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The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic Of Sigurd The Dragon Slayer (Legends from the Ancient North)
by Petra BornerPart of a new series Legends from the Ancient North, Beowulf is one of the classic books that influenced JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings'So the company of men led a careless life,All was well with them: until One beganTo encompass evil, an enemy from hell.Grendel they called this cruel spirit...'J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his life studying, translating and teaching the great epic stories of northern Europe, filled with heroes, dragons, trolls, dwarves and magic. He was hugely influential for his advocacy of Beowulf as a great work of literature and, even if he had never written The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, would be recognised today as a significant figure in the rediscovery of these extraordinary tales.Legends from the Ancient North brings together from Penguin Classics five of the key works behind Tolkien's fiction.They are startling, brutal, strange pieces of writing, with an elemental power brilliantly preserved in these translations.They plunge the reader into a world of treachery, quests, chivalry, trials of strength.They are the most ancient narratives that exist from northern Europe and bring us as near as we will ever get to the origins of the magical landscape of Middle-earth (Midgard) which Tolkien remade in the 20th century.
Sage: Poems
by Marilyn ChinA rebellious, refined, provocative, and audacious volume from award-winning poet Marilyn Chin. In her galvanizing sixth collection of poems, Marilyn Chin once again turns moral outrage into unforgettable art. A rambunctious take on our contemporary condition, Sage shifts skillfully in tone and register from powerful poems on social justice and the pandemic to Daoist wild girl satire. A self-described "activist-subversive-radical-immigrant-feminist-transnational-Buddhist-neoclassical-nerd poet," Chin is always reinventing herself. In Sage, she sings fearless identity anthems, pulls farcical details from an old diary, and confronts the disturbing rise in violence against Asian Americans. Leaping between colloquialisms and vivid imagery, anger and humor, she merges the personal and political with singular, resilient spirit. Whether she is spinning tall tales, mixing Chinese poems with hip-hop rhymes, reinventing lovelorn folk songs with a new-world anxiety, or penning a raucous birthday poem, a heartrending elegy, or an "un-gratitude" prayer, Chin offers dazzling surprises at every turn.
Said Like Reeds or Things
by Mark TruscottWarning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts!Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself in the form of a gesture.Minimalist in form, these small gatherings of words, a.k.a. 'poems', seek strangeness in familiar language; their effect is harmonic dissonance within the mind - like an overturned toy box in your path to the television set, these poems are a fresh and amusing diversion from the everyday from which they are derived. Mysteriously entertaining and precise, these succinct, visual lyrics say as much about the world as they do about their own status as objects for reading, and they persist in the hilarity and contemplation of their own enigmatic possibilities.'Mark Truscott's Said Like Reeds or Things is the work of a mischievous conservationist with a shadow of Basho in the mix. It's sometimes snappy, sometimes calm, and always an exhilarating tease. This is the place where little pieces of perfection ride along a sublime horizon line.' - Lisa Jarnot
Said Not Said: Poems
by Fred Marchant“Fred Marchant teaches and awakens the soul.” —Maxine Hong Kingstonsomeone in Benghazi with a hose in one handuses his free one to wipe down the corpsewater flows over the body and downa tilted steel tray toward the drain what washes off washes off—“Below the Fold”In this important and formally inventive new poetry collection, Fred Marchant brings us into realms of the intractable and the unacceptable, those places where words seem to fail us and yet are all we have. In the process he affirms lyric poetry’s central role in the contemporary moral imagination. As the National Book Award winner David Ferry writes, “The poems in this beautiful new book by Fred Marchant are autobiographical, but, as is always the case with his poems, autobiographical of how he has witnessed, with faithfully exact and pitying observation, the sufferings in the lives of other people, for example the heartbreaking series of poems about the fatal mental suffering of his sister, and the poems about other peoples, in Vietnam, in the Middle East, written about with the noble generosity of feeling that has always characterized his work, here more impressively even than before.”Said Not Said is a poet’s taking stock of conscience, his country’s and his own, and of poetry’s capacity to speak to what matters most.
