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Debt for Sale
By Brett Williams. 2004
Credit and debt appear to be natural, permanent facets of Americans' lives, but a debt-based economy and debt-financed lifestyles are…
actually recent inventions. In 1951 Diners Club issued a plastic card that enabled patrons to pay for their meals at select New York City restaurants at the end of each month. Soon other "charge cards" (as they were then known) offered the convenience for travelers throughout the United States to pay for hotels, food, and entertainment on credit. In the 1970s the advent of computers and the deregulation of banking created an explosion in credit card use--and consumer debt. With gigantic national banks and computer systems that allowed variable interest rates, consumer screening, mass mailings, and methods to discipline slow payers with penalties and fees, middle-class Americans experienced a sea change in their lives.Given the enormous profits from issuing credit, banks and chain stores used aggressive marketing to reach Americans experiencing such crises as divorce or unemployment, to help them make ends meet or to persuade them that they could live beyond their means. After banks exhausted the profits from this group of people, they moved into the market for college credit cards and student loans and then into predatory lending (through check-cashing stores and pawnshops) to the poor. In 2003, Americans owed nearly $8 trillion in consumer debt, amounting to 130 percent of their average disposable income. The role of credit and debt in people's lives is one of the most important social and economic issues of our age.Brett Williams provides a sobering and frank investigation of the credit industry and how it came to dominate the lives of most Americans by propelling the social changes that are enacted when an economy is based on debt. Williams argues that credit and debt act to obscure, reproduce, and exacerbate other inequalities. It is in the best interest of the banks, corporations, and their shareholders to keep consumer debt at high levels. By targeting low-income and young people who would not be eligible for credit in other businesses, these companies are able quickly to gain a stranglehold on the finances of millions. Throughout, Williams provides firsthand accounts of how Americans from all socioeconomic levels use credit. These vignettes complement the history and technical issues of the credit industry, including strategies people use to manage debt, how credit functions in their lives, how they understand their own indebtedness, and the sometimes tragic impact of massive debt on people's lives.A Bernadette Mayer Reader
By Bernadette Mayer. 1992
"She writes as if Everything were still possible in the work of a lifetime at the coincidence of all the…
turvy moments. Better that she's read without a thought to stop. Best so this world is found changed." --Clark Coolidge "What a clear, insistent health there is here--as if the so-called world were seriously the point, which it is, and we could actually live in it, which we do. Truly this is the best How To book I've read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what's for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous." --Robert CreeleyThe War Works Hard
By Dunya Mikhail, Elizabeth Winslow, Saadi S. Simawe. 2006
Mikhail’s poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion. Revolutionary poetry by an exiled Iraqi woman. Winner of…
a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. "Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur'anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail's poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.Elegiac Feelings American: Poetry
By Gregory Corso. 1970
A collection of poems by the renowned Beat poet, Gregory Corso. Gregory Corso's collection of poems contains works of major…
proportions. The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. The second major work, "The Geometric Poem," published previously in a limited edition by Fernanda Pivano in Italy, is a complex visionary restatement of themes from ancient Egyptian religion. Reproduced in facsimile from Corso's handwritten sheets, his marginal decorations, drawings and glyphs are included. The balance of the book is drawn from his shorter poems. Corso's reputation as a leading poet and co-founder of the Beat movement is clearly upheld in these poems. His instinct for integrated lyrical statement, his special contribution to Beat poetry, is as strong as ever; his sense of humor and sexuality have not diminished. But he has added a wider-ranging moral urgency and a new depth of humane solicitude that hold even his strangest visions close to the heart of contemporary feeling.Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror)
By Guy Wernham, Conte De Lautreamont. 1965
This macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and…
most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing. Maldoror is a long narrative prose poem which celebrates the principle of Evil in an elaborate style and with a passion akin to religions fanaticism. The French poet-critic Georges Hugnet has written of Lautréamont: "He terrifies, stupefies, strikes dumb. He could look squarely at that which others had merely given a passing glance." When first published in 1868-69, Maldoror went almost unnoticed. But in the 1890s the book was rediscovered and hailed as a work of genius by such eminent writers as Huysmans, Léon Block, Maeterlinck, and Rémy de Gourmont. Later still, Lautréamont was to be canonized as one of their principal "ancestors" by the Paris surrealists. This edition, translated by Guy Wernham, includes also a long introduction to a never-written, or now lost, volume of poetry. Thus, except for a few letters, it gives all the surviving literary work of Lautréamont.Illuminations: Prose poems
By Arthur Rimbaud. 1957
The definitive translation of the one of the brightest geniuses of French poetry. The prose poems of the great French…
Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varese. Mrs. Varese first published her versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varese discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud's writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations--"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up--now here, now there--unexplored aspects of experience and thought.7 Greeks
