Hotel Almighty PDF Download

Author: Sarah J. Sloat
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448656
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 99

View

Book Description
Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty is a book-length erasure of Misery by Stephen King, a reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and possibility in elliptical, enigmatic poems. Here, "joy would crawl over broken glass, if that was the way." Here, sleep is “a circle whose diameter might be small," a circle "pitifully small," a "wrecked and empty hypothetical circle." Paired with Sloat's stunning mixed-media collage, each poem is a miniature canvas, a brief associative profile of the psyche—its foibles, obsessions, and delights.

Author: Kathleen Ossip
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448796
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 127

View

Book Description
In her groundbreaking and most politicized collection, Kathleen Ossip takes a hard look at the U.S.A. as it now stands. She meditates on our various responses to our country—whether ironic, infantile, righteous, or defeated. Her diction is both high and low, her tone both elegant and straightforward. The book’s crowning achievement, its anchor, and its centerpiece is the poem “July.” In a generous fifty pages, Ossip recounts a road trip from Bemidji, MN, to Key West, FL, with her daughter riding shotgun. Inspired by images that flick across their car windows and nurtured by intimate conversation and plenty of time to think, the poem has an entertaining cinematic sweep. There are poems based on bumper stickers, the names of churches, little shops. Traveling tests her beliefs, and Ossip fully discloses her doubts and confusions. Ossip is an unconventional, mighty magician with words.

Author: Isabel Duarte-Gray
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448753
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 85

View

Book Description
Even Shorn takes its title from the Song of Solomon and that Book’s equation of pastoral feminine beauty with the plenty of harvest. Isabel Duarte-Gray argues that material bounty no longer exists in the rural spaces where she was raised. Duarte-Gray’s poetry mines local orature, family history, and folklore for the music of Western Kentucky, creating the sparse line breaks and the harsh syntax of the present. The poems describe quilt patterns with sinister shapes: “a snake’s tongue is a trigger finger/Man’s tongue pleases no one.” Animals proliferate: “One cat became five/five became nine. /Then a flood and ebb/as each moon brought its tide/below the trailer floor...” A grandfather plays drunk, solitary Russian Roulette. A cousin lives in a closet. Duarte’s poetry is shocking, whip smart, and truly unique.

Author: Shawn Wen
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 194644801X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 119

View

Book Description
"Threading the subtle seam between what lives and what remains, A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause succeeds in conjuring the poetry of Marcel Marceau's performance as both a character on stage and in history. . . . Like pulling a ghost from a dark room, this is an accomplished work of historical portraiture: precise in its objects, complex in its melancholy, and insightful in its humor." —Thalia Field Part biographic inquiry, part lyric portraiture, radio producer Shawn Wen reanimates world-renowned mime Marcel Marceau's silent art. The book opens in darkness, a single figure standing in the spotlight. It's Marceau in his signature hat, painted face, black clothes, and ballet slippers. Over time, the text accumulates objects: dolls, paintings, icons, wives, children, cities, and performances. By turns whimsical and melancholic, this spare volume takes shape through capsule histories, interview clips, vivid scenes, and archival research. Shawn Wen is a writer, radio producer, and multimedia artist. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, The Seneca Review, The Iowa Review, The White Review, and the anthology City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis (Faber and Faber, 2015). Her radio work broadcasts regularly on This American Life, Freakonomics Radio, and Marketplace. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Ford Foundation Professional Journalism Training Fellowship and the Royce Fellowship.

Author: Ashley Farmer
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448915
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 179

View

Book Description
Two weeks before her grandfather purchased a gun, Ashley Farmer’s grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day: her chin hit the floor; her cervical spine shattered. She asked, “I’m paralyzed, aren’t I?” Later, thinking to put her out of her misery, he kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years and shot her in the chest. He tried to shoot himself too, but the weapon broke apart in his hands. He was immediately arrested. This is the scene we are greeted with at the outset of Farmer’s stunning collection of hybrid essays. One of its greatest features is the variety of voices, a kaleidoscopic approach that corals in autobiography, audio transcripts, media, legal documents, Internet comments, short prose pieces, and more. The result is a moving, deeply satisfying, eye-opening story that will surely find many readers.

