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Blue front
by Martha Collins<P>A stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins the victim hanged, though not on a tree, this was not the country, they used a steel arch with electric lights, and later a lamppost, this was a modern event, the trees were not involved. --from "Blue Front" <P>Martha Collins's father, as a five-year-old, sold fruit outside the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909. What he witnessed there, with 10,000 participants, is shocking. <P>In Blue Front, Collins describes the brutal lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the mercilessness of the spectators. <P>The poems patch together an arresting array of evidence--newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations about her father's own experience. <P>The resulting work, part lyric and part narrative, is a bold investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history.
The Blue Grove: The Poetry of the Uraons (Routledge Revivals)
by W. G. ArcherOriginally published in 1940, The Blue Grove is a study of the poetry of the Uraons. This unique consideration of the poetry and folk song of the Uraons presents a wide range of poems organised by theme, including dance poems, cultivation poems, and marriage poems. It also includes examples of a Uraon marriage sermon, a Uraon farewell address, and Uraon riddles. The poems are preceded by a detailed analysis of Uraon marriages and dancing, providing important contextual information. The Blue Grove will appeal to anyone with an interest in the rich history of Uraon folk songs, poetry, and dance.
Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems and Drawings (Sapphic Classic)
by Alexis De VeauxIn 1984, Alexis De Veaux independently published and distributed Blue Heat. Mainstream publishing's interest in work by radical Black women was waning and De Veaux knew that she could reach women with the poems in Blue Heat directly---and she knew they needed these poems.Forty years later, Blue Heat is a Sapphic Classic from Sinister Wisdom with a stunning new introduction and guiding exercises for engaging the poems by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In Blue Heat, De Veaux insists on survival and encourages risk-taking. In these poems, liberation is necessary, and there is only one means to achieve it: by creating a spark. Blue Heat brings intensity akin to the deepest, hottest part of a flame. Like its namesake, this poetry collection is flammable, igniting courage in its readers, achieving De Veaux goal of kindling a spirit of "power, joy and change" in the Black feminist communities.
Blue Heron (Mountain West Poetry Series)
by Elizabeth RobinsonThe poems in Blue Heron delineate a passage through grief and change. Here, personal loss is continuous with threats to other species and landscapes. In response, Robinson has uprooted the terrain of language, “what / bestows itself from / the almost-invisible / and its stain.” If these uprootings are casualties of a poetics seeking to redress imbalance and “pollution,” then they are also opportunities to rethink what can exist in the field of poetic language as “roots also quicken, bruise their plural pronouns, lose tune, / forsake terrain by moving through and on it.” And so Blue Heron links poetic process with organic process, presence with the gap we know as hauntedness. The page is not only a resonant physical field, but also a site of dialogue between human and landscape, between lack and manifestation. If these poems constitute a poetics of loss, they are equally a movement toward a poetics of openness, risk, and renewed balance in which poetry shifts as “a form of weather, a form/of following, falling from the form/as it twists.”
Blue Heron
by Elizabeth RobinsonThe poems in Blue Heron delineate a passage through grief and change. Here, personal loss is continuous with threats to other species and landscapes. In response, Robinson has uprooted the terrain of language, "what / bestows itself from / the almost-invisible / and its stain." If these uprootings are casualties of a poetics seeking to redress imbalance and "pollution," then they are also opportunities to rethink what can exist in the field of poetic language as "roots also quicken, bruise their plural pronouns, lose tune, / forsake terrain by moving through and on it." And so Blue Heron links poetic process with organic process, presence with the gap we know as hauntedness. The page is not only a resonant physical field, but also a site of dialogue between human and landscape, between lack and manifestation. If these poems constitute a poetics of loss, they are equally a movement toward a poetics of openness, risk, and renewed balance in which poetry shifts as "a form of weather, a form/of following, falling from the form/as it twists."
Blue Horses: Poems
by Mary OliverMaybe our world will grow kinder eventually.Maybe the desire to make something beautifulis the piece of God that is inside each of us.In this stunning collection, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life's work. Herons, sparrows, owls and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry and impermanence. Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees or the paintings of Franz Marc, Mary Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.Blue Horses asks what it truly means to belong to this world and to live in it attuned to all its changes. 'To be human,' she shows us, 'is to sing your own song'.
Blue Horses: Poems
by Mary OliverIn this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life's work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature.Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.
