Poetry and the Language of Oppression

Poetry and the Language of Oppression
Author: Carmen Bugan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198868324

A first-hand account of the creative process that engages with the language of oppression and with politics in our time. How does the poet become attuned to the language of the world's upheaval? How does one talk insightfully about suffering, without creating more of it? What is freedom in language and how does the poet who has endured political oppression write himself or herself free? What is literary testimony? Poetry and the Language of Oppression is a consideration of the creative process that rests on the conviction that poetry is of help in moments of public duress, providing an illumination of life and a healing language. Oppression, repression, expression, as well as their tools (prison, surveillance, gestures in language) have been with us in various forms throughout history, and this volume represents a particular aspect of these conditions of our humanity as they play out in our time, providing another instance of the communion, and sometimes confrontation, with the language that makes us human.

In the Language of My Captor

In the Language of My Captor
Author: Shane McCrae
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2016-01-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0819577138

Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017) Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

Postcolonial Love Poem

Postcolonial Love Poem
Author: Natalie Diaz
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1644451131

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Histories of Violence

Histories of Violence
Author: Brad Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-01-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1783602406

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

Yeah No

Yeah No
Author: Jane Gregory
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: American poetry
ISBN: 9780998829029

Poetry. Jane Gregory's mystifying second collection, YEAH NO, begins with a "Knock knock," inviting the reader into a realmwhere "Everything is a pattern / of yesses and no." Within these pages we find Gregory constructing a multivalent world--ripe with struggle, prophecy, and, by the end, a resemblance of hope. Using her highly-tuned sensibility throughout, Gregory guides us through the anxieties of this journey by inventing new and enigmatic forms filled with sonic experimentation and polyphony. YEAH NO builds upon the singular vision found within her previous collection, MY ENEMIES, and continues her elegant and challenging address to poetry. "At the beginning it feels almost awkward (as well as anguished). Written in poems that are accretions containing both language that's constantly questioned and a more subtle, subterranean lyricism: 'the bower made of agitation' seems to be the form, and the book seems to be about being agitated by different impulses. Suddenly, more than mid-way, everything comes together into a new tone, and what was hesitance. is a method. 'I am against achievement,' Jane Gregory says in obvious and thrilling mastery of poetic form. She really takes over then. and the reader's pleasure is acute. This is a terrific book to go through."--Alice Notley "To take the relentless work of sensing/making/relating/judging/desiring/suffering/trying ('What? // Yes. and little else') and wrest it via language into bombs of awful hope and gorgeous despair just is poetry's job, and in YEAH NO Jane Gregory makes it fully and spectacularly hers. 'Thank what is clear / for the grimness,' she writes, 'what the future's retrojection bore a hole right through.' Gregory's taut and particular rigor is a contagion (read: corrective) that I dearly want to spread across the present tense. Take note of what happens to your heart--I mean the organ, 'tenderer. tenderer now'--as you read this mighty book."--Anna Moschovakis

The Other Side of Paradise

The Other Side of Paradise
Author: Staceyann Chin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2009-04-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1439159378

Staceyann Chin has appeared on television and radio discussing issues of race and sexuality, but it is her extraordinary voice that launched her career as a performer, poet, and activist—here, she shares her unforgettable story of triumph against all odds in this brave and fiercely candid memoir. No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Lottery, Jamaica on Christmas Day. Staceyann's mother did not want her and her father was not present—no one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive. It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica. There, she faced far greater troubles than absent parents. So, armed with a fierce determination and exceptional intelligence, she discovered a way to break out of this harshly unforgiving world. Staceyann Chin, acclaimed and iconic performance artist, now brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a brave, lyrical, and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica. She plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, and finding the man she believes to be her father and ultimately her voice. Hers is an unforgettable story told with grace, humor, and courage.

The Trouble Ball: Poems

The Trouble Ball: Poems
Author: Martín Espada
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2012-09-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0393344541

“[An] important work . . . inspiring its readers to greater human connection and to keep fighting the good fight.”—The Rumpus In this new collection of poems, Martín Espada crosses the borderlands of epiphany and blasphemy: from a pilgrimage to the tomb of Frederick Douglass to an encounter with the swimming pool at a center of torture and execution in Chile, from the adolescent discovery of poet Omar Khayyám to the death of an "illegal" Mexican immigrant. from "The Trouble Ball" On my father's island, there were hurricanes and tuberculosis, dissidents in jail and baseball. The loudspeakers boomed: Satchel Paige pitching for the Brujos of Guayama. From the Negro Leagues he brought the gifts of Baltasar the King; from a bench on the plaza he told the secrets of a thousand pitches: The Trouble Ball, The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz, The Thoughtful Stuff. Pancho Coímbre hit rainmakers for the Leones of Ponce; Satchel sat the outfielders in the grass to play poker, windmilled three pitches to the plate, and Pancho spun around three times. He couldn't hit The Trouble Ball.

Cannibal

Cannibal
Author: Safiya Sinclair
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2016-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0803295367

Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.

Veils, Halos & Shackles

Veils, Halos & Shackles
Author: Charles Adés Fishman
Publisher: Kasva Press
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2016
Genre: Rape
ISBN: 9780991058457

All over the world, girls and women are victims of violence, oppression, and discrimination. Too often, women's voices are stifled, ignored, or trivialized--and as a result, other victims feel alone and unsupported. Veils, Halos & Shackles, the first-ever anthology of international poetry specifically addressing the oppression and empowerment of wom

Aurum

Aurum
Author: Santee Frazier
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0816539626

Aurum is a fiercely original poetry collection that reveals the marginalized and estranged Native American experience in the wake of industrial progress. With unforgettable imagery and haunting honesty, these poems are powerfully resonant.