“Join Heller on her quest to help save the world, one poet at a time.” — from the foreword by Susan G. Wooldridge Write a Poem, Save Your Life helps writers of all ages and experience levels navigate their way through all aspects of life. With writing prompts, tools, encouragement, and moving student examples, Meredith Heller gently guides us in the art of using poetry to figure out who we are and what matters to us and to heal the deeper issues many of us face, such as depression, addiction, health and body image issues, low self-esteem, trauma, gender and sexual identity issues, and home and family problems. Along the way, we learn that writing poems helps us believe in ourselves, make positive life choices, and find direction, purpose, and meaning.
“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.
POETIC TRAVEL OF LIFE Poems and short stories that Inspire, Uplift, and Encourage you on your life Journey Poetic Travel of Life is little glances of life. My life as well as so many of your lives. They were written to INSPIRE the creativity in you, UPLIFT you when your down (laugh, smile, enjoy life it really is what you make it) and to ENCOURAGE you to move forward in your poetic travel of life no matter what the obstacles. Loose yourself in the words and flow of each poem and enjoy the journey!
For more than a quarter of a century, Pat Schneider has helped writers find and liberate their true voices. Now, Schneider's acclaimed methods are made available in a single well-organized and highly readable volume.
Elisabeth Tonnard's In This Dark Wood is a study of urban alienation in America. In a haunting, modern-gothic style, it pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations, collected by Tonnard, of the famous first lines of Dante's Inferno: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita." ("In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost"). The images were selected from the Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers who worked in San Francisco from the 1940s to the 70s. This edition is a reprint of a work originally self-published in 2008.
A Study Guide for Stanley Kunitz's "The Layers", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
A constellation of essays that reanimates the work of this pivotal twentieth-century American poet for a new century. This volume is the first to reconsider Roethke’s work in terms of the expanded critical approaches to literature that have emerged since his death in 1963. Editor William Barillas and over forty contributors, including highly respected literary scholars, critics, and writers such as Peter Balakian, Camille Paglia, Jay Parini, and David Wojahn, collectively make a case for Roethke’s poetry as a complete, unified, and evolving body of work. The accessible essays employ a number of approaches, including formalism, ecocriticism, reader-response, and feminist critique to explicate the poetics, themes, and the biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Roethke’s work.
Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Discussing more than 200 poems by more than 100 writers, ranging from ancient Greece and China to the twenty-first century, the book introduces readers to the skills and the critical and theoretical awareness that enable them to read poetry with enjoyment and insight. This third edition has been significantly updated in response to current developments in poetry and poetic criticism, and includes many new examples and exercises, new chapters on ‘world poetry’ and ‘eco-poetry’, and a greater emphasis throughout on American poetry, including the impact traditional Chinese poetry has had on modern American poetry. The seventeen carefully staged chapters constitute a complete apprenticeship in reading poetry, leading readers from specific features of form and figurative language to larger concerns with genre, intertextuality, Caribbean poetry, world poetry, and the role poetry can play in response to the ecological crisis. The workshop exercises at the end of each chapter, together with an extensive glossary of poetic and critical terms, and the number and range of poems analysed and discussed – 122 of which are quoted in full – make Reading Poetry suitable for individual study or as a comprehensive, self-contained textbook for university and college classes.
Introduces students to poetry in the context of understanding basic poetic forms, devices and techniques. As students encounter and respond to poems in a variety of ways, students will develop essential vocabulary, literacy and language skills. Poetry Reloaded uses an engaging writing style to draw students into the world of poetry. By demonstrating how poetry is relevant to many of the things that interest students today. • Annotated poems and biographies bring poetry to life • Stunning, full colour illustrations and other visually engaging material focus on visual literacy • Focus questions encourage students to explore the possible meanings of each poem • Engaging activities cater for a range of abilities, learning styles and interests • A comprehensive glossary of poetic forms, terms, techniques help students remember key concepts • Reading lists extend the experience of poetry in areas of particular interest • Companion website
At the young age of 23 Mitch Koppel received a devastating diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Twenty years of extreme health challenges inspired him to express his journey through poetry. These poems immediately went viral with friends and family to the extent that they urged him to create a book about the story and the poetry it inspired. I don't wish MS on my worst enemy; even if I had a worst enemy. Actually, over our 20-year relationship, my worst enemy has been myself all along and I'm not about to give MS to myself one more time. In truth, as counter-intuitive as this may sound, it was recently refreshing to hear that my MS has sort of reached its end game. I heard this in the hospital no less. I won't get any worse because I'm 1% of the folks that have reached a sort of illness finality. I wasn't upset to hear this. I was actually thrilled because never again will I lose sleep over what the disease had in store next; will my limp get worse, will I one day need a walker or, God forbid, a wheelchair? It's all here now; a path of physical and oft times' mental destruction. I have a white flag, but it's never been raised. You see, I'm not defined by MS. I'm not defined by what's next. I'm not defined by its progress. I'm defined, or would like to be defined by breaking down barriers and setting an example for friends and family alike; especially for my boys. I used to agonize, summarize and theorize that I wasn't worthy. Other dads coached sports. I sat aside. Other dads played catch. I sat aside. Other dads would twirl their children in their arms, suspend them in the air and run around in the yard. I sat and stared. Then it hit me: my boys often call without a reason to tell me they love me. Griffin likes to lie on the couch and play a game he made up called, "Five Kisses." It used to be called "Three Kisses", but he wanted more. Instead of self-pity, I try as best I can to live with self-worth. It has had a domino effect on my soul. As the last tile lands forward, the words on it read, "Not today, MS. Not today." Blame games were a symptom of the past. Spirituality has played a major role in turning grief into accepting I have everything else left to live for, smiles to share and love to let grow; this was and is my new awakening. Like many ill or infirmed, the seasons change but hearts and minds may be frozen. In my heart. In my soul. In dark evenings of emptiness inside sunny days where I closed the blinds, the miracle of spirituality found, the quiet of my soul and memories of what I hope to never endure again. Ultimately, like rivers and streams, all things run into one and passes through illness from times long since passed. Each room, every bed and endless ticking of the room's clock began from the basement of time. A fly on the wall could tell countless stories of pain and suffering, of waiting and wondering, of tears and sorrow. Of a belief of a better tomorrow. Those before me leave fingerprints revealing it was their time and place. Some of those fingerprints come to life under every room's bright hospital lights. Beneath the lights are the echoes of their words. I am haunted by hospitals.
