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Letter to a Distant Father
by Kenneth RaduThe writer of the letter in Kenneth Radu's title poem is reaching across an enormous silence: from a microchipped contemporary Canadian setting to the rest home on the Black Sea where his father is dying; and then even further, back to their lives in a peasant village before the son’s escape under the wire.
Lettera di un uomo sui quaranta
by Riyad Al KadiPubblicata dalla casa editrice Dar Lila, la raccolta è stata scritta dal romanziere e poeta iracheno-inglese Riyad Al Kadi, e si distingue per la molteplicità dei concetti e dell’audacia espressi in essa.
Letters Home
by Sylvia PlathIn answer to the avalanche of inquiries that has descended upon the author ever since the publication of Sylvia's poems in Ariel and her novel, The Bell Jar, she is releasing a section of her intimate correspondence with her family from the time she entered Smith College. It may seem extraordinary that someone who died when she was only thirty years old left behind 696 letters written to her family between the beginning of her college years in 1950 and her death early in February 1963. We could not afford long-distance telephoning, though, and Sylvia loved to write--so much so that she went through three typewriters in that same time.
Letters Written and Not Sent: Poems
by William Louis-DreyfusThis culmination of a life of poetry, art, and social justice “has the freshness of an opening argument and the majesty of a man’s last words” (Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst).Like paperweights, his lyrics are both small and hefty. His subjects range from race relations to trees, from secrets to parenthood, from ideas of god to kissing, from sons and mothers to fate, and of course, to poetry itself. Never afraid of the big questions of why human beings are alive, and what hope and justice are for, Louis-Dreyfus could take decades to finish a poem. A perfectionist, a thinker, and always inspired by visual art, he fought with himself over how to say what he wanted to say best. Like the French-Uruguayan businessman poet Jules Supervielle, whom Louis-Dreyfus translated, he felt the tug of the financial world against the pull of the lyricism of poetry, and the division marked his life and sparked ideas for his finest poems. As the heart condition that seized him made it absolutely imperative, finishing Letters Written and Not Sent literally became a life-or-death matter. This is the book that he wished to send into the world.“There’s rock-bottom integrity, a dignified modesty, and a quizzical, persistent quest for meaning in this collection. It’s a final bequest to the living from an intensely generous man.” —Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems“The poems of William Louis-Dreyfus testify to an inner life of great richness, but one that freely slipped across the border of the self into the world beyond . . . a fine collection of his work, and it is good to have it at last.” —Charles Martin, author of Future Perfect
Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship
by Sarah Ruhl Max RitvoA real professor and her student forge a friendship through correspondence as they discuss love, art, life, cancer, and death. In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer. Over the next four years—in which Ritvo&’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo&’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. &“We&’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,&” Ritvo writes. &“And that&’s all I want—is to know you forever.&” Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.Praise for Letters from Max &“An unusual, beautiful book about nothing less than the necessity of art in our lives. Two big-hearted, big-brained writers have allowed us to eavesdrop on their friendship: jokes and heartbreaks, admiration, hard work, tender work.&” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway &“Immediate comparisons will be made to Rainer Maria Rilke&’s Letters to a Young Artist . . . this book is a nuanced look at the evolution of an incredible talent facing mortality and the mentor, never condescending, who recognizes his gift. Their infectious letters shine with a love of words and beauty.&” —The Observer &“Deeply moving, often heartbreaking. . . . A captivating celebration of life and love.&” —Kirkus Reviews &“Moving and erudite . . . devastating and lyrical . . . Ruhl draws a comparison between their correspondence and that between poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and indeed, with the depth and intelligence displayed, one feels in the presence of literary titans.&” —Publishers Weekly
Letters from a Long Illness with the World: The D.H. Lawrence Poems
by Barry DempsterTuning a fine ear to Lawrence’s letters from 1906 until his death in 1930, Barry Dempster’s poems uncover the man within the myth and give voice to Lawrence’s passionate mortality. Dempster’s act is one of imagination and homage, a kind of lyrical readership which traces the life-and-death line in a great writer’s life, with its constant illness and energy, a line “green as the vein of a young man’s desire.” In this book, Barry Dempster, acclaimed as a writer of short fiction and novels as well as poetry, extends his range and the genre of poetry itself.
Letters from a Young Father: Poems
by Edoardo PontiThe Italian poet and film director shares a series of loving letters to his unborn child in this intimate and reflective poetry collection.Becoming a parent changes everything. Fear and love live together. An expectant father desperately want to give his child happiness and safety—two qualities of life that are often at odds with each other.Letters from a Young Father comprises forty letter-poems written by award-winning film director Edoardo Ponti to his unborn child during the forty weeks of his wife’s pregnancy. These poems are gifts, lessons, slices of joy, blueprints for building a life, and insights into how we work, learn, love, and remember.
Letters from the Heart
by Seema AarellaA poem is best formed when it comes undisturbed in its rawness and realness straight from the heart that feels and emotes unfathomable desires.
