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La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living
Jennifer Hasegawa
Omnidawn, 2019
From the small towns strung along the coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i to the land-locked landscapes of Paraguay to the volcanic surface of Venus, this collection of poetry is a field guide to flora, fauna, and mineralia encountered, real, and imagined. Jennifer Hasegawa scans across physical and mental planes to reveal their inhabitants. Packed tightly into exploratory rocket segments, these poems ignite our gravest flaws to send our grandest potentials into orbit.

 Hasegawa’s poems not only rearrange our ways of seeing the world, but they also reset the language we use in it. Banzai, with a literal translation of “10,000 years,” was used by the Japanese as a rallying cry in imperialistic and militaristic contexts. Today, the understanding of this word has shifted to a comparatively neutral translation of the enthusiastic expression “Hurrah!” in both in Japan and beyond. In La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, Hasegawa aims to reclaim banzai, recasting the language of war and unwavering loyalty and forming it into one that stands against aggression and racism and embraces tolerance and self-acceptance. Here banzai becomes a rallying cry not of war but of grand potential. La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living chronicles a celebratory life and poetry filled with wonder.
 
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"La Clarté Notre-Dame" and "The Last Book of the Madrigals"
Philippe Jaccottet
Seagull Books, 2022
The last works of the last great classic European poet now available in English.

In his 96th and final year, and with the help of the poet José-Flore Tappy, celebrated Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet finished two manuscripts-in-progress, one in prose and one in poetry, both of which are presented in this volume in John Taylor’s sensitive translation.

 The first work, “La Clarté Notre-Dame,” takes off from the “pure, weightless, fragile, yet crystal-clear tinkling” of a monastery bell heard during a walk with friends. With this thought-provoking sound as a leitmotiv, Jaccottet looks back on a life of writing, reading, and scrutinizing humankind’s existential and spiritual aspirations. He sets these concerns against his equally lifelong preoccupation with “the rise of evil in today’s world,” notably in Syria. Composed in a baroque style, the verse poems collected in “The Last Book of Madrigals” explore love. Jaccottet returns in spirit to Italy, the country which for him symbolizes happiness and sensuality. As he evokes amorous attraction, he conjures up Monteverdi’s madrigals, one of Dante’s little-known rhymes, and Giuseppe Ungaretti’s last poem. Reinventing and commenting on these works, Jaccottet meditates on old age, approaching death, despair, and the persistence of love.

Together, both works grapple with devastating darkness, but as Tappy observes in her afterword, however, Jaccottet’s “greatest force” was “his perpetually renewed desire, during the most terrifying night, to head for the light.”
 
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La Far
Eric Linsker
University of Iowa Press, 2014
How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker’s first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are both forms of making others suffer in order to exist. In La Far, the world is faraway near, a hell conveniently elsewhere in which workers bundle Foxconn’s “rare earths” into the “frosty kits” that return us our content, but also the sea meeting land as it always has. Both are singable conditions and lead, irreversibly, to odes equally comfortable with praise and lament. The poems in La Far hope that by making the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, “literalizing / a nightingale beyond / knowledge,” we might construct what Wordsworth called a “Common Day,” a communized life partaken of by all.
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La Vita Nuova
Dante Alighieri
Harvard University Press, 2010

La Vita Nuova (1292–94) has many aspects. Dante’s libello, or “little book,” is most obviously a book about love. In a sequence of thirty-one poems, the author recounts his love of Beatrice from his first sight of her (when he was nine and she eight), through unrequited love and chance encounters, to his profound grief sixteen years later at her sudden and unexpected death. Linked with Dante’s verse are commentaries on the individual poems—their form and meaning—as well as the events and feelings from which they originate. Through these commentaries the poet comes to see romantic love as the first step in a spiritual journey that leads to salvation and the capacity for divine love. He aims to reside with Beatrice among the stars.

David Slavitt gives us a readable and appealing translation of one of the early, defining masterpieces of European literature, animating its verse and prose with a fluid, lively, and engaging idiom and rhythm. His translation makes this first major book of Dante’s stand out as a powerful work of art in its own regard, independent of its “junior” status to La Commedia. In an Introduction, Seth Lerer considers Dante as a poet of civic life. “Beatrice,” he reminds us, “lives as much on city streets and open congregations as she does in bedroom fantasies and dreams.”

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Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England
Joanna Picciotto
Harvard University Press, 2010

In seventeenth-century England, intellectuals of all kinds discovered their idealized self-image in the Adam who investigated, named, and commanded the creatures. Reinvented as the agent of innocent curiosity, Adam was central to the project of redefining contemplation as a productive and public labor. It was by identifying with creation’s original sovereign, Joanna Picciotto argues, that early modern scientists, poets, and pamphleteers claimed authority as both workers and “public persons.”

Tracking an ethos of imitatio Adami across a wide range of disciplines and devotions, Picciotto reveals how practical efforts to restore paradise generated the modern concept of objectivity and a novel understanding of the author as an agent of estranged perception. Finally, she shows how the effort to restore Adam as a working collective transformed the corpus mysticum into a public. Offering new readings of key texts by writers such as Robert Hooke, John Locke, Andrew Marvell, Joseph Addison, and most of all John Milton, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England advances a new account of the relationship between Protestantism, experimental science, the public sphere, and intellectual labor itself.

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Lacemakers
Claire McQuerry
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
In Lacemakers, Claire McQuerry investigates the timeless questions of relationships, of loss and longing, and of environment both natural and manmade. This informal yet haunting collection juxtaposes a myriad of perspectives—public and personal, interior and exterior, sacred and secular—to explore the fathomless mysteries that abound between one human and another. From the metallic hum of the air conditioner to the thrumming of quail wings in the Arizona desert, from the necklace of brake lights on the freeway to the more dangerous and intimate highways of the human heart, McQuerry explores the impact of our environments, both urban and natural, on humankind. Spirituality clashes with modernity in the holiest of places, and we are relentlessly confronted with the irreconcilable otherness of our fellow man. Above all, Lacemakers returns obsessively to separations, offering searing insight into our inability to truly know another person, meditating on the subtle abysses that eternally divide us from others.
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A Ladder of Cranes
Tom Sexton
University of Alaska Press, 2015
Whether watching men releasing caged birds at dawn in New York City or a ladder of cranes rising from a field in Manitoba, Tom Sexton is a keen observer of the interconnectedness of the natural and human worlds. The former Alaska poet laureate takes to the road in this new collection, wending a lyrical and at times mystical path between Alaska and New England.
Travelers along the way include the fabled wolf of Gubbio, old and lame and long past his taming encounter with Saint Francis of Assisi, and Chinese poet Li Bai chanting to a Yangtze River dolphin. Yet, while Sexton’s journey crosses borders—and occasionally centuries—his ultimate destination is always the landscape and people of Alaska. A Ladder of Cranes showcases Sexton’s mastery of both traditional forms and free verse. The tensions of his formal influences, Chinese and European, force the reader to experience these spare lines and tight observations in stunning new ways.
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The Ladder
Poems
Alan Michael Parker
Tupelo Press, 2016
Whether about the moon or hotel sex, politics or poppy seeds, Alan Michael Parker’s poems are always tender and eccentric and nuanced. In his eighth collection, with metaphysical fortitude the poet continues to deliberate—in all sorts of poems, some unpunctuated, some in prose, and some the first-person lyrics well loved by his longtime readers—upon what our daily lives mean. And how do we sing and praise and grieve all at once?
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The lake has no saint
Stacey Waite
Tupelo Press, 2010
Stacey Waite’s the lake has no saint is a study in grief — a work of poetic archaeology that traces the artifacts of the past into the relationships of the present.

Embedded in a powerfully modulated sequence addressing a “you” who shifts in location and identity, many of these poems feel like forms of request, imploring. The speaker’s androgynous self-awareness — and wary attention to the gendered assumptions elicited by bodies — disclose in each poem a recognizable but disorienting (and pressurized) situation.

the lake has no saint will unsettle a reader’s sense of the certainty and stability of gender, as grammar and phrasing are also disrupted and blurred, often requiring us to read closely to hear where one sentence ends as another begins. Yet despite its formal and thematic iconoclasm, this is a book that clearly elucidates a story both heart-rending and ultimately — in its vatic honesty — triumphant.
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Lake Michigan
Daniel Borzutzky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Finalist for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize

From the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for poetry


Lake Michigan, a series of 19 lyric poems, imagines a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated, and overrun by a brutal police force. Thinking about the ways in which economic policy, racism, and militarized policing combine to shape the city, Lake Michigan's poems continue exploring the themes from Borzutzky's Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. But while the influences in this book (Césaire, Vallejo, Neruda) are international, the focus here is local as the book takes a hard look at neoliberal urbanism in the historic city of Chicago.  Named a 2018 Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library. 
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The Lamb Cycle
What the Great English Poets Would Have Written About Mary and Her Lamb (Had They Thought of It First)
David R. Ewbank
Brandeis University Press, 2023
The rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” told in the style—and substance—of the great English poets from Edmund Spenser to Stevie Smith.
 
