The Back Country

The Back Country
Author: Gary Snyder
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1971-01-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0811222802

“A reaffirmation of a back country of the spirit."—Kirkus Reviews This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"—poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"—poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"—poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back"—poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the "backward" countries, and the “back country" of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.

No Nature

No Nature
Author: Gary Snyder
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1992
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

"The greatest of living nature poets. . . . It helps us to go on, having Gary Snyder in our midst."--Los Angeles Times. Snyder is the author of many volumes of poetry and prose, including The Practice of the Wild and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island. Reading tour. "From the Trade Paperback edition.

How to Love a Country

How to Love a Country
Author: Richard Blanco
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0807025917

A timely and moving collection from the renowned inaugural poet on issues facing our country and people—immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more. Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, Richard Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all. Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive. The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.

Inside Out & Back Again

Inside Out & Back Again
Author: Thanhha Lai
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0702251178

Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

My Mountain Country

My Mountain Country
Author: Lijun Ye
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9780999261347

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. In this remarkable English debut, award-winning Chinese contemporary poet Ye Lijun offers readers a lyrical diorama of nature and the inner world. By turns intimate and profound, Ye's poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain's masterful translations make music of everyday silences, and illuminate the invisible openings in our lives. In this vital collection by one of China's essential literary voices, each encounter is an invitation, wherein a village, a nest, a telescope, or a book proves to be a transient guide to the unknown. "Fiona Sze-Lorrain brings her sense of immediacy, and her lucid control of tone, to these inspired translations of Ye Lijun which capture, with unerring musicality, the rhythms of the original Chinese."--Martha Kapos "Ye Lijun's quiet, powerful poems accrete from places, memories, affect, and ideas unique to the poet. The distinctiveness of Ye's diction, metaphors, and associations make her imagination and intelligence anchor in ours. We come away from Ye's mountain, her house, her books, her loves, and return to those of our own with our senses made more acute. Translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a gifted poet herself, creates an English-language voice for Ye Lijun that has all the grace and surprise of the original."--Thomas Moran "[T]he joys revealed in MY MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, which bring together a selection of poems from her three books, elegantly translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, suggest that for an acute observer of the natural world every hour, secret or not, may become an occasion for opening, 'in clarity,' to the beloved, to nature, to the invisible--leaves and roses and flowering trees that at a moment's notice may awaken in her soul, alerting her once again to the mysterious bounty of life on earth."--Christopher Merrill

Flyover Country

Flyover Country
Author: Austin Smith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2018-10-02
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0691181578

A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.

Country Music

Country Music
Author: Charles Wright
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0819572268

A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet's career. Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.

Notes from the Divided Country

Notes from the Divided Country
Author: Suji Kwock Kim
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2003
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780807128725

Offers poems of family, history, love, and vision.

Back to the Light

Back to the Light
Author: George Ella Lyon
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0813181178

Acclaimed poet George Ella Lyon returns with a brilliant new collection that traces the arc of a woman's life from girlhood to mature womanhood. In answer to the first poem, "Little Girl Who Knows Too Much," Lyon embarks on a journey from a child who was silenced to "Some Big Loud Woman" who claims the right to a voice. Along the way she meets allies and guides including Dickinson, Woolf, Mary Travers, Grace Paley, and the giver of dreams. As sailors once navigated by the stars, so Lyon navigates by these luminaries. They are not distant, though. Their light is always near. Alternately witty, tender, shocking, and visionary, Back to the Light reveals the reunion of body and spirit, truth and story. In the process, it demonstrates the power of poetry to liberate and to heal.