explores its relationship with Jesus Christ. As the dialogical journey, it names four stages of homecoming—roots, vision, journey and arrival. By taking an interdisciplinary approach—literary study, inter-cultural dialogue and comparative theology, Xiaoli Yang convincingly demonstrates that the common language between the poet Haizi and the Lukan Jesus provides a crucial and rich source of data for an ongoing table conversation between culture and faith.