In The Lamb Cycle, David R. Ewbank achieves the unthinkable—he writes so convincingly in the style of the great English poets that one could be lulled into thinking that Shakespeare himself was inspired to muse upon the subject of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Ewbank captures not only the style of each of the poets he chooses, but also their preoccupations and subject matter. So D.H. Lawrence’s Mary longs for her lamb as any woman longing for her lover, whilst T.S. Eliot’s Mary is recollected by an old man looking back on his life. Alexander Pope writes an “An Essay on Lambs,” and Tennyson’s lotus eaters become “The Clover Eater.” Brilliantly written, sophisticated, and laugh-out-loud funny, these poems, enhanced by Kate Feiffer’s charming illustrations, will enchant anyone who has ever read an English poem.
 
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The Lame God
M. B. McLatchey
Utah State University Press, 2013
Winner of 2013 May Swenson Poetry Award
In The Lame God, author M. B. McLatchey reminds us of the inevitable bond between art and empathy. With a controlled language that finds its echo chamber in the immortal themes and characters of classical literature, this courageous work accompanies the author on her journey through a parent’s anguish in the face of a horrific crime. Using the art of poetry she gives voice to a suffering—and a love—that might otherwise go unheard.
 
The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.
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Lamentation for 77,297 Victims
Jirí Weil
Karolinum Press, 2020
“Smoke from nearby factories shrouds a countryside as flat as a table, a countryside stretching off to infinity. Covering it are the ashes of millions of dead. Scattered throughout are fine pieces of bone that ovens were not able to burn. When the wind comes, ashes rise to the heavens, bone fragments remain on the ground. And rain falls on the ashes, and rain turns them to good fertile soil, as befits the ashes of martyrs. And who can find the ashes of those from my native land, of whom there were 77,297? I gather some ashes with my hand, for only a hand can touch them, and I pour them into a linen sack, just as those who once left for a foreign country would gather their native soil so as never to forget, so as always to return to it.”

So begins Jiří Weil’s unforgettable prose poem, Lamentation for 77, 297 Victims, his literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. A Czech-Jewish writer who worked at Prague’s Jewish Museum both during and after the Nazi Occupation—he survived the Holocaust by faking his own death and hiding out until the war had ended—Weil wrote Lamentation while he served as the museum’s senior librarian in the 1950s. This remarkable literary experiment presents a number of innovative approaches to writing about a horror many would deem indescribable, combining a narrative account of the Shoah with newspaper-style reportage on a handful of the lives ended by the Holocaust and quotes from the Hebrew Bible to create a specific and powerful portrait of loss and remembrance. Translated by David Lightfoot, Lamentation for 77,297 Victims is a startling and singular introduction to a writer whose works have been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Michiko Kakutani, and Siri Hustvedt.
 
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A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire
Andrew S. Nicholson
University Press of Colorado, 2015

"In Andrew S. Nicholson’s A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire, what is most alive is color, that which gives itself freely, generously: ‘Follow the hopeful as they green the day’ (‘My Garage Fills with an Ever-Increasing Number of Dandelions’). Threaded throughout with Genesis, wherein Jacob wrestles an angel, this gorgeous debut collection builds a ladder firmly rooted here: in sun and earth; in varying and multiple shades of orange; in trials of father and son; in books and paintings; in abandoned casinos; in countries far from home; and/or in the sound of a door closing. Nicholson’s poems come from a man standing by himself, in what George Oppen called the ‘shipwreck of the singular,’ which includes everybody. I’m moved by the luminous generosity, the moral clarity of this work. A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire is news that will stay news.”
—Claudia Keelan, author of The Devotion FieldMissing Her, and O, Heart

"'Who doesn’t nurse a secret love?' asks Andrew S. Nicholson in visionary poems that reveal secret worlds cradled inside this one. Whether considering the casinos of Las Vegas, a fresco in Pompeii, or scenes from the Hebrew Bible, the poet endures one of desire’s more fraught paradoxes: its unchanging ability to bring change, to turn the known into the unknown. These poems bravely attend to such transformations the way Jacob—the book’s patron saint—wrestles with the angel, 'lifting all the flesh / that he can lose.' I admire this poet who knows that blessing doesn’t arrive without loss, who remembers 'I was loved once. / Beneath that love, a kindness took root.' The same sweet feeling lingers long after this book is closed. Dear reader: savor it."
—Brian Teare

 
"Andrew S. Nicholson’s A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire is a gorgeous book. His graceful, playful poems enchant us ('I try to make out the stranger’s face, but he’s shrinking: / a melting gray blur, an ever-smaller thorn.') and transform us ('Sink into the bathwater, any way is a way / to journey toward that joining'). Nicholson has become one of the great poets of a new and radical kind of pastoral."
—Joseph Lease

Opening the space between the ordinary and the visionary, the poems in A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire uncover an intimate relationship with the world, from Las Vegas to Italy to the American Midwest. From a lime glowing in an orchard to a miraculous childhood attempt at levitation, Andrew S. Nicholson’s poems ground themselves in the commonplace and leap for the luminous. Central to this collection are poems that retell stories of Jacob from the Old Testament, relocated behind casinos, glimpsed in miniature on kitchen floors, and heard speaking in a moment of decay. Through these retellings, Nicholson examines the creation of self, family relationships, and a generative sense of the divine.

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Land and Sea
The Lyric Poetry of Philip Freneau
Richard C. Vitzthum
University of Minnesota Press, 1978

Land and Sea was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Although Philip Freneau is best known as the poet of the American Revolution, half his poems had nothing to do with the war, Professor Vitzthum points out, and this, the first systematic, in-depth study of Freneau's lyric poetry, provides a fresh perspective on the poet's non-political work. Demonstrating that there is a heretofore unrecognized pattern of land-sea imagery and symbolism in Freneau's best work. Professor Vitzthum traces changes reflected in this imagery to developments in the poet's thought, which in turn related to major intellectual and literary trends in revolutionary and early republican America. An introductory chapter assesses twentieth century biographical and critical estimates of Freneau, outlines the key themes in his work, and links his thirty-year career as sailor and ship captain to his creation of a covert, symbolistic poetic method. The following five chapters chronologically discuss Freneau's non-political poems from 1772 through 1815. Professor Vitzthum concludes that Freneau was not the derivative and unsuccessful artist he is currently thought to have been but, rather, one of America's genuinely important poets.

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The Land Of Bliss
Cathy Song
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
Cathy Song’s fourth collection of poetry unveils glimpses of the elusive but ever-present power of wisdom and compassion. Recognizing that we have the ability to create our own misery as well as our own bliss, she finds the unexpected in broken lives, despair, and even seemingly joyous occasions. Song’s poems are often, like a handful of water, "cold and impossibly / clear, unlike anything / you’ve ever held before."
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Land of Fire
Poems
Mario Chard
Tupelo Press, 2018
The poems in Mario Chard’s first collection follow three entangled strands — a contemporary immigrant story, echoes of the Fall in Paradise Lost, and meditations on fatherhood in the shadow of Abraham’s command to sacrifice a son. The poet speaks from the American hemisphere, immersed in histories of loss from long before Magellan first glimpsed his tierra del fuego. This Land of Fire is close at hand though we try and insist upon its distance, like the sun, like Milton’s Pandemonium, like the wars outside our borders or within.
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The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business
Jacob Strautmann
Four Way Books, 2020
The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business is an extended elegy for Jacob Strautmann’s home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream. Throughout the book, voices rise up from the page to describe a landscape eroded and plundered by runaway capitalism—its mountain tops leveled by the extractive industries, its waters polluted by runoff from mines—and the fallout from that waste. Those who remain are consigned to life in a ravaged land denuded of nature where birds die and “Sheep / birth limp two-headed things and some / that speak like men if they speak at all.”
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Landlocked
Julia McConnell
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Lesbian bars, libraries, highways, churches, and oil rigs set the scenes for the poems in Landlocked. Whether at work or at play, the speakers in Landlocked live in the space between longing and belonging, wanderlust and homesickness, and explore the intersection of place and identity. In the era of “don’t say gay,” these poems provide a defiantly queer perspective on Oklahoma, one of the reddest of the red states, and its many contradictions.
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Land's End
New and Selected Poems
Gail Mazur
University of Chicago Press, 2020
With her latest poetry collection, Gail Mazur once again shows her mastery of the descriptive-meditative narrative, powerfully evoking the past while writing from the firm ground of the present.

In Land’s End, we see Mazur writing with the kind of lyric authority, ever-deepening emotional range, and intellectual and social scope that her readers have come to expect in her poetry. Beautifully crafted elegies meet with reflections on her own life, her family, and artists who have come and gone. In the title poem, she leads readers through a garden, where new and old growth twists together in an “almanac of inheritances” that conjures the rich memory of poets who have passed on. In this space of remembrance, Mazur also charges us with the responsibility of nurturing art and artists of the future, especially in the face of the disheartening absurdities of contemporary politics. Contemplating the growth and decay so entwined in life, these poems invite us to consider both inevitable brokenness and necessary hope, writing “My work now: to continue learning to absorb the loss, / and live.”

