The Spectral Wilderness

The Spectral Wilderness
Author: Oliver Bendorf
Publisher: Wick Poetry First Book
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781606352113

Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Mark Doty, Judge "It's a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category." --Mark Doty, from the Foreword "Bendorf's collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because "what we used to be matters" in the way that language matters--however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be." --Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography "What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf's poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. 'Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open, ' he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book." --Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down

Advantages of Being Evergreen

Advantages of Being Evergreen
Author: Oliver Baez Bendorf
Publisher:
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9781880834008

Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. "Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf's remarkable ADVANTAGES OF BEING EVERGREEN is an essential book for our time and for all time...Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate...This is a book of the earth's abiding wonder. And the body's unbreakable ability to bloom."--Gabrielle Calvocoressi "This book...offers a topography of the body--each poem, a dropped pin, locating across a broad intricate landscape: memory, hunger, tenderness, grief, and fear. To read these poems is to trust the momentum of tributaries or the distance traveled when the trail is full of switchbacks. This work is an exercise of faith."--Amaud Jamaul Johnson "Written from and with death, the poems in ADVANTAGES OF BEING EVERGREEN offer elegies; they utter prayers that ask our dead to stay; they come as breath constrained and animated by a form that narrates an excess of natures, an excess of rivers that interrupt this book as the poet ponders the impossible question of what it means to be home. Here the body is a shared condition. The body is language. It changes. It resists. It mourns. It reincarnates with the 'teeth of our dead around our neck.'"--Daniel Borzutzky

Extinction Studies

Extinction Studies
Author: Deborah Bird Rose
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0231544545

Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.

The Hospital Suite

The Hospital Suite
Author: John Porcellino
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1770462473

A mini-comics master's poetic musings on illness & the art of getting by The Hospital Suite is a landmark work by the celebrated cartoonist and small-press legend John Porcellino—an autobiographical collection detailing his struggles with illness in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 1997, John began to have severe stomach pain. He soon found out he needed emergency surgery to remove a benign tumor from his small intestine. In the wake of the surgery, he had numerous health complications that led to a flare-up of his preexisting tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Hospital Suite is Porcellino’s response to these experiences—simply told stories drawn in the honest, heart-wrenching style of his much-loved King-Cat mini-comics. His gift for spare yet eloquent candor makes The Hospital Suite an intimate portrayal of one person’s experiences that is also intensely relatable. Porcellino’s work is lauded for its universality and quiet, clear-eyed contemplation of everyday life. The Hospital Suite is a testimony to this subtle strength, making his struggles with the medical system and its consequences for his mental health accessible and engaging.

A Wilderness of Error

A Wilderness of Error
Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2014-01-22
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0143123696

Soon to be an FX Docuseries from Emmy® Award-Winning Producer Marc Smerling (The Jinx) featuring the author Errol Morris! Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris examines one of the most notorious and mysterious murder trials of the twentieth century In this profoundly original meditation on truth and the justice system, Errol Morris—a former private detective and director of The Thin Blue Line—delves deeply into the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. MacDonald, whose pregnant wife and two young daughters were brutally murdered in 1970, was convicted of the killings in 1979 and remains in prison today. The culmination of an investigation spanning over twenty years and a masterly reinvention of the true-crime thriller, A Wilderness of Error is a shocking book because it shows that everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable and that crucial elements of case against MacDonald are simply not true.

Black Boy Out of Time

Black Boy Out of Time
Author: Hari Ziyad
Publisher: Little A
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781542091312

An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way. One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.

Authority

Authority
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2014-05-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374104107

"In the second volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy, questions are answered, stakes are raised, and mysteries are deepened. In Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer introduced Area X--a remote and lush terrain mysteriously sequestered from civilization. This was the first volume of a projected trilogy; well in advance of publication, translation rights had already sold around the world and a major movie deal had been struck. Just months later, Authority, the second volume, is here. For thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X has taken the form of a series of expeditions monitored by a secret agency called the Southern Reach. After the disastrous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the Southern Reach is in disarray, and John Rodriguez, aka "Control," is the team's newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves--and what they expose pushes Control to confront disturbing truths about both himself and the agency he's promised to serve. And the consequences will spread much further than that. The Southern Reach trilogy will conclude in fall 2014 with Acceptance"--Provided by publisher.

I Can't Date Jesus

I Can't Date Jesus
Author: Michael Arceneaux
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2018-07-24
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1501178865

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Featured as One of Summer’s most anticipated reads by the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, ELLE, Buzzfeed, and Bitch Media. From the author of I Don’t Want to Die Poor and in the style of New York Times bestsellers You Can’t Touch My Hair, Bad Feminist, and I'm Judging You, a timely collection of alternately hysterical and soul‑searching essays about what it is like to grow up as a creative, sensitive black man in a world that constantly tries to deride and diminish your humanity. It hasn’t been easy being Michael Arceneaux. Equality for LGBTQ people has come a long way and all, but voices of persons of color within the community are still often silenced, and being Black in America is…well, have you watched the news? With the characteristic wit and candor that have made him one of today’s boldest writers on social issues, I Can’t Date Jesus is Michael Arceneaux’s impassioned, forthright, and refreshing look at minority life in today’s America. Leaving no bigoted or ignorant stone unturned, he describes his journey in learning to embrace his identity when the world told him to do the opposite. He eloquently writes about coming out to his mother; growing up in Houston, Texas; being approached for the priesthood; his obstacles in embracing intimacy that occasionally led to unfortunate fights with fire ants and maybe fleas; and the persistent challenges of young people who feel marginalized and denied the chance to pursue their dreams. Perfect for fans of David Sedaris, Samantha Irby, and Phoebe Robinson, I Can’t Date Jesus tells us—without apologies—what it’s like to be outspoken and brave in a divisive world.

The Live Goat

The Live Goat
Author: Cecil Dawkins
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1971
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

An impressive allegory set in a spectral mid-19th century wilderness which exposes and refracts freedom, corruption and the loss of innocence. Led by Alabian Eustace, father of the dead Eily, a group of Scottish settlers from Alabama moves through 500 miles of frontier to capture and return to "justice" one Isaac, a half-wit boy accused of her murder. Isaac, who greets them with joy, is roped, beaten and tortured. Then the journey "homefree" takes on a dream dimension when, through the swamps, woods, quicksand, rivers and rain, they confront cruelty and horror, feeling the weight of evil both in the threatening land and in themselves. Patient animals die, an Indian woman is raped, a slave is flogged, a tribe of alligators advance: early-on the group passed a hill of neat and waiting graves. But for Toliver, the philosopher, freedom lies beyond acceptance of evil in a common humanity. His final understanding comes from the "free" slave Lottie -- "I was free before I became free." Starved and ragged, the group returns to hang Isaac in spite of the preacher's wild warning: "You ought to have left the live goat in the wilderness. He's your innocence." Studded with symbolism (the young boy passes a hut where women are spinning) and sustained by a lyrical intensity, this is reciprocally demanding and rewarding.

How a Poem Moves

How a Poem Moves
Author: Adam Sol
Publisher: Misfit Book
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781770414563

How a Poem Moves is a collection of 35 short essays that walk readers through an array of contemporary poems. Sol is a dynamic teacher, and delivers essays that demonstrate poetry's range and pleasures through encounters with individual poems that span traditions, techniques, and ambitions.