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Bakkhai
by Anne Carson EuripidesA stunning, new translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson, first performed in 2015 at the Almeida Theatre in London Anne Carson writes, “Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and a god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration. Dionysos is the god of intoxication. Once you fall under his influence, there is no telling where you will end up.”
Barbie Chang
by Victoria Chang"With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous."―Linda Gregerson "Chang's voice is equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified."―American Poets Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie―perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. This energetic string of linked poems is full of wordplay, humor, and biting social commentary involving the quote-unquote speaker, Barbie Chang, a disillusioned Asian-American suburbanite. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that "even silence is not silent." From "Barbie Chang Lives": Barbie Chang lives on Facebook has a house on Facebook street so she can erase herself Facebook is a country with no trees it allows her to believe people love her don't want to cover her Barbie Chang . . . Victoria Chang is the author of three previous poetry books. In 2013, she won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Chang teaches poetry at Chapman University and lives in Southern California.
Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)
by Luke RobertsThis book examines the literary impact of famed British poet, Barry MacSweeney, who worked at the forefront of poetic discovery in post-war Britain. Agitated equally by politics and the possibilities of artistic experimentation, Barry MacSweeney was ridiculed in the press, his literary reputation only recovering towards the end of his life which was cut short by alcoholism. With close readings of MacSweeney alongside his contemporaries, precursors, and influences, including J. H. Prynne, Shelley, Jack Spicer, and Sylvia Plath, Luke Roberts offers a fresh introduction to the field of modern poetry. Richly detailed with archival and bibliographic research, this book recovers the social and political context of MacSweeney's exciting, challenging, and controversial impact on modern and contemporary poetry.
BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing (Best American Experimental Writing Ser.)
by Charles Bernstein Jesse Damiani Seth Abramson Tracie MorrisBAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing is the third volume of this annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year’s volume, guest-edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Sina Queyras, Tan Lin, Christian Bök, Myung Mi Kim, Juliana Spahr, Samuel R. Delany, and even Barack Obama—as well as emerging voices. Intended to provoke lively conversation and debate, Best American Experimental Writing is an ideal literary anthology for contemporary classroom settings.
Be Brave Little Penguin
by Giles AndreaeA feel-good rhyming story with a positive message about confidence and self-esteem, from the creators of international bestseller, Giraffes Can't Dance.Little Penguin Pip-Pip would love to join in with all his friends swimming in the sea, but there's just one problem . . . he's scared of water. Can Pip-Pip overcome his fears and finally take the plunge? This irresistible story shows that sometimes all it takes is a little bit of encouragement - and a whole lot of heart - to finally make that leap!This touching tale will soon become a new family favourite.Praise for Giraffes Can't Dance:'All toddlers should grow up reading this or hearing their parents read it aloud to them' - Daily Telegraph'A rhyming story with superb illustrations' - Independent'This delightful picture book is written in lively rhyming text with vivacious illustrations' - Junior
Beast Meridian
by Vanessa VillarrealBEAST MERIDIAN narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. <p><p> Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at- risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, it survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinxs in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer—another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities—and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. <p> The dissociative states that mark the middle—a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma—is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history.
Beating the Graves (African Poetry Book)
by Tsitsi Ella JajiThe poems in Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s Beating the Graves meditate on the meaning of living in diaspora, an experience increasingly common among contemporary Zimbabweans. Vivid evocations of the landscape of Zimbabwe filter critiques of contemporary political conditions and ecological challenges, veiled in the multiple meanings of poetic metaphor. Many poems explore the genre of praise poetry, which in Shona culture is a form of social currency for greeting elders and peers with a recitation of the characteristics of one’s clan. Others reflect on how diasporic life shapes family relations. The praise songs in this volume pay particular homage to the powerful women and gender-queer ancestors of the poet’s lineage and thought. Honoring influences ranging from Caribbean literature to classical music and engaging metaphors from rural Zimbabwe to the post-steel economy of Youngstown, Ohio, Jaji articulates her own ars poetica. These words revel in the utter ordinariness of living globally, of writing in the presence of all the languages of the world, at home everywhere, and never at rest.
Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes
by Jennifer LoveGroveBeautiful Children with Pet Foxes, the new collection of poetry from Giller Prize–longlisted writer Jennifer LoveGrove, attempts to make sense of a difficult and unsettling world, where one need not look much further than their own communities to witness acts of trauma and absurdity.Here, we're haunted by the ghosts of alienation, trauma, delusion, and fear that the past decade has instilled in us, and bear witness to moments of extreme crisis—in emotional breakdowns, the failures of the mental health system, the lack of support for the most vulnerable members of society, and the impact of psychosis not only on the ill but on those orbiting them.With inventive and startling imagery and logic, we're led on an odyssey through the terrain of startling dreamscapes, where a whole host of personas, both tame and wild—from humans, to foxes, moose, deer and crows, slugs, fish, beetles, mosquitos, earthworms, and more—give voice to the things we can't express in our daily lives.
Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Gina Athena UlysseGina Athena Ulysse's Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me & THE WORLD is a lyrically vivid meditative journey that is unapologetic in its determination to name, embrace and reclaim a revolutionary Blackness that has been historically stigmatized and denied. Crafting experiments with "ethnographic collectibles" of word, performative sounds, and imagery to blur genres and the lines between the geopolitical and the personal, this collection is a testament to postcolonial inheritances. Ulysse's work remixes samples from a range of references as it beckons readers to bear witness to a coming of age as she shifts between time and place and plays with languages to stretch the margins of aesthetics in the academic. These poems, performance texts, and photographs gather fractured memories—longings laced with Vodou chants confronting a past that looms too largely in the present. Because When God Is Too Busy searches for humility while honoring sacred and ancestral imperatives to recognize and salute power beyond Western attachments to reason.
The Bedtime Book (A\fiona The Hippo Book Ser.)
by ZondervanNew York Times bestselling author Mary Engelbreit presents The Bedtime Book, a beautifully illustrated picture book that pairs sleepy time text with Mary&’s beloved, timeless art. From endearing poems and snuggly stories to sweet blessings and precious prayers, each page features different ways for you to read your little one to sleep, making this a book you can turn to night after night.Mama comes to tuck you in, Pulls the covers to your chin, Squeezes fingers, squeezes toes, Lays a kiss upon your nose.From bedtime prayers, poems, and sleepy-time rhymes to short, illustrated stories, The Bedtime Book gives you and your child a soothing bedtime world to explore as they prepare to drift off to sleep. Each reading selection is paired with Mary Engelbreit&’s iconic and inimitable artwork, creating a book of readings and calming illustrations that can be enjoyed by children, adults, and caretakers alike.The Bedtime Book:contains twelve unique reading experiences that can be read straight through or broken up and combined for a different bedtime adventure every night, entries that range from short prayers to stories spanning several spreadsfeatures several unique stories you won&’t find anywhere elseis a great collectors&’ item for fans of Mary Engelbreit&’s art
Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected New Jersey Poems / Selected San Francisco Poems
by August KleinzahlerA collection of August Kleinzahler’s best poems, divided—like his life—between New Jersey and San FranciscoWhen August Kleinzahler won the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, the judges’ citation referred to his work as “ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers.” They might also have added “between New Jersey and San Francisco,” the places Kleinzahler has spent his life traveling between, both on the road and on the page. This collection assembles the best of his New Jersey and San Francisco poems for the first time, organized according to place, with each city receiving its own title and cover. Providing readers with a gorgeous guide to Kleinzahler’s interior geography, Before Dawn on Bluff Road (New Jersey) and Hollyhocks in the Fog (San Francisco) function as both word-maps and word-anatomies of one of our greatest poet’s lifelong passions and preoccupations.
