The Gospel According To Wild Indigo

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The Gospel according to Wild Indigo

Author : Cyrus Cassells
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809336618
Total Pages : 114 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis The Gospel according to Wild Indigo by : Cyrus Cassells

Download or read book The Gospel according to Wild Indigo written by Cyrus Cassells and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize, 2018 Finalist for the Helen C. Smith Award for the Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2019 Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature in Poetry, 2019 Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, Cyrus Cassells’s sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family. The first cycle, rooted in the culture of the Gullah people of Charleston and the Sea Islands, celebrates the resilience of the rice- and indigo-working slaves and their descendants who have forged a unique Africa-inspired language and culture. Set against a Mediterranean backdrop, the second cycle explores themes of pilgrimage, love, and loss, concluding with a pair of elegies to the poet’s mother and the many men lost in the juggernaut of the AIDS crisis. Throughout, Cassells invites the reader to consider the duality of grief and love, as well as the shifting connections between past and present. Cassells’s language is always striking, unpredictable, and beautiful, conjuring a world not only of “placid seagulls perched / in priest-gentle pines / like festive Christmas ornaments” but also one where “Death prevailed, / tireless as a forest partisan.” His poems transport the reader across time, space, and language, searching constantly not just for empathy but also for the human spirit in its triumph, for “our human joy, / laced with an ageless grieving.”

Blackbird

Author : Katie Kapurch
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271096306
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Blackbird by : Katie Kapurch

Download or read book Blackbird written by Katie Kapurch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beginning, the Beatles acknowledged in interviews their debt to Black music, apparent in their covers of and written original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play. Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today. Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.

The Twenty-ninth Year

Author : Hala Alyan
Publisher : Ecco
ISBN 13 : 1328511944
Total Pages : 99 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (285 download)

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Book Synopsis The Twenty-ninth Year by : Hala Alyan

Download or read book The Twenty-ninth Year written by Hala Alyan and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2019 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild, lyrical poems that examine the connections between physical and interior migration, from award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses.

American Radiance

Author : Luisa Muradyan
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496210921
Total Pages : 81 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (962 download)

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Book Synopsis American Radiance by : Luisa Muradyan

Download or read book American Radiance written by Luisa Muradyan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, American Radiance, at turns funny, tragic, and haunting, reflects on the author's experience immigrating as a child to the United States from Ukraine in 1991. What does it mean to be an American? Luisa Muradyan doesn't try to provide an answer. Instead, the poems in American Radiance look for a home in history, folklore, misery, laughter, language, and Prince's outstretched hand. Colliding with the grand figures of late '80s and early '90s pop culture, Muradyan's imagination pushes the reader forward, confronting the painful loss of identity that assimilation brings.

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide

Author : Susan Barba
Publisher : Abrams
ISBN 13 : 1647006058
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide by : Susan Barba

Download or read book American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide written by Susan Barba and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers—perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighborhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, indigenous writers. There are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi. There are prose pieces by Aldo Leopold, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. And most of all, there are poems: from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz and Jericho Brown. The book includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family—think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.

Objects of Hunger

Author : E. C. Belli
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337266
Total Pages : 89 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Objects of Hunger by : E. C. Belli

Download or read book Objects of Hunger written by E. C. Belli and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns stoic and ravaged, but always with gutting honesty, E. C. Belli invites readers to consider the smallest rooms of the intimate in this first collection. With each poem pared down to an elemental language both slight and clear, Belli’s work exhibits a surprising muscularity in its poise. Objects of Hunger explores in reflective, raw lyrics the dread and beauty of our inner worlds as expressed through our struggles against the self and the other. Each poem is a slender organism that speaks its own mind, unafraid of pathos; the emotions here have been tried on and lived in, and the work accrues, lyric after lyric, page after page. In the second section, World War I poems are broken down and dismantled, as the voices of that era’s poets meld with that of a postpartum mother, exposing a shared vernacular among these disparate experiences. Other poems in the collection explore the unraveling and entrapments of the domestic, but with tenacity in place of softness, using a lexicon gathered from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, among others. What emerges is a finely chiseled portrait of intimacy, one that takes seriously love and all discord, the fracas of reticence and familiarity. Belli gives this world to us by way of a throbbing asceticism, in an exploration of resignation, concession, persistence, and monstrosity. This collection tells what it is to need with abandon.

