SmithThe poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences. In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author's East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal: poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.

    Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.

    Also included are some "Mother Said, " "Father Said, " and "My Girlfriend Said" poems, providing plenty of material for the patient on the couch. My Therapist Said is full of advice, some of it sage, some of it absurd.

    Doughty’s poems are at once absurdist and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he reimagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted,” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.

    Little is known of her during her 30 plus years as a slave in Tennessee, or her life shortly thereafter. Her arrival and subsequent life in Cascade, Montana would make her a legend. Enjoy this great, inspiring and very humorous story of one amazing woman!

    The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

    Laird boldly engages with topics ranging from fatherhood and marriage to mass destruction and the cosmos. Go Giants is a brash, brave, and wildly imaginative new collection.From Go Giants:Go in peace to love and serve the.Go and get help. Go directly to jail.Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.Go into detail. Go for the throat.

    Yet for all their metaphorical suggestiveness, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poems about the natural world neither preclude nor erase nature’s relevance as an actual living environment. In their respective poetic projects, the earth matters both figuratively, as a realm of the imagination, and also as the physical ground that is profoundly affected by human action. This double perspective, and the ways in which it intersects with their formal innovations, points beyond their traditional status as curiously disparate icons of American nature poetry. That both of them not only approach nature as an important subject in its own right, but also address human-nature relationships in ethical terms, invests their work with important environmental overtones. Dickinson and Whitman developed their environmentally suggestive poetics at roughly the same historical moment, at a time when a major shift was occurring in American culture’s view and understanding of the natural world. Just as they were achieving poetic maturity, the dominant view of wilderness was beginning to shift from obstacle or exploitable resource to an endangered treasure in need of conservation and preservation.A Place for Humility examines Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry in conjunction with this important change in American environmental perception, exploring the links between their poetic projects within the context of developing nineteenth-century environmental thought. Christine Gerhardt argues that each author's poetry participates in this shift in different but related ways, and that their involvement with their culture’s growing environmental sensibilities constitutes an important connection between their disparate poetic projects. There may be few direct links between Dickinson’s “letter to the World” and Whitman’s “language experiment,” but via a web of environmentally-oriented discourses, their poetry engages in a cultural conversation about the natural world and the possibilities and limitations of writing about it—a conversation in which their thematic and formal choices meet on a surprising number of levels.

    Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.

    

    Its popularity owes much to the lyricism of the prose, thepitch-perfect rendition of black vernacular English, and the memorable characters--most notably, Janie Crawford. Collecting the most widely cited and influential essays published on Hurston's classic novel over the last quarter century, this Casebook presents contesting viewpoints by Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Barbara Johnson, Carla Kaplan, Daphne Lamothe, Mary Helen Washington, and Sherley Anne Williams. The volume also includes a statement Hurston submitted to a reference book on twentieth-century authors in 1942. As it records the major debates the novel has sparked on issues oflanguage and identity, feminism and racial politics, A Casebook charts new directions for future critics and affirms the classic status of the novel.

    The book features raw, blunt, and in your face poems depicting the darker side of relationships. Readers will find themes such as lies, cheating, and heartache abundant in much of this collection. Midnight Milkshakes, being the second volume of Ray's Ice Cream And Suicide, is great for returning readers to the series. The book focuses on much of the same style and mood that is common in his writings.

    

    With pithy, razor-sharp prose, Sennah dissects and reassembles pop culture through personal anecdotes, crafting a love-hate letter to the media and the microaggressions that have shaped how she sees herself and the world. How Do I Look? is a raw and vulnerable reflection on identities real and imagined.

    Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional form, making their particular demands on my voice and body. I am the ‘energumen.’ The poem is the experience." Also included in this book are three essays on the oral tradition in poetry. One essay discusses the history and occasion of the title poem. The others treat such topics as performance art and poetic tradition, ethnopoetics, intoxication and transformation, Tibetan Buddhism, and the renewed ascendency of feminine energy in writing. Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry. She is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado."Anne Waldman is one of the fastest, wisest women to run with the wolves in some time." — The New York Times Book ReviewAnne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born, and Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets).