What if John Henry had a son? Twelve-year-old Ray is haunted by the strangest memories of his father, whom Ray swears could speak to animals. Now an orphan, Ray jumps from a train going through the American South and falls in with a medicine show train and its stable of sideshow performers. The performers turn out to be heroes, defenders of the wild, including the son of John Henry. They are hiding the last of the mythical Swamp Sirens from an ancient evil known as the Gog. Why the Gog wants the Siren, they can’t be sure, but they know it has something to do with rebuilding a monstrous machine that John Henry gave his life destroying years before, a machine that will allow the Gog to control the will of men and spread darkness throughout the world.
Winner of the Levis Reading Prize "Tell me a story / of speed and tell it to me fast for the light is / gaining and I will wake and with this body / break the barrier between what I dream / and what my dreaming means." Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts. In a rushing, rolling style, poems sweep to the edge of falling apart, take great delight in defying that dissolution, and come upon a thing redemptive and clarifying: the fact of love. In a world that "doesn't really care / whether we live or die," Steve Scafidi writes, "tell it you do and why." Against the harrowing fact of death, Scafidi celebrates dream and desire and the sweet erotics of springtime. Witnessing the budding of muscle trees, the nakedness of a lover, and the furious plowing of a river in the month of April amounts to a sensual equivalent of hope. And yet, the facts of history - from Troy to Rome to Montgomery, Alabama - arouse a great dread of our own cruelties. The truth of the South, the poems show, is often a brutal mix of ignorance and force that America learned from the great classical civilizations. From the unthinkable to the quietly heroic, somehow we have emerged. Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer celebrates that fact most of all.
Every day people tune in to The Writer's Almanac on public radio and hear Garrison Keillor read them a poem. And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by the narrator for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." The title Good Poems comes from common literary parlance. For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness. Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" is a good poem, and so is James Wright's "A Blessing." Regular people love those poems. People read them aloud at weddings, people send them by e-mail. Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.
Lines in Long Array demonstrates the enduring impact of the Civil War on American culture by presenting poems and photographs from both the past and present, including 12 wholly new poems by contemporary poets created especially for this volume. Includes previously unpublished poetry by Eavan Boland, Geoffrey Brock, Nikki Giovanni, Jorie Graham, John Koethe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Muldoon, Steve Scafidi, Jr., Michael Schmidt, Dave Smith, Tracy K. Smith, and C. D. Wright. Also includes historic poems by Ethel Lynn Beers, Ambrose Bierce, George H. Boker, Emily Dickinson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Julia Ward Howe, Herman Melville, Francis Orray Ticknor, Henry Timrod, Walt Whitman, and John Greenleaf Whittier.
Outlaw Style is a collection of narrative and lyric poems, many of them in the tradition of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. While gothic imagery, humor, and nineteenth-century diction and reference alternate and interweave, the four thematic currents that converge in the collection are music, race, spirituality, and the impact of monstrosity on somewhat innocent bystanders. Poems like “Dar He,” “Scuppernongs,” and “Plantation of the Mad” address the history of American racial intolerance with muted horror, while the final series of poems explores the roots and impact of traditional music, from unsettling songs of the Carter Family through Delta Blues and the haunting ballad “Strange Fruit.” The collection also features poems, such as “Shepherd Ollie Strawbridge on the Chicken Business,” which question the nature of spirituality; and the central section, “The Booth Prism,” performs a kind of séance in which the author channels the voices of many of the people—from Anna Surratt Tonry to Booth’s lovers and siblings—whose lives were altered by contact with Lincoln’s assassin. Throughout Outlaw Style formal and vernacular rhythms stand in counterpoint, images of violence excavate a stark and troubling beauty, and history and mystery fuse and feud, as the landscape and culture of the American South are presented for interrogation and understanding.