Through tidal creeks and the weightless scenes of ukiyo-e woodcuts, in artists’ studios and along the frozen Charles River, Mazur connects passionately with the world around her. Carrying with her the undeniable presence of loss and of time past, she engages deeply with the present, her historic memory informing a deep concern for contemporary life. Reading Land’s End, we find ourselves with the poet:
as if here at land’s end, here on the coast, urgent,
together we’d have energies to do battle forever.
 
           As if we could rescue the guttering world….
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Landscape Portrait Figure Form
Dean Rader
Omnidawn, 2014
A frog and a toad walk into a book of poems. They meet Paul Klee, Hieronymus Bosch, Adrienne Rich, Sesshu Toyo, Mark Twain, all of them escorted by Dean Rader. There are adventure poems, landscapes, assassins, self portraits, there are what some might call “ideas” mixed with some very funny moments, and what we might quite seriously call “emotions.” This collection will engage those interested in innovative, arresting, humorously engaging poetry.
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Landscape with Bloodfeud
Wendy Barnes
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
Scarred by nuclear smokestacks, oil wells, and surging floodwaters, and haunted by the legacies of slavery, racism, and French rule, the Louisiana of Landscape with Bloodfeud is disenchanted but still exerts an undeniable pull. Reckoning with displacement, ancestral guilt, and centuries of human and environmental exploitation, Wendy Barnes dissects the state’s turbulent past—as a microcosm of colonial oppression, westward expansion, and the birth of global capitalism. With an expat’s detachment, our Louisiana-born speaker contemplates her fraught relationship with her home culture and her white working-class roots, raising questions about complicity and shame, as history “bleeds us all for its tax, some for more, / digging down into every wet wound, / digging down among the taproots, under old folks’ / marble tombs or unmarked graves.”
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Landscape with Human Figure
Rafael Campo
Duke University Press, 2002
In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America’s most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo’s poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us together—just as did the incantations of humankind’s earliest healers—into the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.
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Landsickness
Leigh Lucas
Tupelo Press, 2024
A lyric essay about young love and loss and the aftermath of a former lover’s suicide.

Landsickness explores the inelegant progress of grief and pursues a relentless search for evidence of the beloved’s presence through the physics of splashes, the history of seasickness, and the science of depression. While full of tenderness, the poems employ humor and honesty to observe the ugliness of grief and the failure of elegy to restore the dead. 

From the funeral to the office of her dead-end job to navigating the streets of New York, the speaker experiences a series of false starts as she learns to cope with her new life. Still, there is a real sense of progression in the collection’s end, even as the speaker continues to ask herself: “Why am I obsessed with the physics of his fall?"

 
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Langston Hughes and the Blues
Steven C. Tracy
University of Illinois Press, 2024
The shades and structures of the blues had an immense impact on the poetry of Langston Hughes. Steven C. Tracy provides a cultural context for Hughes’s work while revealing how Hughes mined Black oral and literary traditions to create his poetry. Comparing Hughes’s poems to blues texts, Tracy reveals how Hughes’s experimental forms reflect the poetics, structures, rhythms, and musical techniques of the music. Tracy also offers a discography of recordings by the artists--Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others--who most influenced the poet.
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The Language Book
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

“Ok murky in alter all end, unpredictable day, with rainshine any degree night, the sun kin warm and hot. Enough stone or other jugs lineup of whatever is In Through Out That’s light as much as known Differences evanesce Like, where and/or what on the equator might be french or spanish Longitude and latitude, yep yep sure Americana.”—Larry Eigner, commentary on a selection from Ger­trude Stein’s Tender Buttons

This selection of essays and poetry from the first three volumes of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine dis­cusses a “spectrum of writing that places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, nor sub­ject matter.” (Bernstein and Andrews) The various writers shun labels, slogans, or catch-phrases; their exploration of the ways that meanings and values are re­vealed through the written word is in­tended to open the field of poetic activity, not close it.

The common thread of these essays is the multitude and scope of words’ refer­ential powers—denotative, connotative, and associational; and studying these powers is ultimately a social and political activity as well as an aesthetic one.

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The Language Parallax
Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy
By Paul Friedrich
University of Texas Press, 1986

Humankind has always been fascinated and troubled by the way languages and dialects differ. Linguistically based differences in point of view have preoccupied many original minds of the past, such as Kant, and remain at the forefront of language study: in philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and other fields.

Paul Friedrich's The Language Parallax argues persuasively that the "locus and focus" of differences among languages lies not so much in practical or rational aspects as in the complexity and richness of more poetic dimensions—in the nuances of words, or the style and voice of an author. This poetic reformulation of what has been called "linguistic relativism" is grounded in the author's theory of the imagination as a main source of poetic indeterminacy. The reformulation is also based on the intimate relation of the concentrated language of poetry to the potential or possibilities for poetry in ordinary conversation, dreams, and other experiences. The author presents challenging thoughts on the order and system of language in their dynamic relation to indeterminacy and, ultimately, disorder and chaos.

Drawing on his considerable fieldwork in anthropology and linguistics, Friedrich interweaves distinct and provocative elements: the poetry of language difference, the indeterminacy in dialects and poetic forms, the discovery of underlying orders, the workings of different languages, the strength of his own poetry. The result is an innovative and organic whole.

The Language Parallax, then, is a highly original work with a single bold thesis. It draws on research and writing that has involved, in particular, English, Russian, and the Tarascan language of Mexico, as well as the personal and literary study of the respective cultures. Anthropologist, linguist, and poet, Friedrich synthesizes from his experience in order to interrelate language variation and structure, the creative individual, ideas of system-in-process, and questions of scientific and aesthetic truth. The result is a new view of language held to the light of its potentially creative nature.

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Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf
Gillian R. Overing
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Not a book about what Beowulf means but how it means, and how the reader participates in the process of meaning construction.

Overing’s primary aim is to address the poem on its own terms, to trace and develop an interpretive strategy consonant with the extent of its difference. Beowulf’s arcane structure describes cyclical repetitions and patterned intersections of themes which baffle a linear perspective, and suggest instead the irresolution and dynamism of the deconstructionist free play of textual elements.

Chapter 1 posits the self/reader as a function of the text/language, examining the ways in which the text "speaks" the reader. Chapter 2 develops an interactive semiotic strategy in an attempt to describe an isomorphic relation between poem and reader, between text and self. Chapter 3 addresses the notions of text and self as more complex functions or formulations of desire, and thus complicates and expands the arguments of the two preceding chapters. The final chapter examines the issue of desire in the poem, and, to a lesser extent, desire in the reader (insofar as these may legitimately be viewed as distinct from each other).

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Lantern Puzzle
Ye Chun
Tupelo Press, 2015
Entranced by time and location and the body’s longings, this is a book of self-translation. Each poem has gone through a transmigration process, as the poet negotiates between her native Chinese and her adopted English, attempting to condense, distill, and expand seeing and understanding.
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The Lantern Room
Chloe Honum
Tupelo Press, 2021
“In The Lantern Room, her exquisite new collection, Chloe Honum moves, as her poems do, with range, precision, and astonishing beauty. Honum’s speaker travels across Arkansas motel to motel, missing a beloved, and in the book’s crown jewel, ‘The Common Room,’ chronicles an out-patient hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. The collection closes with sublime meditations on the speaker’s mother’s death: ‘How will I live without her?’ How, indeed. This book is that survival, and more than that, an extraordinary mind pressing through language to speak so deeply, so startlingly, the reader is made larger to receive its enormous gift: ‘But I have rain in my hair. This much is true. Let me bring it to you.’”
—Allison Benis Whit
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The Lapidary's Nosegay
Lara Candland
University Press of Colorado, 2018

The Lapidary’s Nosegay, Lara Candland’s primer of poems, presents to readers a bouquet of resplendent poems that Candland has created, collaged, curated, and reimagined by using the rich floral and gem imagery in the poetry of Emily Dickinson as her primary source material. Dickinson and Candland share linguistic and theological roots in the Bible, nineteenth-century American Protestantism, and a lexicon distinctive to their specific individuarian communities, and this collection of poems draws a serpentine kind of map across nearly two centuries, journeying from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Provo, Utah, from Dickinson’s severe and lush New England to Candland’s own jagged, harsh, and stunning high desert Utah. The Lapidary’s Nosegay explores the ways that both poets have simultaneously challenged and embraced the axiomatic constraints of religion, landscape, and cultural conventions and expectations of each poet’s time and place.

Aesthetically, Candland attempts to challenge the hierarchies of the page through linguistic, typographic, and sonic experimentation. The Lapidary’s Nosegay carries Dickinsonian echoes to alliterative and parenthetic excessivities that indicate sound stresses or that pictographically invoke sun, god, ghosts, ecstasy, and the jewels and flowers tumbling throughout Dickinson’s own poems. This collection works at toppling textual hierarchies, systematically jumbling sound, text, meaning, symbol, and context and entering the vein of radical American aesthetics, politics, and culture that have shaped Candland’s life and poetics.

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Lark in the Morning
The Verses of the Troubadours, a Bilingual Edition
Edited by Robert Kehew
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Although the troubadours flourished at the height of the Middle Ages in southern France, their songs of romantic love, with pleasing melodies and intricate stanzaic patterns, have inspired poets and song writers ever since, from Dante to Chaucer, from Renaissance sonneteers to the Romantics, and from Verlaine and Rimbaud to modern rock lyricists. Yet despite the incontrovertible influence of the troubadours on the development of both poetry and music in the West, there existed no comprehensive anthology of troubadour lyrics that respected the verse form of the originals until now.

