Who would guess that Godzilla, the Invisible Man, Elvis, Donald Duck, Ted Williams, and the Three Stooges might have something to say about the love and loss that shape the way we see the world? And yet these are the pop-culture coordinates that chart the emotional life brilliantly mapped out in Paul Guest s second book of poems. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, this collection plumbs the depths of nature and culture (how, for instance, gar in Old English means spear, and an octopus can lose a limb during mating) to give form to the darkness and the light that make us human.In...
Who would guess that Godzilla, the Invisible Man, Elvis, Donald Duck, Ted Williams, and the Three Stooges might have something to say about the love a...
She became famous, finally, to herself, Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken s first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here a little voice sings / from the back of the auditorium / of my throat. Aren t all of us / waiting to be discovered? The poet s answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life."
She became famous, finally, to herself, Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken ...
Longing itself is nothing but the heart s open spaces, writes Mari L Esperance. And in the open spaces at the heart of these poems is a mother who has disappeared. In a world of war and displacement, illness of the mind and body, imprisonment and violence both historical and personal, the poet leads her readers through a landscape of loss. In unadorned language, she draws readers into the interplay between articulation and silence and finally offers a vision of redemption."
Longing itself is nothing but the heart s open spaces, writes Mari L Esperance. And in the open spaces at the heart of these poems is a mother who has...
In Kara Candito s prize-winning debut collection a garish/human theatre comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves and Puccini s Tosca meets the din of the Times Square subway station. Ferociously witty and intensely lyrical, Taste of Cherry speaks to us in a language that is simultaneously private and public, sensual and cerebral."
In Kara Candito s prize-winning debut collection a garish/human theatre comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Shane Book s collection, Ceiling of Sticks, is a powerful and unflinching sort of documentary poetics. It bears elegiac witness to the effects of global politics on individual lives. Book s poems carry us to Uganda, Ghana, Mali, Trinidad, and Canada s west coast; from a religious sacrifice in Tarahumara, Mexico, to Book s ailing grandfather s bedside. They bring an intimate vision of humanity to scenes of inhuman atrocity and suffering; a moment of clarity and empathy to individuals overwhelmed by war or other man-made catastrophes....
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Shane Book s collection, Ceiling of Sticks, is a powerful and unflinching sort of document...
For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist s wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? The old woman who refuses to leave her home in Chernobyl? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep. And here, in Crews s finely wrought, deeply felt poems, is their testimony. "
For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist s wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in ...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Blackwell Ramsey s A Mind Like This is a work of humor and wit, unexpectedly delightful and full of surprises as it reflects on the oddness of everyday life, the natural world, literary history, popular culture, and more. Everything is fair game for Ramsey, who finds poetry in love and sickness and life, of course, but also in knitting and unreliable bladders and the peculiar name of Kalamazoo. Neruda makes an appearance, as do Eric Clapton and Brahms, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and Jimmy Stewart.Whether observing the pickled...
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Blackwell Ramsey s A Mind Like This is a work of humor and wit, unexpectedly delight...
Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her...
Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childh...
From sensual pleasures and perils, moments and memories of darkness and light, the poems in Orlando Ricardo Menes s collection sew together stories of dislocation and loss, of survival and hope, and of a world patched together by a family over five generations of diaspora. This is Menes s tapestry of the Americas. From Miami to Cuba, Panama to Bolivia and Peru, through the textures, sounds, colors, shapes, and scents of exile and emigration, we find refuge at last in a sense of wholeness and belonging residing in this intensely felt, finely crafted poetry. "
From sensual pleasures and perils, moments and memories of darkness and light, the poems in Orlando Ricardo Menes s collection sew together stories of...
In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn that whatever the state of the body, this much rings true: every ode is an elegy; each...
In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Fili...
