A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY18 start with Q start with Q
How girls of color from eight global communities strategize on questions of identity, social issues, and political policy through spoken word poetry.
Around the world, girls know how to perform. Grounded in her experience of “putting a mic in the margins” by facilitating workshops for girls in Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States, scholar/advocate/artist Crystal Leigh Endsley highlights how girls use spoken word poetry to narrate their experiences, dreams, and strategies for surviving and thriving. By centering the process of creating and performing spoken word poetry, this book examines how girls forecast what is possible for their collective lives.
In this book, Endsley combines poetry, discourse analysis, photovoice, and more to forge the feminist theory of “quantum justice,” which forefronts girls’ relationships with their global counterparts. Using quantum justice theory, Endsley examines how these collaborative efforts produce powerful networks and ultimately map trajectories of social change at the micro level. By inviting transnational dialogue through spoken word poetry, Quantum Justice emphasizes how the imaginative energy in hip-hop culture can mobilize girls to connect and motivate each other through spoken word performance and thereby disrupt the status quo.
Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there. Like James Wright, Robert Bly, Ted Kooser, and Jared Carter before him, Dan Lechay reshapes our imagination to include his distinct and profound vision of this undersung region.
The poetry of Dan Lechay, collected in The Quarry, constructs a myth of the Midwest that is at once embodied in the permanence of the landscape, the fleeting nature of the seasons, and the eternal flow of the river. Lechay writes of memory and the mutability of memory, of the change brought on a person by the years lived and lost, and of the stoic attempts made by those around him to elicit an order and rationale to their lives.
The Quarry is the first full-length collection from this seasoned poet. Final judge Alan Shapiro in writing about The Quarry said: “If Dan Lechay’s poems often begin with the ordinary details and circumstances of life in a small Midwestern town or city, they always end by reminding us that no moment of life is ever ordinary, that ‘Nothing is more mysterious than the way things are.’
The Quarry is a marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence. Under Lechay’s soulful gaze, the backyards, neighborhoods, animals, and landscapes he describes dramatize the often wrenching connection between beauty and loss, evanescence and memory. The Quarry is a thoroughly mature and accomplished book.”
This satisfying collection includes reminiscences and meditations on the details of memory and what it means to visit the past; the vices of titleism and the hydrosyllabic foot in poetry; a comparison of poems and journeys; appreciation of poets Donald Justice and John Crow Ransom; an attempt to define "image"; discussions of the current state of poetry; and various highlights from the Charles Wright Literary Festival.
Charles Wright's books of poetry include The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Country Music: Selected Early Poems. He received the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the 1992 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Souder Family Professor of English, University of Virginia.
Pretty to think of the mind at its end
as a metaphysician beekeeping
after the leaves have fallen at autumn's end.
The bee metaphor is handled brilliantly and subtly throughout the collection as a reminder of how often our constant activity, whether it is mental or physical, is taken for granted.
Frost continues her investigation of the mortal plight by entering into a Dantesque descent into the ebb and flow of the seascape. Body consumes body over and over again as fish are caught and killed and the poet observes the flora and fauna as they partake in the darker cycles of nature. A long narrative poem about the Spanish explorer de Baca and his harrowing travels from southern Florida to Mexico powerfully reinforces the certainty of consumption and loss as it comments on the colonizing of the new world. In the final section, Frost returns once more to the need for movement and summons the Greek god Pan, who dances a rite of acceptance through a metaphysical landscape on the verge of seasonal change--the bees are not dead, the dark woods are filled with music.
This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.
In the introduction, editor Michael Walsh writes that the anthology is “concerned with poems that speak to and about nature as the term is applied in everyday language to queer and trans bodies and identities . . . Queer Nature remains interested in elements, flora, fauna, habitats, homes, and natural forces—literary aspects of the work that allow queer and trans people to speak within their specific cultural and literary histories of the abnormal, the animal, the elemental, and the unnatural.” The anthology features poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Blanco, Kay Ryan, Jericho Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Diaz, and June Jordan, as well as emerging voices such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain, Eric Tran, and Jim Whiteside.
In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Finkel carves a clearing out of the backyard brush and the intellectual brambles of existence.