Lark in the Morning honors the meter, word play, punning, and sound effects in the troubadours' works while celebrating the often playful, bawdy, and biting nature of the material. Here, Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of two seminal twentieth-century poets—Ezra Pound and W. D. Snodgrass—to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse and the astonishing variety of troubadour voices. This bilingual edition contains an introduction to the three major periods of the troubadours—their beginning, rise, and decline—as well as headnotes that briefly put each poet in context. Lark in the Morning will become an essential collection for those interested in learning about and teaching the origins of Western vernacular poetry.
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Las hormigas de oro / Ants of Gold
Poemas / Poems
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi
Swan Isle Press, 2000
For Eduardo Urios-Aparisi poetry is above all, word, spoken word. Word that commits, pronounces, sounds. Word that leaves knots in the voice. For Urios, words play and challenge to play, to conceive the world from different and unsuspected points of view. The poems reflect the senses of the poet; moment to moment, in seduction, abandonment, and loss. It is reality flowing and always fleeing; fragmentary, accelerated, changing and unattainable.
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The Last Incantations
Poems
David Mura
Northwestern University Press, 2014

The personal, historical, and artistic are all in dialogue in David Mura’s daring collection, The Last Incantations. In a variety of poetic modes, Mura harmonizes and contrasts multiple voices to form a powerful meditation. Certain poems speak from his experiences as a third-generation Japanese American and his family’s struggles to prove their "Americanness." Others speak from the intersections of our multiracial society—an Asian teenager in love with a Somali Muslim girl, an apostrophe to Richard Pryor, poems about a Palestinian American friend, Abu Ghraib, the hapa sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The result is a sustained multifoliate poetry, bursting with elegance, heartache, and truth.

 
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Last Lake
Reginald Gibbons
University of Chicago Press, 2016
From Ritual
 
A slow parade of old west enthusiasts,
camp song and hymn, came in along the winding
 
way where rural declined to suburban, slow
riders and wagoners passing a cow staked
 
to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly
up—not in vacant lots the ancient icons
 
of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,
in sacrifices and customs of bride-price
 
or dowry.  (It’s good people no longer make
blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,
 
for example, and in the crunching gravel
parking lots of small churches—oh but we do.)

“The evening forgives the alleyway,” Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poems—but such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbons’s emblematic, vividly presented scenes, his language looks hard at and into experience and feeling. Words themselves have ideas, and have eyes—inwardly looking down through their own meanings, as the poet considers a lake in the Canadian north, a Chicago neighborhood, a horse caravan in Texas, a church choir, a bookshelf, or an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. The last lake is the place of both awe and elegy.
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The Last Person to Hear Your Voice
Richard Shelton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
While Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with soocial issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in Brief Communications from My widowed Mother.
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The Last Predicta
Chad Davidson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

The Last Predicta is Chad Davidson's searing collection of poetry dedicated to endings of all varieties. From odes to the corporate cornucopia of Target and the aggressive cheer of a Carnival cruise, to emotive examinations of Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Matthew or flies circling a putrescent bowl of forgotten fruit, Davidson weaves a lyrical web of apocalyptic scenarios and snapshots of pop culture. Throughout the volume appear cataclysms large and small, whether the finality of a minute passed or the deaths of a thousand swans at Seneca Lake in 1912. Images of King Kong, Starburst candies, and the Brady Bunch swim with mythological figures, Roman heroes, and dead animals as Davidson deftly explores the relationship between the mundane and the profound. At the center of the collection sits the Predicta television itself, "the lives blooming there in Technicolor," at once futuristic and nostalgic in its space age prophecy.

Moving in their very simplicity, these poems resonate with discoveries that belie their seemingly ordinary wellsprings. Chad Davidson's stunning collection repeatedly explores the moment of revelation and all its accompanying aftermaths. The Last Predicta leads readers to ponder all manner of predictions, endings, and everything that follows.

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The Last Quiet Place on Earth
Sonnets in the Time of Coronavirus
Roger Armbrust
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022
It’s 2020, the time of Coronavirus. The poet confronts it and his environment in these 104 sonnets. Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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Last Seen
Jacqueline Jones LaMon
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Inspired by actual case histories of long-term missing African American children, this provocative and heartrending collection of poems evokes the experience of what it means to be among the missing in contemporary America. This thought-provoking collection of persona poems looks at absence from the standpoint of the witnesses surrounding the void and offers an intimate depiction of those impossible moments of aftermath lived by those who remain accounted for and present. While enabling us to question our own sense of identity, this unique collection of poems reveals the blurred edges of separation between them and us and the impact that the missing have upon our present and future.


Finalist, NAACP Image Awards

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The Last Unkillable Thing
Emily Pitinos
University of Iowa Press, 2021
This collection holds a mirror to the self and in its reflection we find the elegiac and the ecological, as in “how much of enjoying a place / is destroying it?”; the worlds both domestic and natural, as in “when the redbird strikes the window, it is me / who takes blame”; a daughter shattered, but not without humor—“I can feel it coming on, my season of lavish suffering, the why me why me why me why me / that leaves me snowblind in the asking”—and, certainly, not without tenderness. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, The Last Unkillable Thing is a journey across landscapes of mourning.
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The Last Visit
Chad Abushanab
Autumn House Press, 2019
In Chad Abushanab’s debut poetry collection, The Last Visit, he carefully and compassionately explores a family broken by alcoholism and abuse. These poems trace the trajectory of an adolescent living with a violent father struggling with addiction, and recount both the abused child’s perspective and his attempts to reckon with his past as he reaches adulthood, chronicling his own struggles with substance abuse and the reverberations of trauma in his life. Amid the violence and hurt, Abushanab’s verse renders moments of compassion—even the least sympathetic figures are shown to be grappling with their flaws, and the narrator struggles to find compassion and move beyond the memories and habits that haunt him. These well-crafted poems explore how the past shapes us and how difficult it can be to leave behind.
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Late Empire
David Wojahn
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
Late Empire, David Wojahn’s most wide-ranging collection of poetry, affirms his status as one of the most compelling and original voices of his generation.  In these poems, private history and public history mingle and merge in a way that is by turns deeply personal and elegiac.  Centered around tow masterful elegies for the writers parents, the poems also treat an array of subjects familiar to us from news events but rarely examined by contemporary poetry.
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Late Psalm
Betshy Sholl
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Late Psalm takes themes from those ancient songs of joy and grief and transposes them into the language of contemporary life.

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Late Rapturous
Frank X. Gaspar
Autumn House Press, 2012
In his fifth poetry collection, Gaspar's poems are spacious and awake, in touch with faith and anxiety, and unafraid to wander. These poems are multi-layered with Judeo-Christian allusions and metaphysical images of faith.
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Late Self-Portraits
Mary Morris
Michigan State University Press, 2022
A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the of Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon’s prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender.

From “Dinner with Hades”:

He shows me a birthday cake, candled. My name is written in pomegranate
seeds. It’s like vertigo. Just before he seeks to devour, he halts to birdsong—
sound of goldfinch, bluebird, hawk, lilting of sparrows. Of whippoorwill
and dove. Wings flap, so many wings, a cool breeze as leaves unfurl into a
once forgotten green and I am back on earth, held in my mother’s arms.
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The Late Tang
Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860)
Stephen Owen
Harvard University Press

The poetry of the Late Tang often looked backward, and many poets of the period distinguished themselves through the intensity of their retrospective gaze. Chinese poets had always looked backward to some degree, but for many Late Tang poets the echoes and the traces of the past had a singular aura.

In this work, Stephen Owen resumes telling the literary history of the Tang that he began in his works on the Early and High Tang. Focusing in particular on Du Mu, Li Shangyin, and Wen Tingyun, he analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. The Late Tang, Owen argues, forces us to change our very notion of the history of poetry. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of available choices—styles, genres, the voices of past poets. It was this repertoire that would endure.

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Latin Poetry
Ludovico Ariosto
Harvard University Press, 2018
Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), one of Italy’s greatest poets, was a leading figure of sixteenth-century Italian humanism. After some years working in the household of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, to whom he dedicated his dazzling romance epic Orlando Furioso (1516), Ariosto settled in Ferrara under the patronage of Ippolito’s brother Alfonso. He continued to write throughout his life, publishing 214 letters, five plays, seven satires in verse, and dozens of lyric poems in Italian and Latin. Ariosto’s Latin poems, translated into English for the first time in this volume, are remarkable for their erudition, technical virtuosity, and playfulness. This edition provides a new Latin text, the first to be based on a collation of the autograph manuscript and editio princeps, and offers a unique insight into the Latin formation of one of the Renaissance’s foremost vernacular writers.
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Latin Poetry
Girolamo Fracastoro
Harvard University Press, 2013
One of the great medical authorities of the early sixteenth century, Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553) was also a prominent Neo-Latin poet. This volume includes his famous didactic poem Syphilis in three books, which gave the name to the disease and contains the first poetical description of Columbus’s discovery of America. Also included are a short Biblical epic, the Joseph, and the Carmina, a collection of shorter poetry in various metres. This volume presents an updated edition of all the Latin texts, two previously unpublished short poems, and the first complete translation into English of Fracastoro’s Latin poetry.
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Latin Poetry
Jacopo Sannazaro
Harvard University Press, 2009
Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530), considered by some authorities the finest Neo-Latin poet of the Italian Renaissance, spent most of his career in Naples, where he was a member and ultimately the head of the Accademia Pontaniana. He is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Virgil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form, as well as elegies, epigrams, and a number of shorter works.This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.
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Laughing Africa
Terese Svoboda
University of Iowa Press, 1990

There is a large intelligence present in Terese Svoboda's poetry and not a shred of sentimentality. From the dramatic coming-of-age in the title poem to the question posed in the last section, "What will I say to my child as it snows / that last winter's papery afterglow?" she continually searches for a responsible, compassionate world, one in which the only illusion is art.