Maps for Migrants and Ghosts

Author : Luisa A. Igloria
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337932
Total Pages : 110 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Maps for Migrants and Ghosts by : Luisa A. Igloria

Download or read book Maps for Migrants and Ghosts written by Luisa A. Igloria and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language as key and map to places, people, and histories lost For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, from her childhood home in Baguio City, the Philippines, to her immigrant home in Virginia, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before. In this poetry collection, Igloria brings together personal and family histories, ruminates on the waxing and waning of family fortunes, and reminds us how immigration necessitates and compels transformations. Simultaneously at home and displaced in two different worlds, the speaker lives in the past and the present, and the return to her origins is fraught with disappointment, familiarity, and alienation. Language serves as a key and a map to the places and people that have been lost. This collection folds memories, encounters, portraits, and vignettes, familiar and alien, into both an individual history and a shared collective history—a grandfather’s ghost stubbornly refusing to come in out of the rain, an elderly mother casually dropping YOLO into conversation, and the speaker’s abandonment of her childhood home for a second time. The poems in this collection spring out of a deep longing for place, for the past, for the selves we used to be before we traveled to where we are now, before we became who we are now. A stunning addition to the work of immigrant and migrant women poets on their diasporas, Maps for Migrants and Ghosts reveals a dream landscape at the edge of this world that is always moving, not moving, changing, and not changing.

The River Where You Forgot My Name

Author : Corrie Williamson
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337487
Total Pages : 96 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis The River Where You Forgot My Name by : Corrie Williamson

Download or read book The River Where You Forgot My Name written by Corrie Williamson and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Montana Book Award-Honor Book, 2019 The River Where You Forgot My Name travels between early 1800s Virginia and Missouri and present-day western Montana, a place where “bats sail the river of dark.” In their crosscutting, the poems in this collection reflect on American progress; technology, exploration, and environment; and the ever-changing landscape at the intersection of wilderness and civilization. Three of the book’s five sections follow poet Corrie Williamson’s experiences while living for five years in western Montana. The remaining sections are persona poems written in the voice of Julia Hancock Clark, wife of William Clark, who she married soon after he returned from his western expedition with Meriwether Lewis. Julia lived with Clark in the then-frontier town of St. Louis until her early death in 1820. She offers a foil for the poet’s first-person Montana narrative and enriches the historical perspective of the poetry, providing a female voice to counterbalance the often male-centered discovery and frontier narrative. The collection shines with all-too human moments of levity, tragedy, and beauty such as when Clark names a river Judith after his future wife, not knowing that everyone calls her Julia, or when the poet on a hike to Goldbug Hot Springs imagines a mercury-poisoned Lewis waking “with the dawn between his teeth.” Williamson turns a curious and critical eye on the motives and impact of expansionism, unpacking some of the darker ramifications of American hunger for land and resources. These poems combine breathtaking natural beauty with backbreaking human labor, all in the search for something that approaches grace.

Hinge

Author : Molly Spencer
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337983
Total Pages : 96 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Hinge by : Molly Spencer

Download or read book Hinge written by Molly Spencer and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finding joy and beauty in the face of suffering Readers enter “a stunted world,” where landmarks—a river, a house, a woman’s own body—have become unrecognizable in a place as distorted and dangerous as any of the old tales poet Molly Spencer remasters in this elegant, mournful collection. In myth and memory, through familiar stories reimagined, she constructs poetry for anyone who has ever stumbled, unwillingly, into a wilderness. In these alluring poems, myth becomes part of the arsenal used to confront the flaws and failures of our fallible bodies. Shadowing the trajectory of an elegy, this poetry collection of lament, remembrance, and solace wrestles with how we come to terms with suffering while still finding joy, meaning, and beauty. Spencer alternates between the clinical and the domestic, disorientation and reorientation, awe and awareness. With the onset of a painful chronic illness, the body and mental geography turn hostile and alien. In loss and grief, in physical and psychological landscapes, Spencer searches the relationship between a woman’s body and her house—places where she is both master and captive—and hunts for the meaning of suffering. Finally, with begrudging acceptance, we have a hypothesis for all seasons: there is suffering, there is mercy; they are not separate but are for and of one another.

Fieldglass

Author : Catherine Pond
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809338149
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Fieldglass by : Catherine Pond

Download or read book Fieldglass written by Catherine Pond and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A candid exploration of sexual identity, female friendship, family dynamics, and queer experiences of love, this book is a collection of poems about obsession, addictions, and a life given over to making art"--

Even the Dark

Author : Leslie Williams
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337495
Total Pages : 82 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Even the Dark by : Leslie Williams

