InThe Infinity Roomthe reader will find polished, precise poems that are built around the author's experiences of touring Nevada's atomic bomb test sites, the Chernobyl disaster site, and Oak Ridge, ...as well as living for decades near Three Mile Island. These iconic landmarks of the threat of nuclear technology become more than talking points as they provide grounding for narratives of faith and skepticism from multiple viewpoints that employ science, religion, history, myth, politics, and popular culture, including a piece about the author's experience as a student at Kent State at the time of the National Guard shooting. The poems here are tightly controlled but electric, dark yet vibrant with love and longing, and packed with memorable characters and places that are presented through a singular, lyrical voice that connects us to what it means to be human.
A masterfully curated collection, drawn from a century of works in the acclaimed Yale Series of Younger Poets The Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. ...Its winners include some of the most influential voices in American poetry, including Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Forché, and Robert Hass. In celebration of the prize's centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
In an essay on his own work in New American Poets of the Golden Gate, Jack Gilbert writes that "I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selection…one of the special pleasures in poetry for me ...is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible." Gilbert's poetry is distinguished by sparse lyricism, forthright clarity of tone, and controlled emotion regarding everyday life and relationships. In his foreword toViews of Jeopardy, Fitts identifies the origins of this approach, calling Gilbert's "abrupt hard mode of expression" the result of preoccupation with "alienation from one's kind, the painful throwing back of the artist upon himself, the compulsive elaboration of the details of a personal myth."
Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives
re-examines the poetry and scholarship of three of the foremost
figures in the twentieth-century history of U.S.-American
anthropology: Edward Sapir, ...Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. While
they are widely renowned for their contributions to Franz Boas's
early twentieth-century school of cultural relativism, what is far
less known is their shared interest in probing the representational
potential of different media and forms of writing. This dimension
of their work is manifest in Sapir's critical writing on music and
literature and Mead's groundbreaking work with photography and
film. Sapir, Mead, and Benedict together also wrote more than one
thousand poems, which in turn negotiate their own media status and
rivalry with other forms of representation. A. Elisabeth Reichel
presents the first sustained study of the published and unpublished
poetry of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, charting this largely
unexplored body of work and relevant selections of the writers'
scholarship. In addition to its expansion of early
twentieth-century literary canons, Writing Anthropologists,
Sounding Primitives contributes to current debates about the
relations between different media, sign systems, and modes of sense
perception in literature and other media. Reichel offers a unique
contribution to the history of anthropology by synthesizing and
applying insights from the history of writing, sound studies, and
intermediality studies to poetry and scholarship produced by noted
early twentieth-century U.S.-American cultural anthropologists.
The poems in Plasma , Bradley Paul’s third book, use common objects, animals, people, and experiences as starting points to consider one’s connectivity to the world. Riddles and obituaries alternate ...with rants and memories of things that never existed or that the speaker has never seen – or that he has, and struggles to remember. The title is inspired by all our conceptions of plasma: an infinitely conductive state of matter in which the many disparate parts act collectively to create a single, ever-shifting whole. The part of the blood that communicates and provides. The ethereal medium by which we watch thousands of electronic images, sounds, and stories.
Getting to Gardisky Lake switchbacks from roadside maples to backcountry sequoia groves, from the lost curves of a high school track to the shining calves of Olympic hopefuls, from grade school ...crushes to married affection, from Jefferson’s slaves to Sherman’s march, from dumpster diving to shopping the mall.  These poems contain American multitudes, some whispering in sincerity and others bragging with thumbs hooked in their belt loops.  In this rich collection, Paul J. Willis invites you in and ushers you out to meet your neighbors and yourself .
Asylum
presents the kind of journey John Clare might have taken in 1841 if, when he escaped the madhouse, he'd been traveling in his head rather than on his feet. Lola Haskins starts out with as ...little sense of direction as Clare had, and yet, after wandering all over the map, she too finally reaches her destination. The four sections in this book are where she rests for the night. The first looks tenderly at the cycle of human life. The second renders the world around her as if she were painting it. By the third, having lost her way, she turns to the supernatural and in the process is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The book ends as she finds it again and arrives in her dear north-west England, having learned from John Clare that she "can be homeless at home and half-gratified to find I can be happy anywhere."
Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge—particularly of the atomic bombs the US dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions ...of atomic tests the US conducted throughout the twentieth century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience. As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author's grandfather's possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. At times, Hawk Parable borrows language from declassified nuclear test films, survivor accounts of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, scientific studies of bird migrations through the Nevada Test Site, and the author's grandfather's letters. This book enacts what it means to encounter fragments—of historical records, family stories, and survivor accounts—through exploring a variety of forms. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.
Gerald Costanzo, long known as one of the best contemporary poets of satire, focuses specifically on American themes that, though presented as parables, fables, jokes, and put-ons, remain darkly ...serious in tone. His subject is the mythic landscape of America itself: the transitory, popular, consumer culture of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life. Costanzo evokes a sense of having arrived on the scene too late, of having missed the heyday of American innocence and possibility, and now-in the present-is forced to live with diminished experience. He mourns a culture where genuine emotion cannot be found but where its semblance can be endlessly marketed. Regular Haunts is a retrospective collection of Costanzo's work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.
Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates ...his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject -- Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself -- that is unwilling to fall under his spell.
