Bambrick began writing poems in order to document the forms of violence she witnessed towards the people and the environment of the Columbia River. While working there she found that reservoirs foster a uniquely complex community--from fish biologists to the owners of luxury summer homes--and became interested in the issues and tensions between the people of that place. The idea of power, literal and metaphorical, was present in every action and encounter with bosses and the people using the river. The presence of a young woman on the crew irritated her older, male co-workers who'd logged, built houses, and had to suffer various forms of class discrimination their entire lives. She found throughout this experience that their issues, while not the same, were inherently connected to the suffering of the lands they worked. Introduction by Sharon Olds.

    Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts. There is truth-telling, and more, in meanness. —from "Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People"Tony Hoagland has won The Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Award, recognizing a poet's contribution to humor in American poetry, and also the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, the only major award that honors a poet's excellence in teaching. Real Sofistikashun, from the title onward, uses Hoagland's signature abilities to entertain and instruct as he forages through central questions about how poems behave and how they are made.In these taut, illuminating essays, Hoagland explores aspects of poetic craft—metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies—with the vigorous, conversational style less of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner. Real Sofistikashun is an exciting, humorous, and provocative collection of essays, as pleasurable a book as it is useful.

    Visual Poetry. Long-cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and text books, and more recently celebrated on the internet, Aram Saroyan's groundbreaking concrete and minimalist poems of the 1960s are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS includes the entire contents of Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968), Pages (Random House, 1969), The Rest (Telegraph, 1971), as well as Saroyan's contribution, "Electric Poems," to the anthology All Stars (Goliard-Grossman, 1972), and a sequence, "Short Poems," which hasn't appeared previously. With ties to the work of such writers and artists as e.e. cummings, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Donald Judd, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Steve Reich, COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS confirms Aram Saroyan's place among the most daring and engaging figures in modern poetry.

    With this book, you'll also be able to link to the PoetrySpeaks.com community to listen to samples, meet poets, and unearth inspirations for your next performance.The Ultimate Guide to Writing and Performing with PowerTake the Mic is an essential guide for lifting your poetry from the page to the stage. Marc Kelly Smith (So What!), grand founder of the Slam movement, serves as you personal coach, showing you how to craft stage-worthy verse and deliver a poetry performance that shakes the rafters and sparks thunderous applause. In Take the Mic, you discover how to... Pen poetry that's conducive to on-stage performance Overcome stage fright Practice powerful performance techniques Rehearse like a pro Shape a loose collection of poems into a killer set Connect with your audience heart and soul Master the art of self-promotion Schedule your own slam poetry tour Transform your hobby into paying gigs Act professional to establish a solid reputation in the Slam communityTake the Mic is packed with practical exercises you can do alone or in class to hone your skills and transform your body, mind, voice, verse, and spirit into an engaging stage presence.You'll also find a brief history of slam, the rules and regulations that govern official slam competitions, and a list of PSI (Poetry Slam, Inc.) Certified Slams, so no matter where you are, you always have a place to Take the Mic!

    Whatever our feelings about établissement and French Maoism here at Commune Editions (they aren’t positive), we think the book is incredible, and expect you will too.Get it here: http://communeeditions.com/excess-the...

    THEORIES OF FALLING is the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Judge Marie Howe said of THEORIES OF FALLING, "I kept coming back to these poems--the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground." "Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting 'Allergy Girl' series will set off such an itch, I doubt you'll ever fully recover...This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where 'even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.'"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

    Divided into four chapters, the book deals with the struggles of pain and healing of wounds of all sorts, finding sweetness in all the bitterness along the way. Sugar, honey, ice & tea takes readers on a journey deep into the dark corners where struggle becomes strength and pushes through all the emptiness until it reaches the light.

    "Alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish, and Espada praises the people Whitman called "them the others are down upon": the African slaves who brought their music to Puerto Rico; a prison inmate provoking brawls so he could write poetry in solitary confinement; a janitor and his solitary strike; Espada's own father, who was jailed in Mississippi for refusing to go to the back of the bus. The poet bears witness to death and rebirth at the ruins of a famine village in Ireland, a town plaza in México welcoming a march of Zapatista rebels, and the courtroom where he worked as a tenant lawyer. The title poem pays homage to the immigrant food-service workers who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. From the earliest out-of-print work to the seventeen new poems included here, Espada celebrates the American political imagination and the resilience of human dignity. Alabanza is the epic vision of a writer who, in the words of Russell Banks, "is one of the handful of American poets who are forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of selves we can no longer silence." An American Library Association Notable Book of 2003 and a 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember."To read this work is to be struck breathless, and surely, to come away changed."—Barbara Kingsolver "Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. If it was up to me, I'd select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States."—Sandra Cisneros "With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet Espada is—his range, his compassion, his astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his tenderness, his humor. "—Marge Piercy "Espada's poems are not just clarion calls to the heart and conscience, but also wonderfully crafted gems."—Julia Alvarez "A passionate, readable poetry that makes [Espada] arguably the most important 'minority' U.S. poet since Langston Hughes."—Booklist"Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martín Espada."—San Francisco Chronicle

