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Bandish as Text: Re-reading Khayal Compositions by ‘Sadarang’ and ‘Adarang’
by Barnashree KhasnobisThis book provides a socio-cultural analysis of khayal bandishes composed by Ne’mat Khan ‘Sadarang’ and Feroze Khan ‘Adarang’. It argues that deciphering khayal bandishes as cultural symbols provides an understanding of the constitution of medieval Indian society and shows how society gets represented via such symbols. The author examines the cultural forces that nurtured the context of compositions by Sadarang and Adarang. She touches upon the cultural exchanges between Hindu and Muslim communities through scholarly and philosophical discourses to create a rationale for khayal as a syncretic form of art.A unique contribution to the study of Indian culture and music, the book will be an indispensable resource for students, teachers, and researcher scholars of South Asian studies, Hindustani music, cultural studies, history, and medieval Indian society.
The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)
by Ha JinFrom the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting: a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai—also known as Li PoIn his own time (701–762), Li Bai's poems—shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life—were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname, the Banished Immortal. Today, Bai's verses are still taught to China's schoolchildren and recited at parties and toasts; they remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language.With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story. He follows Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his ramblings travels as a young man, which were filled with filled with striving but also with merry abandon, as he raised cups of wine with friends and fellow poets. Ha Jin also takes us through the poet's later years—in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China's history—and the mysterious circumstances of his death, which are surrounded by legend.The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.
The Banquet of Donny and Ari
by Naomi GuttmanUnder the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions in this sweeping novella-in-verse. If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L’Orfeo? Would Ariadne's thread be fashioned into tapestries of furious elegy in the face of environmental catastrophe? Would their marriage survive? Amid a fictional marriage in a state of malaise and a real world on the edge of environmental disaster, Guttman lays open moments of vexation and tenderness, of grief, guilt, betrayal and love. Sounding through these moments are the harpsichord and the loom, drawing Donny and Ari, their sons Stephan and Onno, their corgie and their parrot, into the long weave of myth, art and human history.
Bantam: An Anthology of Albanian Verse
by Miranda Shehu-Xhilaga"There are liberties taken in rendering Albanian poetic nuance into English idiom; Ariadne's thread is often hard to follow. But poetry is there to show us a different dimension of our world, no matter if we lose ourselves there for a while. "By virtue of the time I have spent with them, these distinctive poems will stay with me as companions in life, as I hope some of them may do in yours. I am glad to have helped guide them, singing, into the English-speaking world." - Elizabeth Wade Editor
The Baptism of Billy Bean: A Novel
by Roger SkipperLane Hollar's seen little of the world beyond West Virginia—Parris Island and Vietnam—but that was enough. Now, thirty years later, he's estranged from his only son, Frank, and from society at large. Lane has his grandson, Toby; his daughter–in–law, Darlene; his bait shop; and his banjo, and he desires or needs nothing else.But then one day, he and Toby are out fishing when they witness a drug–related murder. Suddenly, the boundaries of his world are no longer his to define. An investigation rules the drowning accidental but reveals the witnesses to the perpetrators, and without preamble, Lane is fighting for his life. Caught between inept—or corrupt—lawmen and a stone–cold killer, Lane finds that his long–neglected survival skills are, like Lane himself, obsolete and ludicrous in a world gone mad.In a rolling war through Appalachia's forests and towns, Lane must fight not only for his life, but for all the things that it has lacked: love, family, and peace.
Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise
by Julie Sheehan"Nearly knocked me off my metaphoric stool."?--Diann Blakely, Antioch Review "When Julie Sheehan takes the lyric poem out for a few drinks, everyone winds up talking fast and loose. The lush, agreeably-out-of-style cocktails who take the stage in Bar Book . . . [pull] the reader through this artful, wry, and unlikely book's tales of hearts on the rocks and hearts surviving."--Mark Doty
Barbarossa: Sonnets
by Jonathan FinkThe German invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941. Over the next four years-from the initial invasion and sweep of the German army through the western Soviet Union, through the siege of Leningrad and the battle for Stalingrad-between 1.6 million and 2 million Soviet citizens perished. A citizen's daily ration at the height of the siege was a square of bread the size of two fingers.In Barbarossa, award-winning poet Jonathan Fink presents a collection of sonnets focusing on the individual lives of Leningrad citizens during the first year of the siege, from the initial German invasion of the Soviet Union to the formation of supply routes over the frozen Lake Ladoga. With precise language and breathless power, Fink illuminates the tension, complexity, and singularity of one of most colossal operations of World War II, and the lives it transformed.
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.
The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography
by Robert CrawfordNo writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns's energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was "sprung . . . from raking of dung," and to his political enemies a "traitor." Drawing on a surprising number of untapped sources--from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, and oratory by his contemporaries--this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and molded by the Scottish Enlightenment, Burns was in several senses the first of the major Romantics. With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible elan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compel the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.
