“Mohja Kahf ’s Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, thrillingly artful in its execution. Its range is immense, its spiritual depth is profound, it negotiates its shifts between archaic and the contemporary with utmost skill. There’s lyricism, there’s satire, there’s comedy, there’s theology of a high order in this book.”
—Alicia Ostriker, author of For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book
“Hagar/ Hajar the immigrant/exile/outcast/refugee mother of a people is given multiple voices and significance in Mohja Kahf’s new book of dramatic monologues, which also reinvents Pharaoh’s daughter, Zuleika, Aïsha, and Mary in poems that are at once lively and learned, agnostic and devout. The sequence on an American mosque, and the poet’s ambivalent love for what it represents, is unique in American poetry.”
—Marilyn Hacker, author of A Stranger’s Mirror
“‘Where have all the goddesses gone,’ writes Mohja Kahf, ‘I tracked down Isis / incognito on Cyprus. /She told me Ishtar / lived under the radar / in southern Iraq. . . .’ In Hagar Poems, Mohja Kahf’s hallmark qualities—irreverence, imagination, wit, poignancy—are all exuberantly in evidence. A wonderful read.”
—Leila Ahmed, author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America
“This brilliant collection captures all the ‘patient threading of relationship’ between Hagar and Sarah as between women, and then between women and men, between human and God. . . . At every turn of the page [Kahf] refuses complacency and circumstance but opts instead for exposing the tenuousness of threads that tie and bind and then come loose before our eyes.”
—From the foreword by Amina Wadud
The central matter of this daring new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah—the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near Eastern heritage, such as Mary and Moses, and touch on figures from early Islam, such as Fatima and Aisha. Throughout, there is artful reconfiguring. Readers will find sequels and prequels to the traditional narratives, along with modernized figures claimed for contemporary conflicts.
Hagar Poems is a compelling shakeup of not only Hagar’s story but also of current roles of all kinds of women in all kinds of relationships.
“Throughout this anthology, more than 60 other well-known Brooks poems can be read the same way, with lines from ‘The Mother’ and ‘The Bean Eaters’ tripping down the right-hand side of the page. The anthology ends with ‘Non-Brooks Golden Shovels’ and ‘Variations and Expansions on the Form.’ The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.”
—Claudia Rankine, The New York Times, August 2017
“The editors, including tireless poetry advocate Kahn, of this unique, new addition to the Gwendolyn Brooks legacy put together a richly diverse set of poets working with the most unusual and fertile new poetic form created in recent years. National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes invented the Golden Shovel, which he illuminates in his stirring foreword, writing, “Because where do poems come from if not other poems?” In a Golden Shovel poem, the last words in each line are taken from a Brooks poem. A veritable who’s who of contemporary poets tried their hands at this encoded homage, including Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Joy Harjo, Billy Lombardo, Sharon Olds, Alberto Ríos, Tracy K. Smith, and Timothy Yu. Beautifully introduced by Patricia Smith, this is a beguiling and mind-expanding anthology shaped by formal expertise and deep appreciation for the complexity and resonance of Brooks’ work and profoundly nurturing influence. In all, a substantial and dynamic contribution to American literature.”
—Booklist, May 2017
"Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry back in 1950. A new book honors her work in using a form called the golden shovel, developed by poet Terrance Hayes. In The Golden Shovel Anthology, poets select a line from a poem of Brooks’s and use it as the closing line or lines in a poem of their own. The result is an expansive and extraordinary assemblage edited by poets Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe, March 2017
The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.
The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks’s original. An array of writers—including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Nikki Giovani, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets.
The poems found here will inspire a diversity of readers, teachers, and writers of poetry while at the same time providing remarkable access for newcomers, making it ideal for classrooms. The Golden Shovel Anthology will also honor Brooks with publication in 2017, the centenary of her birth.
The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be details how the 2016 presidential election developed in the eleven states that make up the South. Preeminent scholars of Southern politics analyze this momentous election, including the issues that drove southern voters, the nomination process in early 2016, and where the region may be headed politically in the Trump era. In addition, each state chapter includes analysis on notable congressional races and important patterns within the states.
This new edited volume will be an important tool for scholars, and also journalists and political enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary southern electoral politics.
Winner, William Rockhill Nelson Award
John B. McLendon was the last living protégé of basketball’s inventor, Dr. James Naismith, and one of the “top ten basketball coaches of the century” in Billy Packer’s opinion. McLendon’s amazing records in college and pro basketball earned him a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame (the first black coach to be inducted), and his coaching philosophy has had a huge influence on basketball coaches. Breaking Through is also a powerful and inspirational story about segregation and a champion’s struggle for equality in 1940s and 50s America.
Black Magic, ESPN’s Peabody Award–winning documentary about players and coaches who attended historically black colleges and universities, covers many of the events in McLendon’s life that Katz writes about in his book.
John McLendon was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016.
