"A new biography of the beloved but mysterious Blind Lemon Jefferson, famous blues musician. Born in 1897, Jefferson was a blind street musician who played his guitar at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in the Deep Ellum area of Dallas, Texas, until a Paramount Records scout discovered him. Between 1926 and his untimely death in 1929, Jefferson made more than 80 records and became the biggest-selling blues singer in America. Although his recordings are extensive, details about his life are relatively few. Through Govenar and Lornell's extensive interviews and research, See That My Grave is Kept Clean gathers the scattered facts behind Blind Lemon Jefferson's mythic representations"--
"The River of Goodness is a lyrical, global exploration of the ways we can create a more just and sustainable world for all, from the author of The River Always Wins and I AM A TEACHER. Every day, posits Marquis, every single human has to make a choice: accept the world the way it is or work to make it better. Each of us can pursue the work of goodness in many ways. The River of Goodness, the second volume in Marquis's River Trilogy, provides real-world examples of people who have taken on the work of goodness, whether through thankless tasks or in dangerous and challenging circumstances. This follow-up to Marquis's beloved first volume, The River Always Wins, argues that making the world better is rooted in the hard daily work of creating change that lasts"--
"A book of poetry meant to conjure the future while nourishing the present, Julie Poole's second collection is inspired by movement within a Texan cityscape. Written 2016-2017 during a taut political moment, Gorgeous Freak follows Poole's decision to start keeping a poetry journal while commuting by foot around Austin. Her intent, folded carefully in these slender and jagged poems, is to call out to a future soulmate, pulling them back into her present: hot, humid Austin, Texas in the first year of the Trump presidency, traversed by foot miles a day, watching the seasons change through surrounding urban flora and fauna"--
"An unabashed exploration of queerness, excess, identity, and tenderness from award-winning poet Dorothy Chan. The speaker in Dorothy Chan's fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, "forehead forever exposed," the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She's the troublemaker protagonist-the "So Chinese Girl"-the queer in a family of straights- the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback, wearing a blue fur coat, drinking a whiskey neat. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy. Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu, offering the reader a taste of each running theme. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection. Amidst the bravado, Return of the Chinese Femme represents all aspects of her identity-Asian heritage, queerness, kid of immigrants' story-in the most real ways possible, conquering the world through joy and resilience"--
"Through free verse, personal photographs, and prosaic gestures, Watcha by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal serves as a watching manifesto that unfolds, layering genres and media. The reader becomes a spectator of a gallery that curates Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous art through ekphrastic poetry. On occasion, the viewer sees theoretical or anecdotal prose contextualizing art observation through introspection. With the codeswitching between English and Spanish as well as with the political implications of the artwork and personal history, the book's trajectory charts a vast terrain that ranges from an artistic standpoint, to border crossing, to belonging, to portraiture, to self-portraiture, to abstraction, to death, to a call for action. Watcha invites inquiry, a space for sight, memory, and consciousness"--
"Occupy Whiteness is a collection of hybrid erasure poems from inaugural Dallas Poet Laureate and multi-world slam competition winner Joaquâin Zihuatanejo. Using long-form works of literature by white, male, straight authors, Zihuatanejo occupies these works by erasing words and pages of these works, leaving only a handful of each work. The white space that remains becomes colonized Brown verse. Occupy Whiteness is an act of rebellion that reclaims spaces and highlights a history of erasure of Brown life. These poems are also haunted and blessed by the image of abuelos who brave the river and desert into border states for the opportunity of freedom. Ultimately these poems are meant to agitate and create uneasiness that makes the reader realize that Zihuatanejo and immigrant children are not Other. These poems strive to depict this equally beautiful and brutal place we call home"--
"The first full-length English translation of Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt, A Blind Salmon engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, and also explores mothering, multilinguality, madness. A Blind Salmon, Chinese Peruvian writer Julia Wong Kcomt's sixth collection of poetry, is her first full-length collection in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepâen, Tijuana, and Vienna; ranges over mothering, multilinguality, madness; takes up sameness and differences; and is shot through with desert sand. In these poems, Wong Kcomt engages in her characteristic unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision. She renders homage to the Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing these poems. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose. She builds a lyrical menagerie"--
"Written with profound beauty and a clear, distinct voice, Once in the Blue Moon is a unique book presenting a young girl's point of view on a crucial turning point in her family's life in rural, World War II-era Oklahoma"--
"A collection celebrating the Centennial of seminal modernist Macedonian poet Aco ésopov. This substantive collection represents éSopov's creative career, starting with his first book of poetry in 1944, when he was fighting in the Yugoslav resistance to the German occupation. In the early 1950s, he published two collections that signaled a new direction for Macedonian poetry as a whole, announcing the arrival of new form "intimate lyricism". Over the next 25 years, éSopov's work deepened further, acquiring a philosophical cosmic dimension and at times venturing into surrealism. The Long Coming of the Fire shares the work of a consummate craftsman little-known in the Anglophone world, achieving a "penetrating, resonant, and melodic" poetic language with "a lively and pregnant imagery that binds together the experience of the author and reader" (Graham W. Reid)"--
