The journey for the truth of self offers the opportunity for triumph and failure. Often as we search for who we’re meant to be in life, we misplace ourselves for a little while. Even when we’re struggling to reconnect with our misplaced cores, we can’t help but be ourselves. Life is simply a journey to fill in the gaps, to find our truths, to become our best selves. When we embrace the all of who we are, we live richer, fuller lives and avoid being simply reflections in silhouette…
We revere strength. We malign strength. We both fear and admire strength. When we reach inside during our weakest moments and find the strength to move forward, we discover the best thing about being human. Our humanity lies in both the strengths and the weaknesses that connect us and separate us. The poems within explore the many facets of strength in the hopes we never allow strength to become merely a silhouette.
Vulnerability’s reputation often causes it to be maligned. Vulnerability creates insecurity and destroys confidence. Delve into the human experience of balancing vulnerability and strength while finding one’s place in the world. Explore the strength in vulnerability and the vulnerability in strength through soul-searching poems that travel the full spectrum o f vulnerability from weakness to silhouette.
Every moment is a memory and every memory is a moment. Memories are moments that build on one another to create the foundation of who we are at any given point in life. Memories - good, bad, and neutral - meld within our minds and hearts housing love, hate, pleasure, fear, anger, and happiness. With each memory we make, we become more compassionate, and therefore more connected to the world around us. Our strengths and weaknesses live in our memories creating the complexity and simplicity that encompasses the full human experience. Come along to discover how moments blossom into growth or become merely a memory in silhouette…
Oh, Democracy, What Say You? Proclamations of freedom and equality echo through hollow speeches ignoring far too many of we, the people. What happens when the people see the manipulation that keeps the powerful in power and those without power powerless? When a democracy becomes cast in silhouette, can it thrive? Can a democracy in silhouette even survive?
Reflections From The Heart is an anthology of a hundred short poems by three poets. These have all come from a crucible of lived experiences, which have left a deep impression on the poets’ minds, their hearts, and indeed, the core of their beings. They have, all three of them, finely honed sensibilities that have been tempered by all the vicissitudes that they, as individuals, have been through. And yet these speak to all, for they have a universality that makes every reader recognize the emotion that gave rise to them, and the truth that each one of them encapsulates. These poems are not, for the most part, “emotions recollected in tranquillity”. The feelings and emotions that they are imbued with remain within the skeins of the lines themselves, sometimes raw, sometimes a little distanced, but never, really, too far away from the heart. They cannot really be called “tranquil” poems, for the experiences that gave rise to them remain, and disturb even today. Bhaskar Bora’s poems have a power that comes from the circumstances that many of them were written in. A doctor with a flourishing practice, he found himself wheelchair bound after complications from a neurosurgical operation. In his despair, poetry, the writing of it, became a cathartic experience. His life story is moving, and the reader can empathise with the emotions embedded in his poems of that period. But his grit in creating a new profession for himself, that of a restaurateur, his thoughts and emotions on this journey are inspirational, especially as, through his poems we get a first-hand account of both his despair and his courage. His loss of mobility is paralleled by a soaring creativity. And yet, in some poems, there is also a beautiful sense of peace, possibly made more piquant by the prevailing circumstances of his life. This one, as he watches his daughters asleep at night: The princesses sleep in peace Faces glowing in moonlit rooms Duvets pulled, pillows spaced ... (Midnight: Bhaskar Bora) And yet, none of the three poets wallow in any kind of self-pity, nor are these an exercise in navel gazing. No, not at all. There is always, in all the poems, a sense of a wider world, in fact a greater entity, even, in some of them that raise them above the level of unremitting hopelessness to one of hope and a sense of journeying into a brighter future. I may not walk today Tomorrow I may run I may be in pain today Tomorrow is my turn (Tomorrow is my Turn: Bhaskar Bora) And of course, there is the cry of pain, moving and poignant, that pierces the reader’s mind. Pains seen, unseen, Voices heard, unheard As the silence screams Into a deafening noise Laughter, sorrow, anger, despair Melt together in the golden brew. (Dance of the Dead: Bhaskar Bora)
This collection brings together 40 years of essays about poetry and literature written by Emily Grosholz. The first section includes essays about some of her favorite poets and thinkers in the United States, England, France and Germany. The second section brings poetry into relation with ethics, politics and practical deliberation, and the third considers it alongside science and imagination. The last section is an homage to The Hudson Review, for whom she has served as an Advisory Editor for many years. As a philosopher, Emily Grosholz has written and thought about feminism, racism, and mathematics and science, which has led her to admire all the more the distinct wisdom of poetry. These essays show how poetry reorganized language and memory, eros and experience, and time and place, and how and why it deepens our understanding of life.
When past and present converge, the characters in these short stories must reexamine the future they planned. Myriad characters and situations populate these stories pushing the characters to decide whether to risk changing their lives as they face loss, love, and revelations. In these short stories of beginnings and endings, of recognizing moments of before and after, of choosing to stay or leave, of facing a future divergent from expectations, lives a thread of hope in life’s ability to transform.
Greg Wrenn's debut collection opens with a long poem in which a man undergoes surgery to become a centaur. Other poems speak in voices as varied as those of Robert Mapplethorpe, Hercules, and a Wise Man at the birth of Jesus. Centaur skitters along the blurred lines between compulsivity and following one's heart, stasis and self-realization, human and animal. Here, suffering and transcendence are restlessly conjoined.
