“Spaar sounds like no other poet writing today.”—Jennifer Chang, The Believer With her trademark language—baroque yet colloquial, immediately recognizable but impossible to duplicate—Lisa Russ Spaar has written her most sumptuous, alluring, and steamy poems to date, each one bursting with an appetite for the sensuous and the lingual. “Is syntax erotic?” she asks in Vanitas, Rough. “If so, please. Please read. Here.”
Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.
“Olivarez steps into the ‘inbetween’ standing between Mexico and America in these compelling, emotional poems. Written with humor and sincerity” (Newsweek). Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek and NPR. In this “devastating debut” (Publishers Weekly), poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in, with a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch. “The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez celebrates his Mexican-American identity and examines how those two sides conflict in a striking collection of poems.” —USA Today
The poems in this collection from Fiona Sampson offer a woman's perspective on the problems of identity, grief, loneliness and ill-health. "Rough music" is an old English custom of public scapegoating. In this book of disturbing musical echoes, brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong and ballad explore violence, loss and belonging.
This is the story of one man's dream to edit a groundbreaking contemporary poetry anthology, of how that dream was actually a lot of work, what with reading many bad poems and also competent ones and handwriting rejection letters and using his wife's family money to pay postage and production costs, all while trying to bounce his newborn son to sleep. It is the story of the epiphanies that come with extreme tiredness: that maybe, just maybe, the greatest poetry book of all is one that contains no poems.
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Carlos Lara. It's hard to believe that the books of Blanca Varela (1926-2009), considered one of Peru's greatest poets, as well as the first woman to win the Federico GarcÃa Lorca International Poetry Prize, have not been translated into English until now. Originally published in Spanish in 1978, this new publication of ROUGH SONG, heralds the long overdue introduction of a major Latin American poet to English-language readers. Born into a family known for advancing art in Latin America, Varela lived briefly in Paris in the late '40s and '50s where she quickly became friends with Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Michaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Alberto Giacometti, and in particular, Octavio Paz, who called Varela "the most secret, timid and natural of them all." Returning to Lima in the '60s, she established herself as one of Peru's key literary intelligentsia. The poems in ROUGH SONG, these "flowers for the ear," range wildly in form, from two lines to seven pages long, and each presents a world of intense precision in language, fully conscious of reality and its metaphysical limits--"yes / the dark matter / animated by your hand / it's me." Varela's deceptively simple poems hold a mysteriously delicate weight far beyond their length. A formidable voice in Latin American literature, Blanca Varela is destined to inspire awe and summon new readers for years to come. "These haunting songs unfold with the mysterious precision of fractals, bending their interiors into pliant, living forms. As I get to know Blanca Varela's work, in Carlos Lara's beautiful translation from the Spanish, my ear becomes attuned to the smallest moving gradations, the spider that 'doesn't dare descend one / more millimeter toward the ground,' a surrealism I associate with Alejandra Pizarnik, Henri Michaux, and I'm so grateful to have come to it."--Alexis Almeida "What a surprise to find in the work of this mid-century Peruvian poet a mind and style that so resonate with my own. Varela's poems are almost violent in their suddenness, their brevity. Unsentimental and often bleak, they are always surprising. Discovering her enlarges my picture of the world."--Rae Armantrout "In ROUGH SONG, Blanca Varela uses language to create 'on the empty plate' and cuts reality open. Originally written in the '70s, this work remains both unpredictable and surprising. In these pages she condenses and transmutes the world into text and texture so that what emerges is legible and sharp. Here 'the word / slithering / will be your footprint.' Let us follow."--Gabriela Jauregui
Poetry. "There is an extraordinary lightness to this collection of poems it is as if they are floating just above the surface of the earth, or in dream, as they celebrate love, marriage, family, friends the small accidents and genuine delights of everyday life. The poems are filtered through a sweet and deeply thoughtful sensibility. You will grow to love the narrator of these poems as she leads us, bravely and with caritas, to the threshold of things, frightening or heavenly, "that might be about to happen." Christine Poreba's debut collection is radiantly lovely.: Sidney Wade"