, said the shotgun to the head.
by Saul WilliamsThe greatest AmericansHave not been born yet<p><p>They are waiting quietly<p>For their past to die<p>please give blood <p>Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...
, said the shotgun to the head.
by Saul WilliamsThe greatest AmericansHave not been born yetThey are waiting quietlyFor their past to dieplease give blood Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...
Saigyo: Poems Of A Mountain Home (Translations From The Asian Classics)
by Burton Watson Saigyô"Poems of a Mountain Home" contains translations of two hundred of Saigyo's poems. His poems are almost all written in the thirty-one syllable "tanka" form, the form most favored in Japanese court poetry. The translations follow the traditional topical arrangements used in Japanese editions of Saigyo's work, allowing the reader to appreciate the poet's celebration of each season of the year.
Sail Away with Me
by Jane Collins-PhilippeJane Collins-Philippe loves the sea – after all she has spent many years living on a sailboat – and she has collected verses old and new to share her understanding and affection. Some of the poems will be familiar, like Eugene Field&’s &“Wynken, Blynken and Nod.&” Others are from Collins-Philippe&’s own pen and are sure to become favorites. Who could resist a poem about a ship with a hippo for a captain and a giraffe named Joyce for a lookout?Laura Beingessner&’s charming art is the perfect complement to a collection that will delight children, whether they are old salts or landlubbers.A note from the author: OOPS! Credit for Baby&’s Boat on the very last page of my book should have gone to Ridley and Gaynor who penned it in 1898. I wouldn&’t want to take credit for something I didn&’t write. Besides, that would make me very old indeed!
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
by Billy CollinsSailing Alone Around the Room, by America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Sailing by Ravens (The Alaska Literary Series)
by Holly HughesGillnetter, mariner, and naturalist Holly Hughes has experienced first-hand the practical and philosophical consequences of navigating difficult waters. In Sailing by Ravens, she gathers wisdom gained from thirty seasons working off Alaska’s shores, weaving personal experience and her love of the sea with the history and science of navigation. In this exquisite collection of poems, Hughes deftly navigates “the wavering, certain path” of a woman’s heart, finding that sometimes the best directions to follow are those that come from the natural forces in our lives. These meditations offer waypoints for readers on their own journeys. “These poems of the sea begin with a school girl’s fascination for ‘the blue sea holding captive all the land’ and end as the seasoned sailor learns that ‘even the old charts/ can’t navigate the wild shoals of your heart.’ Along the way we are shipmates through days of fishing, sailing, loving, and losing as Hughes navigates the lure, lore, and loneliness of a sea that is both natural force and metaphor. I love Sailing by Ravens with its salt of the sea, salt of our deepest lives.” —Gary Thompson, author of One Thing After Another
Sailing through Cassiopeia
by Dan Gerber"Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise-sometimes all at the same time."-Library Journal"The thing itself carries the weight of [Gerber's] poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda, and Wright."-Rain TaxiDan Gerber's mastery of layered imagery and crystalline vision marry European Romanticism with American Zen. These meditative poems engage the natural landscape of California's oak savannas and memories of childhood, while calling upon an array of literary progenitors-from Robinson Jeffers and Rainer Maria Rilke to the classics of the Chinese canon-exploring what it means to be linguistically alive in an animal world. As ForeWord magazine wrote, "Dan Gerber's poems are quick, graceful, alert to their surroundings, and rarely wasting a motion.""The Word is the Picture of Things"Looking down at the lights of Earth,its constellations of lives,however unaware,signal back to the watching galaxiesthat have their seeing inside us.I praised flight and got stuck.I praised gravity and got lost.Along the way my lifedecays, and ripens . . . Dan Gerber is the author of seven collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former racecar driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. His books have earned a Michigan Author Award and the Mark Twain Award. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.
Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels
by Steve MentzJourney through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville’s epic in bold new lightCome sail with I.We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.
