The Niagara River
The Niagara River

Author: Kay Ryan

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0802197515

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A mesmerizing collection from the US Poet Laureate whose work is “as intense and elliptical as [Emily] Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as [Robert] Frost” (J. D. McClatchy, American Poet). In granting the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize to Kay Ryan, Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman wrote that “[she] can take any subject and make it her own. Her poems—which combine extreme concision and formal expertise with broad subjects and deep feeling—could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. Her work has the kind of singularity and sustained integrity that are very, very rare.” Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Kay Ryan’s poems are “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The Niagara River is full of such hidden gems. Bafflingly effective, the poems in this collection seem too brief and blithe to pack so much wallop. Their singular music makes it clear why her poetry has been featured everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to plaques at the zoo to the pages of The New Yorker and The Paris Review (Salon). “Empathic and wryly unforgiving of the human condition, the poems [in The Niagara River] are equal parts pith and punch. The effect is bracing.” —Publishers Weekly

Queen of the Mist
Queen of the Mist

Author: Joan Murray

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2000-04-07

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9780807068571

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This novel-in-verse tells the fascinating story of Annie Taylor, who, in 1901, became the first person to plunge over the brink of Niagara Falls in a barrel. But as Joan Murray reveals, America didn't know what to do with a mature and self-possessed heroine: Annie Taylor, as an 'older woman,' was rejected and exploited and finally eclipsed by the man who repeated her stunt ten years later.

Oceanic
Oceanic

Author: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 1619321769

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"Nezhukumatathil’s poems contain elegant twists of a very sharp knife. She writes about the natural world and how we live in it, filling each poem, each page with a true sense of wonder." —Roxane Gay “Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush... poems. Aphorisms...from another dimension.” —The New York Times “With unparalleled ease, she’s able to weave each intriguing detail into a nuanced, thought-provoking poem that also reads like a startling modern-day fable.” —The Poetry Foundation “How wonderful to watch a writer who was already among the best young poets get even better!” —Terrance Hayes With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and the Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. From “Starfish and Coffee”: And that’s how you feel after tumbling like sea stars on the ocean floor over each other. A night where it doesn’t matter which are arms or which are legs or what radiates and how— only your centers stuck together. Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four collections of poetry. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, Nezhukumatathil teaches creative writing and environmental literature in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.

Inventing Niagara
Inventing Niagara

Author: Ginger Strand

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-05-06

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1416564810

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Americans call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the Falls aren't very natural anymore. In fact, they are a study in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized and landscape redesigned, the Falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up as an example of something real, they are hemmed in with fakery -- waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX films and ersatz Indian tales. A symbol of American manifest destiny, they are shared politely with Canada. Emblem of nature's power, they are completely human-controlled. Archetype of natural beauty, they belie an ugly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies nature, reshaping its contours and redirecting its force while claiming to submit to its will. Combining history, reportage and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces Niagara's journey from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the hidden history of America's waterfall: the Mohawk chief who wrested the Falls from his adopted tribe, the revered town father who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime workers who unknowingly helped build the Bomb and the building contractor who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny ability to zero in on the buried truth, Strand introduces us to underwater dams, freaks of nature, mythical maidens and 280,000 radioactive mice buried at Niagara. From LaSalle to Lincoln to Los Alamos, Mohawks to Marilyn, Niagara's story is America's story, a tale of dreams founded on the mastery of nature. At a time of increasing environmental crisis, Inventing Niagara shows us how understanding the cultural history of nature might help us rethink our place in it today.

Say Uncle
Say Uncle

Author: Kay Ryan

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 0802197493

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“A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning former US Poet Laureate (Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief). Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan’s poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan’s fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books. Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of internationally acclaimed poet and writer Dana Gioia, “take the shape of an idea clarifying itself.” “The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The short lines and quick images—almost snapshots—are elemental. Ryan puts them together, then pulls them apart, and twists them in playful fashion, as though she were an alchemist with a modern experimental attitude . . . Truly short-line, one-stanza (for the most part) wonders: full-brained poems in a largely half-brained world.” —Kirkus Reviews “Witty, charming, serious and delightful . . . her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of Marianne Moore and, latterly, Amy Clampitt. Those poets, though, wrote many kinds of poems: Ryan, in this volume, writes just one kind. It is, however, a kind worth looking out for—well crafted, understated, funny and smart.” —Publishers Weekly

The Mansion of Happiness
The Mansion of Happiness

Author: Robin Ekiss

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 107

ISBN-13: 0820334081

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Robin Ekiss's meditations on memory and mortality are a canary in the coal mine of imagination. With disembodied dolls, dank Parisian catacombs, the gilded interior of a Fabergé egg, and the unfathomable edge of Niagara Falls as the dominion of these poems, reading Ekiss's work is like peering into the perfectly still world of a diorama or daguerreotype: an experience both uncanny and uncompromising.

Nickel Eclipse
Nickel Eclipse

Author: Eric Gansworth

Publisher: American Indian Studies

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13:

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A slice of the rez but also a peek into the heart and the mind of those who live the rez or walked off in new boots. Rooted in truth as good poetry is, [Gansworth's] is a most realistic look at life, and his inimical way of expressing this reality is of depth and a dart into illumniation with an extraordinary vision. --Maurice Kenny.