Blue Hour: Poems
by Carolyn Forché"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted."The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence."-- Robert Boyers
The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems
by Lorna CrozierOver the course of a career spanning three decades, Lorna Crozier has become one of Canada's most beloved poets, receiving high acclaim and numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Poetry Award, and the Canadian Authors Association Award. Now, in this definitive selection of poems, which draws on her eight major collections and includes many of the poems for which she is justly celebrated, Crozier's trademark investigations of family, spirituality, love's fierce attachments, and bereavement and loss have been given a new framework. As a sapphire generates a blue light from within, The Blue Hour of the Day demonstrates Crozier's dazzling capacity to bring depths to light, unfailingly and unflinchingly. It represents the best work of an icon of Canadian poetry.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Blue in Green (Phoenix Poets)
by Chiyuma ElliottPoems that address interpersonal connections while navigating life and care amid disease and disaster. Collaboration runs through the heart of this collection. Human relationships—particularly in families—shape the poems in Blue in Green, as they consider how the question of what we expect from one another evolves into a question of what we owe. When cancer overshadows the ordinary—engrossing the labor of love, work, and friendship—disease becomes a collaborator and proposes new rules of exchange. The forms of Elliott’s works highlight reciprocity. Here you’ll find ekphrastic poems that describe modern jazz songs, letters and letter fragments, and free verse poems in wildly variable line lengths. “When I was a wave,” the speaker repeats, each time telling a different story about intimacy and risk. Blue in Green moves through the struggle of processing the damaging interpersonal reverberations of racism, sexism, and environmental damage, while navigating intertwined personal and political incarnations of care. While a slow-growing disease burns its way through the speaker’s body, these poems reveal the feeling of perpetually existing in the shadow of catastrophe and document the slow and strange process of coming to terms with that way of living.
Blue in Green (Phoenix Poets)
by Chiyuma ElliottPoems that address interpersonal connections while navigating life and care amid disease and disaster. Collaboration runs through the heart of this collection. Human relationships—particularly in families—shape the poems in Blue in Green, as they consider how the question of what we expect from one another evolves into a question of what we owe. When cancer overshadows the ordinary—engrossing the labor of love, work, and friendship—disease becomes a collaborator and proposes new rules of exchange. The forms of Elliott’s works highlight reciprocity. Here you’ll find ekphrastic poems that describe modern jazz songs, letters and letter fragments, and free verse poems in wildly variable line lengths. “When I was a wave,” the speaker repeats, each time telling a different story about intimacy and risk. Blue in Green moves through the struggle of processing the damaging interpersonal reverberations of racism, sexism, and environmental damage, while navigating intertwined personal and political incarnations of care. While a slow-growing disease burns its way through the speaker’s body, these poems reveal the feeling of perpetually existing in the shadow of catastrophe and document the slow and strange process of coming to terms with that way of living.
Blue Iris
by Mary OliverFor poet Mary Oliver, nature is full of mystery and miracle. From the excitation of birds in the sky to the flowers and plants that are "the simple garments" of the earth, the natural world is her text of both the earth's changes and its permanence.In Blue Iris, Mary Oliver collects ten new poems, two dozen of her poems written over the last two decades, and two previously unpublished essays on the beauty and wonder of plants. The poet considers roses, of course, as well as poppies and peonies; lilies and morning glories; the thick-bodied black oak and the fragrant white pine; the tall sunflower and the slender bean. James Dickey has said of her, "Far beneath the surface-flash of linguistic effect, Mary Oliver works her quiet and mysterious spell. It is a true spell, unlike any other poet's, the enchantment of the true maker." In Blue Iris, she has captured with breathtaking clarity the true enchantment and mysterious spell of flowers and plants of all sorts and their magnetic hold on us.From the Hardcover edition.
Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015
by Kevin YoungA rich and lively gathering of highlights from the first twenty years of an extraordinary career, interspersed with "B sides" and "bonus tracks" from this prolific and widely acclaimed poet. Blue Laws gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young's previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut (Most Way Home, 1995) and the amazing "double album" life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, "remixed" for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003) and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness (2008) and Book of Hours (2014), this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting. Together with wonderful outtakes and previously unseen blues, the profoundly felt poems here of family, Southern food, and loss are of a piece with the depth of personal sensibility and humanity found in his Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels or bold sequences such as "The Ballad of Jim Crow" and a new "Homage to Phillis Wheatley."From the Hardcover edition.
The Blue Mimes: Poems
by Sara Daniele RiveraSara Daniele Rivera’s award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone—all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition.Rivera’s poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English—between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themselves as a means of survival, mimicking the stilted actions of the people they once were. Where speech is not enough, this astonishing collection finds a radical practice in continued searching, endurance without promise—the rifts in communion and incomplete pictures that afford the possibility to heal.
Blue Moon Over Moorea
by Sally GauntIn Blue Moon over Moorea, an anthology of poems by Australian lawyer and poet Sally Gaunt, the author mines some of her favourite themes to remarkable effect. Water in all its forms proves a constant inspiration, from ‘Swimming with Seahorses’ to the rapt, almost hallucinatory images of the title poem. Gaunt breathes new life into verse written for the reading community and brings a sharp eye and wry humour to the perennial subjects of love, sex and death. Many of the poems are boldly imaginative recreations of historical events, typically centred on the sea, while the cycle of feather poems that opens the book considers the concept of manhood versus mayhem in a social setting.
Blue on a Blue Palette
by Lynne ThompsonLynne Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”
Blue Rose (Penguin Poets)
by Carol Muske-DukesA new collection of emotionally rich, issue-oriented poems from an award-winning poet whose work “has long been essential reading” (Jorie Graham) Carol Muske-Dukes has won acclaim for poetry that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and lyrical intensity. The poems in her new collection, Blue Rose, navigate around the idea of the unattainable – the elusive nature of poetry, of knowledge, of the fact that we know so little of the lives of others, of the world in which we live. Some poems respond to matters of women, birth, and the struggle for reproductive rights, or to issues like gun control and climate change, while others draw inspiration from the lives of women who persisted outside of convention, in poetry, art, science: the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the scientist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, and the Californian poet and writer Ina Coolbrith, the first poet laureate ever appointed in America.
