Ceremony for the Choking Ghost

Ceremony for the Choking Ghost
Author: Karen Finneyfrock
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2010-08-13
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1935904809

After losing her sister to heart failure, Karen Finneyfrock was unable to write poems for three years. Her voice came back, whispering at first, then screaming. Ceremony for the Choking Ghost contains the sound of that voice returning, bringing poems about grief and its effect on the body, the body politic, memory and, of course, poems about love. From the intensely personal, “How My Family Grieved,” to the political, “What Lot’s Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn’t a Pillar of Salt),” Finneyfrock engages the reader with the chiseled images of a precise storyteller. Finneyfrock writes poetry with muscular verve and narrative push. The depth and breadth suggested in just a few polished images placed next to each other will make you reconsider what poetry can do. -Paul Constant, editor The Stranger If you've never enjoyed poetry once in your whole life-if even the word "poetry" makes you want to fall asleep, or die-you should read Karen Finneyfrock's new book of poetry, Ceremony for the Choking Ghost. -Paul Constant, editor The Stranger ...Finneyfrock's poems, then, are Shields's perfect novels: a shelf full of long, elaborate, heartfelt books that have been whittled down to their bare, sharp skeletons. -Paul Constant, editor “The Stranger”

How to Love the Empty Air

How to Love the Empty Air
Author: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2018-05-07
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1938912810

New York Times bestselling nonfiction writer and poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s How to Love the Empty Air reaches new heights in her revelatory seventh collection of poetry. Continuing in her tradition of engaging autobiographical work, How to Love the Empty Air explores what happens when the impossible becomes real?for better and for worse. Aptowicz’s journey to find happiness and home in her ever-shifting world sees her struggling in cities throughout America. When her luck changes?in love and in life?she can’t help but “tell the sun / tell the fields / tell the huge Texas sky.... / tell myself again and again until I believe it.” However, the upward trajectory of this new life is rocked by the sudden death of the poet’s mother. In the year that follows, Aptowicz battles the silencing power of grief with intimate poems burnished by loss and a hard-won humor, capturing the dance that all newly grieving must do between everyday living and the desire “to elope with this grief, / who is not your enemy, / this grief who maybe now is your best friend. / This grief, who is your husband, / the thing you curl into every night, / falling asleep in its arms...” As in her award-winning The Year of No Mistakes, Aptowicz counts her losses and her blessings, knowing how despite it all, life “ripples boundless, like electricity, like joy / like... laughter, irresistible and bright, / an impossible thing to contain.”

My, My, My, My, My

My, My, My, My, My
Author: Tara Hardy
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2017-01-06
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1938912675

Suddenly stricken by a life-threatening condition, the author finds she has slipped into an alternate reality—one in which her life and her livelihood are no longer to be counted on. Oddly, she finds it’s a place populated with not just hope, but a newfound appreciation for the splendors of the physical world. Her fight to stay alive, while terrifying, is deeply vibrant.

Oh God Get Out Get Out

Oh God Get Out Get Out
Author: Bill Moran
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2017-04-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1949342085

Bill Moran's collection, Oh God Get Out Get Out, goes through us like ugly medicine. It wades through his anxietywater— the grief, trauma, mental illness, money, addiction, deceased friends, and long EMS shifts— all pooled inside the depressed deathmetal kid, his thirsty mouth held open and up to heaven, wanting to die. It walks him and his audience through the haunted house that we are, the one we hate living in. It doesn't look away from the dark. It kindly refuses an early exit. It keeps the death off by leaning into it. Hems it in like a band shirt, animal coat, tv show, or god we can wear when our own bodies are worn out. It eats its way out of Moran and his audience, the same way he will leave this world: wet with its Ugly, wearing the Ugly like a deathmetal shirt, carrying armfuls of Ugly out with him. You'll hate the taste, but he swears you can drink this like medicine. When you want to disappear, it is light you can douse yourself in. When you want to get the hell out, it will clean house. It really hopes you'll stay.

Gentleman Practice

Gentleman Practice
Author: Buddy Wakefield
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1935904116

Buddy Wakefield’s third book, Gentleman Practice, documents the figurative contents of a man’s body attempting to stand firm in the presence of all that is. It’s a poetry book, from the perspective of a journal entry in the National Archives. The National Archives live in a building in Seattle behind barbed wire, directly next door to the Center for Spiritual Living. This is no accident. Gentleman Practice is a disarming de-haunting of accidents. There are no stunt doubles performing the honesty in this book. Head raised and victorious, he has crafted a translation of the human spirit on a small, practical patch, with a very fine tooth indeed. And, while many poetry books read like a thick epic series of sections, Gentleman Practice will no doubt rest in your hands like a well-oiled novel.

The Bible and Feminism

The Bible and Feminism
Author: Yvonne Sherwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 730
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0191034185

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. It features a wide range of contributors who showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms, intersectionality, postidentitarian 'nomadic' politics, gender archaeology, and lived religion, and theories of the human and the posthuman. The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field engages a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia, divorce and family law, abortion, 'pinkwashing', the neoliberal university, the second amendment, AIDS and sexual trafficking, and the politics of 'the veil'. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a multitude of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, this collection looks at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It charts the politics of the Pauline veil in the self-understanding of Europe and reads the 'genealogical halls' in the book of Chronicles alongside acts of commemoration and forgetting in 9/11 and Tiananmen Square.

We Will Be Shelter

We Will Be Shelter
Author: Andrea Gibson
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2014-12-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1949342204

We Will be Shelter, edited by poet and activist Andrea Gibson, is an anthology of contemporary poems that addresses issues of social justice. Unique to this anthology is its focus on creating positive social change through gorgeous, gusty poetry. Alongside and embedded in featured poems are concrete ways to address social and political issues raised. The goal of We Will be Shelter is to raise awareness, encourage critical self-reflection, and call readers to action.

Every Little Vanishing

Every Little Vanishing
Author: Sheleen McElhinney
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 83
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1949342468

Winner of 2021 Write Bloody Publishing Book Award. A perfect book for readers searching for the salve of darker verse and recovery poetry. Every Little Vanishing is, at its core, a collection of poetry that will bring you to your knees with its honesty. "...our marriage / a bridge between staying for the children we had or leaving for the people we want to become." "Every Little Vanishing” might change your definition of poetry forever. If you've ever thought of the poem as something that muses and meanders, think again. Sheleen McElhinney writes poems the way novelists write page-turning fiction. Her first lines grab you by the collar and pull you––no––drag you through each word, kicking and screaming until you reach the poem's end. By the last line, you hurt so good you beg Sheleen to do it again. There were times I wanted to rip out the pages of this book and swallow them, desperate to consume the work in as many ways possible. There were times I pressed my ear to this book and heard an ocean of grief. What I mean is, this book will both drown and buoy you." --Megan Falley, Author of Drive Here and Devastate Me, Write Bloody 2018 Co-Author of How Poetry Can Change Your Heart, Chronicle Books, 2019 “Like submarines, Sheleen McElhinney's unflinching poems probe the lightless regions of memory, addiction, loss, longing, and daughter-/sister-/mother-hood. In her debut collection she illuminates the various ruthlessnesses of a ruthless personal history—an illumination powerful enough to reveal a hard won hope, even here among the grief and disappointments of living. This is a poetics of survival that, using as its instruments, a fierce attention to detail and a brazen, uncompromising candor. It wades resolutely through the terrors of inhabiting a body in time and arrives at the one true miracle: the next moment. And the next. And the next.” --Jeremy Radin, Author of Slow Dance With Sasquatch and Dear Sal. ABOUT THE BOOK: These poems drag you to the darkroom of vulnerability where everything is exposed; the wounded child, the wreckless adolescent, the life and death of a sibling to addiction, and the loss of self through marriage and motherhood. These poems hold beneath their hard exterior the soft underbelly of what it means to love and lose. They are for anyone who wants to learn how to grow a new skin, to excavate the body of its grief, to devour it, and to let it choke you.

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic
Author: Rebecca Bridge
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2014-08-22
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1938912594

An easy-to-follow guidebook. This is the ultimate collection of fun and thought provoking writing inspirations, exercises, reflections, and prompts for story writers and poets alike. This book includes prompts, examples, and helpful nuggets of creative power to set you on your way to writing the best work of your life.Your mind is like your attic -- it's already filled with everything you need to write your story or poem -- a lifetime's worth of material. We're here to help you take your memories along with the wealth of words that are already part of your life and assemble them into stories, poems, and essays. Organized around items you might find in an attic, the prompts in this book will help you find inspiration in everyday objects and experiences.

Said The Manic To The Muse

Said The Manic To The Muse
Author: Jeanann Verlee
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 194934214X

Jeanann Verlee's second book, Said the Manic to the Muse, takes a deeper, more focused look at the erratic, whimsical, ominous, and sometimes perilous ways manic depression functions. Introduced through the careful prophecy of three archetypes: Medea, Jezebel, and Kali–each a woman largely misrepresented and wholly misunderstood–these poems detail the story of one woman's struggle to maintain both strength and sanity in the face of abandonment and aging. From dangerous trysts and barroom brawls to "grief-induced psychosis," Said the Manic to the Muse recounts the year she lost everything, including her mind.