"A rhapsodic follow-up to Tongo Eisen-Martin's Heaven is All Goodbyes, this collection further explores themes of love and loss, family and faith, refracted through the lens of Black experience. These poems honor intellectual tradition and ancestral knowledge while blazing an entirely new path, recording and replaying the poet's sensory travels through America, from its packed metropolises to desolate anytowns. Packed with politically astute and clear-eyed takes on race and class, filled with wisdom and great humanity, these poems perform mind-bending leaps and wander down back alleys to arrive at their moment of ultimate truth"--
The power of Eros, the enduring beauty of art, a love-hate nostalgia for his Argentine homeland, the bonds of friendship and the tragic folly of politics are some of the themes of Save Twilight. Informed by his immersion in world literature, music, art, and history, and most of his own emotional geography, Cortazar's poetry traces his paradoxical evolution from provincial Argentinean sophisticate to cosmopolitan Parisian Romantic, always maintaining the sense of astonishment of an artist surprised by life.
Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming one with the infinite universe from the author of On the Road During an unexplained fainting spell, Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac recognized the experience as “satori,” a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language that is both precise and cryptic, mystical and plain. His vision proclaims, “There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one golden eternity.” Within these meditations, haikus, and Zen koans is a contemplation of consciousness and impermanence. While heavily influenced by the form of Buddhist poems or sutras, Kerouac also draws inspiration from a variety of religious traditions, including Taoism, Native American spirituality, and the Catholicism of his youth. Far-reaching and inclusive, this collection reveals the breadth of Kerouac’s poetic sensibility and the curiosity, word play, and fierce desire to understand the nature of existence that make up the foundational concepts of Beat poetry and propel all of Kerouac’s writing.
"Reality Sandwiches" is a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published in 1963. The title comes from one of the included poems, "On Burroughs' Work": "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." The book is dedicated to friend and fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso. Despite Ginsberg's feeling that this collection was not his most significant, the poems still represent Ginsberg at a peak period of his craft. Contents: My Alba Sakyamuni Coming Out From The Mountain The Green Automobile Havana 1953 Siesta In Xbalba And Return To The States On Burroughs' Work Love Poem On Theme By Whitman Over Kansas Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo Dream Record: June 8, 1955 Fragment 1956 A Strange New Cottage In Berkeley Sather Gate Illumination Scribble Afternoon Seattle Psalm III Tears Ready To Roll Wrote This Last Night Squeal American Change 'Back On Times Square, Dreaming Of Times Square' My Sad Self Battleship Newsreel I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful To An Old Poet In Peru Aether Fearfully Waiting Answer, A Magic Universe Have Felt Same Before Soundy Time, I Hear Again! Einstein Books' edition of "Reality Sandwiches" contains supplementary texts: * Selected Poems From Empty Mirror, By Allen Ginsberg. * Howl, By Allen Ginsberg. * A Few Selected Quotes Of Allen Ginsberg.
This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane DiPrima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” and Bob Kaufman’s stirring “Abomunist Manifesto” appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.
La Loca is at a high pitch in these confessional and ecstatic outbursts made famous by her performances on tour from New York to Australia. She was one of four American writers chosen to represent the United States at the 1988 Winter Olympics Arts Festival in Calgary, Canada. La Loca grew up in impoverished Chicano districts of Los Angeles and now lives in Hollywood, California. "To watch this kinetic portrait of sass and blood and fire and gentle weeping is to wonder if an eggshell shaved translucent could be more fragile then her soul." Itabari Njeri, Los Angeles Times "What this dynamite young woman does is use her keen intelligence, lacerating wit and bold sincerity to transform the ugly, the mundane, the painful into a poetry of substance and joy. Simply wonderful." Wanda Coleman
A collection of poems by beat generation author Jack Kerouac, written between 1954 and 1965 about Mexico, Tangier, Berkeley, the Bowery, God, drugs, and other topics.
An impressive selection, in bilingual format, from the work of one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers. Born in Mexico City in 1951, Alberto Blanco is a dynamic and influential voice in the new poetry of Mexico. A musician, artist, essayist, translator, and storyteller, his poetry explores the connections on frontiers between verbal, visual, and aural experience. He is both an innovator and a classicist, a materialist and a mystic, a visionary and a chronicler of everyday life. Here his poems converse with their English translations, to create "a singular book . . . not simply a bilingual edition, but one unified voice, a poetry that speaks of a world far beyond languages and borders." (from the introduction by Jose Emilio Pacheco).