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6 books match the query 'Shenoda, Matthew'

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Bearden's Odyssey

Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden

Edited by Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, Foreword by Derek Walcott

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Borrowing from Romare Bearden’s aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden’s Odyssey gathers, for the first time, poems from thirty-five of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. Poetic echoes come forth in themes of inspiration with historical intersections of one of the greatest visual artists of the twentieth century.

The award-winning editors, Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, assemble an esteemed literary congregation, with original poems by Chris Abani, Rita Dove, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ed Roberson, Aracelis Girmay, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more. With a powerful foreword by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and stunning visual reproductions of select Bearden masterpieces, this anthology fuses art and literature, standing as a testament to Romare Bearden’s power and influence in the contemporary artistic world.

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Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite

Poems

Andrew E. Colarusso

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite, Andrew Colarusso hybridizes lost and unknown spaces, taking his title from a falconry term for the cord used to restrain a bird. The word derives from the late fifteenth century, from the French créance (“faith”), also denoting a cord to retain a bird of peu de créance (“of little faith,” i.e., which cannot yet be relied upon). Poems of personal narrative and metaphorical depth speak for the voices searching—in a world that lashes out or looks right past what remains tethered to the past—the parts that occupy the whispers of wanting, the dreams of finally being seen.

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Dulce

Poems

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Northwestern University Press, 2018

The poems in Dulce are at once confession and elegy that admit the speaker’s attempt and possible failure to reconcile intimacy toward another and toward the self. The collection asks: what’s the point in any of this?—meaning, what’s the use of longing beyond pleasure; what’s the use of looking for an origin if we already know the ending?

Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions. He allows for the possibility of an and in a world of either/or.

These poems enact a prescient anxiety of what is to come, “I want to say all of this is true / but we both know it isn’t. . . . We already know what’s at the other end of this.” Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet.

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Furious Flower

Seeding the Future of African American Poetry

Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne; Foreword by Rita Dove

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What’s next for Black poetic expression?

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Tahrir Suite

Poems

Matthew Shenoda

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Winner, Arab American National Museum's 2015 George Ellenbogen Poetry Award

Tahrir Suite is a book-length poem that contemplates immigration, homeland, and diaspora in the twenty-first century. The poem, inspired by recent events in Egypt, cycles through the journey of two Egyptians moving across borders, languages, cultures, landscapes, and political systems while their life in the U.S. diaspora evolves and their home country undergoes revolutionary change.

Written from a perspective and about a place that is virtually unexplored in contemporary American poetry, Tahrir Suite works to capture the complicated essence of what it means to be from a specific place that is experiencing such radical change and how our understandings of “home” and “place” constantly evolve. Tahrir Suite is a musical meditation on what it means to be a global citizen in contemporary times.

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