This highly readable folklore collection highlights the most representative and evocative tales in the twenty-five hundred pages of backwoods stories collected by Silas Tunbo toward the end of the last century. Turnbo and his informants, antebellum Ozarks natives, believed that the legends of the hunt were, as William Faulkner would write, “the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening.”
With no apology, the first settlers on the southern frontiers became predators in their own environment. They embraced blood sport and sought its rewards at every turn. The chase promised them a sureness of profit more predictable than land speculation, timbering, or commercial agriculture.
These early opportunists believed that the greatest natural resource along the lush White River drainages in Missouri and Arkansas was large game. Although surrounded by living waters, climax forests, and luxuriant grasses, the tellers of Turnbo’s stories only incidentally made mention of flora. Silas Turnbo and his informants were fascinated by animals and the settlers’ ongoing relationship with them—a relationship often defined by contents for supremacy.
Significantly, Tunbo’s education included only a few years in subscription schools of the 1850s. His writing is direct and in the idiom of hte Ozarks, including spellings that are occasionally whimsical, perfectly befitting these “fireside stories” of the great outdoor drama of the southern frontiers.
Contents:
Why a Feminist Volume on Pluralism? – Bonnie Mann and Jean Keller
PLURALISM ’S FAILURES AND CERTAIN CONDITIONS FOR THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCCESS
Indigenous Agencies and the Pluralism of Empire – Scott L. Pratt
What Would Philosophic Pluralism Look Like?: True Dialogue, Epistemic Credibility, Rational Parity, and Death in the University – Jennifer Lisa Vest
Asking Too Much? Civility vs. Pluralism – Alison Reiheld
Attending to Others: Simone Weil and Epistemic Pluralism – Shari Stone-Mediatore
FEMINIST PLURALISM AND RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEWS
Islamic Feminisms and Freedom – Allison Weir
Is an “Islamic Feminism” Possible?: Gender Politics in the Contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran – Paria Gashtili
Beyond the Modern/Religious Dichotomy: The Veil and Feminist Solidarity in Contemporary Turkey – Fulden Ibrahimhakkioglu
Philosophy, Religion, Race, and Queerness: A Question of Accommodation or Access – Kim Q. Hall
FEMINIST PLURALISM AND FUNDAMENTAL VALUES
Value Pluralism, Intuitions, and Reflective Equilibrium – Lisa Tessman
Radical-cum-Relation: Bridging Feminist Ethics and Native Individual Autonomy – Shay Welch
Lucile Morris Upton landed her first newspaper job out West in the early 1920s, then returned home to spend half a century reporting on the Ozarks world she knew best. Having come of age just as women gained the right to vote, she took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves in a changing world. During her years as a journalist, Upton rubbed shoulders with presidents, flew with aviation pioneer Wiley Post, covered the worst single killing of US police officers in the twentieth century, wrote an acclaimed book on the vigilante group known as the Bald Knobbers, charted the growth of tourism in the Ozarks, and spearheaded a movement to preserve iconic sites of regional history. Following retirement from her newspaper job, she put her experience to good use as a member of the Springfield City Council and community activist.
Told largely through Upton’s own words, this insightful biography captures the excitement of being on the front lines of newsgathering in the days when the whole world depended on newspapers to find out what was happening.
From short, acerbic lyrics to hilarious prose poems about nutty German professors and Dracula’s teenage girlfriend, readers laugh out loud at simple turns of phrase before they are jerked sober by startling insights into the way we live—and Koertge knows how we live.
Nothing in American culture is safe from the scythe of his irony—not Joan Crawford, not Superman, nor Frank Sinatra. He lampoons our literary heroes and historical giants with the gentlest touch, and we find ourselves grinning before we realize that Koertge is redefining what we thought we knew. His poems are alternately funny or poignantly sad because they are always true, and that truth lingers long after the reading is over.
In Geography of the Forehead, Ron Koertge offers us nearly sixty poems, each a brilliant testament to the human condition. “Though he has been writing his influential and highly original poems for many years,” Charles Harper Webb declares, “he is still something of a secret: a poet of dazzling wit, and surprising sweetness. With this collection, however, the secret is out.”
In plain, unpretentious language, with brutal honesty, Ron Koertge can meld violence, love, human ugliness, joy, and modern depravity into a short lyric that makes us laugh out loud or socks us in the gut. His images arrive in giant clown shoes—cigars the size of Florida, the plastic man’s counter-length arms—or neatly packaged in carefully observed detail, as he writes of the “black little hearts” of ants or an ape’s “dark and leathery breast.”
Through every poem, there runs a constant and sincere humanity, a voice that laughs at itself, often goads us a bit, but always stuns and enlightens us when we dis – cover something of ourselves gambling with the crowd at the racetrack, driving from the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant, or shambling with the distraught parent leaving the hospital.
In Making Love to Roget’s Wife, Ron Koertge offers his best work from twenty-three years and a dozen earlier collections. With twenty-five new poems, and over eighty from previous books, this selection reawakens us to the presence of a superbly honed comic voice.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press