Whether he writes a short lyric or a long experimental series, Finkel relies on concrete images—a breeze through grass, a cigarette in a piano player’s hand—to ground his central questions about the clash of order and chaos in our everyday lives.
He delights in naming weeds and towering trees, cars and streets. Yet, in each poem, there is a constant tension between the actual wind and the words we must use to convey the wind’s force.
Working fluently in formal lines and in free verse, he can write with equal authority of butchers or great painters, aged bookkeepers or schizophrenics, Greek gods or house cats. In this new collection, Finkel has given us the priceless keepsakes, the best gifts from the clearing his words have won.
This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Questions About Angels--one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s--is remarkable for its wry, inquisitive voice and its sheer imaginative range. Edward Hirsch selected this classic book for the National Poetry Series, and each of Collins's poems-from his meditation on forgetfulness to his musings on the behavior of angels-is an exploration of imaginative possibilities. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."
Hatif Janabi’s poems are passionate, jolting, apocalyptic, and painful. They deal with war and death, perception and truth, drawing from his family life, his exile in Poland, the Gulf War, violence in Iraq, and his experience in the United States.
The speaker in many of Janabi’s poems moves from a confrontational stance to one of resigned desperation, and from coyness to deep longing, where, occasionally, hope surfaces. The associative processes and the often bizarre surreal imagery he employs are very effective in expressing his profound sense of political and spiritual alienation. Janabi is among a generation of Arab poets who, because of censorship, can speak only obliquely about the harsh reality of their lives. In these poems he has created symbolic landscapes that attempt to reveal the political, social, and psychological stresses with which suffering people live.
Rachel Hadas reaches the peak of her poetic prowess in Questions in the Vestibule. A deeply personal and meditative collection in three sections, Questions moves through the liminal space of solitude and the coded landscape of dreams toward the startling power of a life-changing love.
Hadas’s voice and her formal elegance, as distinctive and distinguished as ever, endow this new work with a precise and thoughtful beauty. Questions in the Vestibule takes readers into a new territory of unapologetic bliss.
Each chapter is a theoretical inquiry into an aspect of poetics in an expanded sense—from the relation of experimental poetry to cultural logics of liberation and political economy, to questions of community and the politics of the avant-garde, to the cultural contexts where it is produced and intervenes. Each serves as a kind of thought experiment that theorizes and assesses the consequences of Language writing in expanded fields of meaning that include history, political theory, art history, and narrative theory. While all are grounded in a series of baseline questions of poetics, they also polemically address the currently turbulent debates on the politics of the avant-garde, especially Language writing, among emerging communities of poets.
In manifold ways, Watten masterfully demonstrates the aesthetic and political aims of Language writing, its influence on emerging literary schools, and its present aesthetic, critical, and political horizons. Questions of Poetics will be a major point of reference in continuing debates on poetry and literary history, a critical reexamination for already familiar readers and a clearly presented introduction for new ones.
Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship
With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.
In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.
Quiet Armor, the third full-length collection from poet Stevie Edwards, examines how capitalism and patriarchy impact romantic relationships and, more broadly, intimacy. Edwards considers the ways in which confessional performances of vulnerability can be coercive, whether popular culture encourages men to seek validation through sexual excess and aggression, and how we encourage women to be complicit in figurative and literal violence against other women.
Drawing on historical and mythological figures—including Medusa, Persephone, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Christina—Edwards builds a fierce investigation into how rape culture has shaped the literary canon, academia, and the world at large. She brings readers into the quiet and intimate spaces we create despite trauma—or perhaps even because of it. Ultimately, Quiet Armor seeks to reclaim positive intimacy, showing us not only the desperate battles but also the healing embraces. All the while, these poems ask us: What does the end of rape culture look like? How do we get there?
Most significantly, Quiet Orient Riot asks of itself, without release or relief: can a text seek linguistic disorientation and reorientation both? Can a text walk the tightrope from detail to detail to envision a kind of awareness that is kin to worship? Quiet Orient Riot does not shy away from a word like “worship.” Nor does it shy away from how such worship might manifest in the words of a poem, bowing to a “chirpy printed sound” in Palestine and a forest of “little justices.”
She is the winner of the 2019 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Dawn Lundy Martin.
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