Poetry
100 Chinese Silences
Timothy Yu's first book of poems, 100 CHINESE SILENCES, brims with sharp, angry, sarcastic and tender poems. He delivers dazzling lines with the deadpan wit and precise timing of Buster Keaton, the stone-faced master of silence. In fact, I had not realized until now--and I mean NOW--that Keaton is really the Timothy Yu of silent films, while Yu is Yu, a slayer of dragons, who knows the millions of sinister and inscrutable ways the Chinese have been silenced in blockbuster films, best-selling novels, Broadway musicals and award-winning poems read on NPR, and closely scrutinized in graduate classes and parking lots of Asian fusion take-out joints with funny names. Not only does Yu make Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder stand on their pointy heads in ways that are illuminating and funny, but he also skewers Jeb Bush, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Marianne Moore, and Eliot Weinberger right through their bright yellow Chinese hearts. You got to love a poet who can do that and never miss his mark. I present you with Timothy Yu, noble Chinese archer and master poet.--John Yau
In Timothy Yu's hall of 100 Chinese poetic mirrors, puppies, blossoms, and hobbled feet clatter against the American grain, leaving wet prints as frowning emoji ciphers to rise up with a mighty bitch slap for Asian/American difference. These poems burn with gloriously wry disdain at the abundance of chinoiserie tinging modernist lineages of geopolitically western poetic traditions. By striking out at un-self-conscious performances of western cultural sophistication, Yu exposes these voices' indebtedness to emptied Chinese images. I pleasure in his poetry's mythic 10th century crystal penis, how it penetrates western imaginative impotencies to see otherwise. He's sharp, incisive, potty- mouthed, unapologetic, slippery, angry, urbane... His silences are fearsome and knowing. Fuck that yellow-faced hologram of Confucius! I want to hear what Timothy Yu has to say!--Sueyeun Juliette Lee
I can't remember when I last read a book as necessary, and as wickedly fun, as Timothy Yu's 100 CHINESE SILENCES. Yu responds to, rewrites, and reforms a whole poetic tradition of Western representations of China and the Chinese, from Ezra Pound to Gary Snyder to Billy Collins. Yu wears his learning lightly, and his various parodies, pastiches, and campy retakes on the poetic tradition balance a love of the poetry he's spent a career studying with a necessary critical edge. Our age demands a re- assessment of old representations of the mysterious east, and Timothy Yu has come through with exactly what we need. 100 CHINESE SILENCES has breakthrough book written all over it.--Robert Archambeau
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After the Fireworks: 40 Poems of Learning About Life
The reader is invited to take a stroll through a life: from the comforts and questions of childhood; through the audacity, heartbreak and yearnings of young adulthood and middle age; to the awakening of acceptance and, perhaps, some insight in later life.
Written at various times over the course of 40-plus years, the poems in this collection present moments remembered, and realizations arising, over the course of the poet's life so far.
All Heathens
Marianne Chan's brilliant debut collection masterfully develops themes of identity and the long-term effects of colonization.
--Largehearted Boy
All Heathens is a declaration of ownership--of bodies, of histories, of time. Revisiting Magellan's voyage around the world, these poems explore the speaker's Filipino American identity by grappling with her relationship to her family and notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. Whether rewriting the origin story of Eve ("I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons"), or ruminating on what-should-have-been-said "when the man at the party said he wanted to own a Filipino," Chan paints wry, witty renderings of anecdotal and folkloric histories, while both preserving and unveiling a self-identity that dares any other to try and claim it.
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America That Island Off the Coast of France
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American Parables
the internet your high schooland find rubble. Your daughter
has the flu. We are sickwith disappointment but
everyone is fine.
--Excerpt from "First Generation: Our Escape"
And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me. Thus begins "Phenomenal Woman," just one of the beloved poems collected here in Maya Angelou's third book of verse. These poems are powerful, distinctive, and fresh--and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it. "It is true poetry she is writing," M.F.K. Fisher has observed, "not just rhythm, the beat, rhymes. I find it very moving and at times beautiful. It has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity. . . . It is astounding, flabbergasting, to recognize it, in all the words I read every day and night . . . it gives me heart, to hear so clearly the caged bird singing and to understand her notes."
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Arrows of Light
In Arrows of Light, Andrea Potos lets us dwell in those fragile moments between day and night, love and loss, living and death. In the stillness of of a blue scarf lake, the pale ochre walls of Van Gogh's rooms, the light that pours through her Yaya's kitchen windows, Potos takes us to the cusp of the unknowable. Pulled through by the thread of her mother's illness and eventual death, this small, elegant collection shines its gold light on those stunning, ephemeral details -- her mother's coral lipstick, blueberries like small sapphires, laundry flapping on the line like angel wings -- that seem to give us tidings of the world beyond and its fluid relationship with what we know now and will always remember.