Download or read book Even the Dark written by Leslie Williams and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The speaker in this collection seeks an understanding of the darkness of suicide and mortal illness in the light of Christian faith. Poet Leslie Williams captures this light in tender and piercing poems that traverse a grieving world where healing is always possible but never assured: “my God can do this, but my God / might not.” Through restless questioning, the speaker finds a balm for suffering in the divine beauty and mystery of the natural world. Seven prose poems woven into the collection deal with different aspects of a young girl’s life-threatening illness. Five additional poems wrestle with the grief of suicide and the emptiness afflicting those left behind. Other poems in the collection reflect on how to approach daily life while coping with heartbreak and express wonder about our responsibilities in a variety of roles: as parents, as neighbors, as an imagined anchoress, as children of God. The language remains beautiful and precise throughout, whether the speaker lies “in a gully cracked / with stars” or tells herself, “It’s a handmade raft I live on.” The speaker entreats, as in Psalm 27, “teach me how to live.” Dwelling attentively in the abundance and mystery of creation, the book aims to offer a comfort and peace that might “even the dark.”

Vanishing Acts

Author : Brian Barker
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337274
Total Pages : 73 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Vanishing Acts by : Brian Barker

Download or read book Vanishing Acts written by Brian Barker and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vanishing Acts, Brian Barker cements his reputation as one of contemporary poetry’s great surrealists. These prose poems read like dreams and nightmares, fables and myths. With a dark whimsicality, Barker explores such topics as extinction, power, class, the consequences of tyranny and war, and the ongoing destruction of the environment in the name of progress. A linked sequence of poems forms the book’s backbone, with an oracular voice from the future heralding the return—or hoped for return—of common animals. Part lyrical odes, part creation myths, part excerpts from a bizarre guide for naturalists, these poems mix fact and fiction, science and fable to create an unsettling vision of a dystopian world stricken by extinction, one where the world’s last catfish sleeps “in the shadow of a hydroelectric dam.” The imaginative language and bizarre stories of these poems are perfectly suited to capture a world that no longer makes sense: a man who wears a toupee to hide an injury inflicted by secret police, a group of villagers who make a bad bargain with a land agent. The poems in Vanishing Acts straddle the comic and the tragic. They are by turns funny and haunting and ripe with scathing satire. They draw on the genres of speculative and science fiction as much as poetic traditions, and speak to the precarious state of man and the natural world in the twenty-first century.

All the Great Territories

Author : Matthew Austin Wimberley
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337738
Total Pages : 86 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis All the Great Territories by : Matthew Austin Wimberley

Download or read book All the Great Territories written by Matthew Austin Wimberley and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Watherford Award for Best Books about Appalachia, 2020 In 2012 Matthew Wimberley took a two-month journey, traveling and living out of his car, during which time he had planned to spread his father’s ashes. By trip’s end, the ashes remained, but Wimberley had begun a conversation with his deceased father that is continued here in his debut collection. All the Great Territories is a book of elegies for a father as well as a confrontation with the hostile, yet beautiful landscape of southern Appalachia. In the wake of an estranged father’s death, the speaker confronts that loss while celebrating the geography of childhood and the connections formed between the living and the dead. The narrative poems in this collection tell one story through many: a once failed relationship, the conversations we have with those we love after they are gone. In an attempt to make sense of the father-son relationship, Wimberley embraces and explores the pain of personal loss and the beauty of the natural world. Stitching together sundered realms—from Idaho to the Blue Ridge Mountains and from the ghost of memory to the iron present of self—Wimberley produces a map for reckoning with grief and the world’s darker forces. At once a labor of love and a searing indictment of those who sensationalize and dehumanize the people and geography of Appalachia, All the Great Territories sparks the reader forward, creating a homeland all its own. “Because it’s my memory I can give it to you,” Wimberley’s speaker declares, and it’s a promise well kept in this tender and remarkable debut.

The Flesh Between Us

Author : Tory Adkisson
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809338432
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis The Flesh Between Us by : Tory Adkisson

Download or read book The Flesh Between Us written by Tory Adkisson and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eroticism cut from classical mythology, ritual, and intimacy In The Flesh Between Us the speaker explores our connections to each other, whether they be lovely or painful, static or constantly shifting, or, above all, unavoidable and necessary. Intensely and unapologetically homoerotic in content and theme, The Flesh Between Us sensuously conducts the meetings between strangers, between lovers, between friends and family, between eater and eaten, between the soul and the body that contains it. Pushing the boundaries of what has been traditionally acceptable for gay and erotic content and themes, the poems adapt persona, Greek mythology, Judaism, and classic poetic forms to interrogate the speaker’s relationship to god and faith, to love and sex, to mother and father. Stark and mythical, the imagery draws from the language of animals and nature. Episodes of kink tangle with creatures of forests and lore. In this tumult, the lines of poetry keep a sense of boundary and distance by the seeming incompatibility of their subjects: daybreak and dissection, human and insect, worship and reality. The touch of irreconcilable bodies, in Adkisson’s language, intimates the precise moment of love. The idea of love moves viscerally through rib, lung, throat, and mouth. The poems show how flesh opens in so many ways, in prayers, in bleeds, in ruts. The flesh, opened, begins to swell. If there is guilt in this, Adkisson’s poems refuse the placid satisfaction of confession. Whatever attachments the reader dares to draw must be made with blade or tongue. The reader must commit to the potential violence narrated by these poems.