Letters in a Bruised Cosmos
by Liz HowardThe latest from the author of the Griffin Poetry Prize Award-winning collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent.GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE, FINALISTTRILLIUM BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY, FINALIST I have to believe my account will outpace its ending.The danger and necessity of living with each other is at the core of Liz Howard&’s daring and intimate second collection. Letters in a Bruised Cosmos asks who do we become after the worst has happened? Invoking the knowledge histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science, Howard takes us on a breakneck river course of radiant and perilous survival in which we are invited to &“reforge [ourselves] inside tomorrow&’s humidex&”. Everyday observation, family history, and personal tragedy are sublimated here in a propulsive verse that is relentlessly its own. Part autobiography, part philosophical puzzlement, part love song, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos is a book that once read will not soon be forgotten.
Letters to Benvenuta
by Rainer Maria RilkeThis collection of letters by the renowned Austrian poet offers a rare glimpse into his private life and his relationship with the woman he called Benvenuta.In January of 1914, Rainer Maria Rilke received his first letter from a Viennese correspondent who had discovered his story collection, Tales of the Dear Lord God. A sudden and intense exchange of letters followed which would eventually put the famous poet in touch with the woman he would never meet. Nearing forty and separated from his wife, Rilke was ill and depressed when his correspondence with Magda von Hattingberg began. A concert pianist many years younger, she was also alone. Von Hattingberg told the story of their brief but dramatic attachment in her book Rilke and Benvenuta. Now their story is made complete with Letters to Benvenuta, a series of letters written by Rilke during a sojourn in Paris.
Letters to Borges
by Stephen Kuusisto"[Kuusisto] is a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor."-The New York Times"A talented writer judged against any standard."-USA TodayBest-selling memoirist Stephen Kuusisto uses the themes of travel, place, religion, music, art, and loneliness to explore the relationship between seeing, blindness, and being. In poems addressed to Jorge Luis Borges-another poet who lived with blindness-Kuusisto leverages seeing as negative capability, creating intimacy with deep imagination and uncommon perceptions."Alone"Today I understoodWhile drinking tea& hearing rainThat the word for birth& the one for sinCome from a single rootIn Finnish - that tongue theySpoke when I was small.Synnty, untranslatable,Original sin nearly,But softer,Like waterCarried a long wayIn a jarIn May.Stephen Kuusisto is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of two collections of poetry and two memoirs, including the best-selling Planet of the Blind (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). A graduate from and former teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Kuusisto now teaches at Syracuse University in New York State.
Letters to Forget: Poems (Cass Donish and Kelly Caldwell Books #2)
by Kelly CaldwellThe debut of Kelly Caldwell, written from within the darkness of bipolar illness and the longing to claim her womanhood &“There can be no history of my body. My forgetfulness is in earnest. I check for it like for keys in a pocket. I&’ve remained a girl all my life.&”With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the poems of Kelly Caldwell—many addressed to the poet Cass Donish, her partner in the years before Caldwell&’s suicide at age thirty-one—swim through a complex matrix of transformations: mental illness, divorce, gender transition, and self-discovery. But they wrestle, too, with the poet&’s painful relationships with her family of Christian missionaries, who never affirmed her identity. In the sequence of &“dear c.&” poems scattered throughout these pages, Caldwell writes letters to her lover from an out-of-state residential hospital where she is receiving treatment for suicidal depression and mania. In a long poem titled &“Self-Portrait as Job,&” she offers us her lucid gaze and her queer take on the biblical figure—an understated yet powerful testament to her own suffering in a society whose structures may not contain her.Both striking and elusive, both raw and learned, with a delicacy of syntax that challenges us to interrogate becoming itself, Kelly Caldwell asks: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?
Letters to Gisèle: 19511970
by Paul CelanInsightful and provocative letters by a great twentieth-century poet to his artist wife about life and, revealingly, his own writing. An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s.One of the most significant European poets of the twentieth century, Paul Celan came from an Eastern European Jewish family and lost his parents to the death camps of World War II. Transplanted to Paris, he produced a body of work that was an ongoing confrontation with that history of loss and with the German language. His poems, anguished and unsleeping, have by now been translated into many languages, becoming a touchstone for poets, writers, and philosophers.Letters to Gisèle presents the letters Celan wrote to his wife, the French visual artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, over the course of close to twenty years, along with letters to the couple&’s son, Eric, and letters from Gisèle to Paul. They provide an intimate view of his literary career and troubled life, which was marked by repeated stays in psychiatric clinics. They also provide an unparalleled glimpse into Celan&’s poetic workshop, including his own word-for-word renderings from German into French of more than a dozen of his poems. These he addressed to Gisèle as an ongoing, informal German lesson. They figure too as messages from the heart. Presented here trilingually, these overlapping versions of Celan&’s poems open up new dimensions of his famously hermetic poetry, as dazzling as it is dark. This edition includes some poems in the original German and Celan's own translations of them.