Saint Agnostica: Poems
by Anya Krugovoy SilverSaint Agnostica is the final work of Anya Krugovoy Silver, a poet celebrated for her incisive writing about illness, motherhood, and Christian faith. The poems in this collection dance between opposite poles of joy and grief, community and isolation, humor and anger, belief and doubt, in moving and devastating witness to a life lived with strength and resolve.
Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
by Jack RidlJack Ridl returns with a collection of poems that mix deft artistic skill with intimate meditations on everyday life, whether that be curiosity, loss, discovery, joy, or the passing of the seasons. An early reader of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch said it best: "Ridl’s books are all treasures, as is he, and his poetry has always been trout-quick, alternately funny and wondrous, instantly intimate, and free of pretense. All these characteristics can be found in this book, and there is something else, something extraordinary: at an age where most poets are content to roll out an imagined posterity, he’s decided to push and refine the art, to see out the day and live it fully, because art and life settle for no less." The first section of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch reflects on the author’s personal history, with poems like "Feeding the Pup in the Early Morning" and "Some of What Was Left After Therapy." The second section continues with meditations on varied events and persons and includes poems such as "The Last Days of Sam Snead" and "Coffee Talks with Con Hilberry." The third attends primarily to the mystery of love and what one loves and contains the poems "The Inevitable Sorrow of Potatoes" and "Suite for the Long Married." The fourth and final section meditates primarily on the imagined in poems like "Over in That Corner, the Puppets" and "Meditation on a Photograph of a Man Jumping a Puddle in the Rain." Saint Peter and the Goldfinch is the work of a talented and seasoned poet, one whose work comes out of the "plainspoken" tradition—the kind of poetry that, as Thomas Lynch puts it, "has to deliver the goods, has to say something about life, something clear and discernible, or it has little to offer." Readers of poetry who enjoy wrestling with life’s big questions will appreciate the space that Ridl allows for these ruminations.
Salad Anniversary
by Julie Winters Carpenter Machi TawaraMachi Tawara's first book of poems, The Anniversary of the Salad combines the classical 'tanka' form with the subject of a modern love affair. It became a sensation, selling over 2 million copies - and the 'salad phenomenon' in Japanese culture was comparable to the 'bananamania' that followed publication of the first novel by Tawara's contemporary Banana Yoshimoto. Contains 15 poems:'August Morning' 'Baseball Game' 'Morning Necktie' 'I Am the Wind' 'Summertime Ship' 'Wake-up Call' 'Hashimoto High School' 'Pretending to Wait for Someone' 'Salad Anniversary' 'Twilight Alley' 'My Bisymmetrical Self' 'So, Good Luck' 'Jazz Concert' 'Backstreet Cat' 'Always American'
Salient
by Elizabeth T. Gray JrA riveting lyrical constellation centered on the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders Fields and tibetan protective magic <p><p> In the foreword to her book-length poem, Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.” <p> Over the course of several decades, Gray tracked the contours and traces of the Ypres Salient, walking the haunted battlefield ground of the contemporary landscape with campaign maps in hand, reading “not only history, poetry, and fiction, but also unit diaries; contemporary reports and individual accounts; survey information and maps of all kinds; treatises on aerial photography and artillery tactics; and manuals on field engineering and tactical planning.” <p> Out of this material, through a process of collage, convergence, and ritual chöd visualization, Gray has composed a spare, fascinating lyrical engagement with The Missing, in shell hole and curved trench, by way of amulets and obstacles. What is salient rises from the secret signs in song, like a blessing, protected from harm.
Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2016
by August KleinzahlerSixteen years’ worth of incisive essays by the great poet and memoirist“Witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler” (Publishers Weekly) has gathered the best of sixteen years’ worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection, setting down his thoughts about great poets and bad poets, about kvetching fiction writers and homicidal musicians, about eccentric critics and discerning nobodies, always with insight and humor, and never suffering fools gladly.Here, in Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs, August Kleinzahler eulogizes famous friends, warts and all (Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton, Leonard Michaels); leads the charge in carving up a few bloated reputations (E. E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan); and sings the praises of unjustly neglected masters (Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Cox). He also turns the spotlight on himself in several short, delightful memoirs, covering such subjects as his obsessive CD collecting, the eerie effects of San Francisco fog, and the terrible duty of selling of his childhood home.
Sally's Hair
by John KoetheLet me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills. There's something in the air, something I can't quite see, Hiding behind this stock of images, this language Culled from all the poems I've ever loved. John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death." Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."
Salsa
by Adrià SalasSalsa estrena Contraveu, la col·lecció de poesia i textos breus de Rosa dels Vents que arrenca aquest any. No remenis tant. I la resposta és: «sí, trobaràs el temps». Sempre val la pena una immersió guiada al fons de les qüestions. Així com els instruments musicals moren quan no els toquem, també la reflexió va perdent la seva efectivitat quan no la sovintegem. He sabut trobar una part de casa meva a l'horitzó, i us l'apropo a tota vela. No l'he embolicada perquè no pensava regalar-la, però serà l'inici d'una inesperada complicitat. Passa't per aquí quan vulguis. El que et diré no alliçona, però ressona. No soc l'Adrià que havies vist abans i no me n'amago. He recuperat velles cantarelles i les faig parlar, ara que els ha arribat el moment. He preparat per a tu moltes propostes indecents. Adrià Salas
Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War
by Helen FrostAnikwa and James, twelve years old in 1812, spend their days fishing, trapping, and exploring together in the forests of the Indiana Territory. To Anikwa and his family, members of the Miami tribe, this land has been home for centuries. As traders, James's family has ties to the Miami community as well as to the American soldiers in the fort. Now tensions are rising—the British and American armies prepare to meet at Fort Wayne for a crucial battle, and Native Americans from surrounding tribes gather in Kekionga to protect their homeland. After trading stops and precious commodities, like salt, are withheld, the fort comes under siege, and war ravages the land. James and Anikwa, like everyone around them, must decide where their deepest loyalties lie. Can their families—and their friendship—survive? In Salt, Printz Honor author Helen Frost offers a compelling look at a difficult time in history.A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013A Frances Foster Book
salt.
by Nayyirah Waheedsalt. is a journey through warmth and sharpness. this collection of poetry explores the realities of multiple identities, language, diasporic life & pain, the self, community, healing, celebration, and love.
The Salt in His Kiss: Poems
by AlfaFrom the author of I Find You In the Darkness, a brand-new poetry collection about love, longing, and one woman's everlasting connection to the sea My soul reminds me thatI am a Mermaid.A woman who longs to be held by the sea...Beloved contemporary poet Alfa is back with a collection of all-new poems celebrating strength and female empowerment. With more than 180 poems focusing on resilience, inner strength, and self-love, The Salt in His Kiss celebrates the fantastic creature inside every woman.
Saltwater Demands a Psalm: Poems
by Kweku AbimbolaIn Ghana’s Akan tradition, on the eighth day of life a child is named according to the day of the week on which they were born. This marks their true birth. In Kweku Abimbola’s rhapsodic debut, the intimacy of this practice yields an intricately layered poetics of time and body based in Black possibility, ancestry, and joy. While odes and praise songs celebrate rituals of self- and collective-care—of durags, stank faces, and dance—Abimbola’s elegies imagine alternate lives and afterlives for those slain by police, returning to naming as a means of rebirth and reconnection following the lost understanding of time and space that accompanies Black death.Saltwater Demands a Psalm creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols—pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings—and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.These poems groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberation’s struggles and triumphs. Abimbola’s poetry invokes the ecstasy and sorrow of saying the names of the departed, of seeing and being seen, of being called and calling back.
Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985–2005
by Rodney JonesRodney Jones has been called "the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry" (Southern Review) and one of the nation's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four bold new pieces.