Bøger af Diane Kistner

Paul Hostovsky: Selected Poems brings together 120 poems from this prolific, masterful, Pushcart Prize-winning poet's previous five collections of poetry, Bending the Notes (2008), Dear Truth (2009), A Little in Love a Lot (2011), Hurt Into Beauty (2012), and Naming Names (2014). Of Hostovsky's work the Georgia Review has written: "High-energy Paul Hostovsky, who makes his living as an interpreter for the Deaf, has been making a lot of noise in the poetry publishing world of late, with five full-length collections and six poetry chapbooks in the past eight years. He is best known for his use of humor in service of serious subject matter, his skill with narrative, and his unpretentiously strong commitment to craft. Joe Weil has written that 'Paul Hostovsky negotiates a territory not far removed from the casual speaking style of Frank O'Hara and the humor and simplicity of Paul Zimmer, but he is not a mere hybrid of these two fine poets. He represents what is best about clarity in poetry.' And Jeffrey Harrison, speaking of Hostovsky's work, has said more succinctly, 'This book kicks ass.'"

SCIENCE AND by Diane Furtney is a moving, insightful, funny and exuberant collection of poems; sometimes the reader feels like an assistant at bold experiments in a wildly colored lab. Unusual discoveries in nine sciences turn into deeply imagined metaphors and tropes in five sections: Science and Family, Science and Romance, Science and the Homo Sapiens Young, Science and Irritation, Science and the Surround. A dramatic nonmetrical couplet form presses the data into trenchant narrative lyrics of love, loss, and growth, as well as a couple of cautionary parables. The poems arrive convincingly at Epicurean goals for living and the steady conviction of being at home in the universe. This is a breakthrough of fresh thinking about the flexibility of poetry and the excitement of living amidst non-received ideas. Only a general familiarity with empirical science is needed.

In this collection of persona poems, Diana Pinckney explores the art of others and regards the wolf as the ultimate other: "Wolves speak to me from beauty, strangeness and vulnerability, representing both the beast and the innocent. Their voice is the music of the wilderness.... As for the beasts and the innocents these poems speak of, this writer feels there are many that are sometimes two-sided-like the god, Janus-and hopes that they will be discovered by the eye and the ear of the reader."

Just as a theme played by the Devil in a dream was turned into a sonata, in THE DEVIL'S SONATA day-to-day observations are turned into poems. In David Chorlton's seventh book of poetry, the desert climate of the Southwest is often the supporting theme in work that speaks for animals as well as a humans and the land itself.

Love is a Burning Building is the second collection of what are also known by insiders as "the birthday poems," written as homage to friends, family, colleagues, associates, acquaintances, and contemporaries. In these works, Bear employs a hybrid form of the prose poem, relying on colons to break up phrases, refrains, and ideas, as well as to tear down some of those very same things. This combination results in a masterful balance in which language is exalted. Dancing Bear never loses track of his theme: cycles-renewal, rebirth, regeneration, change, growth, and hope. These poems are refreshingly positive in their outlook but are not ignorant of the negative facets of cycles that can age all of us too quickly. While the poems were written for individuals, they bear a deep, undeniable universality.

The poems in WHAT THE MOUTH WAS MADE FOR seek to fill up the spaces created by loss and desire with images of open fields, of green, of kisses. What does it mean to be in this world, to eat, to laugh, to speak? Tim Seibles calls these poems "fresh food for the head and heart," saying, "Get this book. Get full."

Set on what remains of a small family farm in the Blue Ridge foothills of Western North Carolina, ROUGH BEAST depicts the quirky ascension of Larry Ledbetter from small-time country gangster to unwilling literary lion. Larry's voice is the engine that drives the sometimes comic but often violent narrative. In his attempt to come to grips with both personal tragedies and his inexplicable success, Larry reveals his vulnerability and shared humanity.