"The Democratic Republic of Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Kinshasa or DRCongo, has had a series of names since its founding. The name of Zaire best corresponds to the experience of the novel's characters. The years of Mobutu's regime were filled with utopias, dreams, fantasies and other uncontrolled desires for social redemption, the quest for easy enrichment and the desecration of places of power. Among these events: Zairians' immigration to Angola during the civil war boycotting the borders inherited from colonization, as if the country did not have its own diamonds, and the occupation of public places by children from outside. The author creates the atmosphere of the time through a roundup of characters: the diviner Tshiamuena, also known as Madonna of the Cafunfo mines, prides herself of being God with whoever is willing to listen to her. Franz Baumgartner, an apprentice writer originally from Austria and rumba lover, goes around the bars in search of material for his novel. Sanza, Le Blanc and other street children share information to the intelligence services when they are not living off begging and robbery. Djibril, taxi driver, only lives for reggae music. As soon as night falls, each character dances and plays his own role in a country mined by dictatorship"--
"The poems in Because You Previously Liked or Played explore a world that is increasingly mediated through technology; the personal and political struggle for meaning, connection, and reality runs like a fever dream through the frenetic circuits of television, cyberspace, and virtual existence. The poems in Because You Previously Liked or Played reveal an extremely online persona who finds life IRL challenging. In the reality of these poems, the reader confronts the difficulties and nuances of a world rendered more accessible, more instantaneous, but also more isolating, uncertain, even terrifying, thanks to the internet. The speaker faces a social sphere that is bigger, faster, more politically unstable. Lyricism and personal expression are interlaced with the language and syntax of chat rooms, gamers, and e-commerce in a way that troubles the dividing lines between the human and the inhuman, the authentic and the artificial, the real and the hyperreal. The self morphs into a sequence of failed firewalls and emotions. And yet the speaker continues questing for answers, for meaning, for connection. These poems provide an unflinching look at a wired existence, but they never lose their capacity for wonder, feeling, surprise"--
Originally published under title Xilase qui riâe di' sicasi riâe nisa guiigu' / La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los râios in 2007 by Escritores en Lenguas Indâigenas.
"Canting Arms (the heraldic term refers to coats of arms that are visual puns) is the fitting title for Galaicu-Paun's selected poems. His style is rich with references at once both playful and thematically serious, ironic, at times comic, and always bristling with verbal energy and unexpected turns in strong, limber lines.. This collection spans his earlier poems with scriptural and erotic references to later, more complex political, historical, psychologically astute works, sardonic, visionary, as well as surprising"--
"From the famous Mexican author, Sergio Pitol, comes his 1988 classic translated by George Henson. Taming the Divine Heron, tells the semi-autobiographical story of a novelist working on his newest masterpiece. The protagonist struggles to tell the perfect story-his own, imagined protagonists mere imitations of the likes of Lord Jim and Alyosha Karamavoz. To help eradicate writer's block, Pitol uses his vessel to praise his own favorite authors. Pitol applauds Bakhtin's world building, Gogol's "carnivalesque [literary] breath", and Dante's dizzying intensity. The character finds a muse in Marietta Karapetiz who he aptly dubs Dante C. de la Estrella, and the two debate the literary greats. As the pair attempt to pull from the techniques of the world's best writers, Pitol creates a love letter to literature from around the globe while simultaneously telling his own magical story. To quote Pitol's protagonist, "the quality of the story, its effects, its brilliance, its intensity, ma[k]e the most absurd circumstances plausible". Taming of The Divine Heron, second in a trilogy including already-published The Love Parade (Deep Vellum, 2022), houses history, hyperrealism, myth, folklore, and memoir; to read Pitol is to appreciate the power of language"--
"A collection of poetry from acclaimed yet underrepresented Kurdish poet Farhad Pirbal. Like that of his contemporary Abdulla Pashew, Farhad Pirbal's poetry is a chronicle of exile and displacement, longing and not belonging. The poetry is in turns wistful and disoriented,reflecting his role as a dissident and persecuted prisoner. "Poáete maudit" of Kurdistan, Pirbal is known as well for his highly publicized antics as for his prolific literary output. Pirbal, born in 1961, "may be the greatest innovator of Kurdish literature in the twentieth century, in both poetry and prose" (Shook, Poetry Foundation)"
"A profound collection of poetry from Japanese poet Hirata, expounding on readership and everyday life. American readers' awareness of contemporary Japan, through literature and poetry, has increased in recent decades, but many are still left with little means of understanding the everyday cultural phenomena that makes Japanese culture what it is. Hirata uses her poems to genuinely investigate aspects of Japanese culture in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand, and she has an extraordinary way of breaking down a normal event, like seeing an old man riding a bicycle in a park, into a journey that elucidates something profound. Her poems gain prosody while keeping a core narrative aspect which is colored with her own dark and warm artistic lens. Every poem in Is It Poetry? helps the reader understand and think about what is to be cherished, feared, loved, and what is not"--
