Waking Up to the Earth, edited by Connecticut's Poet Laureate Margaret Gibson, is an anthology of poems by Connecticut poets who write of their relationships with the earth in a time of global climate crisis. The scope of the poems goes far beyond Connecticut to the whole ecosystem we humans share. With praise and wonder, and sometimes with grief or anger, the poems in this collection pay close attention to our planet and its inhabitants, its forests and oceans, its creatures: turtles and dung beetles, bats and bobcats, oak trees, orchards, and rivers. In a time of climate crisis, the poems in this anthology ask everyone to wake up to the earth, and to cherish it.
With The Glass Globe, celebrated poet Margaret Gibson completes a trilogy distinguished by its meditative focus on the author’s experience of her late husband’s Alzheimer’s disease. In this new collection, she blends elegies of personal bereavement with elegies for the earth during the ongoing global crisis wrought by climate change. Gibson’s poems personalize the vastness of climate catastrophe while simultaneously enlarging personal grief beyond the limits of self-absorption. A work of great compassion and vision, The Glass Globe is a necessary, heartbreaking book from one of our most compelling poets.
The long form poem is a practice of poetics in joy, gratitude, sadness, resilience and pain. This literary work serves as a practice of self-reflection and accountability in the wake of the prison system. This poem is dirge work acknowledging unjust atrocities, but reveling in our human resilience.
An anthology of a different sort, this volume presents a representative sample of contemporary American poems in 2023, with a road map of their origins. Bringing a diversity of styles and sensibilities, 62 poets from across the United States--some well known, some up-and-coming--illuminate their craft. Each poet contributes one poem, accompanied by an essay discussing their creative process and how the verse came to fruition.
Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science. A companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, this guide introduces the reader to seventy indigenous species found in Northern Appalachia, a region comprising parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. As a hybrid literary and natural history anthology, the book consists of descriptions and notes on habitat, range, and ecology provided by six scientists with expertise in the region’s flora and fauna. In addition, eleven artists and seventy poets have provided original artwork and poetry that illuminate the lives of the greater-than-human world. Defying easy stereotypes, the guide presents trees, shrubs, wildflowers and mammals, birds and fish, reptiles and amphibians, and invertebrates and fungi. Love and wonder for these ancient mountains and their ever-evolving residents flood the pages of this book, inviting the reader into a deeper way of knowing a place and the lives dependent on it.
The instant New York Times Bestseller • Nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction “A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. Named a Best Book of the Year by: GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!
Broken Cup brings breathtaking eloquence to what Margaret Gibson describes as "traveling the Way of Alzheimer's" with her husband, poet David McKain. After his initial and tentative diagnosis, Gibson suspended her writing for two years; but then poetry returned, and the creative process became the lightning rod that grounded her and presented a path forward. The poems in Broken Cup bear witness to how Alzheimer's erodes memory and cognitive function, but they never forget to see what is present and to ask what may remain of the self. Moving and unflinchingly honest in the acknowledgment of pain, frustration, and grief, the poems uncover, time and time again, the grace of abiding love. Gibson gives heart as well as voice to an experience that is deeply personal, yet shared by all too many.
The inspiration for most of the poems in Autumn Grasses was a daily engagement calendar that features the art of Japan - screens, hanging scrolls, painted silks and wood-block prints - and the spirit of Zen.
Norah Pollard sings movingly of loss and love punctuated with bursts of wit. She is a beautiful storyteller, eloquent and above all--best of all--she doesn't flinch from the truths of her life. Her poems are compassionate, wise and unflinching. Christie Max Williams writes,"In Lizard Season, as in all her earlier work, Norah Pollard's voice is accessible, generous, and above all, trustworthy. It's a direct, irreverent, muscular voice - a Yankee's voice. The stories contained in these new poems are so consistently and impressively compelling, and so wonderful in their narrative and emotional range, as to achieve a worldly, universal appeal and power. Many are from the poet's own life, but many others give insightful glimpses into the lives of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary moments. These stories are often funny. And like ancient fables, they deliver epiphanies of authentic emotional wisdom. Pollard also consistently enriches her tales with gem-like turns of phrase, some of them deeply memorable and true -- 'You don't know a man until you see / the compass of his compassion.' Pollard has long been known as one of New England's best poets. With Lizard Season, it may be time to reckon her one of America's best poets."
A retrospective collection of one of America's most essential radical poets, 'Angel in Flames' includes James Scully's poems in protest against the Vietnam War.