In 1864, the doors of the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane opened in Weston, West Virginia. Although medical records have not been accessed, titles for the poems in this collection reflect the exact reasons for admission as inscribed in the first logbook used at the hospital from October 22, 1864, to December 12, 1889.

In his debut collection of poetry, Steve Coughlin examines the severity of family trauma on both personal memory and the human psyche. Written in an accessible, colloquial voice that poet J. Allyn Rosser describes as "strong, versatile, original...[and] capable of radically different tones and angles of approach," these poems move from haunted laments to playful musings as they negotiate the complexities of grief with the desire to escape into the imagination's safe refuge. Ultimately, in ANOTHER CITY Coughlin depicts the harsh struggles of a working class family and leaves readers to consider what healing, if any, the imagined world can offer.

Randy Blythe's poems wend their way through personal, historical, regional, philosophical, aesthetic, familial, and spiritual landscapes, and in doing so echo a larger search for how and where liberation might be found, except that the deliverance Blythe's poems conjure at is not what one might expect. Through grit and laughter, the poems level a cold eye at discovering what the true human part is, who we really are beyond the Walmart life we settle for. The result is at times amusing, at times unsettling, often querulous. A sense persists throughout that the good and bad, the laughter and pain we share are inevitable and integral to some end, but what end eludes us. These poems don't go for easy answers because there are none. At the same time, in language and subject matter, the poems themselves are readily accessible, their upshot often a species of clear-eyed joy. Their call is meant for those driven to explore, top to bottom, the heavens and dungeons of the project we understand as being, where we are bound to find nothing if not ourselves.

The Knife Collector features a speaker who cannot escape weighing each present moment and image against the parallel narratives of his youth and his family in Arkansas. While traveling through time and space, these poems explore the physical, emotional, and spiritual landscape that is the speaker's youth and negotiate a path to his fledgling adult life in Atlanta, Georgia.

Life on a small midwestern farm is the genesis of many of the poems in DEAD HORSES. Unsentimental and realistic, they celebrate an enduring involvement with horses (riding, breeding, foaling, and racing) and offer a tough-minded look at the vagaries of rural existence.

In HOUSE YOU CANNOT REACH, a mother's voice is reimagined, amplified, and permitted to ventilate both forbidden grievance and private passion. Simultaneously wistful and excoriating, she cherishes and denounces a philandering husband and ponders the suicide of her youngest son. Whether needling a portfolio manager or reconnoitering the disappointing God of her Irish Catholic upbringing, she casts her sometimes witty, sometimes jaded regard on a society that pampered and grieved her.After a stroke, her restraint loosens even more radically. Her consciousness splinters as she proceeds to cajole the Virgin of Guadalupe, to hallucinate over Tolstoy's War and Peace, and to brazenly equate her addled suffering with that of earthquake victims in Haiti.Complemented by poems in the poet's voice that extend the territory of their mutual experience, this mother's utterances discomfit and regale with terrifying and exultant fervor.

In her latest chapbook, SEWING LESSONS, Judith Rypma weaves word tapestries that reveal and respond to the patterns of our lives. Weaving and embroidering have served as a metaphor for creation for centuries, and each poem beautifully follows that tradition. These tightly crafted poems trace women's progress from ancient looms and spindles to more modern struggles with pleated skirts, and botched home economics classes. Like the Three Fates, the speaker measures and cuts the threads of life in a poignant and powerful examination of how the lives of women and, as importantly, female artists, are stitched together.

The poems in DAMAGED LITTLE CREATURES remind us that we can never remake ourselves entirely; we are distilled through the experiences that shape our early selves In direct and spare language, Sevick's heartrending poems achieve moments of grace and transcendence as they unravel delicate childhood memories, probe complex issues of identity, and wrestle with the impossible work of marriage and parenting.

This book is the third full-length poetry collection by this award-winning poet. Those familiar with Carpathios' work know that his poems are marked by a directness of diction and startlingly original imagery. He continues the exploration of the body--in all its hungers, hurts, and intense passions, as well as the dark winding tunnels within the body toward where the spirit, or the soul, perhaps, dwells--that was the terrain of his first two collections.