Letters to Kurt
by Eric ErlandsonA poetic elegy for Kurt Cobain from the man who created the band Hole with Cobain's wife Courtney Love. "Nearly two decades after the death of Kurt Cobain, a friend and fellow musician not only continues to mourn his suicide, but also rages against the culture that he holds responsible. These 52 'letters' . . . combine the subject matter of the Byrds' 'So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star' with the fury of Allen Ginsberg's Howl . . . A catharsis for the writer and perhaps for the reader as well." --Kirkus Reviews "A touching and enlightening collection of prose poems addressed to [Erlandson's] departed friend." --The San Francisco Bay Guardian "Erlandson finally comes to terms with his loss in 52 prose-poem letters ostensibly addressed to Cobain in which he straightforwardly confronts his inner demons while offering personal reflections on food, drug abuse, death, and self-sabotage."--Booklist "The reverberations of Kurt's suicide last to this day, and have touched the lives of many. Dozens of people could have written their own version of this bracingly candid book; Eric Erlandson has written one, filled with rage and love, landmined with detail, that can stand for them all." --Michael Azerrad, author of Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana "Eric was the spirit-boy in the Nirvana/Hole dynamic. Quiet, bemused, intelligent, and curiously intuitive to the power of hugging the devil, to say we will all be okay . . . Eric expresses how enchanting Kurt was, how the whole scene was, with his thoughtful, radical adult/prose love. Bring on the future, darling."--Thurston Moore, musician "Eric. He was always there: supportive, observing, in the thick of it. Hidden in plain sight . . . Without him, I can't imagine Seattle or L.A. or a dozen other places. This book is beautiful, brutal, brief. Happy-sad eloquence. Boy Scouts playing with the complimentary cologne in the heart of the ghost town. Listen to the man. He knows." --Everett True, author of Nirvana: The Biography Letters to Kurt is an anguished, angry, and tender meditation on the octane and ether of rock and roll and its many moons: sex, drugs, suicide, fame, and rage. It's part Dream Songs, part Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and the Clash. Rants, reflections, and gunshot fill these fifty-two prose poems. They are raw, funny, sad, and searching. This will make a beautiful book for anyone who loved Nirvana and Hole and the time and place when their music changed everything. Ultimately, it's an elegy for Kurt and the "suicide idols" who tragically fail to find salvation in their amazing music.
Letters to Monica
by Philip LarkinIn 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet's death in 1985. <P><P>This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones' death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkin's life and the convolutions of their relationship.
Letters to Yesenin
by Jim Harrison"The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin's, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing."--Hayden Carruth, Sulfur"Harrison inhabits the problems of our age as if they were beasts into which he had crawled, and Letters to Yesenin is a kind of imaginative taxidermy that refuses to stay in place up on the trophy room wall, but insists on walking into the dining room."--The American Poetry ReviewJim Harrison's gorgeous, desperate, and harrowing "correspondence" with Sergei Yesenin--a Russian poet who committed suicide after writing his final poem in his own blood--is considered an American masterwork.In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hardscrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal tendencies. In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenin's inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: "I'm beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends."In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: "My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."
Letters to a Young Brown Girl (American Poets Continuum Series #182)
by Barbara Jane ReyesLetters to a Young Brown Girl
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke Lewis Hyde Charlie LouthRilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke's letters are an endless source of inspiration and comfort. Lewis Hyde's new introduction explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. This edition also includes Rilke's later work The Letter from the Young Worker.
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke M. D. NortonRilke's timeless letters about poetry, sensitive observation, and the complicated workings of the human heart. Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke's life that shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote them.
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria RilkeIn 1903, Rilke replied in a series of 10 letters to a student who had submitted some verses to the well-known Austrian poet for an assessment. Written during an important stage in Rilke's artistic development, these letters contain many of the themes that later appeared in his best works. Essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers.
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria RilkeThese have been called the most famous and beloved letters of the past century. Rainer Maria Rilke himself said that much of his creative expression went into his correspondence, and here he touches upon a wide range of subjects that will interest writers, artists,and thinkers. This luminous translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's classic offers brilliant inspiration to all people who seek to know and express their inner truth. Letters to a Young Poet is a classic that should be required reading for anyone who dreams of expressing themselves creatively.
Letters to a Young Poet (Thrift Editions Ser.)
by Rainer Maria RilkeAt the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds. This book also contains the 'Letter from a Young Worker', a striking polemic against Christianity written in letter-form, near the end of Rilke's life. In Lewis Hyde's introduction, he explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. Charlie Louth's afterword discusses the similarities and contrasts of the two works, and Rilke's religious and sexual wordplay. This edition also contains a chronology, notes, and suggested further reading.
Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary
by Rainer Maria RilkeA fresh perspective on a beloved classic by acclaimed translators Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.German poet Rainer Maria Rilke&’s (1875–1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured by readers for nearly a century. Rilke&’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love. Barrows and Macy&’s translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers. With a new introduction and commentary, this edition places the letters in the context of today&’s world and the unique challenges we face when seeking authenticity.