The mythological central poem, "The Ranchhand's Daughter," shows the gods of isolation and incest warring against each other, destroying a triangle of love and cut into the granite-faced Badlands. It is only in the sensuous landscape of the domestic that possible redemption occurs: the father who dreams of running for president, the mother who signs in the mirror, the couple in the shower with "confidence rising between them." Faced with the inevitable losses, Svoboda strives for meaning and beauty.

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Laughing Lost in the Mountains
Poems of Wang Wei
Wei Wang
University Press of New England, 1992
Wang Wei  was one of the most celebrated poets of China's Tang Dynasty (618-907). An influential painter and practitioner of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, many of his poems contain concise and evocative descriptions of nature whose elegant minimalism offers subtle expression of a transcendence from everyday life. While this purity of poetic expression is what Wang Wei's reputation is built upon, he lived a courtly life of highs and lows in a tumultuous era, suffering demotions and exile, imprisonment and rehabilitation, all of which are evidenced in his verse. Wang Wei's poems grapple with the trappings of worldly life and the quest for enlightenment, painting a complex picture of both his psyche and his Chan discipline. Laughing Lost in the Mountains includes translations of poems running the spectrum of Wang Wei's subjects, as well as an extensive introduction that sheds light on Wang Wei's craft, spirituality, and historical context.
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Laughter Before Sleep
Robert Pack
University of Chicago Press, 2011

One of America’s most eminent nature poets, Robert Pack has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Stephen Jay Gould to Mark Strand. In his latest collection, Laughter Before Sleep, Pack carries on his themes of family and friends, responsibility to the natural world of evolved diversity, the transience of life, the fragility of happiness, and the consolations offered by art and music.

Laughter Before Sleep weighs the nature of endings from the perspective of old age and embraces the humor and play of memory that keep mortality at bay.As we are carried along with Pack’s lyrical, sensitive, and intelligent verse, he takes us on a moving but often comic journey toward the end of life. In the opening section, Pack composes poems that meditate upon a sense of his own diminishing and the meaning of absences. The middle sections form episodes of a memoir in verse, moving from family to history and back again, reflecting on the power of anecdote to shape a life in retrospect. With the final section, Pack recalls his unfulfilled plan to raise penguins in Montana, offers a panegyric on Darwin’s nose, and makes the mistake of trying to impress a police officer with a book of poems.
 
Filled with charm and wit but also with philosophical melancholy, Laughter Before Sleep is a superb addition to the poet’s oeuvre.
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The Laughter of Adam and Eve
Jason Sommer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
Near the beginning, just after the fall, was laughter—at least as Jason Sommer imagines it. In the title poem, Eve catches Adam’s hilarity over what passes for a tree outside of Eden, their laughter a heady combination of longing, defiance, and perhaps even relief, through which they find they now possess “a knowledge of evil that is good,” an understanding that will carry them through life after paradise. Through settings mythical, historical and biblical, through characters that range from Gunga Din to St. Kevin of Glendalough, the poems in this book often search out meaning in the tracing of origins: of a bird’s song, of laughter, of a word, of language itself.  Poems explore the source of the word brouhaha, the song of the “resignation bird,” and the dangerous way a poem of Anna Akhmatova enters the world, under the eyes and ears of Stalin’s secret police, escaping the house arrest its author must endure.
In The Laughter of Adam and Eve, Sommer speaks from a multitude of voices and perspectives, in short, formal lyrics as well as longer free-verse narratives. From the archetypal parents of us all, down through anonymous voices, throughout these pages, women and men speak to—and of—each other, in many roles and relations—as lover and beloved, as child and parent, as dreamer and dreamt of. The poems attempt to travel beyond the traditional binary in search of the common thread that binds us to one another. Perhaps chief among them is story: whether recasting myth so that Pygmalion and Narcissus become a single figure or using an Appalachian tale retold as a message, lover to lover, these poems narrate, while engaging deeply with those special properties that poetry can bring to story.
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Laura
Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell
Barbara L. Estrin
Duke University Press, 1994
How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors—Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell—the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In Laura, Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she occupies.
Through close readings of the Rime sparse and the works of Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, Estrin uncovers three Lauras: Laura-Daphne, who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, who returns the poet’s love; and Laura-Mercury, who reinvents her own life. Estrin claims that in these three guises Laura subverts both genre and gender, thereby introducing multiple desires into the many layers of the poems. Drawing upon genre and gender theories advanced by Jean-François Lyotard and Judith Butler to situate female desire in the poem’s framework, Estrin shows how genre and gender in the Petrarchan tradition work together to undermine the stability of these very concepts.
Estrin’s Laura constitutes a fundamental reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition and contributes greatly to the postmodern reassessment of the Renaissance period. In its descriptions of how early modern poets formulate questions about sexuality, society and poetry, Laura will appeal to scholars of the English and Italian Renaissance, of gender studies, and of literary criticism and theory generally.
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The Lava of This Land
South African Poetry 1960-1996
Denis Hirson
Northwestern University Press, 1997
The lava of change has spilled over South Africa again as apartheid as ended. What sort of social and artistic emerges as it cools? This anthology, containing more than two hundred poems by over fifty poets, spans five distinct historical periods in the contemporary development of South Africa, from the 1960s Durban worker strikes to the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s. Most of the poems have been written in English, but forty-eight have been translated from Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and /Xam, a Bushman linguistic group. Inspired by music, by the language of the streets, by the sensual and the erotic, and by social, political, and economic turmoil, these poems showcase a remarkable complexity of literary traditions. They provide a fascinating and moving rendering of South Africa's hybrid language and unique worldview.
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The Law of Falling Bodies
Poems
Elton Glaser
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
The hard center of The Law of Falling Bodies bears down on the twin enmities of pain and loss. But the book ranges over a broad field, with poems covering everything from the inundations of summer rain ("It's like living in the spit valve of a big trombone") to a lovesick drunk listening to Patsy Cline ("My drink's on the rocks, and I am, too.") Glaser begins with the quirks and revelations of nature, shifts to those difficult adjustments we make as the body breaks down, modulates to a series of scenes imbued with music, and ends on an elegiac note in memory of his late wife ("Grief follows me like a dog behind the butcher's truck"). Along the way, the poems touch on a restless scale of tones, as light as the indignant comedy of "It Ain't the Heat, It's the Stupidity" and as heartbreakingly dark as "Autopsy." At the core is the constant interplay of an agile mind and rich language--what Ezra Pound called "the dance of the intellect among words"--always feeling out what it is to be human. The Law of Falling Bodies is part of the University of Arkansas Press Poetry series, edited by Enid Shomer.
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The Law of Truly Large Numbers
Poems
James Kimbrell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
A new addition to the award winning Pitt Poetry Series
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Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word
Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala
Emil’ Keme
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Bringing to the fore the voices of Maya authors and what their poetry tells us about resistance, sovereignty, trauma, and regeneration 

In 1954, Guatemala suffered a coup d’etat, resulting in a decades-long civil war. During this period, Indigenous Mayans were subject to displacement, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing. Within the context of the armed conflict and the postwar period in Guatemala, K’iche’ Maya scholar Emil’ Keme identifies three historical phases of Indigenous Maya literary insurgency in which Maya authors use poetry to dignify their distinct cultural, political, gender, sexual, and linguistic identities.

Le Maya Q’atzij / Our Maya Word employs Indigenous and decolonial theoretical frameworks to critically analyze poetic works written by ten contemporary Maya writers from five different Maya nations in Iximulew/Guatemala. Similar to other Maya authors throughout colonial history, these authors and their poetry criticize, in their own creative ways, the continuing colonial assaults to their existence by the nation-state. Throughout, Keme displays the decolonial potentialities and shortcomings proposed by each Maya writer, establishing a new and productive way of understanding Maya living realities and their emancipatory challenges in Iximulew/Guatemala.

This innovative work shows how Indigenous Maya poetics carries out various processes of decolonization and, especially, how Maya literature offers diverse and heterogeneous perspectives about what it means to be Maya in the contemporary world.

