Standing on the Verge and Maggot Brain
Standing on the Verge and Maggot Brain

Author: ADRIAN. MATEJKA

Publisher: Third Man Books

Published: 2021-06

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9781734842296

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A collaboration of visual art and poetry inspired by Funkadelic's classic albums Standing on the Verge of Getting It On and Maggot Brain. Adrian Matejka's (Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Big Smoke) new book Standing On the Verge & Maggot Brain is a chorus of poems and visual art that is psychedelic and bright, full of quarter notes disguised as words. The poems bend like a solo bends the big ideas of Funkadelic's glitter and unrepentant funk. The book also bends the design of books themselves. The collection is more accurately described as a double-chapbook, featuring two front covers and no back cover. Essentially, it is a two-in-one book. For the Standing on the Verge chapbook of the two, sculptor and artist Kevin Neireiter translates music into stained glass graffiti in honor of the landmark record Standing On the Verge of Getting It On. Nicholas Galanin's (also front man of the Sub Pop band Ya Tseen) art creates musical compositions from monochromatics in response to the quintessential album Maggot Brain. The book is synesthesia for the ear and alchemy for the eyes and heart. Standing On the Verge & Maggot Brain is both a tribute to the iconic band Funkadelic and deep introspection of the contrasts in poet Matejka's celebrant hips and maggot brain. Just as the album Standing on the Verge of Getting It On is a celebration of energy and action, Maggot Brain is a place of deep sorrow. Matejka explores both the light and dark within the original visual art by Kevin Neireiter and Nicholas Galanin, reflecting the poet's radiances and shadows.

Somebody Else Sold the World
Somebody Else Sold the World

Author: Adrian Matejka

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 0143136445

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A resonant new collection on love and persistence from the author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize The poems in Adrian Matejka's newest and fifth collection, Somebody Else Sold the World, meditate on the ways we exist in an uncontrollable world: in love and its aftermaths, in families that divide themselves, in protest-filled streets, in isolation as routines become obsolete because of lockdown orders and curfews. Somebody Else uses past and future touchstones like pop songs, love notes, and imaginary gossip to illuminate those moments of splendor that persist even in exhaustion. These poems show that there are many possibilities of brightness and hope, even in the middle of pandemics and revolutions.

The Big Smoke
The Big Smoke

Author: Adrian Matejka

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1101613084

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A suite of poems examining the myth and history of the legendary prizefighter Jack Johnson—a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—from the author, with Youssef Daoudi, of the graphic novel Last on His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century The legendary Jack Johnson (1878–1946) was a true American creation. The child of emancipated slaves, he overcame the violent segregationism of Jim Crow, challenging white boxers—and white America—to become the first African-American heavyweight world champion. The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka’s third work of poetry, follows the fighter’s journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejka’s book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnson’s complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.

Secrets from the Center of the World
Secrets from the Center of the World

Author: Joy Harjo

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2021-10-19

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13: 0816546819

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"My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world." This is Navajo country, a land of mysterious and delicate beauty. "Stephen Strom's photographs lead you to that place," writes Joy Harjo. "The camera eye becomes a space you can move through into the powerful landscapes that he photographs. The horizon may shift and change all around you, but underneath it is the heart with which we move." Harjo's prose poems accompany these images, interpreting each photograph as a story that evokes the spirit of the Earth. Images and words harmonize to evoke the mysteries of what the Navajo call the center of the world.

Juan Luna's Revolver
Juan Luna's Revolver

Author: Luisa Igloria

Publisher:

Published: 2022-08-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780268206352

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The poems in Juan Luna' s Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress. Igloria traces journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial power. Her poems allude to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna and the novelist and national hero Jose Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World's Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout the collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility. Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Igloria's poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically-charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective.

Map to the Stars
Map to the Stars

Author: Adrian Matejka

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-03-28

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1524704148

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A resonant new collection of poetry from Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Map to the Stars, the fourth poetry collection from National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka, navigates the tensions between race, geography, and poverty in America during the Reagan Era. In the time of space shuttles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, outer space is the only place equality seems possible, even as the stars serve to both guide and obscure the earthly complexities of masculinity and migration. In Matejka's poems, hope is the link between the convoluted realities of being poor and the inspiring possibilities of transcendence and escape—whether it comes from Star Trek, the dream of being one of the first black astronauts, or Sun Ra's cosmic jazz.

Trouble the Waters
Trouble the Waters

Author: Sheree Thomas

Publisher: Third Man Books

Published: 2021-10-19

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9781734842272

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Trouble the Waters gathers the tidal force of bestselling, renowned writers from Lagos to New Orleans, Memphis to Copenhagen, Northern Ireland and London, offering extraordinary speculative fiction tales of ancient waters in all its myriad forms. Meet techno savvy water spirits, bayou saints and sirens, robots and river rootwomen, a pod of joyful space whales, and a castle of water-born terrors and mysteries. Including work by Nalo Hopkinson, Jaquira Diaz, Andrea Hairston, Linda D. Addison, Rion Amilcar Scott, Marie Vibbert, Maurice Broaddus, and other breakout beautiful voices, these stories and poems celebrate the most vital of elemental forces, water.

Loteria Cards and Fortune Poems
Loteria Cards and Fortune Poems

Author: Juan Felipe Herrera

Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Published: 1999-09-01

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780872863590

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The gorgeous black and white line art inside this hefty little book instantly caught my eye. These linocut drawings were not the regular loteria images. They were modern adaptations, made with painstaking detail (think of a turn-of-the-millenium...

Bunnyman: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting
Bunnyman: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting

Author: William Sergeant

Publisher:

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9781734842289

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This is the true story of one small boy, me, Will Sergeant, navigating the 60's and 70's, a woolly-back (hick) spawned one drunken night on the outskirts of a Nazi pocked and battered Liverpool, growing up with the spectre of WW2 still creeping about most adults padlocked minds. I trudge on into a piss wet 1970s, just as the pustules of teenage years approach popping point. It is a heady time of power cuts, strikes, flying pickets, bread shortages, skinhead gangs, IRA bomb scares, nuclear war fears, rock gigs, glam clothes, drowned motorbikes, explosives, dead-end jobs and the usual school lessons of chicken strangulation. With the help of music, I manage to navigate myself through the sinking sand of prog rock and into the safety of punk. My boots still muddy with a bad attitude, I head into the winter of discontent to become a post-punk trailblazer worshipped all over the world as a god. Well? An inventive and influential guitarist of some note at the very least.

Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century
Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century

Author: Youssef Daoudi

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2023-02-21

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1631495593

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A groundbreaking graphic portrait of boxing legend Jack Johnson, Last On His Feet offers a front-row seat to the Battle of the Century. On the morning of July 4, 1910, thousands of boxing fans stormed a newly built stadium in Reno, Nevada, to witness an epic showdown. Jack Johnson, the world’s first Black heavyweight champion—and most infamous athlete in the world because of his race—was paired against Jim Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion then heralded as the “great white hope.” It was the height of the Jim Crow era, and spectators were eager for Jeffries to restore the racial hierarchy that Johnson had pummeled with his quick fists. Transporting readers directly into the ring, artist Youssef Daoudi and poet Adrian Matejka intersperse dramatic boxing action with vivid flashbacks to reveal how Johnson, the self-educated son of formerly enslaved parents, reached the pinnacle of sport—all while facing down a racist justice system. Through a combination of breathtaking illustrations and striking verse, Last on His Feet honors a contentious civil rights figure who has for more than a century been denied his proper due.