Inspired by the #SayHerName campaign launched by the African American Policy Forum, these poems pay tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists insisting that Black Lives Matter. Elliott engages poets from the past two centuries to create a chorus of voices celebrating the creativity, resilience, and courage of Black women and girls. This collection features forty-nine powerful poems, four of which are tribute poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Phillis Wheatley. This provocative collection will move every reader to reflect, respond-and act.
The bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses forty poems from across the centuries that express the universal experience of loss and reflects on them in order to draw out the comfort, understanding and hope they offer. Some of the poems will be familiar, many will be new, but together they provide a sure companion for the journey across difficult terrain. Some of Malcolm’s own poetry is included, written out of his work as a priest with the dying and the bereaved and giving to the volume a powerful authenticity. The choice of forty poems is significant and reflects an ancient practice still observed in some European and Middle Eastern societies of taking extra-special care of a bereaved person in the forty days following a death – our word quarantine come from this. They explore the nature and the risk of love, the pain of letting go and look toward glimpses of resurrection.
Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) has long been regarded as the lost modernist. Her extraordinary long poem Paris (1920), a journey through a day in post First World War Paris, was considered by Virginia Woolf obscure, indecent, and brilliant'. Read today, the poem retains its exhilarating daring. Mirrlees's experimentalism looks forward to The Waste Land; her writing is integral to the twentieth-century canon. And yet, after Paris, Mirrlees published no more poetry for almost half a century, and her later poems appear to have little in common with the avant garde spirit of Paris. In this first edition to gather the full span of Mirrlees's poetry, Sandeep Parmar explores the paradoxes of Mirrlees's development as a poet and the complexities of her life. Sandeep Parmar was the first scholar to gain access to the Mirrlees Archive at Newnham College, Cambridge, and her edition includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft form. The text is supported by detailed notes, including a commentary on Paris by Julia Briggs, and a selection of Mirrlees's essays. The generous introduction provides the most accurate biographical account of Mirrlees's life available. Mirrlees's Collected Poems is an indispensible addition to a reading of modernism.
Part of a new collection of literary voices from Gibbs Smith, written by, and for, extraordinary women—to encourage, challenge, and inspire. One of American’s most distinctive poets, Emily Dickinson scorned the conventions of her day in her approach to writing, religion, and society. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers is a collection from her vast archive of poetry to inspire the writers, creatives, and leaders of today. Continue your journey in the Women’s Voices series with Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte and The Feminist Papers by Mary Wollstonecraft.
**The Sunday Times Bestseller** Instagram superstar and poet Nikita Gill returns to her roots with her most personal collection yet, including more than twenty poems exclusive to the US edition. I took my worries out and laid them carefully on the kitchen table. Then began the slow but rewarding task of fixing everything that needed more love. Nikita Gill shares a collection of poems crafted as the world went into lockdown, tackles themes such as mental health and loneliness, and the precarity of hope. Through the life cycle of a star, she invites the reader to feel connected to the universe, taking us on a journey through the five stages of grief to the five stages of hope. This collection includes the phenomenal “Love in the Time of Coronavirus,” which was shared across social media over 20,000 times, as well as Gill's poems of strength and hope, “How to Be Strong” and “Silver Linings.” Where Hope Comes From is fully illustrated with beautiful line drawings by the author. All because everything is forbidden now, I want to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower and sing at the top of my lungs.
The final collection by the late Jason Shinder, "one of the finest of our new poets" (Gerald Stern) I close my eyes and try to remember when I was unopposed, when I started to die, buoyant, fragrant, shuddering with love. —from "Before" Jason Shinder's last poems are his moving testimonies to poetry, love, and friendship. With power, clarity, and disarming humor, the poems confront grief and mortality with a humility and fortitude that come only "with hope, stupid hope." Stupid Hope is Shinder's wry, penetrating, and wise farewell.
In his second collection of poems, we meet Félix Garmendía again after he has been settled in Washington Heights for years with his husband, Denis. With Denis, he and his wheelchair Purple Raven swing around Fort Tryon Park, the streets, the building, and the apartment in all seasons. There Félix bears witness to some of the most frightening occurrences of the last fifty years: the disinformation and bigotry of a feral, out-of-control administration, the explosion of racism, the pandemic, and the storming of the Capitol. Through his eyes we watch exhausted healthcare workers exit hospitals, still wearing their equipment, to a universal round of applause, played out differently in every New York neighborhood. We see Black people murdered by police. We shiver with anger at the blend of authoritarianism and misinformed rage that almost guts the heart of our democracy. And yet through it all, through Félix, we also find the grace and courage to laugh and find our own oases of hope. Félix is a poet, HIV+ survivor, and disabled due to Inclusion Body Myositis. He survived his early years in conservative Catholic Puerto Rico and arrived in Manhattan, New York City, in 1988. His poems narrate his life as a gay activist, poet, and storyteller in the face of illness and intolerance. Because of his Inclusion Body Myositis, Félix has become adept at typing with one finger. He has also become incredibly, enchantingly adept at capturing the mood of a year, a day, a season, a place. As in his first poetry collection, Flying On Invisible Wings, Félix sculpts with words the very heart of his wishes, hopes, failings, and cares. But here they are often the wishes, hopes, failings, and cares of a nation, as well. With Félix, we emerge from the deluge that the last few years have brought into our lives. We find the calm place again.
An uplifting book of poems, Hope and Languish takes us on an emotional journey from the first news of the pandemic, through isolation, and finally to a place of hope. Day blends into daythe setting sunannounces the nightand right in betweenlet the bell ringlet each one raise their curtainslean out the windowstep onto the balconyand shout out rebelliouslywe will meet again Within two weeks of moving to Santa Monica lockdowns began and riots broke out. Having never lived in California before, forced isolation in a beachside studio provided Chenelle Bremont time for reflection and poetry.
Translated by David L. Schindler, JrIn what is one of the greatest Catholic poetic works of our century, Péguy offers a comprehensive theology ordered around the often-neglected second virtue which is incarnated inhis celebrated image of the ‘little girl Hope'.
