Author: Michael SIMMs Publisher: ISBN: 9781933974439 Category : Languages : en Pages : 116
Book Description
In this richly imagined collection of poems, Michael Simms draws inspiration from history, psychology, biology, and astronomy, yet at heart he is simply a man with stories to tell. A poet returns home from the funeral of his parents to find that the language of grief is inadequate to describe his complicated relationship with his father, so he invents new words to describe his feelings. An autistic boy on a family vacation to Carlsbad Caverns descends deep into the earth, and breathing the darkness, he becomes a bat. A high school performance of Euripides's The Trojan Women becomes a terrifying prediction of what will happen to one of the girls after graduation. A conversation between two old men about Schubert's Death and the Maiden recalls accusations of sexual harassment one of the friends faces. And in a humorous ars poetica, Simms dreams of kidnapping Charles Bukowski and spiriting him to an AA meeting where Buk slings insults, jumps out the window and flies to the nearest bar on black wings, leading Simms to realize that American poetry needs its misfits and outlaws, and in fact, he prefers poems with a little dirt on them. Simms is a poet who writes as easily about the microfauna in a compost bin as about the complexities of love. He explains the hermeneutics of suspicion as adroitly as a visit to a dog park. He describes an old couple at the seashore through the eyes of an artist drawing them and the climate crises from the perspective of a bronze age king watching his city crumble. Gifted, smart, and flawed, frank about his alcoholism and other personal failings, Simms gives us poems that twist and turn and yet always remain clear in their intent. His empathy is all-embracing, and he challenges the reader's expectations by elegantly expressing abstract ideas through wildly creative, wholly original imagery. These poems keep returning to their central concern of how love can endure in a world that is collapsing. In language both musical and vernacular, Michael Simms stretches the limits of poetic autobiography until personal anecdote rises to the level of timeless myth.
Author: Michael SIMMs Publisher: ISBN: 9781933974392 Category : Languages : en Pages : 94
Book Description
A collection of poems traces one man's raw, funny and poignant evolution to maturity and acceptance. The poems range widely in style and use a broad diction that includes the slang of the streets and the tender language of love, as well as concepts of history, politics and science.
Author: Melanie Simms Publisher: Finishing Line Press ISBN: 9781646627301 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 96
Book Description
"In a dark time the eye begins to see," wrote Theodore Roethke. The poets of this remarkable collection are the eyes by which we begin to see not only the darkness of our harrowing COVID year but also the strength, the necessary strength, to write and create in the midst of it all. In that way, this collection is both a document and a promise of what we can all summon in order to persevere. -Richard Deming, Director of Creative Writing, Winner of the Berlin prize, Yale University "Despite the darkness responsible for the origin of these poems, Melanie Simms has brightened the world by compiling a small, but compelling anthology. I, for one, am happy to have work included among such a varied, engaging collection." -Gary Fincke, author of The Infinity Room and The Mussolini Diaries. Founding Director of the Writer's Institute, Susquehanna University
Author: Dominique Christina Publisher: Beacon Press ISBN: 0807009318 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 114
Book Description
The reimagined story of Anarcha, an enslaved Black woman, subjected to medical experiments by Dr. Marion Sims. Selected by Tyehimba Jess as a National Poetry Series winner. In this provocative collection by award-winning poet and artist Dominique Christina, the historical life of Anarcha is personally reenvisioned. Anarcha was an enslaved Black woman who endured experimentation and torture at the hands of Dr. Marion Sims, more commonly known as the father of modern gynecology. Christina enables Anarcha to tell her story without being relegated to the margins of history, as a footnote to Dr. Sims’s life. These poems are a reckoning, a resurrection, and a proper way to remember Anarcha . . . and grieve her.
Author: Kwoya Fagin Maples Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813176298 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 96
Book Description
The inventor of the speculum, J. Marion Sims, is celebrated as the "father of modern gynecology," and a memorial at his birthplace honors "his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike." These tributes whitewash the fact that Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on eleven enslaved African American women. Lent to Sims by their owners, these women were forced to undergo operations without their consent. Today, the names of all but three of these women are lost. In Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims's autobiography: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims's lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as "bruised fruit." At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience.
Author: Michael SIMMs
Author: Michael SIMMs
Author: Melanie Simms
Author: 
Author: Samuel Albert Link
Author: RICHARD. HAWTREE
Author: Michael Simms
Author: Dominique Christina
Author: Kwoya Fagin Maples
Author: Alice Cary