Bøger i Phoenix Poets serien

Both intensely personal and deeply rooted in recognizable events of a personal, familial, or national significance, "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography. Dan Chiasson divulges the enigmas of the mind through a beautifully constructed poetic voice.

Adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, this book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop and when provincialism confronts urbanity.

Ranging among traditional, open, and newly invented forms, and including a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems, this title begins as a historical meditation on our fall and grows into a song of praise for the green and turning world.

A sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry.

From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton, this book tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness.

Features poems that are haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century.

A book of poems. Exploring history, self, and imagination, as well as the poet's concerns with catastrophe and trauma, it wrestles with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11.

""There's a language for other / languages," writes Rachel DeWoskin in "Two Menus" in a poem titled "Foreigners." But what if the "foreigner" referred to exists within us? Indeed, how do we reconcile our multiple selves, the ones we're born into with those that we develop far from childhood histories and familiar geographies? How do we reconcile the language of our parents with the ones we ourselves adopt as adults? "Two Menus" shows us what it's like to live between languages (English and Chinese) and cultures (the US and China), between histories (youth and adulthood), and how thinking in different languages and locales, over time, shifts our perspectives and our forms of expression. In traditional lyrics and experimental forms, in language that reflects the awkwardness of human communication itself, DeWoskin crosses back and forth between the divided worlds of the self, exploring the elusiveness of understanding in the midst of contradictory social norms. The result is a unique book of poems, partaking in equal parts of humor and bitterness, confusion and delight"--

Imagine you are a Palestinian who came to America as a young man, eventually finding yourself caught between the country you live in with your wife and daughter, and the home--and parents--you left behind. Imagine living every day in your nonnative language and becoming estranged from your native tongue, which you use less and less as you become more ensconced in the United States. This is the story told by Ahmad Almallah in Bitter English, an autobiography-in-verse that explores the central role language plays in how we construct our identities and how our cultures construct them for us. Through finely crafted poems that utilize a plainspoken roughness to keep the reader slightly disoriented, Almallah replicates his own verbal and cultural experience of existing between languages and societies. There is a sense of displacement to these poems as Almallah recounts the amusing, sad, and perilous moments of day-to-day living in exile. At the heart of Bitter English is a sense of loss, both of home and of his mother, whose struggle with Alzheimer's becomes a reflection of his own reality in exile. Filled with wit, humor, and sharp observations of the world, Bitter English brings a fresh poetic voice to the American immigrant experience.

In his first collection of poems, many of which were written during his years as a US Army Special Forces medic, Graham Barnhart explores themes of memory, trauma, and isolation. Ranging from conventional lyrics and narrative verse to prose poems and expressionist forms, the poems here display a strange, quiet power as Barnhart engages in the pursuit and recognition of wonder, even while concerned with whether it is right to do so in the fraught space of the war zone. We follow the speaker as he treads the line between duty and the horrors of war, honor and compassion for the victims of violence, and the struggle to return to the daily life of family and society after years of trauma. Evoking the landscapes and surroundings of war, as well as its effects on both US military service members and civilians in war-stricken countries, The War Makes Everyone Lonely is a challenging, nuanced look at the ways American violence is exported, enacted, and obscured by a writer poised to take his place in the long tradition of warrior-poets.

How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? The Bower engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker's year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with her young daughter. The speaker immerses herself in the history of Irish politics--including the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles--and gathers stories of a painful, divisive past from museum exhibits, newspapers, neighbors, friends, local musicians, and cabbies. Quietly meditative, brooding, and heart-wrenching, these poems place intimate moments between mother and daughter alongside images of nationalistic violence and the angers that underlie our daily interactions. A deep dive into sectarianism and forgiveness, this timely and nuanced book examines the many ways we are all implicated in the impulse to "protect our own" and asks how we manage the histories that divide us.

"My Bishop and Other Poems" oscillates between shorter lyrics, which represent the interior or private life, and two long prose poems, which represent the social, external world.

Guided by a moral vision to document human experience, this unique collection takes raw historical materials--newspaper articles, autobiography and letters, court testimony, a convict ledger, and even a menu--and shapes them into sonnets, ballads, free verse, and prose poems.

What obsesses Halliday in Losers Dream On is how to recognize reality without relinquishing the pleasure and creativity and courage of our dreaming. Halliday's poetry exploits the vast array of dictions, idioms, rhetorical maneuvers, and tones available to real-life speakers (including speakers talking to themselves).

A collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits--well, I mean, sorry, yes--prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.

This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man's son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.

It has been seventeen years since Lloyd Schwartz has published a book of original poems, so there is much anticipation from his fans. In "Little Kisses," Schwartz takes his characteristic tragi-comic view of life to some unexpected and sometimes disturbing places. Here we find heart-breaking and comic poems about personal loss (the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, for example, or his mother s failing memory, or a precious gold ring gone missing); uneasy love poems and poems about family; and poems about identity, travel, and art with all their potentially recuperative powers. The book also contains some memorable translations, jokes, and wordplay, as well as formal surprises, all of which Schwartz s readers have come to relish in his verse. His books have been all too few and far between; this new one after so very long is sure to be greeted by an eager readership."

Connie Voisine's third book of poems, "Calle Florista," centers on the border between the US and Mexico and celebrates the stunning, if severe, desert landscape. Southern New Mexico's proximity to Mexico (indeed, it was "still" a part of Mexico until 167 years ago) is also an occasion for Voisine to explore themes of splitting and friction in both human and political contexts. Through a combination of directness and excision, the poems in this book oscillate between describing complex, private sensibilities, on the one hand, and, on the other, cracking the private self open (and vulnerable) to the wider world. The focus on the Mexico-US border is also a way for Voisine to experiment with the speaking voice in the poems: whose space is this border, she asks, and what voice can properly tell the story of this place?

Features a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself. This book recounts the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists.

Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, this book traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes-natural and domestic, political and religious - across America's East and Midwest.

Includes poems that sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archaeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, this title celebrates communities both invented and real.

Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, this book insistently addresses the author's desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness.

Features a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time.