Department of Elegy

Department of Elegy
Author: MARY. BIDDINGER
Publisher:
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2022-01-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9781625570291

Part post-punk ghost story, part Gen-X pastoral, Mary Biddinger's poetry collection DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY conjures dim nightclubs, churning lakes, and vacant Midwestern lots, meditating on moments of lost connection. With the afterlife looming like fringe around the edges of this book, Biddinger constructs a view of heaven as strange as the world left behind. These poems escort us from forest to dance floor, bathtub to breakwater, memory into present. "In DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY, Mary Biddinger examines the hot pink ignorance of youth and the equally vulnerable present. These thrillingly nimble, funny poems empathize with hunger and long for longing."--Jennifer L. Knox "The Talking Heads once asked, 'How did I get here?' a rhetorical interrogation that happens at the very point where our past and present lives intersect. Time's fulcrum, and all its possibilities, even the imaginary ones, are the deep gothic heart that powers Mary Biddinger's DEPARTMENT OF ELEGY. This collection savors its sadness but never wallows in it, just as it asks the reader to take all the joys of the world and taste them. If an elegy is a song of mourning, these poems--with their abiding love for the human experience and a generous dollop of empathy--are an invitation to the most rollicking Irish wake you've ever attended. They remind us that we come together not only to mourn but also to celebrate the things that ask us to say goodbye."--Steve Kistulentz "Mary Biddinger's seventh poetry collection guides readers across the dangerous terrain between memory and chaos with confidence, bravado, and--ultimately--hard-won expertise. The speakers' words themselves sustain a series of exquisite and delicate tensions between utterance and erasure, between form and improvisation, anchored throughout by a series of 'Book' poems ('Book of Hard Passes,' 'Book of the Sea,' 'Book of Misdeeds,' 'Book of Transgressions,' 'Book of Disclosures,' 'Book of Mild Regrets'). The emotional undercurrent of this collection samples such a wide range of life and existence that we are left wondering where time goes and why so quickly, from the ritualistic taste of the insides of gloves, to the realization that once '...your friends have perished under tragic circumstances / eventually they become like beloved characters from books.'"--Erica Bernheim Poetry. Fiction.

Partial Genius

Partial Genius
Author: Mary Biddinger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2019-08-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781625570062

Poetry. "I love this book so much. A work of meticulous craft and profound originality, Mary Biddinger's newest collection of prose poems is one of the best books I've read on our historical moment and the decades that led to it. PARTIAL GENIUS reads like a dossier of the psychological landscape of late capitalist America and the end of empire. In the tradition of John Ashbery, but wholly original in her own vision and voice, Biddinger draws from a deep well of poetic intellect and wit to illuminate the existential threats and imaginative possibilities of our collective self-destruction. In 'The Subject Pool' the speaker watches a man tattoo AU COURANT around her thigh. The tattoo artist has no idea. Every poem is chock-full of revelations in every detail. Reading this book felt like sitting by the fire in some secret location with a double agent, smoking her pipe telling tales of all that went down right in front of our faces, while we were all driven to distraction by outrage. To paraphrase Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, She's got it all in this book."--Heather Derr-Smith "'How many days since you began your last panic...?' Mary Biddinger asks in her latest collection. Quirky, imaginative, and wry in tone, PARTIAL GENIUS is a book that thwarts expectation, turns convention on its head, surprises and delights. Within a narrative scaffolded like a twisting stairway or maze-like hall, these fascinating poems feature high school reunions, job interviews, broken dioramas, and birth control pills; they showcase apologies, parlor games, and consolation prizes, intricacies, illusions, and tricks. Comfort is found in a bar of bathroom soap. An assistant manager wonders why a blazer is named for fire. A radio is implanted in the chest as a companion to the heart. Spheres of uncertainty juxtaposed against landscapes of failure create the book's complex beauty and dangerous edge, as Biddinger claims, 'The best part of figure skating was getting cut.' PARTIAL GENIUS comes to us as both a study of despair and a gleaming beacon of hope."--Jennifer Militello

Elegy for Iris

Elegy for Iris
Author: John Bayley
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1466854243

"I was living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending--in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing." So John Bayley describes his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English-speaking world, revered for her works of philosophy and beloved for her incandescent novels. In Elegy for Iris, Bayley attempts to uncover the real Iris, whose mysterious world took on darker shades as she descended into Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a luminous memoir about the beauty of youth and aging, and a celebration of a brilliant life and an undying love.

