Author: Ruth Stone
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1556593279
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. “Ruth Stone is . . . a pre-eminent American poet.” —Harvard Review

Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1524732575
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called "one of the poetry stars of his generation" (Los Angeles Times). "We sleep long, / if not sound," Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, "Till the end/ we sing / into the wind." In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South--one poem, "Kith," exploring that strange bedfellow of "kin"--the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. "Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead." Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them—of us—poetry can save.

Author: John Stone
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807140406
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Author: Christine Valters Paintner
Publisher: Paraclete Press
ISBN: 1640602356
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
The poems in Dreaming of Stones are about what endures: hope and desire, changing seasons, wild places, love, and the wisdom of mystics. Inspired by the poet’s time living in Ireland these readings invite you into deeper ways of seeing the world. They have an incantational quality. Drawing on her commitment as a Benedictine oblate, the poems arise out of a practice of sitting in silence and lectio divina, in which life becomes the holy text. No stranger to poetry, Paintner’s bestselling spirituality titles have often included poems. In this first exclusively poetic collection, she writes with a contemplative heart about kinship with nature, ancestral connections, intimacy, the landscape, the unfolding nature of time, and Christian mystics. It can be read for reflection to spark the heart and to offer solace and inspiration in difficult times. Breath This breathing in is a miracle, this breathing out, release, this breathing in a welcome to the unseen gifts which sustain me each moment, this breathing out a sweet sigh, a bow to my mortality, this breathing in a holy yes to life, this breathing out a sacred no to all that causes me to clench and grasp, this breathing in is a revelation, this breathing out, freedom.

Author: Caki Wilkinson
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574413090
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 83

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Book Description
The poems in Circles Where the Head Should Be are full of objects and oddities, bits of news, epic catalogues, and a cast of characters hoping to make sense of it all. Underneath the often whimsical surface, however, lies a search for those connections we long for but so often miss, and a wish for art to bridge the gaps.

Author: Mark Leidner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781964499277
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The followup to his beloved debut collection Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, Mark Leidner's Returning the Sword to the Stone is simultaneously profound and irreverent, in the same way that the world is flat as we walk and round as we live. "A child surprised that a neon sign / isn't hot the first time they touch one / knows how it feels as an adult to achieve one's goals" states the speaker of "Youth Is A Fugitive" and this sentiment is one of the central precepts of Returning the Sword to the Stone. Congealing directly off the page, these are poems that only Mark Leidner could have written.

Author: Ruth Stone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Ordinary Words is the luminous, wild, and lyrical collection of poetry that brought Ruth Stone the critical acclaim she long deserved with the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it paved the way to the National Book Award and long-deserved critical attention. Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of Americana, marked by Stone's characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor. Sister poet to Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Syzmborska, Ruth Stone offers a view of her country and its citizens that is tender humorous, and filled with hard political truths as well as love, beauty, cruelty, and sorrow. Ruth Stone is a poet of the people, and poet's poet. Ordinary Words shows that poetry is about everyday life, our life. Poems are set in Rutland, Vermont; Indianapolis; Chattanooga; Houston; Boise; and Troy, New York (where celluloid collars were made). Stone's subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonalds as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters: ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.

Author: Shara McCallum
Publisher: Alice James Books
ISBN: 194857943X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 89

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Book Description
No Ruined Stone is a verse sequence rooted in the life of 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. In 1786, Burns arranged to migrate to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation, a plan he ultimately abandoned. Voiced by a fictive Burns and his fictional granddaughter, a "mulatta" passing for white, the book asks: what would have happened had he gone?

Author: Bianca Stone
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1935639749
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
The much-anticipated debut collection from a celebrated young poet, Someone Else's Wedding Vows marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in American poetry. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

Author: Elana Bell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807144649
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this debut collection, Eyes, Stones, Elana Bell brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The poems invoke characters inexorably linked to the land of Israel and Palestine. There is Zosha, a sharp-witted survivor whose burning hope for a Jewish homeland helps her endure the atrocities of the Holocaust. And there is Amal, a Palestinian whose family has worked their land for over one hundred years -- through Turkish, British, Jordanian, and now Israeli rule. Other poems -- inspired by interviews conducted by the poet in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and America -- examine Jewish and Arab relationships to the land as biblical home, Zionist dream, modern state, and occupied territory.