Book picks similar to
The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards: Poems by Rachel Mennies
poetry
jewish-lit
boekenkast
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You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake
Anna Moschovakis - 2011
Plato would have loved them."—Ann LauterbachIn a world where we find "everything helping itself / to everything else," Anna Moschovakis incorporates Craigslist ads, technobabble, twentieth-century ethics texts, scientific research, autobiographical detail, and historical anecdote to present an engaging lyric analysis of the way we live now. "It's your life," she tells the reader, "and we have come to celebrate it."
Petit à Petit
Ambica Uppal - 2020
It assures you that tomorrow will be a better day and encourages you to realise your potential and achieve your aspirations. Petit à Petit is centred on themes like self-love, self-confidence and taking life into your own hands.No matter how far-away and impossible your dreams seem, don't be afraid to reach for them.
I Found You
Praneeth Chandra - 2021
Divided into seven chapters, from love to the family. It's all about falling in love madly, getting hurt deeply, bearing all the pain in darkness. Still finding hope and waiting for a miracle to heal the broken heart, waiting for the love, makes me feel like home. It is all about love and trusting the universe
Knots
Deblina Bhattacharya - 2019
Knots is a collection of poetry and prose about love and heartbreak, tragedy and grief, survival and loss. It's a journey through the numerous knots that we tie in life, and the ones we tangle and untangle with. It explores the realities of mental illness & suicide, social taboos & violence against women, pain & darkness, self love & healing in all its naked glory. The rhythm of Knots resonates directly with the poet's heart, conveying to the readers that there is a way to untangle every knot in life, but sometimes, some of these knots are what we are made of. Foreword by Dr. Santosh Bakaya
The Sobbing School
Joshua Bennett - 2016
Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.
Bastards of the Reagan Era
Reginald Dwayne Betts - 2015
Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear "the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.
E-mails from Scheherazad
Mohja Kahf - 2003
. . . This is Kahf's ultimate message: that religion and ethnicity and color and nationality are as nothing in the face of simple humanity; that spirituality and life are beyond all of these, that no creed or ideology may be taken as justification for harm."--Lisa Suhair Majaj Kahf establishes herself as a new voice in the tradition of ethnic American poets, blending the experiences of recent Arab-American immigrants into contemporary American scenery. In her poems, Muslim ritual and Qur'anic vocabulary move in next door to the idiom of suburban Americana, and the legendary Scheherazad of the Thousand and One Nights shows up in New Jersey, recast as a sophisticated postcolonial feminist. Kahf’s carefully crafted poems do not speak only to important issues of ethnicity, gender, and religious diversity in America, but also to universal human themes of family and kinship, friendship, and the search for a place to pray. She chronicles the specific griefs and pleasures of the immigrant and writes an amulet for womanly power in the face of the world’s terrors. Her poetic energy is provocative and sassy, punctuated now and then with a darker poem of elegiac sadness or refined rage.Mohja Kahf is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas.
The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems)
Alice Walker - 2013
In this dazzling collection, the beloved writer offers over sixty new poems to incite and nurture contemporary activists. Hailed as a “lavishly gifted writer” (The New York Times), Walker imbues her poetry with evocative images, fresh language, anger, forgiveness, and profound wisdom. Casting her poetic eye toward history, politics, and nature, as well as to world figures such as Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, and the Dalai Lama, she is indeed a "muse for our times" (Amy Goodman).By attentively chronicling the conditions of human life today, Walker shows, as ever, her deep compassion, profound spirituality, and necessary political commitments. The poems in The World Will Follow Joy remind us of our human capacity to come together and take action, even in our troubled political times. Above all, the gems in this collection illuminate what it means to live in our world today.
Zig-Zag Girl
Brenna Twohy - 2017
This is where I come from. Everyone I love still lives there." Widely known for her performance poetry, author Brenna Twohy offers an intimate portrait of loss, abuse, and the messy ways that we heal. Often funny and always honest, Zig-Zag Girl is about grief, strength, and the magic of holding on.
The Pink Institution
Selah Saterstrom - 2004
As the impoverished decay of the Deep South expresses itself through their bloodlines, a new impression of Southern history and heritage emerges. The lyrical gravity and singular style of this unforgettable debut novel will transform the reader in its wake.Selah Saterstrom’s writing has appeared in 3rd Bed and Pitkin Review. She is the editor of Soul Collections, a collection of prose and poetry written by at-risk teenagers in North Carolina. Born in Mississippi in 1974, she now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she teaches at Warren Wilson College.
Lessons on Expulsion
Erika L. Sánchez - 2017
—from “Poem of My Humiliations”“What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border—the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.
Teahouse of the Almighty
Patricia Smith - 2006
Smith’s poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell“I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem.”—Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judgeFrom Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation’s premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade—a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned cele-bration of poetry’s liberating power.
A Little White Shadow
Mary Ruefle - 2006
What remains visible is delicate poetry: artfully rendered, haunted by its former self, yet completely new. A high-quality replica of the original aged, delicate book in which Ruefle “erased” the text, this book will appeal to fans of poetry as well as visual art.Mary Ruefle is the author of Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism (Wave Books, 2012), and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and include the publication of A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.
Colosseum: Poems
Katie Ford - 2008
—"Earth"With gravity and resplendence, Colosseum confronts ruin in the ancient world and in the living moment, from historical accounts and from firsthand experience. Displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Katie Ford returns this powerful report attesting to the storm's ferocity and its aftershock. Ford examines other catastrophes—those biblical, obscured by time, and those that play out daily, irrefutably, in the media. Colosseum is an essential, moving book in its insistence that our fates are intertwined and that devastation does not discriminate.