Barely Composed: Poems
by Alice Fulton"Fulton is exactly the kind of poet Shelley had in mind when he said 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' " --Verse In this eagerly awaited collection of new poems--her first in over a decade--Alice Fulton reimagines the great lyric subjects--time, death, love--and imbues them with fresh urgency and depth. Barely Composed unveils the emotional devastations that follow trauma or grief--extreme states that threaten psyche and language with disintegration. With rare originality, the poems illuminate the deepest suffering and its aftermath of hypervigilance and numbness, the "formal feeling" described by Emily Dickinson. Elegies contemplate temporal mysteries--the brief span of human/animal life, the nearly eternal existence of stars and nuclear fuel, the enduring presence of the arts--and offer unsparing glimpses of personal loss and cultural suppressions of truth. Under the duress of silencing, whether chosen or imposed, language warps into something uncanny, rich, and profoundly moving. Various forms of inscription--coloring book to redacted document--enact the combustible power of the unsaid. Though "anguish is the universal language," there also is joy in the reciprocity of gifts and creativity, intellect and intimacy. Gorgeous vintage rhetorics merge with incandescent contemporary registers, and this recombinant linguistic mix gives rise to poems of disarming power. Visionaries--truth tellers, revelators, beholders--offer testimony as beautiful as it is unsettling. Shimmering with the "good strangeness of poetry," Barely Composed bears witness to love's complexities and the fragility of existence. In the midst of cruelty, a world in which "the pound is by the petting zoo," Fulton's poems embrace the inextinguishable search for goodness, compassion, and "the principles of tranquility."
Bark in the Park!: Poems for Dog Lovers
by Avery CormanGo on a walk to the park with all different kinds of dogs and their owners in this funny and charming poetry picture book.Enjoy Avery Corman's canine poetry for an Afghan hound, basset hound, beagle, bloodhound, Daschshund, boxer, greyhound, and more as they stroll with their owners to the park.PugIs the Pug cute? Or is the Pug ugh?Mostly, people loveThe little Pug's mugHyewon Yum captures the unique characteristics of the owner and his pet as she beautifully illustrates the humorous walk from each dog's home to the park and back.
Barn Blind
by Jane SmileyThe verdant pastures of a farm in Illinois have the placid charm of a landscape painting. But the horses that graze there have become the obsession of a woman who sees them as the fulfillment of every wish: to win, to be honored, to be the best. Her ambition is the galvanizing force in Jane Smiley's first novel, a force that will drive a wedge between her and her family, and bring them all to tragedy. Written with the grace and quiet beauty of her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, "A Thousand Acres".
Barren Ground
by Ellen GlasgowSet in Virginia, Dorinda Oakley is a passionate, intelligent, and independent young woman struggling to define herself.
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.
Barter: POEMS
by Ira SadoffIra Sadoff's new volume of poems opens with a quotation from Rilke: "But because truly being here is so much; because everything here / apparently needs us, the fleeting world, which in some strange way / keeps calling us. . . ." The poetry collected here is a response to this call. Rooted firmly in the "fleeting world," Sadoff's poems find epiphanies of meaning in unexpected and even unpleasant experiences and emotions. The poems in Barter delve deeply into the past, the personal past of regret, travel, love, divorce, and bereavement, as well as the global past of Beethoven, Vietnam, and the fall of communism. Each poem is offered up by Sadoff as a barter, something to be traded for a little more time, a little more understanding. The poems in Barter comment on the power of culture to interject itself into our desire for an idealized self, the way our inner and outer lives lack correspondence, harmony, and integration. They also talk about commerce, the trading of bodies, the way we as a nation "use" and exchange and appropriate -- and like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, try to bargain with and evade the urgency of our time on earth. In the poem "Self-Portrait with a Critic," Sadoff makes what could be a succinct statement of purpose: "And inside, let's not make it pretty, / let's save the off-rhyme and onomatopoeia / / for the concert hall, let's go to the wormy place / where the problematic stirs inside his head."
Bartlett's Poems for Occasions
by Geoffrey O'BrienA poetry collection with selections for various events.
Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written about the Game
by Nanae Tamura Cor van den HeuvelPresenting more than two hundred of the greatest haiku ever written about the game. One of the most unusual baseball books of the 2007 season, this remarkable new collection, which includes poems from both America and Japan, captures perfectly the thrill of baseball--a double play, a game of catch, or the hushed pause as a pitcher looks in before hurling his pitch. Like haiku, the game is concerned with the nature of the seasons: joyous in the spring, thrilling in summer's heat, ripening with the descent of fall, and remembered fondly in winter. Featuring the work of Jack Kerouac, the king of the Beat writers, who penned the first American baseball haiku, and Alan Pizzarelli, a major American haiku poet, the collection also includes Masaoka Shiki, one of the four great pillars of Japanese haiku, who fell in love with baseball when he was a student in Tokyo. Baseball Haiku, a literary and baseball treasure, will make a marvelous gift for the baseball fan in your family.
