Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."
Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on...
Poet Alicia Ostriker is also a highly original scholar/teacher of midrash, the commentary and exegesis of scripture (the same root as madrasa, place of study). Here she studies Jewish history, Jewish passion, Jewish contradictions, in a compendium of learned, crafted, earthy and outward-looking poems that show how this quest has informed and enriched her whole poet s trajectory.
Marilyn Hacker"
Poet Alicia Ostriker is also a highly original scholar/teacher of midrash, the commentary and exegesis of scripture (the same root as madrasa, pla...
White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Expanding the territory of her 2006 book Blue Front, which focused on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, this book turns, among other things, to Martha Collins' childhood. Throughout, it explores questions about what it means to be white, not only in the poet's life, but also in our culture and history, even our pre-history. The styles and forms are varied, as are the approaches; some of the poems address race only implicitly,...
White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. E...
A reverent jag of irreverence, tilting forward to arresting moments of beauty, astonishment, confusion, and grief, the poems in David Daniel's Ornaments find their myths in history and pop culture; they take their truths, but just as much their doubts, from the fallibility of what we remember and the desperation with which we struggle to assemble it.
A reverent jag of irreverence, tilting forward to arresting moments of beauty, astonishment, confusion, and grief, the poems in David Daniel's Ornamen...
This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker s reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move to a new house and a new life, a life in which she is always alert to the absences and danger but also a life in which she begins to see language as a kind of salvation. This section also develops the speaker s first knowledge of sex, primarily in the poems, The Goose Girl and A Woman Was Raped Here. The second section follows the speaker into adolescence and young adulthood, and these poems further explore the sexual violence in the world in...
This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker s reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move...
"Emotionally direct and visually all alike in column-shaped free verse, the poems in this debut from the Minneapolis-based Kiesselbach open up to show startling verbal skills, intellectual depths, and sensory complications. 'Beach Thanksgiving' wheels from seaside scenes into one, then another, sad memory: 'Fire s an assortment of sparks down the beach/ beside which your new family cooks./ Asked to bear a ring, / you pulled and pulled at your hair.' For an elderly mother, once a gardener, 'Joy s bolted/ in her face to sorrow/ like a pair of shears.' Marital love in the present (Kiesselbach...
"Emotionally direct and visually all alike in column-shaped free verse, the poems in this debut from the Minneapolis-based Kiesselbach open up to show...
Appetite is a book that explores our American Mythologies, particularly masculinity and film. Smith investigates our fascinations with the body, gender, and entertainment in poems that are critically observant, darkly funny, darkly angry, and, sometimes, heartbreaking. Whether he is cataloging shirtless men in films and bad television, lyricizing the anxieties of childhood, or redrawing the lines of cultural membership, Appetite attacks its subjects with wit, candor, and compassionate intensity. These poems announce their presence with a style that is as beautifully wrought...
Appetite is a book that explores our American Mythologies, particularly masculinity and film. Smith investigates our fascinations with the body...
Whirlwind is one woman s frank, witty, mordant, sexy look at the breakup of a marriage and its emotional aftermath. With her characteristic linguistic play and mixture of poetic registers and styles, Sharon Dolin takes her readers on an off-the-tracks emotional ride through the whirlwind that goes by the name of divorce. Hang on tight. Here poems are never merely confessional, but use formal aplomb to ride the white-heat rage, hurt, denial, reflection, regret, wistfulness, desire, and sexual passion as they go hurtling through the many stages of grief after the death of a relationship...
Whirlwind is one woman s frank, witty, mordant, sexy look at the breakup of a marriage and its emotional aftermath. With her characteristic lin...
This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood--including sexual abuse--using a "cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism." Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.
This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal po...