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Leaping Poetry
An Idea with Poems and Translations
Robert Bly
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as “riding on dragons.” Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of “leaping” as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Tranströmer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought.
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Learning by Heart
Contemporary American Poetry about School
Maggie Anderson
University of Iowa Press, 1999

Learning by Heart brings together a unique and diverse collection of poems about the experience of school as seen through the eyes of America's best contemporary poets. These poets capture the educational process not only in the classroom but as it takes place in libraries and hallways, on playing fields and at dances. Alternately joyous and defiant, they demonstrate how it is that young people come to find their place in the world.

Most of the poems in this anthology were written between 1970 and 1995, a period that encompasses both the halcyon years of poets-in-the-schools programs and the primary and secondary school years of many of the poets included. Their poems define school in that most contemporary sense — “with a multitude of voices”—reflecting perspectives from African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and Native American as well as Anglo American backgrounds, from both public and private schools in rural and urban environments.

Learning by Heart offers a profound and timely statement about schools and learning as well as the role of art in education. Finally, these poems validate that most important lesson: even the most common of experiences is worthy of creative expression.

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The Least of These
Todd Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2010

In his third collection of poems Todd Davis advises us that "the only corruption comes / in not loving this life enough." Over the course of this masterful and heartfelt book it becomes clear that Davis not only loves the life he's been given, but also believes that the ravishing desire of this world can offer hope, and even joy, however it might be negotiated.
     Drawing upon a range of stories from the Christian, Transcendental, and Asian traditions, as well as from his own deep understanding of the natural world, Davis explores the connection between the visible and invisible worlds, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God." 
     A direct poetic descendant of Walt Whitman, Davis invites us to sing "the songs we collect in the hymnals of our flesh- / impromptu, a cappella, our mouths flung open / in a great wide O."

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Leaves of Grass, 1860
The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition
Whitman, Walt
University of Iowa Press, 2009

In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition was Whitman’s last best hope for national salvation. Now available in a facsimile edition, Leaves of Grass, 1860 faithfully reproduces Whitman’s attempt to create a “Great construction of the New Bible” to save the nation on the eve of civil war and, for the first time, frames the book in historical rather than literary terms.

In his third edition, Whitman added 146 new poems to the 32 that comprised the second edition, reorganized the book into a bible of American civic religion that could be cited chapter and verse, and included erotic poetry intended to bind the nation in organic harmony. This 150th anniversary edition includes a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume, a thought-provoking introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy that situates Whitman in nineteenth-century America, and annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman’s poems.

A profoundly rich product of a period when America faced its greatest peril, this third edition finds the poet transforming himself into a prophet of spiritual democracy and the Whitman we celebrate today—boisterous, barbaric, and benevolent. Reprinting it now continues the poet’s goal of proclaiming for “the whole of America for each / individual, without exception . . . uncompromising liberty and equality.”

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Leaving
Laton Carter
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Whether charting the moments before or after work, the unspoken emotions accompanying separation and reunion, or the necessity of a grocery store as a "last place" for people to engage publicly, Laton Carter's poems attend to the parts of our lives that are easiest to ignore, like solitary highway drivers passing in their cars and the unspoken link binding people together. In poem after poem, the speaker relentlessly pulls the reader to spaces, both physical and emotional—fearful of the inability to bridge the gap between ideas, places, and individuals, yet unable to avoid trying. Mining the territory of responsibility and longing, these poems remind us that the minutiae and variation in our private lives combine to serve up a larger public identity. An impressively mature first collection of poems, Leaving is a bold book that eschews the superfluous, leaving only that which is most essential and meaningful.
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Leaving Tulsa
Jennifer Elise Foerster
University of Arizona Press, 2013

In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman’s coming of age in a dislocated time. Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems—fire, shell, highway, wing—gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem builds on a theme of searching for a lost “self”—an “other” America—that crosses biblical, tribal, and ecological mythologies.

In Leaving Tulsa, Foerster is not afraid of the strange or of estrangement. The narrator occupies a space in between and navigates the offbeat experiences of a speaker that is of both Muscogee and European heritage. With bold images and candid language, Foerster challenges the perceptions of what it means to be Native, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an American today. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent.

Foerster’s journey transcends both geographic space and the confines of the page to live vividly in the mind of the reader.

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Ledger
Wheeler, Susan
University of Iowa Press, 2005
The many meanings of “economy” are the ground for the mediation and lament of Ledger, Susan Wheeler’s fourth book. In its Greek origins, economy referred to the stewardship of a household and, as it developed, the word also came to include aspects of government and of religious faith. Ledger places an individual’s crisis of spirituality and personal stewardship, or management of her resources, against a backdrop of a culture that has focused its “economy” on financial gain and has misspent its own tangible and intangible resources.
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Left Turns in Brown Study
Sandra Ruiz
Duke University Press, 2024
In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.
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The Legend of Light
Bob Hicok
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
Whether Hicok is considering the reflection of human faces in the Vietnam War Memorial or the elements of a “Modern Prototype” factory, he prompts an icy realization that we may have never seen the world as it truly is. But his resilient voice and consistent perspective is neither blaming nor didactic, and ultimately enlightening. From the shadowed corners into which we dare not look clearly, Hicok makes us witness and hero of The Legend of Light.
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The Lengest Neoi
Stephanie Choi
University of Iowa Press, 2024
The Lengest Neoi embraces and complicates what it means to err—to wander or go astray; a deviation from a code of behavior or truth; a mistake, flaw, or defect. Beginning with the collection’s title, which combines a colloquial Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi / “Pretty Girl”) and the English suffix for the superlative degree (—est), these poems wander, deviate, and flow across bodies, geographies, and languages. In this collection from Stephanie Choi, you’ll find the poet’s “tongue writing herself, learning to speak.”
 
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Leprosarium
Poems
Lise Goett
Tupelo Press, 2018
When the manuscript that became Lise Goett’s new book Leprosarium was chosen for the Winner Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, judge Toi Derricotte’s citation said, “This is dangerous art, as serious as a heart attack, unsparing mostly of the poet herself, and as intensely rewarding as it is unsettling.” Goett’s poetry, infused with a bountiful vocabulary, is rife with extravagantly dramatic forms that take in the sweep of western art and religion via relationships between those with power and those who’ve suffered their commands.
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The Lesser Fields
Rob Schlegel
University Press of Colorado, 2009
Winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
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The Lesser Histories
Jan Zábrana
Karolinum Press, 2022
The first collection of poetry in English by an acclaimed twentieth-century Czech writer.

From the eighth floor of a tower block in Central Europe, Jan Zábrana surveyed the twentieth century. He had been exiled from his own life by Communism. His parents were imprisoned, their health was broken, and he was not allowed to study languages in college. Refusing both to rebel outright or to cave in, he thought of himself as a dead man walking. “To all those who keep asking me to do things for them, I sometimes feel like saying: ‘But I’m dead. I died long ago. Why do you keep treating me as if I were one of the living?’”

Yet during some of Europe’s most difficult years, he wrote The Lesser Histories, a collection of sixty-four sonnets that range through themes of age, sex, and political repression—a radiant testament to his times. The lines are emptied both of personal pathos and political stridency. Often Zábrana’s own voice segues into those of poets he had translated over the years, leaving only a bare shimmer of subjectivity—humorous, oblique, pained—with which to view his own works and days. The poems document a splendid and bitter isolation, and are immersed in the humor, hatreds, and loves of the everyday. Published in Czech in the ill-fated year of 1968, they subsequently fell into neglect. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Zábrana’s collected poems and selected diaries were published in Czech, and he was acclaimed as a major twentieth-century writer. Now, with this collection, he can begin to reach English-language readers for the first time.
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Let It Be Broke
Ed Pavlic
Four Way Books, 2020
The poems in Ed Pavlić’s Let It Be Broke are ignited by sonic memories—from Chaka Khan on the radio to his teenaged daughter singing “Stay” at a local café—that spark a journey into personal and ontological questions. Pavlić’s lyric lines are equal parts introspection and inter-spection, a term he coins for the shared rumination that encourages some collective deep thinking about the arbitrary boundaries that perpetuate racial and geographic segregation and the power of words to transcend those differences. In an epiphanic moment, Pavlić recalls a quote shared by a former teacher as “a hammer made of written words,” and how he held “onto those words / as if they were steel bars and I was dangling over some bright black deepness.”
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Lethal Theater
Susannah Nevinson
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
In her new poetry collection, Lethal Theater, Susannah Nevison reckons with the rituals of violence that underpin the American prison system, both domestically and abroad. Exploring the multiple roles of medicine in incarceration, Nevison’s poems expose the psychological and physical pain felt by the prison system’s inhabitants. Nevison asks readers to consider the act and complications of looking—at the spectacle of punishment, isolation, and interrogation, as mapped onto incarcerated bodies—by those who participate in and enforce dangerous prison practices, those who benefit from the exploitation of incarcerated bodies, and those who bear witness to suffering. Unfolding in three sections, Nevison’s poems fluidly move among themes of isolation and violence in prisons during period of war, the history of medical experimentation on domestic prisoners, and the intersection between anesthesia used in hospital settings and anesthesia used in cases of lethal injection. Lethal Theater is an attempt to articulate and make visible a grotesque and overlooked part of American pain.
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Let's All Die Happy
Erin Adair-Hodges
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
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Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle
Anna Maria van Schurman
Iter Press, 2021
Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded as the most erudite woman in seventeenth-century Europe. As “the Star of Utrecht,” she was active in a network of learning that included the most renowned scholars of her time. Known for her extensive learning and her defense of the education of women, she was the first woman to sit in on lectures at a university in the Netherlands and to advocate that women be admitted into universities. She was proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, Persian, Samaritan, and Ethiopian, as well as several vernacular European languages.

