Life and Death


Robert Creeley - 1998
    Both honors made specific notes of his experimental style, his long influence, and his ongoing importance. Creeley's 1998 collection, Life Death, now available as a New Direction paperback, is the capstone of a career that has poignantly combined "linguistic abstraction with specificity of time and place." (R.D. Pohl, Buffalo News)

Weather Central


Ted Kooser - 1994
    Ted Kooser’s third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a ten year period by a writer whose work has been praised for its clarity and accessiblity, its mastery of figurative language, and its warmth and charm.

Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty and Sexuality Among a Saharan People: Fatness and Beauty in the Sahara


Rebecca Popenoe - 2003
    Feeding Desire analyses this beauty ideal in the context of Islam, conceptions of health, and notions of desire Full description

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Dan Chelotti - 2013
    The wildly inventive imagery in these cinematic pieces lodges them somewhere between the surreal and the pure symbol, colorful and smooth like the lyrics of John Ashbery or Linda Pastan. In Chelotti’s poems, diamonds talk and sheriffs balance frogs on the tips of pens.The rain says, Listen to Debussy,go ahead, Debussy will fix you.—From “Migraine Cure”The secret to including everythingis to intricately divide your mindand then, all of a sudden,undivide it.—From “Still Life on a Scrolling Background”

50 World’s Greatest Short Stories


Various - 2017
    book

Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku


William J. Higginson - 1985
    It presents haiku poets writing in English, Spanish, French, German, and five other languages on an equal footing with Japanese poets. Not only are the four great Japanese masters of the haiku represented (Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki) but also several major Western authors not commonly known to have written haiku.

Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day


Donald KeeneYasunari Kawabata - 1955
    Now considered the standard canon of modern Japanese writing translated into English, Modern Japanese Literature includes concise introductions to the writers, as well as a historical introduction by Professor Keene. Includes: Growing Up by Ichiyo, a lyrical story of pre-adolescence in the 90s; Natsume’s story of Botchan, an illustarred and ineffectual Huck Finn; Nagai’s The Sumida River; Kokomitsu’s Kafkaesque Time; Kawabata’s The Mole; Firefly Hunt; a glimpse into Tanizaki’s masterpiece Thin Snow; and the postwar work of such writers as Dazai and Mishima.

My Individualism & The Philosophical Foundations of Literature


Natsume Sōseki - 1914
    Soseki Natsume is widely considered the foremost novelist of the Meiji period in Japan.

The Case of the Marble Monster and Other Stories


I.G. Edmonds - 1961
    These stories are filled with imaginative and moral solutions to each case. In one case, he is called to decide what should be done with a man caught stealing a smell. The stories are creative, the solutions inventive, and the judgements are fair.

A Handmade Museum


Brenda Coultas - 2003
    Her poems are sculptures pieced together from bits of memory and a montage of American detritus. This cinematic and wildly original collection asks the big questions as it documents our private selves, playing out our lives in public.Before becoming a poet, Brenda Coultas was a farmer, a carny, a taffy maker, a park ranger, a waitress in a disco ballroom, and the second woman welder in Firestone Steel’s history. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Conjunctions, Epoch, Fence, and Open City. She lives one block from the Bowery in New York City.

Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50: Poems


Lee Ann Roripaugh - 2019
    Those who stayed at the plant to stabilize the reactors, willing to sacrifice their lives, became known internationally as the Fukushima 50.In tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh takes a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the disaster. Here we meet its survivors and victims, from a pearl-catcher to a mild-mannered father to a drove of mindless pink robots. And then there is Roripaugh's unforgettable Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and "annihilatrix." Tsunami is part hero and part supervillain--angry, loud, forcefully defending her rights as a living being in contemporary industrialized society. As humanity rebuilds in disaster's wake, Tsunami continues to wreak her own havoc, battling humans' self-appointed role as colonizer of Earth and its life-forms."She's an unsubtle thief / a giver of gifts," Roripaugh writes of Tsunami, who spits garbage from the Pacific back into now-pulverized Fukushima. As Tsunami makes visible her suffering, the wrath of nature scorned, humanity has the opportunity to reconsider the trauma they cause Earth and each other. But will they look?

The Poetry of Zen


Sam Hamill - 2004
    Poetry has been an essential aid to Zen Buddhist practice from the dawn of Zen—and Zen has also had a profound influence on the secular poetry of the countries in which it has flourished. Here, two of America’s most renowned poets and translators provide an overview of Zen poetry from China and Japan in all its rich variety, from the earliest days to the twentieth century. Included are works by Lao Tzu, Han Shan, Li Po, Dogen Kigen, Saigyo, Basho, Chiao Jan, Yuan Mei, Ryokan, and many others. Hamill and Seaton provide illuminating introductions to the Chinese and Japanese sections that set the poets and their work in historical and philosophical context. Short biographies of the poets are also included.

A Clean Marriage


Sayaka Murata - 2015
    ‘Frequency of sex since marriage: zero.’ Sayaka Murata on a sexless marriage and the ‘Clean Breeder’ technique for pleasureless reproduction.

Essential Kanji: 2,000 Basic Japanese Characters Systematically Arranged for Learning and Reference


P.G. O'Neill - 1973
    It introduces the kanji that are now in everyday use, a mastery of which makes it possible to read most modern Japanese. Devised for either home or classroom use, the book has been tested and refined by years of use in university classes taught by the author.

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry


Ernest Fenollosa - 1919
    George Kennedy of Yale, who called it “a small mass of confusion". The old theory as to the nature of the Chinese written character (which Pound & Fenollosa followed) is that the written character is ideogrammic—a stylized picture of the thing or concept it represents. The opposing theory (which prevails today among scholars) is that the character may have had pictorial origins in prehistoric times but that these origins have been obscured in all but a few very simple cases, & that in any case native writers don’t have the original pictorial meaning in mind as they write. Whether Pound proceeded on false premises remains an academic question. Let the pedants rave. An important extension of imagist technique in poetry was gained by Pound’s perception of the essentially poetic nature of the Chinese character as it's still written.