Appalachian Reckoning

Appalachian Reckoning
Author: Anthony Harkins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Appalachian Region
ISBN: 9781946684790

In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover

Paper: An Elegy

Paper: An Elegy
Author: Ian Sansom
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2013-10-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0007481071

A witty, personal and entertaining reflection on the history and meaning of paper during the (passing) era of its universal importance.

Poems of Edward Thomas

Poems of Edward Thomas
Author: Edward Thomas
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 159051579X

Since the publication of Walter de la Mare's first edition of his poems in 1920, Edward Thomas has gradually come to be seen as one of the great English poets of the 20th century. Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg, and Sassoon as a "war poet," he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war. His main subjects were the English countryside and people, solitude, and the anguish of solipsism. As de la Mare wrote eighty years ago, "When Edward Thomas was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered of so pure and true a crystal that a clearer and tenderer reflection of it can be found no other where than in these poems." This complete collection of Thomas's poems returns us to the ongoing relevance of this essential poet. Revealing a poet whose work resonates in our times, this volume will be returned to again and again. The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow And true love parting blackens a bright morrow: Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen. But greater sorrow from less love has been That can mistake lack of despair for hope And knows not tempest and the perfect scope Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual Of drops that from remorse and pity fall And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw, Removed eternally from the sun's law. - Last Poem [The sorrow of true love]

Saint Monica

Saint Monica
Author: Mary Biddinger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Adolescence
ISBN: 9780982876619

Poetry. Mary Biddinger's poetry collection SAINT MONICA reinvents the saint as an everyday girl coming of age in the rust belt Midwest. These poems explore temptation, transgression, and heavenly presences in a landscape that is far from holy. "Biddinger crisply narrates these memorable tales that entwine horror and sensual discovery, using deft rhythms, head-snapping line breaks, and highly original imagery." Rachel Dacus"

Small Enterprise

Small Enterprise
Author: Mary Biddinger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781625579256

Poetry. The time: creeping toward the millennium, yet before Y2K panic inspires everyone to stockpile bottled water and cheap wine. The place: a Midwestern metropolis with echoes of Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, a city trying to preserve the past as a future arrives with gut rehabs and shuttered churches. The dramatis personae: corner bar denizens, bad girls with big plans, novels and their writers, a petulant lake, flocks of grandmothers with rosaries, a wrecking ball or two. Mary Biddinger's fourth full- length collection of poems, SMALL ENTERPRISE, introduces us to a world of risk and risk management, a continual struggle to stay afloat, and a hot triangular romance between man, woman, and city.

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy
Author: J D Vance
Publisher: Harper Large Print
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780063438354

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story... From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "You will not read a more important book about America this year."--The Economist "A riveting book."--The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."--David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth

Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9781938086922

Climate change is the great existential reality of our time. How we approach this crisis will affect life on Earth for all present and future generations. In spite of our collective ideals, irreversible damage to the environment is imminent and represents both an urgent local and global concern. Through photographs of an acutely endangered landscape, Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth explores the deep paradox between the devout, powerful presence of nature and environmental loss and damage.Extending eighteen miles along Central California's famed coastline and divided into both a natural preserve and a state vehicular recreation area, the Oceano Dune complex has long fascinated photographers and artists such as Edward and Brett Weston and Ansel Adams. The ephemeral, ever-changing landscape here expresses a sublime order and reflects the many correlations between the land and the dynamics of human society. Using metaphors that inspire hope and explore impermanence and darkness contrasted with the purity of suffusing light, Ulrich's photographs have been likened to Mark Rothko's "silence and solitude" that express the resonance and subtle dimensions of consciousness.The coastal environment of the Oceano Dunes is tempered by multiple threats such as incessant motorized activity, the toxicity of surrounding industrial-scale agriculture, and the second-worst air quality in the nation. Thus, for the title and sequence of the images, the photographer employs the literary form of an elegy, an extended reflection and lamentation on Earth during the twenty first century. An elegy refers to a poetic reflection of sorrow and love, often for a transient, mortal entity. As Ulrich writes: "Sorrow and love for Earth, indeed. No better articulation exists for my regard for our dying planet and common mother."