"Milk Tongue refers to the layer of milk that coats a baby's tongue, which often is a challenge to distinguish from thrush, the overgrowth of naturally occurring yeast. As poet and pediatrician, Mathieu explores how we diagnose and investigate where normal consumption and overconsumption meet. How do we learn what to desire? What happens when what we want is destructive to our world? How might we reconceive of (be)longing in a way that rejects overconsumption? These poems suggest, "what if, more than place, it's about sound?" In Milk Tongue Mathieu uses haibun, long poems, and experimental forms to explore what we inherit or pass on - privilege, oppression, anxiety, "hypnagogic conjure," and a warming earth - and envisage how, through deep attention to the emotional vibrations under the surface of these phenomena, we might become "both human and an / animal worthy of this speck of dust.""--
"The poems in Love Training are intimate in focus and scale: taut and contemplative, they ruminate on family, exile, romantic love, and the vagaries of human perception. Love Training, which gathers poems from several of Andrâes Neuman's books into a single unified collection, is divided into three sections. The first, the titular "Love Training," focuses on family (and its history), loss, relationships, love, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, "Fictions of Sight," are associated with questions of perception, perspective, and creativity. And the third, "I Don't Know Why" - which is the first phrase of every poem in the section - is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions; it serves as a kind of coda to the book. While Andrâes Neuman is a celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid, sensitive, incisive - and quite prolific - poet. Love Training is the first English translation of his poetry"--
"From Kurdish poet and writer Farhad Pirbal, a heartbreaking collection of short stories. Each tale in The Potato Eaters underlines 'otherness', or isolation and displacement in contemporary society. His characters are at once resonant and shocking, his ability to decry trauma reminiscent of American greats like Morrison and Hurston. The title story from this collection is one of the most acclaimed Kurdish short stories; it features a town that, due to famine, only survives on potatoes. The community comes to appreciate the base cuisine and abandon currency for their coveted starch. When the story's protagonist returns from his travels, he brings gold home and he is met with utter apathy; he is a stranger in his own country. 'Lamartine' tells the story of a struggling poetry expert with a PhD on Lamartine's lines in search of a lucrative career. He has trouble finding the right words to get a job. He visits a local career agency and in plain verse, asks for a career; he and the agent imagine a world wherein poets are paid by the line instead of the hour, a world in which artists always have a steady income. After the encounter, he says to a statue of his hero, 'we really do live pitifully, us all like us, artists and poets. Often I have thought that a demon, at the beginning of time, must have nursed us: misfortune our first milk.' 'The Deserter' spotlights a forgetful soldier struggling to find his lost leg in 1989. He hobbles for nearly ten days until his Corporal informs him to prepare for war. 'How?', he wonders. The two go in search for a new leg, scavenging through piles of human body parts. In war, all warriors lose pieces of themselves: legs, arms, minds, hearts and souls. He reflects on his station: 'My generation and I...we are the sacrifice of our era; the sacrifice to war and the dirty battles of those fools and frauds we call today's leaders.' The story ends there -- without resolution. This finality parallels the ramifications of war: stories and lives cut short, questions left unanswered"--
"Freedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins's formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and Afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different "rooms." The speaker isn't afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more-all while using humor and craft. What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live"--
"A historical document reintroducing Dallas as an early French socialist utopia, pieced from journal entries, letters, and sketches of French scholar Victor Considerant. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, where visions of egalitarian futures brewed, Victor Considerant set off with a legion of over two hundred European settlers to create their own socialist utopia. Their settlement was La Râeunion, just thirty miles outside of Downtown Dallas, along the scenic Trinity river. Utopian visions clashed with the harsh agrarian realities of Texas, as the settlers - academics, musicians and intellectuals - floundered in the heat, and La Râeunion wilted. Victor Considerant's name can be found everywhere in Dallas, but the history of its provenance is not as ubiquitous. Collecting his journal entries, letters to friends back home, and sketches of his surroundings, The Road to Texas provides a glimpse into his ambitions and visions and a sketch of 18th century Dallas. Full of lush descriptions, ardent aspirations, and harsh lessons, it is both an incisive, informative documentation of the founding of Dallas, and an important historical resource to re-examine our present"--
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Lookout tells the story of the Kinzlers, a complex working-class family firmly rooted in northwestern Montana.Josiah and Margaret Kinzler have forged an unusual bond marked by both tenderness and distance; their daughters, Cody and Louisa, grow up watching their parents navigate what it means to be true to yourself and what that costs. Lookout offers a gripping dual coming-of-age: Cody's from stoic ranch kid to hotshot firefighter to resilient woman learning to rely on others, and Josiah's as he struggles to thrive in a world that has misunderstood him. Bound by their love of the land, the Kinzlers work to bridge the gaps created by what they leave unspoken. Lookout brings to life a family coming out to itself, at hom in a new and nuanced American West.