This volume presents in translation a remarkable collection of her letters and poems—many of which were previously unpublished—that span almost four decades of her life, from 1631 to 1669.
 
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Letters
Books 3–9
Sidonius
Harvard University Press

Belles lettres.

Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallo-Roman, was born at Lugdunum (Lyon) about AD 430. He married Papianilla, daughter of the Emperor Avitus in whose honor he recited at Rome on 1 January 456 a panegyric in verse. Sidonius later joined a rebellion, it seems, but was finally reconciled to the emperor Majorian and delivered at Lyon in 458 a panegyric on him. After some years in his native land, in 467 he led a Gallo-Roman deputation to the Emperor Anthemius, and on 1 January 468 recited at Rome his third panegyric. He returned to Gaul in 469 and became Bishop of Auvergne with seat at Clermont-Ferrand. He upheld his people in resisting the Visigoths. After Auvergne was ceded to them in 475, he was imprisoned but soon resumed his bishopric. He was canonized after his death.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Sidonius is in two volumes. The first contains his poetry: the three long panegyrics, and poems addressed to or concerned with friends, apparently written in his youth. Volume I also contains Books 1–2 of his Letters (all dating from before his episcopate); Books 3–9 are in Volume II. Sidonius’ writings shed valued light on Roman culture in the fifth century.

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Letters from Limbo
Jeanne Marie Beaumont
CavanKerry Press, 2016
In Letters from Limbo, voices of the dead reach the living through various means, including the titular letters, revealing experiences harrowing and mysterious, and exploring limbo as an abode of souls as well as a state of entrapment and intermediacy. Fluent in many modes—lyric to documentary—the poet commands varied poetic forms. That we dwell in metaphorical limbos by virtue of our unpredictable earthly sojourn is a haunting truth this book both illuminates and celebrates.
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Letters from the Black Ark
D.S. Marriott
Omnidawn, 2023
Rhythmic lyrical poems that embody black music, existence, and tragedy.

The poems in this collection center on the word “dub,” which accrues a subtle lyrical connotation throughout its various forms and meanings—to bestow, vest, crown, and also to suspend, reverb, echo, and sever. Dub poetry plays with revealing and concealing, while also pointing the way to the conditions that produce black poetic music. In D.S. Marriott’s poetry, tragic catastrophes of current black existence—London knife crime, the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, and deadly race violence—are portrayed as questions of language. To speak this language, as Marriott’s poem show, is to take on the forces that cause rupture. Throughout these poems of loss, exile, and obliteration, the poet foresees his downfall and metamorphosis, ultimately realizing too late that he cannot transcend the reverberations and echoes laden with black social death.
 
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Letters of Transit
Theodore Worozbyt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
Letters of Transit is a passport to the space between: prose and poetry, reverie and memory, death and fecundity. Its invitation is a journey without destination, a ramble, a thrill ride, an open-ended ticket. But it maps an uncanny territory, populated with ominous doctors, proctors, theorists, forgers and game show hosts, whose agendas seem no less threatening than the intrusions of red spitting monkeys, biting spiders, monster hornets, unseen shrieking creatures. One ranges through its pages with an electric sense of visiting places impossibly recognizable—the dream realm of a collective unconscious. Its attractions are part freak show, part museum, part mausoleum. Theodore Worozbyt brings a rich and intricate vision to a world both gorgeous and grotesque, where one must suspect every detail of being a crucial clue.
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Letters to Jargon
The Correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams
Edited and Introduced by Andrew Rippeon
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Gathers some of the most intimate, personal writing on life and the art of poetry by a crucial figure in late twentieth-century American letters
 
Celebrated by both the Black Mountain poets in the 1950s and 1960s and the Language poets in the 1970s and 1980s, Larry Eigner’s poems occupy an important place in American poetry and poetics, and his reputation and legacy grow seemingly stronger with each passing year. Letters to Jargon collects all of the known correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams, the influential publisher of Jargon Society Press and himself a poet.
 
Eigner’s correspondence with Williams began in the early 1950s, as the two were in conversation over the manuscript of On My Eyes, published by Jargon in 1960. Their correspondence continued for many years thereafter, extending into the period when Eigner’s work started to gain recognition from the nascent movement that would become known as “Language” writing.
 
The letters are quite broad in their range of reference and provide a fuller context for Eigner’s poetry and thinking. Eigner and Williams discuss their own poetic practices, including the source material for specific poems, general writing practices, and small press and little magazine publication. This volume offers considerable insight into their shared literary communities as Eigner reports on his readings in contemporary poetry and poetics, as well as his correspondence and contact with other poets including Charles Olson, Vincent Ferrini, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Grenier, and Barrett Watten.
 
Also recorded are Eigner’s reactions to current events and explications of his own poems, including the contexts for appropriated lines and distinctions of character spacing. Eigner also shares with Williams details of his home life, his financial difficulties and the daily challenges of his cerebral palsy. Finally, the book features a series of images of the original letters, enabling readers to see Eigner’s specific material-textual practices.
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Levee
Paul Otremba
Four Way Books, 2019
The poems in Paul Otremba’s Levee explore the intersection between the ecological, the political, and the personal in a world built on oil and greed. The city of Houston is at once backdrop and metaphor for the ways in which violence—both natural and manmade—have become part and parcel of twenty-first century life. “It’s a luxury to be this calm,” Otremba writes in the opening poem, a held-breath between the disastrous effects of hurricanes and cancer. Yet Otremba’s exquisite lines manage to wrest meaning from the devastation wrought by both global warming and a terminal illness: “If there is a lesson / on how not to worry, it’s that you’re not stuck only being one thing, /the multitudes in me and the multitudes in you.”
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LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia
Jeff Mann
West Virginia University Press, 2018

This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.

With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon made up of writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ.

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Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin Home
Tom Sexton
University of Alaska Press, 2018
“On the night Li Bai tried to embrace the moon / in its fullness on the surface of the Yangtze River, / blossoms scented the air, and beyond the moon / pale stars powdered the sky. That faint shiver / of white near the surface was a dolphin rising. / I carry a book of his poems whenever I travel, / poems that touch the heart like a gentle snow. / Look, over there in that marsh, a snowy egret rising.”

​The day after their wedding, Tom and Sharyn Sexton set off on the more than 4,500-mile journey from Massachusetts to Alaska. Now, more than fifty years later, Tom Sexton is retracing those steps through his exceptional poetry. He describes the communities they passed through and ruminates on the changes, good and bad, that have taken place in the decades since. He still finds hope in the country and draws transformative hope from the land that connects all of us.
Appropriate for a journey that moves from east to west, the Sexton’s real-life voyage is embedded in the imaginary journey of the ancient Chinese poet, Li Bai, from Broad Pass to Polychrome Pass in the Alaska Range.
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The Life and Letters
Irving Feldman
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In poems whose subjects range from theme parks to late-night radio, the aftermath of the Holocaust to television, The Life and Letters represents a celebrated poet-scholar at the height of his art.
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The Life Assignment
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
Four Way Books, 2020
The speaker of the poems in The Life Assignment is reviewing his history. As if sorting through a box of photographs, the speaker sorts through relationships, trying to discern what was healthy from what was exploitative. Concepts of love are turned over and over in these poems: romantic love, love of family, love of country, self-love (or lack thereof). Often the speaker finds that what at first appeared to be caring, was insincere all along. When tenderness is in short supply, how can one protect himself? How can one find home? In his debut collection, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado bends poems through bilingual lyrics that present spartan observation as evidence for its exacting verdict: “We never leave when life is elsewhere. The clemency of men disappears / as does the light, tarring the roofs.” An electric debut collection.
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The Life Beside This One
Lawrence Raab
Tupelo Press, 2017
“There is no poet who brings more companionability to the uncanny than Lawrence Raab. The Life Beside This One is full of reasons to be scared to death, but drawn with an exquisite equilibrium where you’d least expect. The door out in these poems is never the door in. This is an art that shows us how an extraordinary imagination can be the crux of a great humanity, even a basis for hope and comfort.” ––Dean Young. The poems of Lawrence Raab are accessible yet mysterious, their complexities an aspect of (and sometimes hidden by) their clarities. The title of his ninth collection suggests both the life we live and another life alongside—what might have been but wasn’t, yet remains in the imagination. “The casual tone,” Mark Strand has written of Raab’s work, “the offhand remark, are not only the means by which sense establishes itself, but also the way it take on a miraculous resonance.”
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Life in a Country Album
Poems
Nathalie Handal
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Winner, 2020 Palestine Book Award
Finalist, 2019 Foreword Indies Award

From migrations to pop culture, loss to la dérive, Life in a Country Album is a soundtrack of the global cultural landscape—borders and citizenship, hybrid identities and home, freedom and pleasure. It’s a vast and moving look at the world, at what home means, and the ways we coexist in an increasingly divided world. These poems are about the dialects of the heart—those we are incapable of parting from, and those that are largely forgotten. Life in a Country Album is a vital book for our times. With this beautiful, epic collection, Nathalie Handal affirms herself as one of our most diverse and important contemporary poets.