Beginner's Guide to a Head-On Collision: A Memoir in Poems
by Sebastian MatthewsThe award-winning author of In My Father&’s Footsteps combines prose and poetry in a poignant memoir that captures the aftershocks of a tragic car accident. &“Beginner&’s Guide to a Head-on Collision offers the deeply moving poetic memoir of Sebastian Matthews&’s life in the years after the car accident that devastated him and his wife and son. The poems, which often read like electric improvised prayer-songs, intimately evoke the terrors and wonders of catastrophic physical injury and of &‘life re-booted.&’ They are disturbing, eerie poems that embody the paradoxes of being The Dead Man at the crossing. They are amazingly honest in their hopeful, mystical sense of fate. In this unforgettable book, the reader is present at the scene of the accident where the hovering spirit that has departed the body addresses the living person re-entering his brokenness and answering for his transcendent awareness.&” —Kevin McIlvoy, author of Hyssop &“These poems detail both physical and spiritual misery, and though suffering can turn us into many things, Matthews—our banged-up storyteller, singer, docent—strives to deliver himself back to a body of affection, intimacy, and kindness. Beginner&’s Guide to a Head-on Collision is a remarkable record of that difficult journey.&” —Patrick Rosal, author of Brooklyn Antediluvian &“By reading Beginner&’s Guide to a Head-on Collision we learn how to go in and out of the body as necessary and, in order to take in the possibility of a larger life, how to wrest from breakage release from our thin views of who we are.&” —Vievee Francis, author of Forest Primeval
The Best of Poetry in Motion: Celebrating Twenty-five Years On Subways And Buses
by Alice Quinn Billy Collins“Poems once in motion…continue to move their readers. And what an imaginative variety of poetic delights is offered here.”—Billy Collins It would have pleased Walt Whitman, that poet of urban motion, to envision his words coursing by electrified rail through a diverse, global city of 8 million souls. Since 1992, with the presentation of an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the Poetry in Motion program—co-sponsored by MTA Arts & Design and the Poetry Society of America—has brought more than 200 poems, in whole or in part, before the eyes of millions of subway and bus riders, offering a moment of timelessness in the busy day. The poems are by an eclectic mix of writers, from Sappho and Sylvia Plath to W. H. Auden, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Nikki Giovanni, Patrick Phillips, and Aracelis Girmay. Each of the 100 poems gathered here has, in sixteen lines or less, the power to enliven the quotidian, provide nourishment for the soul, and enchant even the youngest among us.
Better Nature
by Fenn StewartMuch of the language that makes up Better Nature—the first poetry collection by writer and academic Fenn Stewart—is drawn from a diary that Walt Whitman wrote while travelling through Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.But rather than waxing poetic about the untouched Great White North, Stewart inlays found materials (early settler archives, news stories, email spam, fundraising for environmental NGOs, and more) to present a unique view of Canada's "pioneering" attitude towards "wilderness"—one that considers deeper issues of the settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, the notion of terra nullius, and the strategies and techniques used to produce a "better nature" (that is, one that better serves the nation).
Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse
by Rob Long"Poets, wrote Shelley, are 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' Big deal. But now for the rst time ever a poet is the Leader of the Free World, and he's even more totally unacknowledged—by Democrats, the media, Lena Dunham, Deep State leakers, and other losers. This superb collection of winning verse, brilliantly edited by Rob Long, spans the decades from the early 'Table at Le Cirque' to my personal favorite 'The Mantle of Anger.' With this dazzling anthology, bitter fake-news hacks for whom Trump is beyond reason will have to admit that he's also beyond rhyme (except for page 74)." —MARK STEYN, bestselling author of America Alone, After America, and The Undocumented Mark Steyn "This book pleased me so much, I culturally appropriated Haiku to contribute to the cover." — MILO YIANNOPOULOS"More lyrical than Walt Whitman, pithier than Robert Frost—and making a heck of a lot more sense than Emily Dickinson, this book should be required reading for every Literature major on campus."—JAMES DELINGPOLE, columnist at Breitbart.com and The Spectator and author of 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy and The Little Green Book of Eco-FascismBigly is hilarious compilation of memorable quotes from President Donald Trump arranged as poetry that will have the president's fiercest supporters and harshest critics asking the same question: Can a president appoint himself Poet Laureate? Divided into sections on Life, Love, Beauty, and Death—and including a dedicatory haiku by Milo Yiannopoulos, a foreword by How to Lose Friends and Alienate People author Toby Young, and poignant editor's notes that reveal the hidden meaning in Trump's expert verse—Bigly is a must-have for political junkies who've been following President Donald Trump's unconventional speeches, interviews, complaints, jokes, quips, and witticisms.
The Bird-while (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
by Keith Taylor“A Bird-while. In a natural chronometer, a Bird-while may be admitted as one of the metres, since the space most of the wild birds will allow you to make your observations on them when they alight near you in the woods, is a pretty equal and familiar measure” (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Journal, 1838). Without becoming didactic or pedantic about the spiritual metaphor hidden in the concept of the “bird-while,” Keith Taylor’s collection evokes certain Eastern meditative poets who often wrote in an aphoristic style of the spirit or the mind mirroring specific aspects of the natural world. The Bird-while is a collection of forty-nine poems that meditate on the nature—both human and non-human—that surrounds us daily. Taylor is in the company of naturalist poets such as Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver—poets who often drew from an Emersonian sensibility to create art that awakens the mind to its corresponding truths in the natural world. The book ranges from the longer poem to the eight line, unrhymed stanza similar to that of the T'ang poet Han-Shan. And without section breaks to reinforce the passing of time, the collection creates greater fluidity of movement from one poem to the next, as if there is no beginning or end, only an eternal moment that is suspended on the page. Tom Pohrt’s original illustrations are scattered throughout the text, adding a stunning visual element to the already vivid language. The book moves from the author’s travel accounts to the destruction of the natural world, even species extinction, to more hopeful poems of survival and the return of wildness. The natural rhythm is at times marred by the disturbances of the twenty-first century that come blaring into these meditations, as when a National Guard jet rumbles over the treeline upsetting a hummingbird, and yet, even the hummingbird is able to regain its balance and continue as before. At its core, Taylor’s collection is a reminder of Emerson’s idea that natural facts are symbols of spiritual facts. These well-crafted poems will be easily accessible to any literary audience, with a more particular attraction to readers of contemporary poetry sensitive to the marriage of an Eastern sensibility with contemporary American settings and scenes.
Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems, 1997-2015
by Bruce BondBlackout Starlight brings together a selection of poems from nine previously published books, along with a generous assortment of new work. At the heart of this collection are investigations of the role of eros, language, and creative life, and of the wonder and anxiety of their absence. In Bond’s telling, the lines between real and unreal, living and dead, blur together in the poet’s imagination, casting an equally compassionate eye upon “the man we see writhing in the marble” of an uncarved statue and the son at a funeral trying to face “the other half of life, the part / without my father in it.”Taken together, the selections in this book represent the highlights of a dazzling career in poetry and leave the reader eager for many more years of Bond’s verses to come.
Blood Too Bright: Floyd Dell Remembers Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Floyd Dell Jerri DellWhat lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,I have forgotten*One hundred years ago, Bohemian author and editor of the radical Masses magazine, Floyd Dell, began a passionate affair with a newcomer to Greenwich Village — the yet to be discovered “girl poet,” Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the years that followed, both Dell and Millay became symbols of early 20th century feminism, rebellion and literary freedom.A century later, while poring over her grandfather Floyd’s papers at Chicago’s Newberry Library, Jerri Dell discovered hundreds of handwritten letters and an unpublished memoir about his love affair with Millay. Finding him as outlandish, entertaining and insightful as he was when she knew him fifty years before, she chose to bring him and his poet lover back to life within the pages of this book.Admirers of Edna Millay — as well as literary and political history buffs, Bohemian Village enthusiasts, and readers interested in writers who famously influenced social norms — are sure to enjoy this eye-witness account of a fascinating woman and exceptional poet. My candle burns at both ends;It will not last the night* *Excerpts from Sonnet XLIII and First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay
bone
by Kiese Laymon Yrsa Daley-Ward<p>From the celebrated poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, a poignant collection of poems about the heart, life, and the inner self. <p> Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark. <p> The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward’s collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence—so clear and pared-down, they become universal. <p> From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human. <p> “You will come away bruised.<br> You will come away bruised<br> but this will give you poetry.” <p> Foreword by Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
The Book of Levinson
by Cat DixonThe family of Bob Levinson, a retired FBI agent, have been anxiously waiting for news, any news, about his fate since he vanished during a business trip to Iran in March 2007. These poems are based are on signs that Bob Levinson held up in photographs that were sent to his family in 2011.
Border Crossing
by Caitlin MalingCaitlin Maling's second volume, Border Crossing, continues to showcase the development of an exciting new voice in Australian poetry. Now Maling's poems shift from the first volume's gritty treatment of childhood and adolescence growing up in WA, to a consideration of what it is to be an Australian in America, where the conflicting voices and identities of home and abroad jostle against and seek their definitions from each other. In this volume, as in the first, her emphasis on place – geography and environment – is as strong as ever.
The Bosses
by Sebastian AgudeloAgudelo’s books have always been concerned with the relationship between worker and consumer, whether in the kitchens or in the neighborhood, but in The Bosses, his spectacular third outing, Agudelo’s sharp focus finally lands on the seen and unseen authority figures who dictate the boundaries of our lives, contemplating power structures from the current managerial culture to a historical exploration of the role that authority plays in our lives.