Illiterate Heart

Illiterate Heart
Author: Meena Alexander
Publisher: TriQuarterly Books
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2002
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

Winner, 2002 PEN Open Book Award Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Meena Alexander's poetry emerges as a consciousness moving between the worlds of memory and the present, enhanced by multiple languages. Her experience of exile is translated into the intimate exploration of her connections to both India and America. In one poem the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi visits with her while she speaks on the phone in her New York apartment, and in another she evokes fellow-poet Allen Ginsberg in the India she herself has left behind. Drawing on the fascinating images and languages of her dual life, Alexander deftly weaves together contradictory geographies, thoughts, and feelings.

Birthplace with Buried Stones

Birthplace with Buried Stones
Author: Meena Alexander
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2013-09-30
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0810152398

"With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander's poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both everywhere and nowhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether walking a city street or reading Bashō in the Himalayas, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war, the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath. The poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones range widely over time and place, from Alexander's native India to New York City. Uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world, Alexander's poetry is an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and its capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard." -- back cover.

Hungry Heart

Hungry Heart
Author: Jennifer Weiner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476723400

Previously listed (and titled "The F Word") in the Spring/Summer 2013 Hotlist. Back orders are holding. From bad blind dates to modern childbirth to handling her six-year-old daughter's use of the f-word -fat - for the first time, Jennifer Weiner goes there, with the wit and candor that have endeared her to readers all over the world. Print run 250,000.

Raw Silk

Raw Silk
Author: Meena Alexander
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2004-07-29
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0810151588

Alexander's cross-cultural perspective and sense of global identity (gained from her childhood in India and the Sudan, and her adult life in New York City) infuses her poems. She writes about violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope in the midst of a post-September 11 world.

Poems for a Small Planet

Poems for a Small Planet
Author: Robert Pack
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN:

Eight-three poets forge a vision of nature for the post-industrial age.

America Is in the Heart

America Is in the Heart
Author: Carlos Bulosan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0295805013

First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.

Fault Lines

Fault Lines
Author: Meena Alexander
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1558612823

In this evocative memoir, an acclaimed Indian poet explores writing, memory, and place in a post-9/11 world. Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Fault Lines follows one woman’s evolution as a writer at home—and in exile—across continents and cultures. Meena Alexander was born into a privileged childhood in India and grew into a turbulent adolescence in the Sudan, before moving to England and then New York City. With poetic insight and devastating honesty, Alexander explores how trauma and recovery shaped the entire landscape of her memory: of her family, her writing process, and her very self. This new edition, published on the two-year anniversary of Alexander's passing in 2018, will feature a commemorative afterword celebrating her legacy. "Alexander's writing is imbued with a poetic grace shot through with an inner violence, like a shimmering piece of two-toned silk." —Ms. Magazine "Evocative and moving." —Publishers Weekly “One of the most important literary voices in South Asian American writing and American letters broadly writ, Meena Alexander’s close examination of exile and migration lays bare the heart of a poet.” —Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son

Illiterate America

Illiterate America
Author: Jonathan Kozol
Publisher: Doubleday
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2011-11-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0307800571

It is startling and it is shaming: in a country that prides itself on being among the most enlightened in the world, 25 million American adults cannot read the poison warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter from their child’s teacher, or the front page of a newspaper. An additional 35 million read below the level needed to function successfully in our society. The United States ranks forty-ninth among 158 member nations of the UN in literacy, and wastes over $100 billion annually as a result. The problem is not merely an embarrassment, it is a social and economic disaster. In Illiterate America, Jonathan Kozol, author of National Book Award-winning Death at an Early Age, addresses this national disgrace. Combining hard statistics and heartrending stories, he describes the economic and the human costs of illiteracy. Kozol analyses and condemns previous government action—and inaction—and, in a passionate call for reform, he proposes a specific program to conquer illiteracy. One out of every three American adults cannot read this book—which is why everyone else must.