Mercedez Holtry is a slam poet, writer, student, mentor, and Chicana feminist who focuses on bringing out her roots, experiences and lessons learned through her poetry in hopes that they embrace her people and other artists around her. She has represented ABQ on multiple final and semifinal stages for national poetry events. Mercedez is passionate about spoken word and aspires to continually learn all she can about her art through working and slamming for her community.
A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017 One of Oprah Magazine's "Ten Best Books of 2017" "This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood. . . . These exquisite poems defy categorization." —The New Yorker The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.
A multicultural saga, This Fierce Blood follows three generations of women in the Sylte family. In rural late-nineteenth-century New England, Wilhelmina Sylte is a settler starting a family with her Norwegian immigrant husband. When she forms an inexplicable connection with a mountain lion and her cubs living near their farm, Mina grapples with divided loyalties and the mysterious bond she shares with the animals. In 1927, Wilhelmina's daughter-in-law, newly widowed Josepa, is accused of witchcraft by a local priest for using the healing practices passed down from her Native mother. Fighting for her family's reputation and way of life, Sepa finds strength in worldly and otherworldly sources. When Magdalena, an ecologist, inherits her great-grandmother Wilhelmina's Vermont property, she and her astrophysicist husband decide to turn the old farm into a summer science camp for teens. As Magda struggles with both personal and professional responsibilities, the boundary between science and myth begins to blur. Rich in historical and cultural detail, This Fierce Blood combines magical realism with themes of maternal ancestral inheritance, and also explores the ways Hispano/Indigenous traditions both conflicted and wove together, shaping the distinctive character of the American Southwest. Readers of Téa Obreht and Katherine Arden will find much to admire in this debut novel.
"Katie Ford's is a finely-wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc." —Poetry I lie still, play dead, am delivered decree: our daughter weighs seven hundred dimes, paperclips, teaspoons of sugar, this child of grams for which the good nurse laid out her studies as a coin purse into which our tiny wealth clinked, our daughter spilling almost to the floor. —from "Of a Child Early Born" In Katie Ford's third collection, she sets her music into lyrics wrung from the world's dangers. Blood Lyrics is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."
In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello,' she writes: 'I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I’m a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino’s name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.
Chosen by the American Library Association as a 2012 Notable Book in Poetry. Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both. Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace. "[BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." —Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree "This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other.”“br />—Publishers Weekly, starred review From "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries: How else can I quench this thirst? My lips travel down your spine, drink the smoothness of your skin. I am searching for the core: What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the laws of nature be defied? Your body tells me: come close. But beauty distances even as it draws me near. What does my body want from yours? My twisted legs around your neck. You bend me back. Even though you can't give the bones at birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside. You give me—what? Peeling back my skin, you expose my missing bones. And my heart, long before you came, just as broken. I don't know who to blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my body doesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. If innocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful. Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship. Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school. Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.
Originally published in 1962, the experimental study of aesthetics was a field particularly associated with the name of C.W. Valentine, who in this book provided a critical review of research carried out since the end of the nineteenth century principally by British and American psychologists. The investigations described, many of them conducted by the author, are concerned with individual responses to what is commonly regarded as beautiful in painting, music, and poetry, an important distinction being made between the perception of objects as ‘beautiful’ as opposed to ‘pleasing’. The reactions of children and adults, and of people having different ethnic and social backgrounds, are explored in a variety of experiments dealing with specific elements, including colour, form, and balance in painting; musical intervals, discord, harmony, melody, and tempo; and rhythm, metre, imagery, and associations in classical and romantic poetry. Other experiments seek to disclose the temperamental and attitudinal factors underlying individual differences in the judgement and appreciation of specific works of art. Of particular interest are the studies of responses to modern paintings, poems and musical compositions. The findings throw light on the development of discrimination and taste and suggest the possibility of some common factor in the appreciation of these three arts. It was felt that critics as well as psychologists and aestheticians would find much to encourage reflection and to stimulate further research.
THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS transports readers to the majestic landscapes and hard Native American lives of the desert Southwest and into the embrace of a way of looking at the world that seems almost like revelation. Born to a storytelling Native mother and a roughneck, song-singing cowboy father, Nasdijj has lived on the jagged-edged margins of American society, yet hardship and isolation have only brought him greater clarity--and a gift for language that is nothing short of breathtaking. Nasdijj tells of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, of the young boy's struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome, and of their last fishing trip together. It is a heartbreaking story, written with great power and a diamondlike poetry. But whether Nasdijj is telling us about his son, about the chaotic, alternately harrowing and comical life he led with his own parents, or about the vitality and beauty of Native American culture, his voice is always one of searching honesty, wry humor, and a nearly cosmic compassion. While Nasdijj struggles with his impossible status as someone of two separate cultures, he also remains a contradiction in a larger sense: he cares for those who often shun him, he teaches hope though he often has none for himself, and he comes home to the land he then must leave. THE BLOOD RUNS LIKE A RIVER THROUGH MY DREAMS is the memoir of a man who has survived a hard life with grace, who has taken the past experience of pain and transformed it into a determination to care for the most vulnerable among us, and who has found an almost unspeakable beauty where others would find only sadness. This is a book that will touch your soul.
The Fourth Edition of the Disability Studies Reader breaks new ground by emphasizing the global, transgender, homonational, and posthuman conceptions of disability. Including physical disabilities, but exploring issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities, this edition explores more varieties of bodily and mental experience. New histories of the legal, social, and cultural give a broader picture of disability than ever before. Now available for the first time in eBook format 978-0-203-07788-7.
"Nate Marshall was paying close attention when Chuck D said, 'Rap is CNN for Black people.' In his hard-hitting chapbook, BLOOD PERCUSSION, Marshall takes the Hard Rhymer's words and masterfully applies them to poetry, turning his eye toward gun play, free lunches, skull caps, prayers, and praise songs. With wit and fierce music, these poems take on the subjects that can't find a space on the evening news, reminding the reader again and again that there is power and grace in truth- telling even when those truths are difficult to hear."—Adrian Matejka
