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Divine Honors (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Hilda Raz. 2011
This elegant and moving collection documents Hilda Raz's experience with breast cancer. The journey, from diagnosis to chemotherapy to mastectomy,…
from denial to humor to grief and rage, is ultimately one of courage and creativity. The poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally testaments to Raz's insistence on making an order out of chaos, of finding ways to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of good and evil, health, blame, personal boundaries -- in short, a new sense of self. These poems remain intimately bound to the world and of the senses, becoming documents of transformation.Erasures (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Donald Revell. 1992
"When history proves useless and consensus chimerical," Donald Revell has written, "the poet's necessity is invention, and this does a…
lot to explain our century's preference for revision over mimesis." For Revell, The disruptions of this century have destroyed old illusions of historical continuity: "The consolations of history are furtive,/ then fugitive, then forgotten." Invoking such contemporary events as the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, he seeks to integrate the political with the personal in a search for new paradigms of value and honor.Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Donald Revell. 1994
The world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that…
made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in Beautiful Shirt. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: "This is the world as I have known it./ It has a soft outline and is easily victimized."Juxtaposed within a trio of long, introspective poems are shorter lyrics that push the limits of poetic syntaxes and dictions. In all, Beautiful Shirt searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities.Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Wesleyan Poetry in Translation)
By Antonio Machado. 2011
Loose Sugar (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Brenda Hillman. 1997
Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials…
of which this book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language marries life. Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as "space / time" or "time / work") in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native -- and feminine -- language.Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Jane Hirshfield. 1988
Death Tractates (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Brenda Hillman. 1992
From the depths of sorrow following the sudden death of her closest female mentor, Brenda Hillman asks anguished questions in…
this book of poems about separation, spiritual transcendence, and the difference between life and death. Both personal and philosophical, her work can be read as a spirit-guide for those mourning the loss of a loved one and as a series of fundamental ponderings on the inevitability of death and separation. At first refusing to let go, desperate to feel the presence of her friend, the poet seeks solace in a belief in the spirit world. But life, not death, becomes the issue when she begins to see physical existence as "an interruption" that preoccupies us with shapes and borders. "Shape makes life too small," she realizes. Comfort at last comes in the idea of "reverse seeing": that even if she cannot see forward into the spirit world, her friend can see "backward into this world" and be with her. Death Tractates is the companion volume to a philosophical poetic work entitles Bright Existence, which Hillman was in the midst of writing when her friend died. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993, it shares many of the same Gnostic themes and sources.Sea Room (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Maria Flook. 1990
Sea Room is a navigational term meaning adequate space at sea in which to maneuver a ship. The term seems…
an incongruity - that something so open and deep should require such precise and careful charting. In these most specific and powerful poems, the poet maps areas of obsessive love, phobic illness, godlessness, the prism of sexuality and romantic instinct in which all things are reflected, distorted.There's a playful terror in Maria Flook's poems. Her animated word is full of signs and signals; she always finds the telling analogue or makes the figure which reveals, illuminated everyday perceptions. "Dreams have cruel motives. Sleep worries/ both the decent and the wicked/ who keep odd hours/ so I walked out."The poems search for reprieve, or a calm, in wronged lives. Any accusations are fully explored, recalled in forgiveness or apology for relationships long over.The Eagle's Mile (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By James Dickey. 1990
A book of new poems by a major writer is an event. A book of new poems that marks a…
different, more powerful approach is cause for celebration. "What I looked for here," James Dickey tells us about The Eagle's Mile, "was a flicker of light 'from another direction,' and when I caught it - or thought I did - I followed where it went, for better or worse." In this new work, Dickey edges away from the narrative-based poems of his previous books and gives instead more primacy to the language in which he writes. His poetry gains flexibility, and his poetic power becomes even surer and more clearly expressed. "I have experimented," Dickey writes, "and look forward to experimenting more."Selected Poetry, 1937-1990 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Djelal Kadir, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto. 1994
This bilingual anthology brings together a representative selection from more than a half century of this distinguished Brazilian poet's lifetime…
work. Along with previously translated poems are many others in English for the first time. The remarkable group of poets and translators includes Elizabeth Bishop, Alastair Reid, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, and W. S. Merwin.The Known World (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Don Bogen. 1997
Turning bare description into a luxuriance, The Known World looks at the complex relationship of past and present, creating energetic…