Like the colonial-era document and the small New England city from which it draws its title, The Holyoke Diaries is a microcosm haunted by the past and driven by dreams and desires. It bristles with the innocent cruelty of childhood, the self-conscious sexuality of adolescence, and the responsibility of adulthood and parenthood. These are poems that explore the ways men and women give meaning to the places they inhabit: the evasions, hallucinations and appreciations, the building up and tearing down, combining elements both lyrical and narrative, using the power of language so that readers might experience times and places and struggles for meaning that might otherwise be lost in the swirl of history.

Set in Fresno, the Sierra Nevadas and Greece, the poems in Before Kodachrome look back unflinchingly at a fractured California childhood in the 1950s and '60s. In the process they lay out in stark contrast the dimensions of a life where parents, real and surrogate, are at once loving and violent, attentive and neglectful, righteous and morally bankrupt. From his adopted homeland, the cradle of Western civilization, the poet weaves stories from classical mythology, the Old Testament, fairy tales and popular American culture that show how a balanced adult self can be formed, not by avoiding childhood trauma and insistently "moving on," but by using language and narrative to delve deep into one's past and bring back artifacts that provide meaning, stability and, yes, at times, transcendence.

This new collection by SIBA nominee and GAYA winner Dana Wildsmith brings the reader back once more to Wildsmith's family farm in Bethlehem, Georgia, a farm introduced through Wildsmith's earlier poetry collection, One Good Hand, and her environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal. There is a poem for each day of advent in this book, beginning with poems set in the biblical Bethlehem, and then moving in time and place to Wildsmith's Christmases in Bethlehem, Georgia. The book is appropriately rounded out by the musical score based on one of the poems in the book.

Winner of the 2012 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. DEAD WENDY is a sequence of elegiac poems, reflections on broken relationships and unlikely friendships, lyrics-sung, shouted, wept-of life's raw drama and ultimate tragedy. At heart, it is a love story. The narrative a tapestry of memories brought forth in three distinct voices as each character recounts events, the poems chronicle the last days of a young woman and the two men who loved her-and pursued her beyond death.

Of Christopher Bursk's poetry, Joel Brouwer in The New York Times Book Review writes, "If you're looking for skeptical poststructuralist experiments with language's unstable elements, look elsewhere. Bursk has bottomless faith in language and its capacities to enlighten and delight." Bursk's Selected Poems reveal their author's trust in those odd little bits of breath we call vowels and consonants to engage the world. Drawing on his experience as a father and grandfather, teacher and prison counselor, pacifist and protestor, Bursk sets great store in the potential of parts of speech to challenge and heal, puzzle and provoke. For him words are "places of comfort, places of justice," whether they are exploring the painful confusions of childhood and sexuality; witnessing to the violations of spirit and body in the Congo or on the cellblock; examining the challenges of classroom, picket line, nursery or hospital ward; confronting the difficulties of living in the past and in the here and now. Bursk in his work in the corrections system helped those incarcerated to trust that something good comes of facing, honestly and bravely, both one's limits and one's possibilities. In his poetry he asks the same of himself. In both cases this honesty and courage is made possible by a faith that words, though they may test us, will not let us down.

Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that "the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common" and that nature is always "describing its own design." The poems in Sean Lause's BESTIARY OF SOULS puts Emerson's claims to the test, with the assumption that, rightly seen, the common is never ordinary.

Bill Edmondson's long-awaited first book is a tour de force of distinctive, finely-honed poetic skills and a world view brutally honest yet ultimately hopeful. In lines carved like phrases from a jazz score, Edmondson's poetry travels a sinewy geography-the Mississippi River, Molokai, New Orleans, San Francisco's Tenderloin-and the human landscape as well, all sides of it, behavior and spirit. This book is a master work, its poems haunting and unforgettable.