A collection of contemporary poems exploring the grit of work, love, and the land down South Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright's anthology Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry centers on the darker side of southern experience while presenting a remarkable array of poets from diverse backgrounds in the American South. As tough-minded as they are high-minded, the sixty contemporary poets and two hundred poems anthologized in Hard Lines enhance the powerful genre of "Grit Lit." The volume gathers the work of poets who have for some decades formed the heart of southern poetry as well as that of emerging voices who will soon become significant figures in southern literature. These poems sting our sensesinto awareness of a gritty world down South: hard work, hard love, hard drinking, hard times; but they also explore the importance of the land and rural experience, as well as race-, gender-, and class-based conflicts. Readers will see, hear (for poetry is meant to ring in the ears), and feel (for poetry is meant to beat in the blood); there is plenty of raucousness in this anthology.And yet the cultural conflicts that ignite southern wildness are often depicted in a manner that is lyrical without becoming lugubrious, mournful but not maudlin. Some of these poets are coming to terms with a visibly transforming culture—a "roughness" in and of itself. Indeed many of these poets are helping to change the definition of the South. The anthology also features biographical information on each poet in addition to further reading suggestions and scholarly sources on contemporary poetry. Featured Poets: Betty Adcock, David Bottoms, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Rodney Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ron Rash, Dave Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Charles Wright, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Kate Daniels, Kwame Dawes, Claudia Emerson, Andrew Hudgins, T. R. Hummer, Robert Morgan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dan Albergotti, Tarfia Faizullah, Forrest Gander, Terrance Hayes, Judy Jordan, John Lane, Michael McFee, Paul Ruffin, Steve Scafidi, Jake Adam York
A celebration of men's voices in prayer--through the ages from many faiths, cultures and traditions. "If men like us don't pray, where will emerging generations get a window into the soul of a good man, an image of the kind of man they can aspire to be--or be with--when they grow up? If men don't pray, who will model for them the practices of soul care--of gratitude, confession, compassion, humility, petition, repentance, grief, faith, hope and love? If men don't pray, what will men become, and what will become of our world and our future?" --from the Introduction by Brian D. McLaren This collection celebrates the profound variety of ways men around the world have called out to the Divine--with words of joy, praise, gratitude, wonder, petition and even anger--from the ancient world up to our own day. The prayers come from a broad spectrum of spiritual traditions--both East and West--including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and more. Together they provide an eloquent expression of men's inner lives, and of the practical, mysterious, painful and joyous endeavor that prayer is. Men Pray will challenge your preconceived ideas about prayer. It will inspire you to explore new ways of prayerful expression and new possibilities for your own spiritual journey. This is a book to treasure and to share. Includes prayers from: Marcus Aurelius * Daniel Berrigan * Rebbe Nachman of Breslov * Walter Brueggemann * Bernard of Clairvaux * St. Francis of Assisi * Robert Frost * George Herbert * Gerard Manley Hopkins * St. Ignatius Loyola * Fr. Thomas Keating * Thomas à Kempis * Chief Yellow Lark * Brother Lawrence * C. S. Lewis * Ted Loder * Nelson Mandela * General Douglas MacArthur * Thomas Merton * D. L. Moody * John Henry Newman * John Philip Newell * John O'Donohue * Rumi * Rabindranath * Tagore * Walt Whitman * many others
Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, Seriously Funny ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Tour said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of Seriously Funny hope its readers find much to share with others.
National Book Award–winning poet Terrance Hayes selects the poems for the 2014 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). The first book of poetry that Terrance Hayes ever bought was the 1990 edition of The Best American Poetry, edited by Jorie Graham. Hayes was then an undergrad at a small South Carolina college. He has since published four highly honored books of poetry, is a professor of poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, has appeared multiple times in the series, and is one of today’s most decorated poets. His brazen, restless poems capture the diversity of American culture with singular artistry, grappling with facile assumptions about identity and the complex repercussions of race history in this country. Always eagerly anticipated, the 2014 volume of The Best American Poetry begins with David Lehman’s “state-of-the-art” foreword followed by an inspired introduction from Terrance Hayes on his picks for the best American poems of the past year. Following the poems is the apparatus for which the series has won acclaim: notes from the poets about the writing of their poems.
A landmark anthology envisioned by Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States American Journal presents fifty contemporary poems that explore and celebrate our country and our lives. 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith has gathered a remarkable chorus of voices that ring up and down the registers of American poetry. In the elegant arrangement of this anthology, we hear stories from rural communities and urban centers, laments of loss in war and in grief, experiences of immigrants, outcries at injustices, and poems that honor elders, evoke history, and praise our efforts to see and understand one another. Taking its title from a poem by Robert Hayden, the first African American appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, American Journal investigates our time with curiosity, wonder, and compassion. Among the fifty poets included are: Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Matthew Dickman, Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Cathy Park Hong, Marie Howe, Major Jackson, Ilya Kaminsky, Robin Coste Lewis, Ada Límon, Layli Long Soldier, Erika L. Sánchez, Solmaz Sharif, Danez Smith, Susan Stewart, Mary Szybist, Natasha Trethewey, Brian Turner, Charles Wright, and Kevin Young.