    From the ancient world right up to the present day, it includes poems on wanderlust, travel, daydreams, flights of fancy, escaping into books, tranquillity, courage, hope and resilience. From frustrated housewives to passionate activists, from servants and suffragettes to some of today’s most gifted writers, here is a bold choir of voices demanding independence and celebrating their hard-won power.Immerse yourself in poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Christina Rossetti, Stevie Smith, Sarah Crossan, Emily Dickinson, Salena Godden, Mary Jean Chan, Charly Cox, Nikita Gill, Fiona Benson, Hollie McNish and Grace Nichols to name but a few

    There is nothing so complicated as a human being and sometimes nothing so horrific!

    . . . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, and Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”—Srikanth Reddy Kiki Petrosino earned graduate degrees from both the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poem, “You Have Made a Career of Not Listening,” was featured in the anthology Best New Poets 2006. She lives in Iowa City.

    Across the centuries—Tu Fu lived in the T'ang Dynasty (731-770)—his poems come through to us with an immediacy that is breathtaking in Kenneth Rexroth's English versions. They are as simple as they are profound, as delicate as they are beautiful.Thirty-five poems by Tu Fu make up the first part of this volume. The translator then moves on to the Sung Dynasty (10th-12th centuries) to give us a number of poets of that period, much of whose work was not previously available in English. Mei Yao Ch'en, Su Tung P'o, Lu Yu, Chu Hsi, Hsu Chao, and the poetesses Li Ch'iang Chao and Chu Shu Chen. There is a general introduction, biographical and explanatory notes on the poets and poems, and a bibliography of other translations of Chinese poetry.

    New frontiers discovered. What it means to be human reimagined.Dreams of tomorrow become reality in this third collection of bestselling authors and newly emerging writers from Sci-Fi Bridge. From the inner worlds of unforgettable characters to alien planets at the farthest reaches of our galaxy and beyond, our writers examine the human experience from within and without. They hold up a mirror to the human experience. Who are we as a species? Who do we want to be? How do we achieve that greatest vision of ourselves for us and our children?You'll wonder at the possibilities of what we can accomplish together. You might even come to believe that a better tomorrow can be more than a dream....Foreword by Chris Fox"Centurion" by M.G. Herron"Geospermia" by Patty Jansen"Storming the Norse Wind" by M.D. Cooper"The Far Side of Psyche" by Rhett C. Bruno"Sparkle Ship Shine" by Hall & Beaulieu"Latecomers" by Chris Ward"Fool's Gold" by Zen DiPietro"The Tribe" by Andreas Christensen"The Theta Patient" by Chris Dietzel"The Last Ship" by Chris Pourteau"Taken For a Walk" by Justin Sloan"Playing Doctor" by Robert Jeschonek"Awaken Me, Paper Robot!" by A.K. Meek"Refurbished" by Artie Cabrera"Steel's First Temper" by David VanDyke"Siren Song" by Jon Frater"Digital Commander" by J.S. Morin"Little Blue" by Chris ReherWant to know more about Sci-Fi Bridge? Visit our site at scifibridge.com and subscribe to receive giveaways and great Sci-Fi deals straight to your inbox.

    Auden, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rita Dove, and hundreds more-Staying Alive is a unique anthology that illuminates the vital force of our humanity, the passion of our aspirations, the power of our spirituality. From the enigma of death to the sweetness of friendship, these poems speak to life's mysteries and consolations and help us navigate the most trying times in recent memory. Staying Alive is already an astonishing best-seller in the United Kingdom, where it has gained a wide-ranging audience. This new edition, specially revised for its American readership, reconnects acionados and newcomers alike to the force of poetry, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.

    There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing." From the life of Chicago's South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts."Her formal range," writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, "is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso." That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry retains its power to move and surprise.