Author: Paul Griner
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 194644877X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

View

Book Description
Liam is the boy, lying in the hospital, in grave condition, a bullet lodged in his head. Otto is his father, a commercial artist whose marriage has collapsed in the wake of the disaster. Paul Griner’s brave novel taps directly into the vein of a uniquely American tragedy: the school shooting. We know these grotesque and sorrowful events too well. Thankfully, the characters in this drama are finely drawn human beings—those who gain our empathy, those who commit the unspeakable acts, and those conspiracy fanatics who launch a concerted campaign to convince the world that the shooting was a hoax. The Book of Otto and Liam is a suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat read and, at the same time, it is a meditation on the forms evil can take, from the irredeemable act of the shooter himself, to the anger and devastation it causes in the victims’ families. Griner has managed to make an amazing, incredibly powerful book, one that is like no other.

Author: Jenny Johnson
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 194141138X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 88

View

Book Description
These poems, likened to Elizabeth Bishop's, are about desire, love, seeing, gender, difference, ecology, queerness in the "natural" world, loss, LGBTQ lineage, and its community. They contain a sinuous, shape-shifting quality that makes her explorations of sex and selfhood all the more resonant. Jenny Johnson won a 2015 Whiting Fellowship. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Author: William Sarabande
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553579061
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497

View

Book Description
Dark forces are at work within the realms of earth and sky, and a savage new dance of life and death is about to begin....the internationally acclaimed saga of the First Americans continues in this long-awaited novel from bestseller William Sarabande. As the Ice Age draws to a close, the men and women living on the northeast coast of the North American continent struggle to adapt to their rapidly changing environment. Ancient cultures clash as warriors battle for vital hunting territories. When a mammoth is seen in a forest, the shaman, who is also brother to the headman, conjures wondrous and terrifying visions for his imperiled band as he goads them to hunt a beast that may be the last of its kind. Although an ancient legend promises death for the People on the day that the last mammoth dies, the shaman counters with a legendary promise of his own--that those who dare hunt, kill, and consume the flesh of the mammoth will be made invincible in battle. The hunt is successful but the headman is killed--and the shaman comes to power and takes possession of his brother's woman and daughter. Although he has no suspicion of his uncle's treachery, the eldest son of the former headman must live with the fear of the charging mammoth that caused him to feign injury rather than risk his own life to save his father's. Now, as the last mammoth walks the land, a young warrior who has lost nearly everything to his enemies must learn new ways, or die in a world where men, women, and even children dare not be less than heroes.

Author: Amy Wright
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448818
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 129

View

Book Description
How to capture Amy Wright’s Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round, a one-of-a-kind book-length essay containing a multitude of individual voices? Wright, conductor extraordinaire, has managed to piece apart, then fold together conversations from a bevy of thinkers like Dorothy Allison, Rae Armantrout, Gerald Stern, Lia Purpura, Raven Jackson, Wendy Walters, Kimiko Hahn, Philanese Slaughter, and others, blended into one harmonious whole. Wright opens the book: “This essay anchors a central thread of dialogue over a dizzying divide. It weaves a decades worth of questions and answers from a range of discussions I’ve had with artists, activists, scientists, philosophers, physicians, priests, musicians, and other representatives of the human population. Some of them are famous, some will be, some should be—but all of them refract the light of the unknowable mystery of the self.” The subjects range from the interconnected (inspiration and craft) to the seemingly disparate (colonialism and entomophagy), all with the hope of finding what truly matters to us. If this book is a paper concert, it is a symphony. Just pull up a chair and listen.

Author: Hai-Dang Phan
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 194644829X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 81

View

Book Description
In Reenactments, poet Hai-Dang Phan explores the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as a second-generation Vietnamese American. Woven throughout the poems is a narrative of his family’s exodus from Vietnam that beautifully elucidates the American record of immigration, dislocation, inheritance, and ultimately hope. The poems are persuasively varied in their approach. The past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles, providing bold new perspectives. And, in a fresh move, Phan widens the lens, interspersing translations of several other contemporary Vietnamese poems to the mix. This subtle and moving debut is an important addition to the literature of immigration.