1
How to Communicate by
Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the Braille slate to sensuous prose poems to incisive erasures that find new narratives in nineteenth-century poetry. Calling out the limitations of the literary canon, Clark includes pathbreaking translations from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language built on touch. How to Communicate embraces new linguistic possibilities that emanate from Clark's unique perspective and his connection to an expanding, inclusive activist community. Amid the astonishing task of constructing a new canon, the poet reveals a radically commonplace life. He explores grief and the vagaries of family, celebrates the small delights of knitting and visiting a museum, and, once, encounters a ghost in a gas station. Counteracting the assumptions of the sighted and hearing world with humor and grace, Clark finds beauty in the revelations of communicating through touch: "All things living and dead cry out to me / when I touch them." A rare work of transformation and necessary discovery, How to Communicate is a brilliant debut that insists on the power of poetry.
Call Number: PS3603.L36464 H69 2023Publication Date: 2022
Phantom Pain Wings by
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an "I-do-bird-sequence," where "Bird-human is the 'I.'" Her remarkable essay "Bird Rider" explains: "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I've never been." What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in "the eternal void of grief" (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine). Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnes Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.
Call Number: PL992.415.H886 N3513 2023Publication Date: 2023
Not Your Mama's Melting Pot by
"From jump, there was such sonic, emotional, and intellectual drive to these poems, that I couldn't resist-why would I want to-the pull of Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's vision and sensibility. Verve and élan are words I might use, but they lack sufficient verve and élan. And if I wrote, 'his future is bright, ' I'd be wrong-his future is here, and this book is as much fire as I can ask for." --Bob Hicok, author of Hold
Call Number: PS3611.I632565 N68 2018Publication Date: 2018
2
The Trees Witness Everything by
A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called "wakas," each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name--with reverence, economy, and whimsy--the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.
Call Number: PS3603.H3575 T74 2022Publication Date: 2022
Some Animal by
In this cross-genre collection, fragments of memoir rub against the language of psychomedical regimes found in a body unbound by gender binaries. Some Animal draws out dream-like resonances between the impersonal and the experiential, resulting in a collection where "the grotesque and the beautiful crash like waves eroding shore."
Call Number: PS3619.H578 S66 2018Publication Date: 2018
Midwood by
In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl's careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.
Call Number: PS3616.R538 M53 2022Publication Date: 2022
3
Prelude to Bruise by
Praise for Saeed Jones: "Jones is the kind of writer who's more than wanted: he's desperately needed."--FlavorWire "This book leaves your body transformed in a way that poetry should." --ElevenEleven "I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness, and outright joy."--D. A. Powell "Prelude to Bruise works its tempestuous mojo just under the skin, wreaking a sweet havoc and rearranging the pulse. These poems don't dole out mercy. Mr. Jones undoubtedly dipped his pen in fierce before crafting these stanzas that rock like backslap. Straighten your skirt, children. The doors of the church are open."--Patricia Smith "It's a big book, a major book. A game-changer. Dazzling, brutal, real. Not just brilliant, caustic, and impassioned but a work that brings history--in which the personal and political are inter-constitutive--to the immediate moment. Jones takes a reader deep into lived experience, into a charged world divided among unstable yet entrenched lines: racial, gendered, political, sexual, familial. Here we absorb each quiet resistance, each whoop of joy, a knowledge of violence and of desire, an unbearable ache/loss/yearning. This is not just a 'new voice' but a new song, a new way of singing, a new music made of deep grief's wildfire, of burning intelligence and of all-feeling heart, scorched and seared. In a poem, Jones says, 'Boy's body is a song only he can hear.' But now that we have this book, we can all hear it. And it's unforgettable."--Brenda Shaughnessy "Inside each hunger, each desire, speaks the voice of a boy that admits 'I've always wanted to be dangerous.' This is not a threat but a promise to break away from the affliction of silence, to make audible the stories that trouble the dimensions of masculinity and discomfort the polite conversations about race. With impressive grace, Saeed Jones situates the queer black body at the center, where his visibility and vulnerability nurture emotional strength and the irrepressible energy to claim those spaces that were once denied or withheld from him. Prelude to a Bruise is a daring debut."--Rigoberto González From "Sleeping Arrangement": Take your hand out from under my pillow. And take your sheets with you. Drag them under. Make pretend ghosts. I can't have you rattling the bed springs so keep still, keep quiet. Mistake yourself for shadows. Learn the lullabies of lint. Saeed Jones works as the editor of BuzzfeedLGBT.
Call Number: PS3610.O6279 P74 2014Publication Date: 2014
All the Odes by
A career-spanning volume, charting the Nobel laureate's work in the ode form Pablo Neruda was a master of the ode, which he conceived as an homage to just about everything that surrounded him--from an artichoke to the clouds in the sky, from the moon to his own friendship with Federico García Lorca, from the seasons to his favorite places in Chile. He was in his late forties when he committed himself to writing an ode a week and in the end produced a total of 225, which are dispersed throughout his varied oeuvre. This bilingual volume, edited by Ilan Stavans, the distinguished translator and scholar of Latin American literature, gathers all the odes together for the first time in any language. Rendered into English by an assortment of accomplished translators that includes Philip Levine, Paul Muldoon, Mark Strand, and Margaret Sayers Peden, collectively they read like the personal diary of a man in search of meaning who sings to life itself, to our connections with one another, and to the place we have in nature and the cosmos.Allthe Odesis a lasting statement on the role of poetry as a lightning rod during tumultuous times.
Call Number: PQ8097.N4 A2 2013Publication Date: 2013