Filled with impassioned logic and musicality, John Sibley Williams' debut collection strives to control the uncontrollable by redefining the method of approach. In these compact poems, so edged in dark corners and the strenuous songs of beauty and identity, Williams establishes a unique world of contradictions and connections that bridge the foreign and the familiar. Moving through art and history, through apocalyptic visions and family, into and back out of the paradox of using language to express languagelessness, Controlled Hallucinations weaves universal themes and images with the basic human reality of touch, word, and what is lost in their translation.

Winner of the 2014 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. William Greenway's poems travel between muggy recollections of a Southern Baptist childhood, meditations on the otherworldly beauty of Wales, and commentary on life, death, and the revelry in between. For every witty turn of phrase, a punch beyond the punch line stuns us with wisdom and transcendence. A poem like "Ophelia Writes Home," a witty revisionist account that shifts the slaughter of that famous tragedy to domestic bliss, exemplifies Greenway's genius for reconciliation, for the grace of happiness no matter what happens. We smile, we grieve, and we keep reading these surehanded and goodhearted poems.

Bill Glose's HALF A MAN lays bare the impact of war on the individual soldier. The book's first half, about war and life in the military, tells of the sometimes harrowing, sometimes maddening, but always emotional experiences of soldiers in today's Army. The second half is about the baggage a soldier brings home with him and the opposing feelings that threaten to tear him apart: the guilt, the pride, the joy, the anger. Evocative, imagistic, and mesmerizing, replete with telling details and enriched by occasional humor, this collection of war poetry is a brilliant portrayal of what all those touched by war must cope with on both the battlefield and homefront.

Peeling away stereotypes with knife-sharp images, Elizabeth Schultz's collection of poems opens up the Kansas landscape to reveal astonishing complexities and subtleties. These poems dazzle the senses, breathing life not only into plants and animals, but also into seasons and the sky. For readers familiar with America's heartland as well as for those unfamiliar with it, THE SAUNTERING EYE becomes a necessary guide to seeing more fully and more deeply, to envisioning this and other landscapes as myriad-layered, connected to the remote past as well as to a perplexing future.

Globetrotter and cross-country motorcyclist, George Moore has traversed the deserts and plains of the West in search of the cultural equivalent of a cowboy nirvana, always open to the vast, open spaces and seduced by the heights. He has explored the last best remote corners of the planet and written extensively on both the tail-ends and origins of a diverse humanity. Moore's poetry fuses a modernist, philosophical intensity with a postmodernist's eye for the absurd and startlingly diurnal. The Hermits of Dingle centers on a group of rock islands off the Irish coast, where 7th-century hermits made their stark homes in small beehive huts. The poetry begins with this minimalist setting, a sensibility tuned to the nature of how we live in the world, uncluttered by the advances of civilization, but it then goes deeper, uncovering moments of significance from the perspective of the poet's unflinching eye as it comes to rest on the sharper realities and heartfelt truths of the human world.

In this thematically creative chapbook of poems, we learn the secrets of hardware, such as screws, fuses, hinges, pliers, and hammers, to name a few.

This is a book of surrealistic, metaphysical poems about love; poems of invitation, engagement, ordeal, passion and devotion. Meisel's poems evoke the sentinels of love through the wise voices of angels, swerving swallows, talking orchids, erotic roses, healing chocolates, delirious guitars, oil covered murres and saffron finches flying into sunbeams. In this book violins sing. Napoleon, Bach, Schumann express love to their wives, and lovers risk everything to stretch into love's healing powers of solace, challenge, forgiveness, empathy and joy. Leaping deer become violins, a wedding ceremony is held inside a fish, and angels-longing to be born into flesh-contemplate the definitions of beauty. Meisel's book celebrates the unconquerable power of the female voice-a voice of lyrical wisdom, honesty, beauty, fervor and grace-that dares the reader to believe that devotion is the aerobics of love.