Kaleidoscope: Turns of Prose and Poetry is a collection of literature from The Carnegie Writers, Inc. Adult Writing Workshop. Through poetry, prose, and play-writing, each writer involved brought their own voice to the page. Everyone sees something different in a kaleidoscope, but to communicate that vision is something else entirely. These writers beautifully depict the shifting shapes and colors of everyday life. Writing Facilitators Heather Hickox and Brian Smith would like to thank the participants of the Adult Writing Workshop for their hard work and commitment to this project. Kaleidoscope is a wonderful achievement, a true monument to creative expression, and we hope it will be enjoyed and explored for ages. The Carnegie Writers, Inc. is a community-based non-profit organization focused on writing education and collaboration. The Carnegie Writers provides positive and productive support for writers of all ages, also offering publications, writing events, and professional conferences. The organization was founded by Oluwakemi Elufiede in August 2013.
Kate Kingston writes about intimate environments, especially the terrain of Spain and Mexico and the wilderness in the Southwestern U.S., to reveal the complexities, strengths, and resilience of the female spirit. The poems in Shaping the Kaleidoscope resonate with the theme of landscape as integral to the self, how our outer landscapes shape and reveal our inner landscapes.
Will Lyza’s 1968 summer mystery lead to . . . pirate treasure? When Lyza helps her dad clean out her late grandfather’s house, a mysterious surprise brightens the sad task. In Gramps’s dusty attic, Lyza discovers three maps, carefully folded and stacked, bound by a single rubber band. On top, an envelope says “For Lyza ONLY.” What could this possibly be? It takes the help of her two best friends, Malcolm and Carolann, to figure out that the maps reveal three possible spots in their own New Jersey town where Captain Kidd (the Captain Kidd, seventeenth-century pirate) may have buried a treasure. Can three thirteen-year-olds actually conduct a secret treasure hunt? And what will they find? In a tale inspired by a true story of buried treasure, Jen Bryant weaves an emotional and suspenseful novel in poems, all set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War during a pivotal year in U.S. history.
The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.
National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.
Eleven fictive poets from Latin America, France and Quebec. Their poems, interviews, biographies and letters weave images of diverse lives and poetics. In the tradition of Fernando Pessoa, Boyle presents an array of at times humorous, at times tormented heteronymous poets. In their varied voices and styles, writing as they do across the span of the 20th Century and into the 21st, these haunted and haunting figures offer one of poetry's oldest gifts - to sing beauty in the face of death. In all this Boyle, their fictive translator, is deeply enmeshed. "As in his ground-breaking work, Apocrypha, Peter Boyle plays hauntingly and movingly with character and voice in this brilliant new collection. The often broken, dark-edged lives of his 'translated' poets are rendered in language that is both intimate and universal. These poems and prose pieces span cultures and contexts to evoke an intoxicating range of human feeling and experience. Boyle's poetry confronts the dark, but it is also uplifting in its perfection of craft and for the way it radiates the enormous power that poetry has to uncover deep, surprising knowledge. I can think of no Australian poet more deserving of a central place on the world stage than Peter Boyle. His imaginative sweep is staggering." - Judith Beveridge "Somewhere between a brief, succulent anthology of the best twentieth century poetry and a rare contemporary novel, Ghostspeaking rescues, from a world within this one, eleven poets who never existed. But that can never be said again. These lives and works are so convincing that readers will trawl the web to learn more about them. All of the writers gathered here are wonderful, some quite remarkable: what then does that leave us to say of the man who created them?" - David Brooks Praise for multi-award winning Apocrypha: "[Peter Boyle is] one of the best and most fascinating of Australian poets ... Apocrypha, a brilliant work - to my mind one of the pinnacles of recent Australian poetry" - Martin Duwell Peter Boyle is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Towns in the Great Desert: New and Selected Poems. The highly awarded Apocrypha (2009) marked the beginning of his experimentation with heteronyms and the merging of fiction, poetry and speculation. Boyle is also a prolific translator of poetry with six books of poetry translated from Spanish. After working for more than twenty years as a teacher with TAFE NSW he is now completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University, focusing on the translation of poetry, the heteronym tradition and their connections."
“Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is an awakening itself.” —Vogue Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even—and especially—in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief. Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
This newest collection of poetry by multi-award winning poet Robert A. Cozzi is filled with as many wonderful aspects as the kaleidoscope is color and shapes. Each poem will take you on a different path, whether it be vulnerability, loss, love, friendships, or powerful memories. All of these messages converge to create a beautiful representation of the human experience. Allow this collection to take you on an adventure where you will discover new stories that are reflected in your own life.
