To the vanishing point where light will expand/where light wants the eye to go ("Towards Light") Light, as a physical and metaphorical entity recurs in many of the poems in this new collection by Sarah Day. Light makes its presence felt in these poems as a source of illumination and grace, it is also the means by which the flaws and discrepancies of the present and past are highlighted. "Sarah Day is a poet of wonderful attentiveness. She notices everything, persuading us, as readers, that she has seen and heard the living world truly. Wherever she stands, she gives lyrical utterance in Towards Light to our fresh, daily life, vibrant in its perpetuity." Christopher Wallace-Crabbe
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
"Light was Everywhere," poems by Richard Wehrman, brings together for the first time poetry previously shared only with a small number of individuals working, as he has, on paths of awakening, insight, and inner illumination. These poems always take as their touchstone the vibrant revealed earth, the rebirth of soul and spirit, and the continuous revelations of presence and awareness. A support for those who travel any difficult road, this small volume offers a confirmation of the challenges and rewards as we move towards spirit and open heart awareness. "Light was Everywhere" points us toward the beauty and support we are continually given by the world, and the growing recognition that what the Earth herself is, we are.
"The first half contains some of Bidart's most luminous and intimate work-poems about the art of writing, Eros, and the desolations and mirror of history (in a spectacular narrative based on Tacitus). The second half of the book exerts the overt lyricism of the opening section into even more ambitious territory-"The Second Hour of the Night" may be Bidart's most profound and complex meditation on the illusion of will,"--Amazon.com.
Though often deprived of public position, women have long practiced the personal art of writing and so have been prepared to be our spiritual and visionary voices of light."--BOOK JACKET.
