Beyond Katrina

Beyond Katrina

Author: Natasha Trethewey

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2015-08-01

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 082034902X

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Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of her natal Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home. In this new edition, Trethewey looks back on the ten years that have passed since Katrina in a new epilogue, outlining progress that has been made and the challenges that still exist.


Sisyphusina

Sisyphusina

Author: Shira Dentz

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04-05

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9781948587099

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Poetry. Women's Studies. Art. Music. SISYPHUSINA is a cross-genre collection of prose, poetry, visual art, and improvisatory music, centered on female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack rich vocabularies to describe female aging, Shira Dentz uses the hybrid form as an attempt to suture new language that reflects internal and physical processes that constitute a shifting identity. By deviating from formal classical construction, and using the recurring image of a rose, SISYPHUSINA circles around conventions of beauty, questioning traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. Some of the book's images are drawn from separate multimedia collaborations between the author and composer Pauline Oliveros, artist Kathy High, and artist Kathline Carr. A musical composition improvised by Pauline Oliveros, based on one of her text scores, titled "Aging Music," is the book's coda, and readers can listen to it online by scanning a QR code inside the book. The interweaving of these collaborations with the author's voice and voices from other sources imbue this book with a porous texture, and reimagines the boundary of the book as a membrane.


The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy

The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy

Author: John Brehm

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1614293422

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Over 125 poetic companions, from Basho to Billy Collins, Saigyo to Shakespeare. The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy received the Spirituality & Practice Book Award for 50 Best Spiritual Books in 2017 by Spirituality and Practice Website. The poems expertly gathered here offer all that one might hope for in spiritual companionship: wisdom, compassion, peacefulness, good humor, and the ability to both absorb and express the deepest human emotions of grief and joy. The book includes a short essay on “Mindful Reading” and a meditation on sound from editor John Brehm—helping readers approach the poems from an experiential, non-analytical perspective and enter into the mindful reading of poetry as a kind of meditation. The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy offers a wide-ranging collection of 129 ancient and modern poems unlike any other anthology on bookshelves today. It uniquely places Buddhist poets like Han Shan, Tu Fu, Saigyo, Ryokan, Basho, Issa, and others alongside modern Western poets one would not expect to find in such a collection—poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Jack Gilbert, Ellen Bass, Billy Collins, and more. What these poems have in common, no matter whether they are explicitly Buddhist, is that all reflect the essential truths the Buddha articulated 2,500 years ago. The book provides an important poetic complement to the many prose books on mindfulness practice—the poems here both reflect and embody the dharma in ways that can’t be matched by other modes of writing. It’s unique features include an introduction that discusses the themes of impermanence, mindfulness, and joy and explores the relationship between them. Biographical notes place the poets in historical context and offer quotes and anecdotes to help readers learn about the poets’ lives.


My Bright Abyss

My Bright Abyss

Author: Christian Wiman

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2013-04-02

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0374216789

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A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry


Having and Being Had

Having and Being Had

Author: Eula Biss

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0525537473

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A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING “A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author, “one of the leading lights of the modern American essay.” —Financial Times “My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges—in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences—she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”


YOUNGER and WISER

YOUNGER and WISER

Author: Gene Jones

Publisher:

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780998324005

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A unique fusion of three literary formats that gives poetry mainstream appeal. This innovative book combines storytelling and wisdom phrases with contemporary poetry to form a universally appealing literary masterpiece.


I May Or May Not Love You

I May Or May Not Love You

Author: David Perkins

Publisher: Ice Cube Press

Published: 2020-03-07

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781948509152

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The poems in I May or May Not Love You reflect the author's belief that all of the history of poetry is there for the looting. You'll find Marianne Moore lurking in "I Should Have No Doubts," and Ezra Pound hanging out in "Meditation in the Color of C"; Homer beached in "Sentiment for a City," and W.B. Yeats bar-hopping in "Aging Out," among others. And while he believes that all schools of poetry have something to teach, it's better to stay in class and go on assimilating rather than graduate. It's the music of words that matter here: the "banging of consonants" the "rolling vowels," and the assonance and alliteration and the "contrapuntally chimed rhymes, off-key and off-kilter," as they wander the terrain; Paris, Philadelphia, Denver; gazing at clocks and mirrors, listening to Tchaikovsky, playing the lottery, looking askance at Death, and cross-examining love.


In the Lateness of the World

In the Lateness of the World

Author: Carolyn Forché

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0525560408

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FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY “An undisputed literary event.” —NPR “History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another. Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.