Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a spine-tingling collection of terrifically creepy poems about the deadly art of murder. The villains and victims who populate these pages range from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard and his wives to Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and Mafia hit men. The literary forms they inhabit are just as varied, from the colorful melodramas of old Scottish ballads to the hard-boiled poetry of twentieth-century noir, from lighthearted comic riffs to profound poetic musings on murder. Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Mark Doty, Frank Bidart, Toi Derricotte, Lynn Emanuel, and Cornelius Eady are only a few of the many poets, old and new, whose work is captured in this heart-stopping—and criminally entertaining—collection.
Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money is a groundbreaking study covering a range of contemporary authors and issues, from Haizi to Yin Lichuan and from poetic rhythm to exile-bashing. Its rigorous scholarship, literary sensitivity and lively style make it eminently fit for classroom use.
Sconnettts is a collection of 77 poems written over the past two decades by Scottt Raven reflecting on various aspects of love. Additional subject matter includes sports, action movies, TV shows, technology and family. This edition is set up chronologically with the first poems written when Scott was still a teen. Permission was granted for all dedications that appear in print for poems 1-34, while the quotes on the back of the book have been written by women who once were/still are in actual relationships with Scottt. These appear in the form of Lovers' Complaints mimicking the original Shakespearean Sonnets.
Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of “death,” poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China’s continued self-identity as a “nation of poetry” (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China’s media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule. As the first book to deal explicitly with the discourses and functioning of scenes within the Chinese cultural context, Verse Going Viral will be of value to students and scholars of Chinese literature, cultural studies, and media, as well as to general readers interested in China's dynamic cultural scenes.
In this refreshing and inspiring book, Phil Roberts asserts that poetry, like music, is based on sound and so close attention should be paid to its rhythms and metrical patterns. He illustrates his points with lively examples ranging from nursery rhymes and limericks to recent experimental forms as well as familiar pieces from over the centuries. The book concludes with a Millennium Anthology, a salute to the poetry of the past thousand years, including pieces from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA.
Chinese prose poetry today is engaged with a series of questions that are fundamental to the modern Chinese language: What is prose? What is it good for? How should it look and sound? Millions of Chinese readers encounter prose poetry every year, both in the most official of state-sponsored magazines and in the unorthodox, experimental work of the avant-garde. Recite and Refuse makes the answers to our questions about prose legible by translating, surveying, and interpreting prose poems, and by studying the people, politics, and contexts that surround the writing of prose poetry. Author Nick Admussen argues that unlike most genres, Chinese prose poems lack a distinct size or shape. Their similarity to other prose is the result of a distinct process in which a prose form is recited with some kind of meaningful difference—an imitation that refuses to fully resemble its source. This makes prose poetry a protean, ever-changing group of works, channeling the language of science, journalism, Communist Party politics, advertisements, and much more. The poems look vastly different as products, but are made with a similar process. Focusing on the composition process allows Admussen to rewrite the standard history of prose poetry, finding its origins not in 1918 but in the obedient socialist prose poetry of the 1950s. Recite and Refuse places the work of state-sponsored writers in mutual relationship to prose poems by unorthodox and avant-garde poets, from cadre writers like Ke Lan and Guo Feng to the border-crossing intellectual and poet Liu Zaifu to experimental artists such as Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The volume features never-before seen English translations that range from the representative to the exceptional, culminating with Ouyang Jianghe’s masterpiece “Hanging Coffin.” Reading across the spectrum enables us to see the way that artists interact with each other, how they compete and cooperate, and how their interactions, as well as their creations, continuously reinvent both poetry and prose.
Faye Blakemore is a photojournalist for a major New York newspaper. Faye has been taking photos since she was a small child, taught by her photographer grandfather, after spending hours in the strange blood-red light of his darkroom. Now Faye specializes in what one reviewer calls, “blood-and-guts journalism.” Her first book of photos is as celebrated as it is controversial—and as harrowing. Faye convinces her editor to send her to Afghanistan and the Congo to report on the acid burnings, the machete attacks, and the women survivors. Yet that series of assignments—each darker and more dangerous than the next—brings Faye closer to her both her own demons and to the family secrets that still haunt her and threaten to destroy her and the woman she loves.
The contemporary creative writing class in fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, AKA the "workshop," evolved in MFA programs introduced to U.S. universities after World War II, and today the majority of accomplished, successful literary novelists, short fiction writers and poets were influenced by the workshop process. But the poetry "workshop" in which the poem under discussion is reviewed and discussed by students and poet-teachers remains controversial to some readers and a mystery to others. This may be the first book exploring the craft of poetry that combines observations and analyses of the poet-teacher together with her students' own accounts of their initial creative impetus and their revision processes.
A searingly powerful memoir about the impact of addiction on a family. In the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with drug addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint, Hans’ sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, tries to make sense of what happened. In Mayhem, she asks the difficult questions those close to the world of addiction must face. “Who can help the addict, consumed by a shaming hunger, a need beyond control? There is no medicine: the drugs are the medicine. And who can help their families, so implicated in the self-destruction of the addict? Who can help when the very notion of ‘help’ becomes synonymous with an exercise of power; a familial police state; an end to freedom, in the addict’s mind?” An eloquent and timely attempt to understand the conundrum of addiction—and a memoir as devastating as it is riveting.
A lot can change in a few months. Jake Palmer is living proof of that. In a short time, the once–shy loner has discovered his incredible supernatural abilities and forged a tight bond with his fellow Mystyx. What's more—he's fallen for his best friend, Krystal. And fallen hard. Still, some things remain the same—like the jocks who keep bullying him. Even though they have no idea how powerful Jake has become. And while he tries to follow Krystal's advice, he may not be able to keep his cool much longer. But there are bigger problems ahead, because the darkness that's been hovering nearby is about to descend on the town of Lincoln, Connecticut. And when it does, the Mystyx will learn who to trust, who to fear and just how much is at stake…