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Balancing: Poems of the Female Immigrant Experience in the Upper Midwest, 1830-1930
The poems in Balancing were inspired by the experiences of women who, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, sought new homes in the Upper Midwest. The first waves of pioneers, predominantly Yankees from Northeastern states, were soon followed by European immigrants. Few women recorded their struggles and satisfactions, but by juxtaposing research and imagination, Kathleen Ernst breathes new life into their forgotten stories.
Bitters
Bitters is an extended quarrel with God, driven by the desire to recover what is banished to the marginal and apocryphal. In her third collection Seiferle claims whatever originates in the earth as an emissary of the divine, whether it is a starving boy in a supermarket or the maggots thriving in the skin of a cat.
Seraphim
Even houseflies must have their angels.
Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice
of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch,
it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them,
can they blame me? Like all good messengers,
they're just testing whether we are still alive.
By such means, the priest taught me, God creates.
All the living and the dead, just a nursery
for his hatching. So when I found a trinity
of maggots in the abdominal wall
of a living kitten, though I had to pinch
them out, I could not blame them--Shadrach,
Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses
of a homesick God, caught in the furnace
of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.
Against the background and harsh light of the desert Southwest or withing the darkness of European history and religion, Seiferle has created a new kind of beauty: tragic, wise, open to every possibility. And just as the liquor of the title are colorful, earthy draughts of distilled spirits with an ancient medicinal history, so too are they a fitting metaphor for these darkly humorous and curative poems.
Rebecca Seiferle's The Music We Dance To was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and poems from the volume are included in The Best American Poetry 2000. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Memorial, the Writers' Exchange, and the Writers' Union Poetry Prize. Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce won the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She lives in Farmington, NM.
Bloodroot Poems
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Blue Dress
In this quiet, clear-eyed collection, Townsend meditates on loss--childhood bereavement, depression, divorce--to arrive at the realization that it is through loss that we come to possess some of life's most profound gifts.
The project of Alison Townsend's poetry is to chart a course through the deepest of losses--to attempt some safe passage through a lifetime's erasures. Intimate, warm and observant, this book involves us in the inscription of a life.--Mark Doty
Alison Townsend was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and spent her childhood in North Salem, New York. She received a B.A. at Marlboro College in Vermont, an M.A. at Claremont Graduate School in California, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College in Mont-pelier. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.
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Books and Libraries: Poems
Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop
Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation.
It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.Call Us What we Carry
Canoeing a River with No Name
Carpe Noctem
Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems
Dramatic new retellings of Celtic poetry's great lyrics and legends
Cinderbiter collects tales and poems originally composed and performed centuries ago in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, when notions of history and authorship were indistinguishable from the oral traditions of myth and storytelling. In the spirit of recasting these legends and voices for new audiences, celebrated mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw and award-winning poet Tony Hoagland have created extraordinary new versions of these bardic lyrics, folkloric sagas, and heroes' journeys, as they have never been rendered before. In long, shaggy tales of the unlikely ascensions of previously unknown heroes such as Cinderbiter, in the shrouded origin stories of figures such as Arthur and Merlin, and in anonymous flickering lyrics of elegy, praise, and heartbreak, these poems retain at once the rapturous, supernatural imagination of the deep past layered with an austere, devout allegiance to the Christian faith. Shaw and Hoagland's collaboration summons the power within this storehouse of the Celtic mind to arrive at this rare book--distinctive, audacious, and tuned to our time and condition with a convincing resonance.- Please log in to review this product
Come Clean
No matter how smattered my insides, I am relieved that I left my room tidy--
One less ugly sight. I always wanted to die clean & pretty
while my dreams made music in the night.--Excerpt from "Last Words"
Come-Hither Honeycomb
Dead Man's Float
"Bracingly candid, gracefully elegiac, tough, and passionate, Harrison travels the deep river of the spirit." --Booklist
"[Jim Harrison] is still close to the source. . . . Dead Man's Float is, as its title would suggest, a flinty and psalmist look at mortality and wonder." --Los Angeles Times
Two months after the hardback publication of Dead Man's Float, Jim Harrison was found dead in his home office. Harrison always thought he would die young, and when he didn't he became increasingly preoccupied with time. As old age proved to be a harrowing trial, Harrison titled his book after a survival technique used by swimmers during an exhausting journey. This paperback edition includes the poem Harrison was writing at the time of his death, published here for the first time.
From "Bridge"
. . . Sometimes the sea roars and howls like
the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.
What beauty in this the darkest music
over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies . . .
Jim Harrison was the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His books have been translated into two dozen languages, and in 2007 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Dear Azula, I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom
These poems pay homage to the cartoon characters who made us the wicked lovestruck people that we are. These ubiquitous stories of teen ghost boys and water bending women gave wonder to a generation raised by recession. In illustrious villains we learned our own glamour. In chiseled chins and 2D teeth we learned desire. In Dear Azula, I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom we bring the early 2000s renaissance of animation into our modern lives to unpack, celebrate, revel, and remember.