Herostories reveals tales untold by most history books: the harrowing journeys and vital triumphs of 19th and 20th century midwifery in the vast landscape of Iceland. Composed from the memoirs and biographies of 100 Icelandic midwives, poet-historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s found poems illuminate the dangers and valor of birthwork. Forgoing traditional sagas of androcentric conquest, these poems center the adventures of ljósmæður, “mothers of light.” Tómasdóttir leverages epic elements—dashing mountain treks, rivers forded on horseback, unyielding compassion—to challenge how and by whom stories become legend. The follow-up to Tómasdóttir/Thors’ award-winning, PEN-nominated Stormwarning, Herostories documents the professional achievements of the island’s first women to work outside the home, precursors to today’s midwives who remain central to contemporary Icelandic healthcare. Beyond archival recognition, the text's formally ambitious poetics render gender-based battles for literacy and education alongside narratives of selfless womanly caretaking, pressurizing the fundamental tensions between feminine self-actualization and the romanticized service of these trailblazing figures.
Based on a true story set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, The Purchased Bride relates the story of Maria, a Greek girl who was bought when she was fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man. As the Ottoman Empire falls and insurgents torch their Greek village in the Caucasus, Maria and her parents flee and find shelter in a refugee camp across the border in Ottoman territory. Cholera and plague are impending, and the priest running the camp takes a desperate measure, arranging to marry Maria off to a wealthy Ottoman Turk in the capital. She and her best friend, Lita, then travel toward the Black Sea coast through a fascinating world of ancient and forgotten Ottoman mountain communities. They encounter escalating violence, sniper attacks, and marauding troops amid the Empire’s collapse, as breakaway provinces declare themselves independent caliphates in defiance of the Sultan. And when Lita escapes, Maria is left to face her fate alone. A story of war, struggle, and ultimate success, based on the life of Constantine’s grandmother, The Purchased Bride sheds light on a turbulent and dangerous part of history.
Forgetting is a brief but searing sojourn inside the mind of Alma as she navigates the complexity of the past and future within her identity. On her nighttime wanderings through a Paris saturdated with cultural and historical meaning, she begins the slow work of grieving for her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and begins to unravel the ways that his experience continues to reverbrate across generations. The journey, both inward and outward, simple and infinitely varied, brings Alma to reconsider her whole life and the circumstances that led to her very birth. In Forgetting, Finkelstein sheds new light on the oldest dilemmas, asking: "What to do wth the brief time that is given to us?"
A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet's insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus.Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet's diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet's struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile. But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield? This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva's poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.
What if everything they’ve told us about the Garden of Eden was wrong? Faced with what appears to be an apocryphal manuscript containing ten books and 91 chapters, Eve decides to tell her version of the story of Genesis: she was not created from Adam’s rib, nor is it correct that she was expelled for taking the apple from the serpent; the story of Abel and Cain isn't true, neither are those of the Flood and the Tower of Babel...In brilliant prose, Carmen Boullosa offers a twist on the Book of Genesis that dismantles patriarchy and rebuilds our understanding of the world—from the origin of gastronomy, to the domestication of animals, to the cultivation of land and pleasure—all through the feminine gaze. Based on this exploration, at times both joyful and painful, The Book of Eve takes a tour through the stories we’ve been told since childhood, which have helped to foster (and cement) the absurd idea that woman is the companion, complement, and even accessory to man, opening the door to criminal violence against women. Boullosa refutes this entrenched, dangerous perspective in her foundational and brazen feminist novel.
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