By Guy Davenport. 1995
"Overall, this volume will afford great pleasure to scholars, teachers, and also those who simply love to watch delightful souls…
disport themselves in language."--Anne Carson Here is a colorful variety pf works by seven Greek poets and philosophers who lived from the eighth to the third centuries BC. Salvaged from shattered pottery vases and tattered scrolls of papyrus, everything decipherable from the remains of these ancient authors is assembled here. From early to later, the collection contains: Archilochos; Sappho; Alkman; Anakreon; the philosophers Herakleitos and Diogenes; and Herondas. This composite of fragments translated by Guy Davenport is the most complete collection of its kind ever to appear in one volume.Selected Poems
By Kenneth Patchen. 1957
This selection is drawn from ten earlier volumes by the poet who has been called "the most compelling force in…
American poetry since Whitman." The late Kenneth Patchen was unique among contemporary poets for his direct and passionate concern with the most essential elements in the tragic, comic, blundering and at rare moments glorious world around us. He wrote about the things we can feel; with our whole being--the senselessness of war, the need for love among men on earth, the presence of God in man, the love for a beloved woman, social injustice and the continual resurgence of the beautiful in life.The Quarry: Essays
By Susan Howe. 2015
The Quarry presents new and pivotal Susan Howe prose pieces. A powerful selection of Susan Howe's key essays, The Quarry…
moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through essential texts such as "The Disappearance Approach," "Personal Narrative," "Sorting Facts; or, 47 Ways of Looking at Chris Marker," "Frame Structures," and "Where Should the Commander Be" to end with her seminal early art criticism, "The End of Art."Selected Poetry and Prose
By Stephane Mallarme. 1982
The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition. Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé…
presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned "father of the Symbolists." Mallarmé's major elegies, sonnets, and other verse, including excerpts from the dialogue "Hériodiade," are all assembled here with the French and English texts en face. Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem "Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance" and the drama "Igitur," as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these "Mardis," and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, "The Afternoon of a Faun," inspired Claude Debussy's famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé's oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature
By Denise Levertov. 1997
As Denise Levertov comments in her brief foreword to The Life Around Us, she has "shared with most poets in…
every time and place an ardent love of what my eyes and other senses revealed to me in the world we call nature. Yet in this selection of sixty-two poems chosen by the author "celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined." The Life Around Us shows us both the eternal renewal of the natural world and its imperilment: "In these last few decades of the 20th century it has become ever clearer to all thinking people that although we humans are a part of nature ourselves, we have become, in multifarious ways, an increasingly destructive element within it, shaking and breaking 'the great web'--perhaps irremediably."Palilalia
By Jeffery Donaldson. 2008
Palilalia is disordered speech. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this lesser known vocal tic is "an involuntary repetition of…
words, phrases or sentences." Sister to echolalia (repeating what others say), and distant cousin to the more forbidding coprolalia (the involuntary use of obscene language), palilalia can feel, on the one hand, like an affliction to be suppressed, and on the other, like a kind of meditative mantra that focuses and intensifies your thought. "Your repetitious tics," the ghost of the poet's mentor, Northrop Frye, tells him, are " the ecstatic rhapsodist's / St. Vitus Dance, slangster's whizzle / and conjuration, philologist's hullabaloo." It isn't a question of how to stop them, but of finding how far they will take you. Jeffery Donaldson offers poems about Tourette's Syndrome, about his loves and blessings, about the erotic life as flavoured by all these, and about the grace of a stillness in the midst of so much mental noise. Paul Val�ry said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. All poets have palilalia, or should have....Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China
By David Hinton. 2005
The earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history, Mountain Home is vital poetry that feels utterly…
contemporary. China's tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" poetry stretches across millennia. This is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th- through 13th-century China and includes the poets Li Po, Po Chu-i and Tu Fu. The "rivers-and-mountains" tradition covers a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic scenes, social protest, travel, sage recluses, and mountain landscapes shaped into forms of enlightenment. And within this range, the poems articulate the experience of living as an organic part of the natural world and its processes. In an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this tradition grows more urgently important every day. Mountain Home offers poems that will charm and inform not just readers of poetry, but also the large community of readers who are interested in environmental awareness.Midwinter Day
By Bernadette Mayer. 1982
Perhaps Bernadette Mayer's greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978, at 100 Main Street, Lenox, Massachusetts. "Midwinter…
Day," as Alice Notley noted, "is an epic poem about a daily routine." A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again: ". . . a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away the long black night!"Christmas Poems
By James Laughlin, Albert M. Hayes. 2008
