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American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language
By Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine. 2002
The Tatters (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Brenda Coultas. 2014
In this nuanced and moving new collection of poems, Brenda Coultas weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place…
in it. Coultas, who is known for her investigative documentary approach, turns her attention to landfills and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from the random, often perfect, pigeon feathers found on city streets. In a seamless weave of poetic sentences, The Tatters explores how our human processes of examination are often bound up with destruction. These poems enable us to be present with the sorrow and horror of our destructive nature, and to honor the natural world while acknowledging that this world no longer exists in any pure form, calling to us instead from cracks in the sidewalk, trash heaps, and old objects. Check for the online reader's companion at tatters.site.wesleyan.edu.Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Brenda Hillman. 2013
Fire? its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms?is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's masterful series on the…
elements. Her previous volumes?Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water?have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader's companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Eugene Ostashevsky, Lyn Hejinian, Genya Turovskaya, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. 2014
The poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural…
style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko's writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language--although "perpetually incomplete" and shifting in meaning--remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet's Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko's work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications. Check for the online reader's companion at endarkenment.site.wesleyan.edu.The Folded Heart (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Michael Collier. 1989
In his second book, Collier ( The Clasp ) applies a characteristically light touch to profundities: traveling through memory, from…
conscious to unconscious knowledge, or in physical space that soon acquires figurative dimension, the poet plumbs personal matters of fact that effortlessly outgrow the personal. His narrators seek out the transfiguring moment. In "Spider Tumor," one of the strongest poems, a visit to a childhood friend brings a luminously clarifying encounter with death and the understanding that this meeting is only one of many the future holds for the narrator, while in "The Lights," a boy notices the way ivy "feet" have left tracks on a brick wall in "a pattern radiating / like a corner of a galaxy." Looking but not straining for inherent "patterns" in his subjects, Collier writes with selfless grace about experience; his personas are elegantly unassuming. In his work, "the earth's / powdery talc obscures our keen desires with time," but a reckoning with those desires is still necessary, even if in conclusion one finds "twenty years have passed and I feel / the absence of something / I never held."The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Clayton Eshleman, James Arnold, Aime Cesaire. 2013
Aime Cesaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty.…
This long poem was the beginning of Cesaire's quest for negritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Cesaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anti-colonialist rhetoric material that Cesaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.Sky Ward (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Kazim Ali. 2013
Drunk on the sun and the sea, Kazim Ali's new poems swoop linguistically but ground themselves vividly in the daily…
and real. Both imprisoned by endlessness and dependent on it for nurturing and care, in Sky Ward Ali goes further than ever before in sounding out the spaces between music and silence, between sky and ocean, between human and eternal. "Daily I wish stitched here to live," moans his Prometheus, wondering what release from familiar bondage might actually portend. "So long liberation," his Icarus sings as he plummets from the sky with desperation and grace, ready to unfeather and plunge into the everything-new. Whether in the extended poem-prayer to Alice Coltrane or in the "deleted scenes" and "alternate endings" to his critically acclaimed volume Bright Felon, or in the spirit-infused and multi-faceted lyrics he has become known for, Ali once again reinvents possibilities for the personal lyric and narrative.My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Lyn Hejinian. 2013
Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans…
inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language--the things people say and the ways they say them--shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.Collected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By David Lehman, Joseph Ceravolo, Parker Smathers, Rosemary Ceravolo. 2013
Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply…
felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo's aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo's poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo's later work reveals him to be "one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation." Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem "The Hellgate," are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.Public Figures (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Jena Osman. 2012
Public Figures is an essay-poem with photographs and text that begins with a playful thought experiment: statues of people in…
public spaces have eyes, but what are they looking at? To answer that question, Jena Osman sets up a camera to track the gaze of a number of statues in Philadelphia--mostly 19th century military figures carrying weapons. How does their point of view differ from our own? And how does it compare, say, to the point of view of other watchful military figures, such as drone pilots? In this book, Osman combines the histories behind these statues with poetic narratives that ask us to think about our own relational positions, and how our own everyday gaze may be complicit with the gun-sights of war. Public Figures illustrates how history is transformed, and even erased, by monuments and other public records of events. Through poetry, those histories can be made visible again.Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776 (The Driftless Connecticut Series)
By Dennis Barone, Dick Allen. 2012