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Life in a Field
Poems
Katie Peterson
Omnidawn, 2021
This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time.

A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California—with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for? A narrator’s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”
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The Life of a Hunter
Michelle Robinson
University of Iowa Press, 2005
Part detective novel, part cinematic saga, part street-smart narrative, the poems in The Life of a Hunter form a document of expedition that couples individual discovery with communal transformation. Michelle Robinson's characters are consigned to particular mechanisms of survival to various forms of physical and psychological evolutions--as a reaction to their search for an acceptable spiritual condition. The multiple identities of her pressured characters are susceptible to physical transformations that provide “a brief jolt of anesthesia, / instead of the cold tenderness of interruption.” Robinson uses the culture of film and fiction as an analogy for the world just out of reach and the world already at hand; preoccupied with what precision “sounds like,” the figures in her poems respond to the possibility of future change as well as the fact that change is a constant in their lives. “Don't misunderstand. It was the most cynical year of our era / and anything would have been better than to have been asked / to find something beautiful.” Robinson's is a strong young voice, detached and observant yet disturbingly present.
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The Life of Harishchandra
Raghavanka
Harvard University Press, 2017

A thirteenth-century adaptation of one of ancient India’s most enduring stories, a cornerstone of the Kannada literary canon, translated for the first time into English.

The Life of Harishchandra, Raghavanka’s thirteenth-century masterpiece, is the first poetic rendering of one of ancient India’s most enduring legends. When his commitment to truth is tested by a powerful sage, King Harishchandra suffers utter deprivation—the loss of his wife and son, his citizens and power, and, dearest of all, his caste status—but refuses to yield. The tale has influenced poets and readers through the ages. Mahatma Gandhi traced his own commitment to truth to the impact of a Harishchandra play seen in childhood.

A poet from northern Karnataka trained in the twin traditions of Sanskrit and Kannada, Raghavanka negotiates a unique space for himself in the Kannada literary canon through important thematic, formal, and stylistic innovations. The conflicts he addresses—of hierarchical social order, political power, caste, and gender—are as relevant to contemporary India as to his own times.

Accompanied by the original text in the Kannada script, this spirited translation, the first into any language, brings an elegant and energetic narrative to a global readership.

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The Life of Padma
Svayambhudeva
Harvard University Press, 2018

The first English translation of the oldest extant work in Apabhramsha, a literary language from medieval India, recounting the story of the Ramayana.

The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama’s exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship.

The second volume recounts Rama’s exile with Sita and his brother Lakshmana. The three visit various cities—rather than ashrams, as in most versions; celebrate Lakshmana’s marriages; and come upon a new city built in Rama’s honor. In Dandaka Forest, they encounter sages who are masters of Jain doctrine. Then, the discovery of Sita’s disappearance sets the stage for war with Ravana.

This is the first direct translation into English of the oldest extant Apabhramsha work, accompanied by a corrected text, in the Devanagari script, of Harivallabh C. Bhayani’s critical edition.

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The Life of Padma
Svayambhudeva
Harvard University Press, 2018

The first English translation of the oldest extant work in Apabhramsha, a literary language from medieval India, recounting the story of the Ramayana.

The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. The work was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama’s exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship.

The first volume of The Life of Padma begins by recounting the histories and noteworthy ancestors of Rama’s allies and enemies, focusing on his antagonist, Ravana. Svayambhudeva connects central characters from the Ramayana tradition to one another and to Rishabha, the founding prophet of Jainism, in a complex web of family relations dating back generations.

This is the first direct translation into English of the oldest extant work in Apabhramsha, accompanied by a corrected reprint in the Devanagari script of Harivallabh C. Bhayani’s critical edition.

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The Life of Texts
An Introduction to Literary Studies
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explains why literature has been interpreted in different ways across time. Finally, it asks why some texts fascinate people so much that they are reproduced and passed on to others in the form of new editions, in adaptations to film and theatre, and, last but not least, in the ways we look at the world and act out our lives. The Life of Texts is designed around particular issues rather than the history of the discipline as such. Each chapter concentrates on a different aspect of 'the life of texts' and introduces the key debates and concepts relevant to its study. The issues discussed range from aesthetics and narrative to intertextuality and intermediality, from reading practices to hermeneutics and semiotics, popular culture to literary canonisation, postcolonial criticism to cultural memory. Key concepts and schools in the field have been highlighted in the text and then collected in a glossary for ease of reference. All chapters are richly illustrated with examples from different language areas.
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Life Pig
Alan Shapiro
University of Chicago Press, 2016
From Let Me Hear You
 
Outside is inside now.
The pyramid whose point
we are is weightless
and invisible
and has become itself the night
in which alone
together
on a high plateau
we go on shouting
out whatever name
those winds keep blowing back
into the mouth that’s shouting it.
 
Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry is situated at the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.
 
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Light As Light
Poems
Simon J. Ortiz
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person’s life. Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Written in Ortiz’s signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. The collection also includes prayer poems written for the speaker’s son; poems that retell traditional Acoma stories and history; and poems that engage environmental, political, and social justice issues—making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound.

The poems in Light As Light travel far across both space and memory, landing everywhere from the New Mexico of the speaker’s childhood, to California, Tucson, and present-day Beijing, and many airports, highways, and way stations in between. The central concern uniting this collection is language itself: the weight and significance of English and Keres, as well as the nature and power of poetry as a way of life. No collection of Indigenous literature is complete without the work of Simon Ortiz, and this book is a powerful journey through the poet’s life—both a love letter to the future, and a sentimental, authentic celebration of the past.
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The Light of Desire
La Luz del Deseo
Marjorie Agosín
Swan Isle Press, 2009

Marjorie Agosín’s intensely personal long poem The Light of Desire is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the Song of Songs and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in The Light of Desire is both physical and metaphorical. The lovers’ bodies are the paths, the geography, leading not only from desire to sensual pleasure, but to memory and illumination. The light on the pink stones of Jerusalem, the sunlight of Galilee, from hills to the sea, the fragrant air and “mantle of stars,” all become one in this tender, rhapsodic expression of longing and desire. This is not unrequited love, but rather a reciprocal passion that brings exquisite pleasure, pain, a sense of fragility, and the hope and belief in that which is eternal.

The poem was written over a four-year span in Jerusalem’s Mishkenot Sha’ananim neighborhood, overlooking the wall of the Second Temple, and these hallowed surroundings imbued Agosín’s poetic voice. Lori Marie Carlson’s sensitive translation maintains the spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.

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The Light the Dead See
Selected Poems of Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford
University of Arkansas Press, 1991

Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction, “Stanford was the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five.”

The Light the Dead See collects the best work from those nine volumes and six previously unpublished poems. In the earlier poems, Stanford creates a world where he could keep childhood alive, deny time and mutability, and place a version of himself at the center of great myth and drama.

Later, the denial of time and mutability gives way to an obsessive and familiar confrontation with death. Although Stanford paid an enormous price for his growing familiarity with Death as a presence, the direct address to that presence is a source of much of the striking originality and stunning power in the poetry.

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Lighting the Shadow
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Four Way Books, 2015
Lighting the Shadow is about a woman’s evolving journey through desire, grief, trauma, and the peculiar historical American psyche of desire and violence. These poems explore the international and psychological wars women survive—wars inflicted through various mediums that employ art, race, and literature. Furthermore, the collection is about a woman’s transformation and acceptance of her complicated attempts to balance her spirit’s own spectrum. Pulling the poet away from death, these poems insist that she open her life to her own powers and the powers of a greater world—a world that is both bright and dark.
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Lightning from the Depths
An Anthology of Albanian Poetry
Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck
Northwestern University Press, 2008

If a people

Have no poets

And no poetry of their own

For a National Anthology

Then treachery and barking

Will do the trick

With these words, a challenge is laid down in this new volume of Albanian poetry. Albania, however, has a dynamic tradition of literature. Lightning from the Depths is the first English collection to present the full range of Albanian verse. Albanian literature has had many lives. The early Christian traditions disappeared as Islam and the Ottoman Empire took over. Muslim literature, too, withered when the nation strove to become an independent European country. The beginnings of a modern tradition were quashed by the Stalinists. All along this rocky path, poets have turned the political strife, poverty, and isolation their nation has often experienced into culture, both celebrating and questioning the society in which they live. Lightning from the Depths opens readers’ eyes to a new political and cultural world populated artists who can spin despair into poetry.

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The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House
Nick Lantz
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Nick Lantz explores the transformative power of tragic and miraculous experiences, through these poems that illuminate near misses of tragedy and transcendence. His gaze is both roving and microscopic—the Challenger explosion, Bigfoot, a love letter written from inside a missile silo, a mother naming and re-naming a family’s short-lived pets, and a plea for post-9/11 redemption. Lantz never lets his subjects or his readers off the hook, plunging head first into worlds that are both eccentric and familiar, alarming and hopeful.

Finalist, Foreword Magazine’s Poetry Book of the Year
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