For, there is truth in imagination, found in the kingdom of magic words. Poems for the King is a collection of joyful, spiritual, admiring, and inspirational poems which examine faith in God, people, nature, and social and philosophical affairs. This beautiful book also features amazing artworks and illustrations, painted and drawn by the author. Makes for a wonderful reading.
A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic. Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue. The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?” In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.
In this unforgettable space opera, #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin presents a chilling vision of eternal night—a volatile world where cultures clash, codes of honor do not exist, and the hunter and the hunted are often interchangeable. A whisperjewel has summoned Dirk t’Larien to Worlorn, and a love he thinks he lost. But Worlorn isn’t the world Dirk imagined, and Gwen Delvano is no longer the woman he once knew. She is bound to another man, and to a dying planet that is trapped in twilight. Gwen needs Dirk’s protection, and he will do anything to keep her safe, even if it means challenging the barbaric man who has claimed her. But an impenetrable veil of secrecy surrounds them all, and it’s becoming impossible for Dirk to distinguish between his allies and his enemies. In this dangerous triangle, one is hurtling toward escape, another toward revenge, and the last toward a brutal, untimely demise. Praise for Dying of the Light “Dying of the Light blew the doors off of my idea of what fiction could be and could do, what a work of unbridled imagination could make a reader feel and believe.”—Michael Chabon “Slick science fiction . . . the Wild West in outer space.”—Los Angeles Times “Something special which will keep Worlorn and its people in the reader’s mind long after the final page is read.”—Galileo magazine “The galactic background is excellent. . . . Martin knows how to hold the reader.”—Asimov’s “George R. R. Martin has the voice of a poet and a mind like a steel trap.”—Algis Budrys
5th Place Winner of the 2020 Writer's Digest Poetry Contest and a Semi-finalist in the 2020 National Poetry Society of Virginia Poetry Contest The title Searching for Nova Albion comes from a pilgrimage Pamela Cranston, an Episcopal priest, once made to Drake's Beach near Point Reyes, California. There, in 1579, Sir Francis Drake landed the first English ship in North America, which he called Nova Albion (New Britain). The title poem is a protest against abuses of the environment and of power, wherever and whenever they happen. Inspired by the works of George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, R. S. Thomas, David Scott, and Rowan Williams, the author aspires to follow in their footsteps as a fellow poet-priest. Searching for Nova Albion displays a distinctive kind of spiritual sensibility found both within twentieth century English classical music and the Northern California landscape. These poems display a love for the roots and beauty of the English language, as well as an appreciation for the mystical, but also keep a critical eye to question, laugh with, or doubt Christian tradition. Common themes that arise are unexpected encounters with nature and the numinous; questions about life, death, and eternity; writing and finding one's voice; dealing with loss and defeat; and the recompense of joy.
On the “Best Poetry Books of the Year” list from Library Journal “A sophisticated and breathtaking writer, Reeves takes the reader on a harrowing journey: each poem comes packed with arresting imagery, relentless in its examination of how tragedy and trauma become internalized — cleaning out the wounds to understand the pain.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Roger Reeves' King Me stitches together many worlds into one startling and visceral book. His ranging, encyclopedic knowledge crosses history, medicine, biology, metapoetics and more, but he tackles it all with a bold and sonorous surrealist flow.”—American Microreviews From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s, King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became very interested in the mythology of king, the one who is sacrificed at the end of the harvest season. . . . For me, the myth manifests in the killing of young black men, Emmett Till, and in the ways America deems young, black male bodies as expendable—Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. These are the young kings whom we love to kill—over and over again." From "Some Young Kings": The hummingbirds inside my chest,with their needle-nosed pliers for tonguesand hammer-heavy wings, have left a messof ticks in my lungs and a punctured lullabyin my throat. Little boy blue come blowyour horn. The cow's in the meadow. And Dorothy's alone in the corn with Jack, his black fingers, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clickingalong her legs until she howls—Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker . . . Roger Reeves earned his MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing and his PhD from the University of Texas. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Since the publication of the bestselling Sounding the Seasons, Malcolm Guite has repeatedly been asked for more sonnets. This new collection offers a sequence of 50 sonnets that focus on many passages in the Gospels: the Beatitudes, parables and miracles, teachings on the Kingdom, and the ‘hard sayings’ - Jesus’ challenging demands with which we wrestle. In addition this collection includes: •A sequence of seven sonnets on 'The Wilderness', exploring mysterious stories of divine encounter such as Jacob’s wrestling with the angel. •Poetic reflections on music, hospitality and ecology. •Seven short poems celebrating the days of creation. •A biblical index pairing the poems with scripture readings for use in worship.