Baseball, Snakes, and Summer Squash: Poems About Growing Up
by Donald Graves Paul BirlingThis unsentimental and ambitious collection of poems by Donald Graves chronicles the American childhood of a boy as he moves with his family to a house in the country, and the changes the boy experiences in that year. From formidable lessons learned from a bully, and facing parents after breaking curfew with his brother, to math woes and misadventures with his independent Scottish terrier, Rags, the poet's convincing voice gives the reader a generous, spirited perspective of growing up. Black-and-white illustrations add an appealing visual element to this coming-of-age collection.
Basho's Narrow Road
by Matsuo Basho Hiroaki SatoMatsuo Basho (1644-94) is considered Japan's greatest haiku poet. Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi) is his masterpiece. Ostensibly a chronological account of the poet's five-month journey in 1689 into the deep country north and west of the old capital, Edo, the work is in fact artful and carefully sculpted, rich in literary and Zen allusion and filled with great insights and vital rhythms. In Basho's Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages, poet and translator Hiroaki Sato presents the complete work in English and examines the threads of history, geography, philosophy, and literature that are woven into Basho's exposition. He details in particular the extent to which Basho relied on the community of writers with whom he traveled and joined in linked verse (renga) poetry sessions, an example of which, A Farewell Gift to Sora, is included in this volume. In explaining how and why Basho made the literary choices he did, Sato shows how the poet was able to transform his passing observations into words that resonate across time and culture.
Basura y otros poemas
by A.R. AmmonsLa obra de uno de los mayores poetas estadounidenses del siglo XX traducida por primera vez en España. En este volumen reunimos, por una parte, Basura, un portentoso poema largo, una verdadera épica de las ideas y acerca de la relación del hombre con la materia, y, por otro, una selección de sus mejores poemas breves, de tal modo que la magnitud y la ambición del poeta quedan justamente representadas. Las traducciones de Daniel Aguirre y de Marcelo Cohen, así como los textos que las acompañan, suponen la cabal presentación en el ámbito hispánico de un poeta esencial de nuestro tiempo. A.R. Ammons es uno de los grandes poetas norteamericanos del siglo XX. Junto a John Ashbery, es sin duda uno de los pocos que supieron seguir con valentía el camino abierto por Wallace Stevens, su antecesor más cercano. Reseña:«Ammons se presenta como el poeta del intransigente control geométrico de la Tierra sobre los hombres. Tuvo que aprender a ser distinto de lo que era y regresar de nuevo a los orígenes, con una exigencia musical siempre mayor. El canon de la poesía estadounidense lo insertará en la tradición quizá más profundamente de lo que él pretendía.» Harold Bloom
Battle Dress: Poems
by Karen Skolfield“A terrific and sometimes terrifying collection—morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original.” —Rosanna Warren, 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize citation In a poetic voice at once accessible and otherworldly, gutsy and insightful, U.S. Army veteran Karen Skolfield offers a rare glimpse of a female soldier’s training and mental conditioning. Through the narratives of a young soldier, her older counterpart, and her fellow soldiers, Skolfield searches for meaning in combat preparation, long-term trauma, and the way war is embedded in our language and psyche.
The Battle of Maldon: Together with the Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
by J. R. Tolkien Peter GrybauskasThe first-ever standalone edition of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most important poetic dramas, that explores timely themes such as the nature of heroism and chivalry during war, featuring previously unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.In 991 AD, Vikings attacked an Anglo-Saxon defense-force led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, resulting in brutal fighting along the banks of the river Blackwater, near Maldon in Essex. The attack is widely considered one of the defining conflicts of tenth-century England, due to it being immortalized in the poem, The Battle of Maldon.Written shortly after the battle, the poem now survives only as a 325-line fragment, but its value to today is incalculable, not just as a heroic tale but in vividly expressing the lost language of our ancestors and celebrating ideals of loyalty and friendship.J.R.R. Tolkien considered The Battle of Maldon “the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy.” It would inspire him to compose, during the 1930s, his own dramatic verse-dialogue, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, which imagines the aftermath of the great battle when two of Beorhtnoth’s retainers come to retrieve their duke’s body.Leading Tolkien scholar, Peter Grybauskas, presents for the very first time J.R.R. Tolkien’s own prose translation of The Battle of Maldon together with the definitive treatment of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and its accompanying essays; also included and never before published is Tolkien’s bravura lecture, “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a wide-ranging essay on the nature of poetic tradition. Illuminated with insightful notes and commentary, he has produced a definitive critical edition of these works, and argues compellingly that, Beowulf excepted, The Battle of Maldon may well have been “the Old English poem that most influenced Tolkien’s fiction,” most dramatically within the pages of The Lord of the Rings.
Baudelaire
by Jean-Paul Sartre Martin TurnellThe abstractions like Existence and Being, Freedom and Nature are turned into a theory of psychoanalysis, stuck in man's creativity and opposed to Freudian determinism. This theory is put into practice in this book on Baudelaire.
BAX 2015: Best American Experimental Writing
by Jesse Damiani Douglas Kearney Seth AbramsonBAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year's volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors--like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Aaron Kunin, Joyelle McSweeney, and Fred Moten--as well as emerging voices. Best American Experimental Writing is also an important literary anthology for classroom settings, as individual selections are intended to provoke lively conversation and debate. The series coeditors are Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani.