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62 books match the query 'Political & Protest' and 3 start with i

cover of I Woke a Lake

I Woke a Lake

Susan McCabe

University Press of Colorado, 2025

I Woke a Lake faces the anxieties of climate change, extinctions, and political chaos. Susan McCabe weaves together the fragile fabric of worlds imagined and lost, both palpable and present. Poised between reveries and ruins, the book traverses several layers: the Ice Age; the excavation of the oldest female body; ancient Los Angeles before humans; and, in Sweden (McCabe’s mother’s home country), the 377-million-year-old meteor-made Siljan lake, in conversation with the oldest tree alive. These channeled non-human voices, both whimsical and uncanny, animate more recent landscapes—such as Dalarna’s nearby seventeenth-century copper mine, now closed, along with a fantastical modern ice hotel in a state of meltdown. The landmarks of loss are sometimes dizzy-making as McCabe celebrates her childhood pantheism and queer development in West Hollywood, mourns dead relatives and lost habitats, and confronts her masculine lineage, blotted out through grief, addiction, and war. I Woke a Lake holds up an invisible telephone connecting recurrent locales, among them, blasted orchards, the Veterans’ Cemetery, Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home in Great Village, grieving parties, and a cryopreservation site. These different layers reverberate with each other, taking on a haunted and haunting music, reaching toward an otherworldly, tender overhearing. 
 
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cover of Incendiary Art: Poems

Incendiary Art

Poems

Patricia Smith

Northwestern University Press, 2017

From National Book Award winner Patricia Smith 
 
One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history. 

Winner, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize 
Finalist, 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 
Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category  
Winner, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award 
Winner, 2018 BCALA Best Poetry Award 
Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice 
Finalist, Neustadt International Prize for Literature 
Winner, 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

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cover of It's Important I Remember: Poems

It's Important I Remember

Poems

Cortney Lamar Charleston

Northwestern University Press, 2026

An incantation of strength and solace for persisting in twenty-first-century America

“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” In his sweeping third collection, Charleston brings a poet’s ear for echo and rhythm to bear on American history and life after 2016. For Charleston, these rhymes cut two ways: the long tradition of American racism and fascism, and the steady pulse of Black persistence. The collection’s titular invocation frames each poem, at times an oratory to rally a crowd, in other moments a private prayer whispered as the speaker gathers himself to face another day. Charleston insists that should we cede memory of our national biography—whether to repression or indifference—we will witness the country’s dissolution into something unrecognizable to many, yet all too familiar to its most marginalized people. But with each reiteration and riff, he also invokes a tenuous hope—that if we summon an American history of Black resistance, we might still make a more perfect union.

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