In this ambitious lyric sequence, the speaker’s fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which all inhabitants are “soft targets.” Her melancholic examinations recall life’s uncanny ability to transform ordinary places―subways, cafes, street corners―into sites of intense significance that weigh heavily on the modern mind.“O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon/enough what’s the rush,” Landau writes, contemplating a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks, and climate change. Still there are the ordinary and abundant pleasures of day-to-day living, though the tender exchanges of friendship and love play out against a backdrop of 21st century threats with historical echoes, as neo-Nazis marching in the United States recall her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany.

    As Marilyn Hacker has written, "Black, lesbian, mother, cancer survivor, urban woman: none of Lorde's selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems."

    Unsettled explores racism, ableism, abuse and resistance as well as the bonds of community, family and friendship. As an Irish Traveller writing from a feminist perspective, McDonagh’s essays are rich and complex, raw and honest, and, above all else, uncompromising.Praise for UnsettledDon’t read this memoir in sorrow and outrage, read it because Rosaleen McDonagh is so proud, smart and ingenious, she will make you feel more properly alive. Beautifully written, this book beats back the darkness. It brings us all further on. — Anne EnrightMoving and eloquent, this collection is both the story of one woman’s life and a work of profound literary activism. — Emilie PineRosaleen’s story is her story. It’s a very important story and she has a right to tell it. Rosaleen demonstrates, contrary to some settled people’s opinion, that our community is matriarchal, our mothers are so resourceful, and we are not victims. The book is a testimony to the importance of identity and belonging. — Anne BurkeLike James Baldwin before her, this work is a ferociously honest exploration of the intricacies of racism, identity, sexuality, disability, grief, sensuality and marginalisation. It is also a beautiful piece of prose; honest and difficult and deeply moving. This book sees Rosaleen McDonagh masterfully taking all the parts of her life and fitting them together brilliantly for us. A must read. — Mark O’HalloranEmotive, honest and raw. Rosaleen McDonagh takes us on a journey of self acceptance, a journey that sees her face challenging obstacles and setbacks; as well as meeting friends and allies who help her to carve out a place in which she belongs. Unsettled is not only the recount of personal experiences but an authentic glimpse of Traveller life and culture as well as Rosaleen’s very sense of identity. — Michael Power

    The poems are lyrical and well crafted; images recur and build upon one another as the book progresses. Personal but never confessional, she hold emotion in check."--Library Journal

    Here the spiritual and the secular comingle in a "Fierce fragmentation, lonely tune." Harvey inhabits, challenges, and explores the many facets of the female self--as daughter, mother, sister, wife, and artist. Every page is rich with Harvey's rapturous music.

    But there is still in these "rhythms" a seething beat of sexuality and vice, whipped up into a delicious sense of perversity by Barnes's art. On the evidence of Barnes's numerous other works, most of which included art that was interleaved with her writing, Messerli has restored the drawings-which in the Bruno edition appeared in the back, after the poem's-to the front of the book so that they can create an interplay with the texts.

    His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

    Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary."—Nin Andrews"Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds."—Wyn CooperKelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in Kingston, Washington.

    Ortiz takes us through the streets of Los Angeles and the internal maps she's charting as she moves from her twenties to her thirties in a studio apartment in Hollywood. A cartography of love, loss, and transformation, Hollywood Notebook is a portrait of the author's psyche overlaid on a map of the city she makes her home.“…In the equally honest and courageous Hollywood Notebook, Ortiz reflects on the hard lessons learned as a young woman navigating through the streets of Los Angeles. By gathering bits of wisdom and poignant life experiences, she pieces together a portrait of her youth as complex and dynamic as the place she calls home.” --Rigoberto González, for NBC NewsHollywood Notebook is on NBC News/Latino Summer Reading List: 9 Great New Books by Latino Authors: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/su...

    So great was his stature as an Urdu poet that he never had to mould his poetry to suit the demands of film songwriting; instead, producers and composers adapted their requirements to his poetry. His songs in films like Pyaasa, Naya Daur and Phir Subah Hogi have attained the status of classics. This exhaustive biography traces the poet’s rich life, from his troubled childhood and his equally troubled love relationships, to his rise as one of the pre-eminent personalities of the Progressive Writers Movement and his journey as lyricist through the golden era of Hindi film music, the 1950s and 1960s.

    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

    This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.

    Toni Morrison uses modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. Two different narrators tell the story. The first is Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child’s and an adult’s perspectives, and the second is an omniscient narrator. Claudia’s and Pecola’s points of view are dominant, but the reader also sees things from other character’s points of view.The subtext of the first part of the novel ('Autumn' and 'Winter') suggests various topics. In my presentation, I mainly focus on the “Dick and Jane narrative” by means of which the novel opens. Furthermore, I will explore the themes “whiteness as the standard of beauty” and “seeing versus being seen” which are sometimes closely connected.'The Bluest Eye' provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, and the idealization of white beauty in the movies. Pecola eventually desires blue eyes in order to conform with these white beauty standards imposed on her.However, by wishing for blue eyes, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently.