Poetry

Envisioning Brazil is a comprehensive and sweeping assessment of Brazilian studies in the United States. Focusing on synthesis and interpretation and assessing trends and perspectives, this reference work provides an overview of the writings on Brazil by United States scholars since 1945.
"The Development of Brazilian Studies in the United States," provides an overview of Brazilian Studies in North American universities. "Perspectives from the Disciplines" surveys the various academic disciplines that cultivate Brazilian studies: Portuguese language studies, Brazilian literature, art, music, history, anthropology, Amazonian ethnology, economics, politics, and sociology. "Counterpoints: Brazilian Studies in Britain and France" places the contributions of U.S. scholars in an international perspective. "Bibliographic and Reference Sources" offers a chronology of key publications, an essay on the impact of the digital age on Brazilian sources, and a selective bibliography.

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A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present

Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.

One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems.

Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Room Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine.

Kemi Alabi's transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country's central and ordained fictions--those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.

Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire--a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit's capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing--the highest power there is.

All Pilgrim charts our vanishing into the modern landscape, mapping both the terror and the ecstatic vision of belonging to the world. Tuned to the intermingling of peril, banality, and beauty, the voice in these poems is hungry for something to sing about but unable to ignore the signs of crisis.

Total magnificence. Multi-sensory voyager - sculptor of love and painter of concept and delirium, a choreographer of space and a duende-splicer between Baudelaire, Lorca and Strauss. Angela is somewhere in there, cinematic; a Casanova pin-stripe suit, then a fl aring thigh, then a topaz sari. I fi nd Penaredondo a most accomplished poet, a devouring mind and most of all, a deep, intimate observer touching the big bright, dark worlds - their wounds and miracles. She says, "I want to be that kind / who walks through a wall of fi fty lives." Indeed she possesses this kind of power. A genius at work. - Juan Felipe Herrera Poet Laureate of the United States Angela Penaredondo's powerful debut, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, is a luminous and timely book of migratory poetics that gathers in the body, no matter how impossibly marooned, the mouth of the lyric I. Drawn from the compression of loss, ..".beyond the clenched doors, the perfume / of starved fl owers." Penaredondo's speaker seeks in the ..".web of wetness, what...has been written out." The poet's collapsing of cultural dimensions into the weight of traveling through an embodied history and present reveals an urgent landscape (of war, of art, of nature, of people) of the inevitable and the incommensurable: "I'd rather be whoever bathes / in the monsoon, knees swaying- / unequaled. Wanting allows gospel..." Penaredondo's truth brilliantly explores precariousness, revealing the need to move at its edges, and to escape, into "husk" and "crystalline pictograph"-"I came back not to regret / or ask the particulars why I left. / When a tree falls, its roots / aim jagged, pointing / in all directions..." - Ronaldo Wilson Author of Farthest Traveler The poems in All Things Lose Thousands of Times aptly tell a transnational coming of age story, a becoming from the savage and the fertile, the urban and the fantastic, where "heaven comes after collision." This is a stunning debut for Penaredondo, poems that shimmer with dense and riveting lyricism. - Carmen Gimenez Smith Author of Milk and Filth"

A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.

Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades.

Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People's Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.

This romantic fusion of art--poetry, prose, and unbridled creativity--was birthed from one soul's season of adventure and unraveling, inviting us to surrender the great for the greater.

What started as a break from Australian artist Tess Guinery's rapidly growing design business turned into an instinctive, playful experiment with words, colors, and sounds--and eventually into a tangible book, The Apricot Memoirs.

This collection of poetry and prose, thoughtfully illustrated and printed on colored paper, is infused with grace and playfulness. It explores love, personal growth, creativity, spirituality, vulnerability, and motherhood in the art medium of words, all the while creating a rich portrait of a deeply empathetic, talented, and whimsical artist. Esoteric, mysterious, and unfailingly beautiful, The Apricot Memoirs is an invitation to dig deep, embrace the uncomfortable, and free your creativity, unbound.

Written in the years following the sudden death of a cherished friend, Arrhythmia traces the shock doctrine of grief as it electrifies the lives of those left behind. Alliances shift. Loss multiplies. Poems call out from the body, wrestling the twin impossibilities of memory and meaning in language that is by turns starkly simple and twistingly inventive. A tribute to queer friendship, these poems weave chronic grief (a damaged planet, social injustice) with the stab of a loved one's sudden absence--of what happens to the vibrant particulars of a life when it ends.

**Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award**

This book-length sequence by the critically acclaimed poet is a seeker's story, revealing personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding and meaning in their wake.

In Asylum, poet Jill Bialosky embarks on a Virgilian journey, building a narrative sequence from 103 elegant poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore darkness and sustenance both. Taken together, these piercing pieces--about her nascent calling as a writer; her sister's suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the monarch butterfly; and the woods where she seeks asylum--form a moving story, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope. Bialosky considers the oppositions that govern us: our reason and unreason, our need to preserve and destruct. What are words when they meet the action of what they attempt to modify? she asks, exploring the possible salve of language in the face of pain and grief. What Asylum delivers is a form of hard-won grace and an awareness of the cost of extreme violence, inexplicable loss, and the miraculous cycles of life, in work that carries Bialosky's art to a new level of urgency and achievement.

Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving--known as Dr. J--who dominated courts in the 1970s and '80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia '76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J's famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

An deeply moving testament to 9/11 and its horrific aftermath, this epic illustrates the power of a single moment and how each decision we make can change the course of a life.

On September 11, 2001, journalist Tom Flynn set off on his bike toward the World Trade Towers not knowing what he was riding into. Bikeman is one man's journey back to the horrors of that day and to the humanity that somehow emerged from the dust and the death. Both heartbreaking and haunting, his words will stay with you like that 'forever September morning.'" --Meredith Vieira, NBC's Today

From those whose deaths revealed the most private moments of their lives, to those who helped guide the way to safety, veteran journalist Thomas Flynn's Bikeman chronicles the morning of September 11, 2001 like no other published work. What began with a bicycle ride to the World Trade Center to cover the first tower's attack continued as the south tower fell and Thomas Flynn found himself quickly transitioning from reporter to participant as he beared witness to and, with a disquieted view, fought for his own life in the very event his well-trained journalistic senses intended to record and report. Now Flynn, as both journalist and now survivor, must come to terms with the harrowing ordeal and somehow find peace in the very act of surviving. With a forward from Dan Rather, Bikeman is a testament to the strength and courage we must summon at the blink of an eye.

In this deeply emotional memoir that is part journalist's record, part survivor's lament, Flynn writes:
Survival is the absence of death.
It is a subdued, a hushed existence. . .
I live to talk about it,
to relate the tale as it happens,
not only its extremities and cruelty,
but also the goodness that flourishes too.

Poetry. About McGriff's BLACK POSTCARDS, poet John Witte writes "these poems transpire in moonlight, bending but not breaking. Rarely has a writer so thoroughly described the abrasion of his spirit. Childhood, the homeplace, even the lover's body are drawn relentlessly into a maelstrom of injury and loss. And yet the poet is paradoxically astonished by the beauty and grandeur of this damaging life. Verging on dream, McGriff's poems in BLACK POSTCARDS achieve an authentic rural American Surrealism."