Beauty is a Verb
Beauty is a Verb

Author: Jennifer Bartlett

Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1935955055

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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."--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.

This Land is Not My Land
This Land is Not My Land

Author: A. D. Winans

Publisher:

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13: 9780988827943

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Considered by many to be his best work, "This Land Is Not My Land" is a series of poems written by a young A D Winans when he was a Military Policeman stationed in Panama during the U.S. occupation of that country. In these short narrative poems, Winans depicts scenes of ordinary poor people sacrificed to the forces of corporate greed and power. Though these are not political poems per se, they are slices of reality compressed into thumbnail sketches that give the reader a sympathetic view of the lives of third world citizens and the inequities between rich and poor nations. Originally published in 2005 as a Presa Press chapbook, This Land Is Not My Land was given the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Achievement Award. The new edition has eight new poems contributed by A D Winans at the age of 78.

M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A
M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A

Author: A. Van Jordan

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9780393059076

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MacNolia Cox won the Akron District Spelling Bee, and at the age of 13 she became the first African American to reach the final round of the national competition. The Southern judges, it is thought, kept her from winning by presenting a word not on the official list. The word that tripped MacNolia, ironically, was "nemesis." When she died 40 years later, the girl who "was almost/ The national spelling champ" had become a cleaning woman, a grandmother, and "the best damn maid in town." Cox's ambition and her later frustration find incisive shape in this remarkably varied meditation on ambition, racism, discouragement and ennui, where successive pages can bring to mind a handbook of poetic forms (a double sestina, Japanese-inspired syllabics, a blues ghazal and prose poems based on definitions of prepositions), Ann Carson's "TV Men" poems, Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah and the documentary film Spellbound. Jordan (Rise) begins in Cox's later life, giving voice to her husband, John Montiere, at "The Moment Before He Asks MacNolia Out on a Date," then to MacNolia herself when in 1970 her son dies just after his return from Vietnam. As counterpoints, Jordan intersperses poems about African-Americans who won more lasting public acclaim, among them Richard Pryor, Josephine Baker and the great labor organizer and orator A. Philip Randolph. Jordan's most quotable poems, however, return to the voice of the 13-year-old speller, who "learned the word chiaroscuro/ By rolling it on my tongue// Like cotton candy the color/ Of day and night." (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. Library Journal.

The Oxford Book of American Poetry
The Oxford Book of American Poetry

Author: David Lehman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 1193

ISBN-13: 019516251X

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Redefines the great canon of American poetry from its origins in the 17th century right up to the present.

Tradition and the Individual Poem
Tradition and the Individual Poem

Author: Anne Ferry

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780804742351

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A theoretical, historical, and critical inquiry, this book looks at the assumptions anthologies are predicated on, how they are put together, the treatment of the poems in them, and the effects their presentations have on their readers.

Of Women, Poetry, and Power
Of Women, Poetry, and Power

Author: Zofia Burr

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780252027697

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The haunting legacy of Emily Dickinson's life and work has shaped a romantic conception of poetry as private, personal, and expressive that has governed the reception of subsequent American women poets. Of Women, Poetry, and Power demonstrates how the canonization of Dickinson has consolidated limiting assumptions about women's poetry in twentieth-century America and models an alternative reading practice that allows for deeper engagement with the political work of modern poetry. Analyzing the reception of poems by Josephine Miles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou, Zofia Burr shows the persistence of these critical outlooks and dispels the belief that we have long since moved beyond such limiting gendered expectations. Turning away from an obsessive concern with a poet's biography, Burr's readings of contemporary women's poetry accentuate its engagement and provocation of readers through its forms of address. Burr shows how displacing the limits of dominant reception is possible by approaching poetry as communicative utterance, not just as self-expression.