One Secret Thing

One Secret Thing

Author: Sharon Olds

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2013-08-21

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 0307804372

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A powerful collection of poems about family and grief—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down" (San Francisco Chronicle). Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy—sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger—public and private—illuminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning. One Secret Thing is charged throughout with Sharon Olds’s characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power. The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his first rotation in the emergency room. On the ancient boarding-school radio, in the attic hall, the announcer had given my boyfriend’s name as one of two brought to the hospital after the sunrise service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the stairwell banisters, at their lathing, the necks and knobs like joints and bones, the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said Which one of them died, and now the world was an ant’s world: the huge crumb of each second thrown, somehow, up onto my back, and the young, tired voice said my fresh love’s name. from “Easter 1960”


The Rain in the Trees

The Rain in the Trees

Author: W. S. Merwin

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 1988-03-12

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 0394758587

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A volume of poems concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and with history and how the world endures it—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch). A literary event—a new volume of poems by one of the masters of modern poetry—The Rain in the Trees is W. S. Merwin's first book since the publication of his Opening the Hand. Almost no other poet of our time has been able to voice in so subtle a fashion such a profound series of comments on the passing of history over the contemporary scene. To do this, he seems to have reinvented the poem—so that the experience of reading Merwin is unlike the reading of any other poetry. In such famous books as The Lice, The Moving Target and (most recently) Opening the Hand, he has produced a body of work of great profundity and power made from the simplest and most beautiful poetic speech. Merwin can now rightfully be called a master, and this book shows in every way why this is the case.


The Insanity of Empire

The Insanity of Empire

Author: Robert Bly

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13:

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This poetry collection discusses the Iraq war and some of the ominous implications of that serious step taken by the Republican administration. The collection includes six poems from the author's book on the Vietnam War, as well as a new group of poems discussing the power of the greedy soul or 'the rapacious soul.' Another five poems are in the ghazal form, including 'Call and answer, ' one of the first poems written against the Iraq War.


American War Poetry

American War Poetry

Author: Lorrie Goldensohn

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9780231133104

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Arranged by war, the book begins with the Colonial period and proceeds through Whitman admiring Civil War soldiers crossing a river to end with Brian Turner, who published his first book in 2005, beckoning a bullet in contemporary Iraq.


Essays After Eighty

Essays After Eighty

Author: Donald Hall

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2014-12-02

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 0544286944

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The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny” essays (The New York Times). From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children’s author. Now, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, his essays continue to startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: “thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” He also addresses his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.” “Deliciously readable…Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge.” —The Wall Street Journal


Sho

Sho

Author: Douglas Kearney

Publisher: Wave Books

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 1950268624

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2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.


On the Horizon

On the Horizon

Author: Lois Lowry

Publisher: Clarion Books

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 0358129400

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From two-time Newbery medalist and living legend Lois Lowry comes a moving account of the lives lost in two of WWII's most infamous events: Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. With evocative black-and-white illustrations by SCBWI Golden Kite Award winner Kenard Pak. Lois Lowry looks back at history through a personal lens as she draws from her own memories as a child in Hawaii and Japan, as well as from historical research, in this stunning work in verse for young readers. On the Horizon tells the story of people whose lives were lost or forever altered by the twin tragedies of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Based on the lives of soldiers at Pearl Harbor and civilians in Hiroshima, On the Horizon contemplates humanity and war through verse that sings with pain, truth, and the importance of bridging cultural divides. This masterful work emphasizes empathy and understanding in search of commonality and friendship, vital lessons for students as well as citizens of today's world. Kenard Pak's stunning illustrations depict real-life people, places, and events, making for an incredibly vivid return to our collective past. In turns haunting, heartbreaking, and uplifting, On The Horizon will remind readers of the horrors and heroism in our past, as well as offer hope for our future.


Our Best War Stories

Our Best War Stories

Author: Christopher Lyke

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781953665553

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The best new and established voices from the Forever Wars! Thirty-six prize-winning works of 21st century war poetry, fiction, and non-fiction!Since 2016, administered by the Chicago-based literary journal Line of Advance, the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards have served to highlight not only some of the best contemporary voices writing about modern wars-Vietnam to Afghanistan-but to creatively commemorate the life of a U.S. Army leader and writer, beloved by his family and troops.In 2020, the annual competition expanded to include the voices of writers who are immediate family members of those serving, or who have served, in the U.S. military.Finalists are awarded cash-prizes, and publication in Line of Advance. Many have gone on to write and publish larger works, including award-winning novels and poetry collections. Past Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Award winners and finalists include:Eric Chandler: U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, former F-16 fighter pilot over Iraq and Afghanistan, outdoor sports writer, and author of the 2017 poetry collection Hugging This Rock: Poems of Earth & Sky, Love & War.U.S. Marine Corps veteran, winner of the inaugural Syracuse University Press Veterans' Writing Award for best book-length fiction or non-fiction, and author of the forthcoming novel Revolutions of All Colors.Travis Klempan: U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Iraq War veteran, and author of the novel Have Snakes, Need Birds.Ray McPadden: U.S. Army Ranger veteran, winner of the American Library Association's W.Y. Boyd Award for Excellence in Military Fiction, and author of the novel And the Whole Mountain Burned.Bill Upton, U.S. Army veteran, a former crew chief on C-7A "Caribou" aircraft over Vietnam, and author of the memoir Pizza and Mortars: Ba-muoi-ba & Body Bags.


Afterland

Afterland

Author: Mai Der Vang

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2017-04-04

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1555979645

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The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Carolyn Forché When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what the current gives. When we reach the camp, there will be thousands like us. If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads and waiting pastures of America. We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage for the sweetest mangoes. I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep. —from “Transmigration” Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.