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Showing 1 - 7 of 7 items
By Cass Donish. 2024
Written in the devastating aftermath of a partner’s suicide, this unprecedented collection is a restorative memorial act, an exploration of…
queer time, and a powerful expression of nonbinary and trans love in the wake of traumatic loss. “suddenly a brilliant red-tailed star / flew across the sky, a sun reversing time, / I crossed one world to another / I stood with her in the other world” In Your Dazzling Death , Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss. With searing vulnerability and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief. “Let me paint this / entire country / the colors of your face,” they write, unearthing the wild and shifting scale of mourning. Donish affirms the beauty of their lover’s trans becoming, recalling when they “sounded out / your new potential names / until we found those syllables / that tasted, you said, like honey.” In the sequence “Kelly in Violet,” the centerpiece of this collection, the shattering experience emerges in conversation with the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose words appear in ghostly traces. Your Dazzling Death ritualizes the work of grief and subverts linear time, asserting that the future will forever be informed by a monumental love that is still alive, not only in the past, but in an imagined space of timelessness where love and grief are inevitably intertwined
By Morgan Parker. 2024
In her “witty and searing” first essay collection, award-winning poet Morgan Parker examines “the cultural legacy of Black womanhood and…
the meaning of finding ‘well-being’ in a world that wasn’t built for you” ( Vogue ). Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to a battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyperawareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In a collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist, Parker examines America’s cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages. She touches on such topics as the ubiquity of beauty standards that exclude Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby’s fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious. With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman’s psyche—and of the writer’s search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it
By Morgan Parker. 2024
The award-winning author of Magical Negro traces the difficulty and beauty of existing as a Black woman through American history,…
from the foundational trauma of the slave trade all the way up to Serena Williams and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina&“An engrossing journey through Parker&’s expansive and gifted mind.&”—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is PassedDubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to a battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyperawareness stemming from the effects of slavery.In a collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist, Parker examines America&’s cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages. She touches on such topics as the ubiquity of beauty standards that exclude Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby&’s fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman&’s psyche—and of the writer&’s search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.
By Cass Donish. 2024
Written in the devastating aftermath of a partner&’s suicide, this unprecedented collection is a restorative memorial act, an exploration of…
queer time, and a powerful expression of nonbinary and trans love in the wake of traumatic loss.&“suddenly a brilliant red-tailed star / flew across the sky, a sun reversing time, / I crossed one world to another / I stood with her in the other world&”In Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of &“obliteration,&” widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss.With searing vulnerability and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief. &“Let me paint this / entire country / the colors of your face,&” they write, unearthing the wild and shifting scale of mourning. Donish affirms the beauty of their lover&’s trans becoming, recalling when they &“sounded out / your new potential names / until we found those syllables / that tasted, you said, like honey.&” In the sequence &“Kelly in Violet,&” the centerpiece of this collection, the shattering experience emerges in conversation with the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose words appear in ghostly traces.Your Dazzling Death ritualizes the work of grief and subverts linear time, asserting that the future will forever be informed by a monumental love that is still alive, not only in the past, but in an imagined space of timelessness where love and grief are inevitably intertwined.
By Carl Phillips. 2024
An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips. Carl Phillips’s Scattered…
Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that’s based on human memory. If the poet’s last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition—“Tears / were tears,” mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn’t, the way people live until they don’t. And there was also joy. And beauty. “Yet the world’s still / so beautiful . . . Sometimes // it is . . .” And it was enough. And it still can be.
By Brittany Rogers. 2024
“A once-in-a-generation debut.”—Angel Nafis “This self-assured, dazzling debut has a story to tell.”—Aricka Foreman Following the tradition of Nikky Finney,…
Krista Franklin, and Morgan Parker, Brittany Rogers’s Good Dress documents the extravagant beauty and audacity of Black Detroit, Black womanhood, community, class, luxury, materialism, and matrilineage. A nontraditional coming of age, this collection witnesses a speaker coming into her own autonomy and selfhood as a young adult, reflecting on formative experiences. With care and incandescent energy, the poems engage with memory, time, interiority, and community. They also nudge tenderly toward curiosity: What does it mean to belong to a person, to a city? Can intimacy and romance be found outside the heteronormative confines of partnership? And in what ways can the pursuit of pleasure be an anchor that returns us to ourselves?
By Zoe Whittall. 2024
“It is a confusing thing to be born between generations where the one above thinks nothing is traumaand the one…
below thinks everything is trauma.”From acclaimed novelist and television writer Zoe Whittall comes a memoir in prose poetry that reconfirms her celebrated honesty, emotional acuity, and wit. Riving and probing a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation, No Credit River is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself.Open and exacting, this is a unique examination of anxiety in complex times, and a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.