Sing

Sing
Author: Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2011-10
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0816528918

A multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation. Unprecedented in scope, Sing gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile, and features familiar names like Sherwin Bitsui, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Lee Maracle, and Simon Ortiz alongside international poets--both emerging and acclaimed--from regions underrepresented in anthologies.

The Song Poet

The Song Poet
Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2016-05-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1627794956

From the author of The Latehomecomer, a powerful memoir of her father, a Hmong song poet who sacrificed his gift for his children's future in America In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.

Today in the Taxi

Today in the Taxi
Author: Sean Singer
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Total Pages: 75
Release: 2022-12-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1946482854

From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck

Native American Songs and Poems

Native American Songs and Poems
Author: Brian Swann
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 65
Release: 1996-09-18
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0486294501

Rich selection of traditional songs and contemporary verse by Seminole, Hopi, Arapaho, Nootka, other Indian writers and poets. Nature, tradition, Indians' role in contemporary society, other topics.

Nerve Squall

Nerve Squall
Author: Sylvia Legris
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2005
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781552451601

Winner of the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize Sonic congestion. Purgatorial traffic jam: corkscrewing countercochlearwise the only way out. Nerve Squall is a field guide like no other, a surreal handbook to a landscape at the crossroads of meteorology and neurology, where the electrical storms without and the electrical impulses within converge. Legris's fascination with weather, ghosts and brain disorders is the starting point for a collection of poetry that ensures you'll never look at nature the same way again. You'll find snow golems and ghost cats, and a sky filled with fish swimming the winds of a storm. And you'll find a haunted terrain where the natural world becomes an allegory for our most intimate fears. Despite their dark and often cinematic approach, these poems are also tinged with a sly, apocalyptic wit that can't help but laugh as the sky falls. Nerve Squall is a vital exploration of the symbiosis of storm, nerve and language, a sure-handed guide to the end of the world. 'Legris loves language, the way it radiates, not just for what it can say by syntactic regularity and accumulation, but for its cellular resonances ... Powerful resonance is created over a whole page with a minimum of words, in a sculpture that hardly qualifies as verse as we commonly know it. But there is no question that it is poetry, and [that it] is the use of words at its most pared. Here is Legris' brilliance, her knife-edged attention at its finest.' - Open Letter

Bud's Book of Poetry

Bud's Book of Poetry
Author: Bud Peka
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2023-08-22
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

In this book, I have covered a broad spectrum of topics in my poetry: faith, hope, charity, and love of God and neighbor, as Christ taught us to do. Subjects include church holy days, life and death, sickness, human relations, nature, humor, the changing seasons, the poor, the abused, the addicted, the homeless, pets, and wildlife. Being a WWII veteran, war and those who have served, been injured or died, the MIAs, and patriotism have always been important in my life. Each holiday or season inspires me to write about the current happenings. No two people see things the same, so I enjoy letting others see into my thoughts at the time a poem was written. Writing poetry is a shorthand to express my feelings and emotions on topics that are important to me. I hope you enjoy my poetry and ramblings through a variety of topics. With God’s help, I shall write as long as I can sit at a keyboard. Thank you for your interest in this endeavor. ***** My Finale I hear the Lord calling, He’s calling me home, that’s why I’m writing, this poet’s last poem. I love You, my dear Lord, when You call, I’ll be there, it is You I’ve adored, You have answered my prayer. When You do call me, I’ll write no more poems, I pray I’ll be taken, to my heavenly home. Bud

Garden Physic

Garden Physic
Author: Sylvia Legris
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0811229912

A musical celebration of the garden, from chaff to grass, and all of its lowly weeds, herbs, and creatures Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world’s most cherished pastimes: Gardening! “At the center of the garden the heart,” she writes, “Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff.” As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris’s poems map the garden as body and the body as garden—her words at home in the phytological and anatomical—like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky’s “80 Flowers.” In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation—spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.

Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life

Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life
Author: Marta McDowell
Publisher: Timber Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1604699752

“A visual treat as well as a literary one…for gardeners and garden lovers, connoisseurs of botanical illustration, and those who seek a deeper understanding of the life and work of Emily Dickinson.” —The Wall Street Journal Emily Dickinson was a keen observer of the natural world, but less well known is the fact that she was also an avid gardener—sending fresh bouquets to friends, including pressed flowers in her letters, and studying botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke. At her family home, she tended both a small glass conservatory and a flower garden. In Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, award-winning author Marta McDowell explores Dickinson’s deep passion for plants and how it inspired and informed her writing. Tracing a year in the garden, the book reveals details few know about Dickinson and adds to our collective understanding of who she was as a person. By weaving together Dickinson’s poems, excerpts from letters, contemporary and historical photography, and botanical art, McDowell offers an enchanting new perspective on one of America’s most celebrated but enigmatic literary figures.