An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement. Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement—about why we’re here in front of this sign? Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible.
Poetry. Sara Deniz Akant's BABETTE, selected by Maggie Nelson for Rescue Press' Black Box Poetry Prize, mixes motor-thrum with incantation, promising to "make no pattern / known again." Perpetually on the move, BABETTE's populous from Penny "turned into a toy" to the always absent, always there "gohst in the glare" are machines of the living, at once spectre, shell, meat, and instrument. Uneasy in their habits, these poems transition between spaces "not made for inhabitants," sifting through manor walls as easily as fog banks. BABETTE is subversive, menacing, infectious. "There are hazards to Babette." "Let me tell you some things about BABETTE. It doesn't sound like anything else. Each page feels perfect. Each page brings an unheralded pleasure. It is a deeply weird, expert emissary from a world already fully formed." Maggie Nelson "With its collapsed, secret scale and disarmingly milky climate, BABETTE beguiles. The poems read like the residue of some opaque and possibly lethal substances, swirling in a sweating, leaded glass. A nervous, deliciously suspect book." Joyelle McSweeney "Ghost at the edge of seeing, 'what is left when light abandoned.' These apparitions of BABETTE are not simply poems but strains, as the eye strains toward vision, as the voice strains toward song. Sara Deniz Akant is a visually and sonically arresting poet, pushing the limits of the knowable range of the imagination. 'I'm the beast that wrote the note.' The note that lingered in air." D.A. Powell "In BABETTE, Sara Deniz Akant inaugurates a new form of speculative poetry whose lyric narrations hover just below consciousness. Akant's poems feel entirely invented: the pacing is hypnotic, the diction unearthly, the narration sensual. These poems are a quest, often a fantastical one, but a quest that cannot be easily constellated. BABETTE is the future of poetry." Cathy Park Hong"
Winner, Jane Addams Children's Book Award A young girl navigates family and middle school dramas amid the prejudices and paranoia of the Cold War era in this “excellent example of historical fiction for middle grade readers” (School Library Journal) World War II is over, but the threat of communism and the Cold War loom over the United States. In Detroit, Michigan, twelve-year-old Marjorie Campbell struggles with the ups and downs of family life, dealing with her veteran father’s unpredictable outbursts, keeping her mother’s stash of banned library books a secret, and getting along with her new older “brother”—the teenager her family took in after his veteran father’s death. When a new girl from Germany transfers to Marjorie’s class, Marjorie finds herself torn between befriending Inga and pleasing her best friend, Bernadette, by writing in a slam book that spreads rumors about Inga. Marjorie seems to be confronting enemies everywhere—at school, at the library, in her neighborhood, and even in the news. In all this turmoil, Marjorie tries to find her own voice and figure out what is right and who the real enemies actually are. Includes an author’s note and bibliography.
Biography of twentieth-century poet Sara Teasdale, drawing from personal papers that had been withheld from publication for nearly fifty years after her death to reconstruct her tragic history, and including samples of her poetry and prose.
Louder Than Words is the second poetry collection from spoken word educator Sara Hirsch; the former UK Slam Champion, ranked 3rd in the World Slam Championships (as seen on the BBC). Sara presents poems for and about young people and a selection of their responses in this gritty, honest and accessible collection. This is a conversation between poems, schools and hemispheres, including poems by students in London and New Zealand, alongside Sara's original poems that inspired them. These are the poems scrawled in the back of maths textbooks; the accidental masterpieces. These are the poems stuffed in blazer pockets, the poems spat in school playgrounds and the ones that never made it that far. These poems spiral between the personal and the universal in an attempt to capture what it is to write, speak and breathe as a young person today and as a poet who still doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up. "Impossible not to be dazzled" The Scotsman.
*WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2015* *WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PETERS FRASER + DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2015* There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots. With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.
These masterful elegies follow the contours of a troubled mother-daughter relationship, explore the paradoxes of mourning, and relish the complicated joys of perseverance to map not only how one makes sense of the world but also how one reenters it after experiencing a transformative loss. Divided into four sections, this poignant collection begins with “Terra Inferna,” which chronicles a single mother’s attempt to raise her daughter in 1980s rural Georgia. “Terra Incognita” follows the daughter’s journey across states, out of devastating poverty, and into a loving marriage, as her mother loses her battle with colon cancer. In “Terra Nova,” the speaker meditates on her mother’s passing, her crisis of meaning turning to revelation of legacy’s love. “Terra Firma” brings closure, as the speaker reconciles her grief while rediscovering how to find joy in life’s small moments.
Poetry. California Interest. Latinx Studies. HEART LIKE A WINDOW, MOUTH LIKE A CLIFF is a transgressive, yet surprisingly tender confrontation of what it means to want to flee the thing you need most. The speaker struggles through cultural assimilation and the pressure to "act" Mexican while dreaming of the privileges of whiteness. Borjas holds cultural traditions accountable for the gendered denial of Chicanas to individuate and love deeply without allowing one's love to consume the self. This is nothing new. This is colonization working through relationships within Chicanx families--how we learn love and perform it, how we filter it though alcohol abuse--how ultimately, we oppress the people we love most. This collection simultaneously reveres and destroys nostalgia, slips out of the story after a party where the reader can find God "drunk and dreaming." Think golden oldiez meets the punk attitude of No Doubt. Think pochas sipping gin martinis in lowriders cruising down Who Gives a Fuck Boulevard.
Winner, High Plains Book Award Poetry, 2019 Winner, George Bogin Memorial Award, 2019 Finalist, Julie Suk Award, 2018 In these edgy poems of witness, Sara Henning’s speaker serves as both conduit and curator of the destructive legacies of alcoholism and multigenerational closeting. Considering the impact of addiction and sexual repression in the family and on its individual members, Henning explores with deft compassion the psychological ramifications of traumas across multiple generations. With the starling as an unspoken trope for victims who later perpetuate the cycle of abuse, suffering and shame became forces dangerous enough to down airliners. The strands Henning weaves—violent relationships, the destructive effects of long-term closeting, and the pall that shame casts over entire lives—are hauntingly epiphanic. And yet these feverish lyric poems find a sharp beauty in their grieving, where Rolling Stone covers and hidden erotic photographs turn into talismans of regret and empathy. After the revelation that her deceased grandfather was a closeted homosexual “who lived two lives,” Henning considers the lasting effects of shame in regard to the silence, oppression, and erasure of sexual identity, issues that are of contemporary concern to the LGBTQIA community. Even through “the dark / earth encircling us,” Henning’s speaker wonders if there isn’t some way out of a place “where my body / is just another smoke-stung / dirge of survival,” if, in the end, love won’t be victorious. Part eyewitness testimony, part autoethnography, this book of memory and history, constantly seeking and yearning, is full of poems “too brutal and strange to suffer / [their] way anywhere but home.”