Blue Sky White Stars
by Sarvinder NaberhausAn inspiring and patriotic tribute to the beauty of the American flag, a symbol of America&’s history, landscape, and people, illustrated by New York Times bestselling and Caldecott-honor winning artist Kadir Nelson Wonderfully spare, deceptively simple verses pair with richly evocative paintings to celebrate the iconic imagery of our nation, beginning with the American flag. Each spread, sumptuously illustrated by award-winning artist Kadir Nelson, depicts a stirring tableau, from the view of the Statue of Library at Ellis Island to civil rights marchers shoulder to shoulder, to a spacecraft at Cape Canaveral blasting off. This book is an ode to America then and now, from sea to shining sea.
Blue Sky White Stars Bilingual Edition
by Sarvinder NaberhausAn inspiring tribute to the beauty and meaning of the American flag, a symbol of America's history and people, illustrated by New York Times bestselling and Caldecott-honor winning artist Kadir Nelson--now available with text in Spanish and English.Wonderfully spare, deceptively simple verses pair with richly evocative paintings to celebrate the iconic imagery of our nation, beginning with the American flag. Each spread, sumptuously illustrated by award-winning artist Kadir Nelson, depicts a stirring tableau, from the view of the Statue of Library at Ellis Island to civil rights marchers shoulder to shoulder, to a spacecraft at Cape Canaveral blasting off. This book is an ode to America then and now, from sea to shining sea, and is now accessible to a much larger audience in this bilingual edition.
Blue Sonoma
by Jane MunroIn Blue Sonoma, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called "the gifts reserved for age." A beloved partner’s crossing into Alzheimer’s is at the heart of this book, and his "battered blue Sonoma" is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sharp shards of insight, Munro's wisdom here is deeply embedded, shot through with moments of wit and candour. In the tradition of Taoist poets like Wang Wei and Po-Chu-i, her sixth and best book opens a wide poetic space, and renders difficult conditions with the lightest of touches.
The Blue Split Compartments (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Andrea BradyThe Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring how the physically intimate relationships between military drone operators and their victims are mediated, not only through the technological interfaces of the screen and drone, but also through language and subjectivity. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war' conducted from remote airbases, where pilots in shipping containers surveil and destroy remote 'objects'. Brady's approach offers a sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality that generates legible currents of meaning and orientation. Entire countries have been turned into 'open air prisons', where the buzzing of drones overhead induces profound trauma and changes to social life. These poems strafe a documentary history of drone warfare with personal memory, and reflections on the myths and mechanics of prosthetic violence, voyeurism, masculinity, and desire. The Blue Split Compartments is a bitter comedy in drone erotics, a devastating reach into the twisted soul of murderous techno-surveillance regimes, a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution.
Blue-Tail Fly: Blue-tail Fly
by Vievee FrancisA poetic treatment of the period of American history between the beginning of the Mexican War and the end of the Civil War, by Michigan poet Vievee Francis.
The Blue Tower
by Tomaz Salamun Michael BigginsThe work of this "eminent, still-wild spirit of Central Europe" (Publishers Weekly) continues to electrify. In The Blue Tower, language is remade with tenderness and abandon: "Rommel was kissing heaven's dainty hands and yet / from his airplane above the Sahara my uncle / Rafko Perhauc still blew him to bits." There is an effervescence and a sense of freedom to Tomaž Salamun's poetry that has made him an inspiration to successive generations of American poets, "a poetic bridge between old European roots and the American adventure" (Associated Press). Trivial and monumental, beautiful and grotesque, healing, ferocious, mad: The Blue Tower is an essential volume.
Blue Wren
by Bron BatemanBlue Wren is a beautiful and moving body of work from poet Bron Bateman. Using Frida Kahlo as her inspiration, she has crafted a collection of poems that builds on the themes from Of Memory and Furniture of healing and reclaiming her past. In her new book, Bron experiments with different forms, such as magical realism, prose poetry and free verse, with many poems addressed to her lover, her sister, her children and the strong influence that her mother had on her life.
Blues
by John Hartley WilliamsSubversive and satirical, inventive, wry and unconventional, John Hartley Williams has long been celebrated for his maverick sensibility, for his outsider's take on the way we live our lives. In Blues, his eighth collection, he focuses with new directness on the turmoil of Germany and Eastern Europe, and writes eloquently about being English, and staying English, in a continental climate, through all the upheavals of the last fifteen years. Alert to the intricacies and ironies of the language, to the musculature of politics and passion, these poems are chronicles of change, wired to the energies of jazz and science fiction, yet the under-song is a threnody for the loss of a kind of Englishness - voiced powerfully in a moving elegy for the poet Ken Smith. While there is no diminishing of his comic brio, no dulling of his incisive, questioning intelligence, Blues finds John Hartley Williams taking on subjects of new depth and complexity - while maintaining his characteristic lightness of touch, imagination and profound originality.