Awake the voice! Awake the string! Dark and dull night fly hence away, And give the honor of this day…
That sees December turned to May. --William Herrick Christmas Poems is a pleasing and diverse selection of classic holiday poems that goes all the way back to an eclogue of Virgil, moves along to a wide range of authors such as Chaucer, Herbert, Longfellow, Dickinson, Paul Dunbar, Rilke, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Thomas Merton, Wallace Stevens, Marie Ponsot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O'Hara, Denise Levertov, and Bernadette Mayer. Beautifully designed, this New Directions gem (originally published in the 1940s and reissued in the 1970s) rings with the deep sentiments of the season and just the right splash of holiday cheer. Christmas Poems comes with French flaps and is the perfect size for a stocking stuffer. Christmas Poems was originally edited by Albert M. Hayes and New Directions founder and publisher James Laughlin as A Wreath of Christmas Poems, and published as part of the "Poets of the Year" series in 1942. The collection was updated and revised in 1972, and selections for this newly revised 2008 edition have been chosen by the editorial staff at New Directions.Core Samples from the World
By Forrest Gander, Graciela Iturbide, Lucas Foglia, Raymond Meeks. 2011
A gorgeous, wide-ranging volume of poetry and essays by Forrest Gander, studded with the work of three great photographers. Forrest…
Gander's Core Samples from the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and essay (a form of Japanese haibun). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander explores tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander's "sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson" (Donald Revell, The Colorado Review).The Selected Poems of Tu Fu
By David Hinton, Tu Fu. 1989
For over a millennium, Chinese literati have almost unanimously considered Tu Fu (712-770 A.D.) to be their greatest poet. Tu…
Fu radically altered poetry as he found it in the High T'ang period. In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton, "the first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature." This edition of The Selected Poems of Tu Fu is the only comprehensive selection of the poet's work currently available in English. While retaining a scholar's devotion to the text, Hinton has attempted "to recreate Tu Fu's poems as new systems of uncertainty." By reflecting all the ambiguity and density of the originals, he has created compelling English poems that significantly alter our conception of Chinese poetry. Included with the poems are the translator's introduction and translation principles. as well as a biography of Tu Fu; together these provide a fascinating portrait of a uniquely sensitive spirit during one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history.Passionate Hearts
By Wendy Maltz. 1996
In her search for positive, healthy sexual images to help her in her practice, renowned sex therapist and author Wendy…
Maltz solicited and sought out "poems that inspire and celebrate healthy sexual intimacy; poems in which heart connection was at the core of the sexual experience." In reviewing more than 1,500 submissions, she asked, "Does this poem represent mutual caring and desire? Do the partners relate as equals, respecting each other as separate individuals? Is there a sense of emotional trust and honesty? Are the sexual interactions assumed to be safe from emotional and physical harm? Does the poem celebrate sensual pleasures?" The result is a remarkable anthology of intimate, emotionally explicit, yet accessible poetry, representing new voices as well as the most revered contemporary poets. Culled from classic works of poetry, literary and erotica journals, and unpublished poetry, Passionate Hearts celebrates the joys of sexual connection and expression throughout the life of a relationship, from early courtship to mature love. These poems awaken desire and reveal the mysterious power and beauty of sexual sharing. Contributing poets include: Gary Soto, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Marge Piercy, Tess Gallagher, e.e. cummings, Molly Peacock, Raymond Carver, Galway Kinnell, Sara Teasdale, David Steinberg, Robert Wrigley, Dorianne Laux, Olga Broumas, and moreDirty Poem
By Leland Guyer, Ferreira Gullar. 1930
Considered the greatest long poem in 20th century Brazilian poetry, Ferreira's Gullar's Dirty Poem was written as a response to…
the Brazilian dictatorship that put him in exile and murdered thousands. Written in 1975 in Buenos Aires when Ferreira Gullar was in political exile from the Brazilian dictatorship, Dirty Poem is an epic poem that amid life events traces the author's political and artistic evolution and is by most accounts the most important long poem of contemporary Brazilian literature. Scholar and critic Otto Maria Carpeaux wrote: "Dirty Poem deserves to be called 'National Poem' because it embodies all of the experiences, victories, defeats, and hopes in the life of the Brazilian citizen." It is a hypnotic work that draws on the poet's memory of adolescence in the seaside city of Sao Luís do Maranhao during World War II and deals openly with the "dirty" shamefulness of a socio-economic system that abuses its citizens with poverty, sexism, greed, and fear.Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese
By Kenneth Rexroth, Eliot Weinberger. 2009
"Rexroth's readings from the Japanese master poets are breathtaking in their simplicity and clarity."--The New York Times I go out…
of the darkness Onto a road of darkness Lit only by the far off Moon on the edge of the mountains. --Izumi Shikobu Over the years, thousands of readers have discovered the beauty of classic Japanese poetry through the superb English versions by the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth. Mostly haiku, these poems range from the classical and medieval to modern poetry, with an emphasis on folk songs and love lyrics. Because women played such an outstanding role in Japanese literature, included here are selections from their work, including the contemporary, deeply sensuous Marichiko. This elegant, beautifully designed gift book of poems spanning many centuries presents the original texts in romanji, the transliteration into the Western alphabet.