Unearth

Author : Chad Davidson
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809337711
Total Pages : 79 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Unearth by : Chad Davidson

Download or read book Unearth written by Chad Davidson and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What if the end were as colorless as real / estate?” the speaker asks in Unearth. Poet Chad Davidson’s latest collection takes a hard look at our world as it collapses under numerous trials and tribulations. Fashioned mostly of elegiac poems, Unearth charts the way in which personal grief ripples out to meet and mirror larger systems of loss. The first section deals with local traumas and bereavements—the loss of pets, the disintegration of a friends’ marriage. These tragedies combine with more ominous, larger breakdowns in the second section until, in the final section, grief roils over into historical wickedness, institutionalized violence, and state-sanctioned wrath. Ultimately, “Even the mouth / of a volcano, from far away, / is beautiful.” The poetry itself offers us vessels into which we can pour out our despair. To understand the failing earth, Davidson’s speaker cajoles us to see the pain at its roots. From the opening poem—a reluctant elegy for a mother—to the final eschatological survey, an ode to maddening violence and destruction on a global scale, this collection imagines a world in which private and public terrors feed on each other, ultimately growing to a fever pitch. An act of resistance, this collection gives voice to our deep-seated emotional pain and offers us constructive ways to deal with it.

Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live

Author : Monica Berlin
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809336839
Total Pages : 90 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live by : Monica Berlin

Download or read book Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live written by Monica Berlin and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monica Berlin’s Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live resides at the turbulent confluence of relentless news cycles and the repeated rending of our interior lives. In Berlin’s poetry sorrow makes its own landscape—solitary, intimate, forward-looking. Whether we attempt to traverse it or choose bypass, her poems show us where we live, how we carry on. These poems notice the day in the wind, the night tucked up to the train tracks, and a slipping-in of yesterday, memory-laden, alongside the promise of a more hopeful tomorrow. Here is the Midwest, vibrant and relic, in the ongoing years of collapse and recovery. Here the constant companionship of weather lays claim to its own field of vision. Here, too, devastation: what’s left after. Berlin reminds us we are at the mercy of rivers, oceans, earth, wind, rain, blizzard, drought, and each other. “Maybe what I mean / to say is that I’ve come to see all the names we might / recognize destruction by,” Berlin’s speaker discovers. “We might / sometimes, stupidly, call it love.” On her familiar prairie of lyricism and tumult, beauty and ruin, Berlin’s poems insist, plead, and seek to reassure. In a collection both mournful and urgent, both a “little book of days” and a song, this poet meditates on loss, wonder, and always the consolations of language.

View from True North

Author : Sara Henning
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809336855
Total Pages : 90 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis View from True North by : Sara Henning

Download or read book View from True North written by Sara Henning and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, High Plains Book Award Poetry, 2019 Winner, George Bogin Memorial Award, 2019 Finalist, Julie Suk Award, 2018 In these edgy poems of witness, Sara Henning’s speaker serves as both conduit and curator of the destructive legacies of alcoholism and multigenerational closeting. Considering the impact of addiction and sexual repression in the family and on its individual members, Henning explores with deft compassion the psychological ramifications of traumas across multiple generations. With the starling as an unspoken trope for victims who later perpetuate the cycle of abuse, suffering and shame became forces dangerous enough to down airliners. The strands Henning weaves—violent relationships, the destructive effects of long-term closeting, and the pall that shame casts over entire lives—are hauntingly epiphanic. And yet these feverish lyric poems find a sharp beauty in their grieving, where Rolling Stone covers and hidden erotic photographs turn into talismans of regret and empathy. After the revelation that her deceased grandfather was a closeted homosexual “who lived two lives,” Henning considers the lasting effects of shame in regard to the silence, oppression, and erasure of sexual identity, issues that are of contemporary concern to the LGBTQIA community. Even through “the dark / earth encircling us,” Henning’s speaker wonders if there isn’t some way out of a place “where my body / is just another smoke-stung / dirge of survival,” if, in the end, love won’t be victorious. Part eyewitness testimony, part autoethnography, this book of memory and history, constantly seeking and yearning, is full of poems “too brutal and strange to suffer / [their] way anywhere but home.”