Hellenistic Poetry has enjoyed a notable re-appreciation in recent years and received ample scholarly discussion, especially focusing on its reception and innovation of Greek poetic tradition. This book wishes to add to our picture of how Hellenistic poetry works by looking at it from a slightly different angle. Concentrating on the interaction between contemporary poets, it attempts to view the dynamics of imitation and reception in the light of poetical self-positioning. In the courtly Alexandrian surroundings, choosing a poetic model and affiliation determines one's position in the cultural field. This book sets out to chart, not only the well-known complexities of handling the poetic past, but especially their relation to the poetic interaction of the Hellenistic, in particular Alexandrian poets.
This is a poetry book includes 25 poems split into two sections: windows and mirrors. Window poems are about others while mirror poems are about my own life. The first poem of each collection has a QR code in the corner. When scanned, the QR code will pull up a video of me performing the piece. I hope it brings it to life and shows all the emotions that went into this portfolio. This book is perfect for anyone who enjoys poetry: both happy, sad, and every emotion in between. I hope it is a window into the world and mirror of mine.
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.
Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry “Sometimes,” Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.” In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.” Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics. Additional Recognition: A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021" A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021" A Reader's Digest "14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now" Selection A Books Are Magic "Recommended Reading" Selection An Indie Gift Guide 2021 Indie Next Selection
This harrowing yet hopeful novel shares “an authentic and compassionate look at the ups and downs of teenage life and living with Tourette syndrome” (Kirkus). For most people, the number ten is just another number. But for sixteen-year-old Troy Hayes, who suffers from Tourette Syndrome and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, it dictates his entire life. He must do everything by its exacting rhythm—even in the face of ridicule and bullying. Finally fed up with the humiliation, loneliness, and pain he endures, Troy writes a list of ten things to do by the tenth anniversary of his diagnosis—culminating in suicide on the actual day. But the process of working his way through the list changes Troy’s life: he becomes friends with Khory, a smart, beautiful classmate who has her own troubled history. Khory unwittingly helps Troy cross off items on his list, moving him ever closer to his grand finale, even as she shows him that life may have more possibilities than he imagined.
Newbery Award honoree Ashley Bryan has hand-selected a dozen of National Book Award winner Nikki Giovanni’s poems to illustrate with his inimitable flourish. There is nothing more important to a child than to feel loved, and this gorgeous gathering of poems written by Nikki Giovanni celebrates exactly that. Hand-selected by Newbery honoree Ashley Bryan, he has, with his masterful flourish of color, shape, and movement, added a visual layering that drums the most impartant message of all to young, old, parent, child, grandparent, and friend alike: You are loved. You are loved. You are loved. As a bonus, one page is mirrored, so children reading the book can see exactly who is loved—themselves!
In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought—from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"—Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images—in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe—together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period. Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.
In this deeply philosophical and highly inventive new collection, John Hollander, the distinguished author of numerous books of poetry, offers profound yet playful meditations on the reflective mind and on the words with which we come to know the world. In forms as varied as sonnets, songs, and ancient odes, he muses over the ways we use (and misuse) language as “we grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head / And keep it in a soft continuingness.” Here, too, are striking verses about the passage of time as recorded by the movement of light and shadow across a surface, whether it be the face of a clock or the enclosed walls of a Hopper painting. Throughout, Hollander delights us with mirrors, palindromes, and strange and surprising reversals that keep the mind ever alert with the challenge “to make words be themselves, taking time out / From all the daily work of meaning, to / Make picture puzzles of what they’re about.” Donna Seaman has written of John Hollander, “His wise and robustly complex poems span the mind like stone aqueducts or canyon-crossing railroad bridges—awesome works of knowledge and craft, art and devotion.” In this exciting new volume, Hollander shows once again the reach of his poetic imagination.
Written in the midst of World War II after its author emigrated to America, "The Sea and the Mirror" is not merely a great poem but ranks as one of the most profound interpretations of Shakespeare's final play in the twentieth century. As W. H. Auden told friends, it is "really about the Christian conception of art" and it is "my Ars Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to be Shakespeare's." This is the first critical edition. Arthur Kirsch's introduction and notes make the poem newly accessible to readers of Auden, readers of Shakespeare, and all those interested in the relation of life and literature--those two classic themes alluded to in its title. The poem begins in a theater after a performance of The Tempest has ended. It includes a moving speech in verse by Prospero bidding farewell to Ariel, a section in which the supporting characters speak in a dazzling variety of verse forms about their experiences on the island, and an extravagantly inventive section in prose that sees the uncivilized Caliban address the audience on art--an unalloyed example of what Auden's friend Oliver Sachs has called his "wild, extraordinary and demonic imagination." Besides annotating Auden's allusions and sources (in notes after the text), Kirsch provides extensive quotations from his manuscript drafts, permitting the reader to follow the poem's genesis in Auden's imagination. This book, which incorporates for the first time previously ignored corrections that Auden made on the galleys of the first edition, also provides an unusual opportunity to see the effect of one literary genius upon another.