Connecticut may be a small state, but it is large indeed in its contribution to the nation's literature. Garnet Poems…
features forty-two poets whose work has a strong connection to Connecticut. The first major anthology of Connecticut poetry to appear since the mid-nineteenth century, it includes the work of such notable poets as Wallace Stevens, Lydia Sigourney, Mark Van Doren, Richard Wilbur, Susan Howe, and Elizabeth Alexander. Distinguished writer-scholar Dennis Barone has supplemented the poems with an editor's preface, notes that illuminate the poet's (or poem's) relation to the state, and informative biographies. The book also features a foreword by Dick Allen, the current Connecticut state poet laureate.Just Saying (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Rae Armantrout. 2013
In Just Saying, improbable and even untenable speakers are briefly constituted--only to disappear. The result is part carnival, part nightmare.…
A television pundit's rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord and/or the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as chimeras, creatures that appear when old distinctions break down and elements generally kept separate combine in new ways. Here Armantrout both worries (as a dog worries a bone) and celebrates the groundless fecundity of being and of language.Sam's Book (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By David Ray. 1987
When Sam Ray was killed at nineteen in an accident, his father began writing poetry dedicated to his memory. Sam's…
Book is a collection of these elegies and other poems written during Sam's lifetime. "How should I mourn?" David Ray asks. By recalling poignant events from the past he transcends his grief. He remembers Sam's first bath, a "holy/Rite"; tying the shoelaces of the "little man"; traveling to Greece, where Sam is "the first.../to see the holy moon." With painful wit and regret he summons up the image of his son's blue Toyota, fastidiously transformed by Sam and his girlfriend into a "love nest." Ray muses on what he taught Sam and what Sam taught him. Originally published in 1987, Sam's Book won the 1988 Maurice English Poetry Award.Taking on the Local Color: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Program)
By Cynthia Genser. 1977
Cynthia Genser's landscapes, like those of D.H. Lawrence, are analogues of human emotions; her men and women exist in their…
effects-prototypes one minute, passionate and distinctly visible individuals the next. Person and place invite the reader into an adventure that begins and ends everywhere.The language employed throughout is voluptuous, sensuous, yet precise. The appeal is to all the senses as well as to reason and intelligence: the poems, seamed with a difficult, sweaty beauty, stimulate every pleasure center. But pure language play also leads to hard, intelligent sense.Of her own work, Cynthia Genser has said, "Although I belong to no special school or group, I align my poetry with the work of others aiming their metaphors at the banality and reductionism of our world-at the terror or planned obsolescence, Vogue Magazine, the threat of nuclear warfare. I cannot agree more with the Marxist Henri Lefebvre that poetry is the enemy and eventual victor in the war against 'terrorism' and the terrorist society we now live in."What Is Amazing (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Heather Christle. 2012
Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and…
invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.The Black Riviera (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Mark Jarman. 1990
Yet, these are ultimately poems of survival. Jarman explores the redemptive power of the imagination and the ways in which…
we transform experience into stories we tell about our lives. His characters vividly express the will to cling to existence and understand it as they pursue the meaning of family, home, identity, and love. Invented memories resurrect a forgotten past, opening doors of possibility and adding a strange richness to everyday life. "Flowers of the flesh,/ Hung on the cliffs to watch and be watched./ Don't let me see reproach, don't let me see it,/ In your eyes. Let me be the only one/ Who knows and tells you."Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, vol. 3 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Mark Rudman. 1999
In these powerfully conceived and understated poems, Mark Rudman asks how culture is created and shared, and how historical events…
and figures are known through direct experiences of place. The title Provoked in Venice alludes to the structure of the book, wherein a trip to Italy becomes the catalyst for a meditative view of the convergence of imagination, history, and the 20th-century attempt to recover them both. The narrator enters the maze of Venice like a contemporary Dante guided only by the voice of the "rider"-interlocuter. Rich in allusions to literature, film, and the past, this final volume of the trilogy will engage and sustain all mental travelers.New Time (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Leslie Scalapino. 1999
Time spent in Japan, and everyday life in Berkeley and Oakland, come together as a kaleidoscope of words and consciousness…
in New Time. Leslie Scalapino pushes at the edges / spatial shape of language and experience in her new collection by writing that is itself events, which are to "punch a hole in reality."Real events, occurring in real time, are transformed in the act of writing them as perceived rather than interpreted. Phrases repeat, conjoin, break apart, and return in this challenging and innovative work, as Scalapino moves toward a "new time" wherein there is no 'inner' -- one's illusion that is "the adamant social being / is inner" and "the body is a new form."There Are Three: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Donald Revell. 1998
Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in…
the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. "Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul." These spare and elegant poems speak of a conversion in which a new city is founded in the heart of silence, and grace is a refinement of grammar.New Dark Ages (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Donald Revell. 1990
New Dark Ages is a book of ideas that exhibits a rare quality - adventurousness. The poems are intelligent and…
deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as :If the original idea of America is defunct, what has taken its place? If privacy is no more, how do we go about the business of loving? If God and history have become one, what is the relationship between morality and expediency?" And, above all, "Why is it that, in spite of all, the twentieth century is so heart-breakingly beautiful - a true vindication of humanism?"