juxtaposition between different historic periods to envision life at the end of our own century. Don Bogen calls the work an archeology, and uses details f life in past eras as a way of penetrating the surfaces of history. In his account, everything known is both encumbered with and defined by the past. Short poems in this collection cohere around the long title poem, which explores the nineteenth century through more than thirty sections in different voices and styles, including lists, mock letters, brief narratives, and lyric passages. The result is lively and illuminating.Corridor: Miniature Edition (Wesleyan New Poets)
By Jonathan Aaron. 2011
Poetry that springs from the collision of memory, dream, and history, Jonathan Aaron's narratives and lyrics develop in unpredictable, often…
unlikely ways toward moments of surprising disclosure. The poems in Corridor look back on actual or fictional events in history (the fate of a foolhardy Roman commander, the musings of a fourth-century farmer who saw the Huns), celebrate modern adventures of the imagination such as filmmaker Luis Bunuel and novelist/fabulist Julio Cortazar, explore moments of a private vision (a man recalls his addiction to cigarettes, a woman tries to communicate with a water monster), recast the narrative spells of a ballad - "Serial Nocturne," the collection's longest work, revisits and renews the age-old story of the demon lover. Different as they are, these poems are driven by an underlying impulse to portray characters as odds with the worlds they inhabit, people who are therefore all the more of those worlds, individuals whose dilemmas and crises all have something to tell us about the struggle of moral consciousness to discover itself.Threshold Songs (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Peter Gizzi. 2011
About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the…
unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken.Apples from Shinar (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Hyam Plutzik, David Scott Kastan. 2011
Apples from Shinar was Hyam Plutzik's second complete collection. Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan University Press's…
newly minted poetry series, the collection includes "The Shepherd"--a section of the book-length poem "Horatio," which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. "The love and the words and the simplicity," that mark Plutzik's poetry, writes Philip Booth, "are all here [in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come peacefully, and wonderfully, alive." With a previously unpublished foreword by Hyam Plutzik and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan, this edition marks the centenary of Plutzik's birth and will introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of the best mid-century American poets.James Dickey: The Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By James Dickey, Robert Kirschten. 2011
James Dickey: The Selected Poems is the first book to collect James Dickey's very best poems. Like many visionary poets…
of the ecstatic imagination, Dickey experimented in a wide variety of literary styles. This volume brings together the finest work from each of the periods in Dickey's extremely controversial career. For over three decades, until his death in 1997, Dickey was one of the nation's most important poets; these are the poems that brought him a popular readership and critical acclaim.The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By James Dickey. 1992
For over three decades, James Dickey has been one of the nation's most important poets and a prominent man of…
letters. The Whole Motion collects his poetic oeuvre into a single volume: 235 poems from his first book, Into the Stone (1960), to The Eagle's Mile (1990), along with previously uncollected poems and unpublished "apprentice" works.Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Alice Notley. 2011
Left dead after our cultures were broken by triumphant enemies, our stories changed to suit others. We now change them…
again to suit ourselves. Songs and Stories of the Ghouls purports to give power to the dead--voices to the victims of genocide both ancient and contemporary--and presence to women. Medea did not kill her sons; Dido founds a city, over and over again, the city of the present author's poetry. In these poems the poet asserts that though her art comes from a tradition as broken as Afghanistan's statuary, there is always a culture to pass on to one's children, and one is always involved in doing so. We are the ghouls, the drinkers of the blood-sacs, and we insist that we are alive.Money Shot (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Rae Armantrout. 2011
The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm,…
these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot's investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent "great recession" of 2008-2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? Do we "know it when we see it"? Looking at sex, botany, cosmology, and death through the dark lens of "disaster capitalism," Armantrout finds evidence of betrayal, grounds for rebellion, moments of possibility, and even pleasure, in a time of sudden scarcity and relentless greed. This stunning follow-up to Versed--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award--is a wonderfully stringent exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in capitalism.In Favor of Lightning (Wesleyan New Poets)
By Barbara Molloy-Olund. 1987
Barbara Molloy-Olund's poems begin squarely in the world of the senses, then extend that world into the realm of imagination.…
The sky comes to imply a commanding spiritual intelligence. Trees tossing in a storm suggest the "fleeting, impetuous nerve/ we manage only once or twice/ our whole lives." Pigs in a barnyard imply a rich connection between the sacred and the profane, The poet's achievement is her subtlety; we admire her serene and unobtrusive flights of mind. Molloy-Olund's Midwestern landscapes mesh gracefully with her ruminations, creating a poetry that is hers alone.Things Come On: An amneoir (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
By Joseph Harrington. 2011
Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and…
pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet's mother's illness and death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public tragedies--showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting "amneoir" (a blend of "memoir" and "amnesia") explores a time for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary evidence--not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between individual experience and history.