Book picks similar to
Rules of the House by Wangmo Dhompa
poetry
asia-fiction
asian-american
d-apogee-press
A Collection of Rumi: Quotes and Poetry
Alayna Miller - 2016
Rumi is one of the greatest poetical geniuses and spiritual masters in human history. His name stands for Love and ecstatic flight into the infinite. Today, Rumi is one of the most widely read poets in the west and has been described to be on par with Beethoven, Shakespeare and Mozart. During a 25 year period, Rumi composed over 70,000 verses of poetry focusing on diverse and varied topics. Rumi’s influence goes beyond nationalities and ethnicities with his work having been translated in numerous languages around the world. His work is mystical and intensely philosophical, with poems of fiery soulful expression, to passionate love verses filled with yearning and desire. Rumi describes the life of mystics as a “gathering of lovers, where there is no high or low, smart or ignorant, no proper schooling required.” He believed in a life journey following a love-based principle free of guilt, fear and shame. The bringing together of a wealthy nobleman and a poor wanderer serve as a reminder to us all that inspiration can come from anywhere and anyone can aid us in advancing our growth.
Dictee
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - 1982
A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.
A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World
Christine Gerhardt - 2014
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.
In My Own WORDS...MY Real Reality
Toya Wright - 2016
I've been through a lot this past year, from the social media petty parties to admitting my mom into a psyche ward. In My Own Words I offer my truths without filters, ad-libs or edits. I share my struggle with what seemed an unforgiving storm of tests of my faith. I had an up close and personal pass to the private suffering from the public humiliation of the man I loved. With the full dissolution of my marriage ranging from a bi-coastal separation, to an amicable divorce. It seemed all too unreal to hear the words “something terrible has happened to your brothers”. Losing them both at once, at a time when we were just starting to become closer seemed so unfair; it all seemed so unfair! Then I would put my grief on hold to plan their funeral. How was I to remain strong and keep pushing? I had to, there was no other option; my daughter was watching. She's my motivation, she's what's keeps me going. So with God, prayer, and faith; I just kept moving.
Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations
Jonny Sun - 2021
The pieces range from long meditations on topics like loneliness and being an outsider, to short humor pieces, conversations, and memorable one-liners.Jonny's honest writings about his struggles with feeling productive, as well as his difficulties with anxiety and depression will connect deeply with his fans as well as anyone attempting to create in our chaotic world. It also features a recipe for scrambled eggs that might make you cry.
excerpts from the book i'll never write
Nadia Nell Starbinski - 2017
Divided into four sections: love, loss, acceptance, and growth- the content serves the purpose of making you feel and finding the light at the end of the tunnel.
Atlantis
Lauren Eden - 2017
Heartbreaking and humorous, Atlantis is a journey about picking up the pieces from the ruins of a life they said would be good for you.
Pippa Park Raises Her Game
Erin Yun - 2020
It seems like everyone, from her family to the other kids at school, has a plan for how her life should look. So when Pippa gets a mysterious basketball scholarship to Lakeview Private, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself by following the “Rules of Cool.”At Lakeview, Pippa juggles old and new friends, an unrequited crush, and the pressure to perform academically and athletically while keeping her past and her family’s laundromat a secret from her elite new classmates. But when Pippa begins to receive a string of hateful, anonymous messages via social media, her carefully built persona is threatened.As things begin to spiral out of control, Pippa discovers the real reason she was admitted to Lakeview and wonders if she can keep her old and new lives separate, or if she should even try.Bonus ContentDiscussion Questions, Author Q&A, and Korean Language Glossary and Pronunciation Guide
The Glass Age
Cole Swensen - 2007
Starting there, this extended poem—part art criticism, part history—considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.
The Best at It
Maulik Pancholy - 2019
The start of middle school is making him feel increasingly anxious, so his favorite person in the whole world, his grandfather Bhai, gives him some well-meaning advice: Find one thing you’re really good at. And become the BEST at it.Those four little words sear themselves into Rahul’s brain. While he’s not quite sure what that special thing is, he is convinced that once he finds it, bullies like Brent Mason will stop torturing him at school. And he won’t be worried about staring too long at his classmate Justin Emery. With his best friend, Chelsea, by his side, Rahul is ready to crush this challenge. . . . But what if he discovers he isn’t the best at anything?Funny, charming, and incredibly touching, this is a story about friendship, family, and the courage it takes to live your truth.
Banana Palace
Dana Levin - 2016
Observing the crisis of human appetite through the lenses of psychology and science fiction, she's disquieted at a world "ruled by a bi-polar father-god, unconscious, suicidal."The personal meets the collective in these poems: insane rants transform into contemporary oracular speech; a child who once hoarded candy grows into an adult who consumes a planet. Mutation, social media, eco-collapse, a dream of a survivable End Times: no less than the future of the body is at stake, bodies corporeal and political, ecological and spiritual. Was that the soul, wishingwe would invent the bodyout of existence,so many of us nowenthralled by doom...Dana Levin has published three books of poetry, Wedding Day (Copper Canyon), Sky Burial (Copper Canyon), and her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, won the APR/Honickman Award. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.
Made Flesh
Craig Arnold - 2008
could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book ReviewsA girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.
I Am Golden
Eva Chen - 2022
We see hair as inky black and smooth as a peaceful night sky. We see skin brushed with gold.This joyful and lyrical picture book from New York Times-bestselling author Eva Chen is a moving ode to the immigrant experience, as well as a manifesto of self-love for Asian American children.