Bøger udgivet af Alice James Books

Brother Sleep is a collection of grievances through which a speaker mourns the loss of a brother, grandfather, and a sense of self as they navigate a landscape of desire marred by violence against queer and Mexican people.Set in the border cities of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, these poems navigate the liminal space between language and silence. As the poems grieve the loss of family, the violence perpetrated against queerness, the bodies lost border-side, and the cruelty against tenderness, Amparan's words bloom in evocation. Reflecting on lovers, friends, family, classmates, and others of impact, they navigate personal reconciliation in response to imposed definitions of their personhood.These poems evoke an equal sense of sorrow and tenderness amidst a complex landscape of the self.

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destructionthrough natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history.The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope.By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in menin the structures that they design and maintain.

From the perspective of a teacher in a youth detention center, these hard-hitting poems have a unique blend of dark humor and realism.In a composition of both compassion for Americas unheard voices and contempt for the systems unjustness, American Treasure chronicles McDonoughs personal place within the nation. She considers her work with incarcerated students, her privilege, her womanhood, and the connection she shares with others. Through this exploration, McDonough writes with care about the possibility of a people in a country built on cruelty.Poems prod, ache, question, and laugh, as they tap into the complexity of a modern nation full of contempt for the vile systems woven into the American fabric, while also celebrating those who live in spite of them.

In the deeply personal Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized American citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major auto accident.The collection is an odyssey of what it means to recoverphysically and mentallyin the aftermath of trauma and traumatic brain injury, charting when before crosses into after. Through connected poems, buckling and expansive syntax, ekphrasis, and conjoined poetic forms, Decade of the Brain remembers and misremembers hospital visits, violence and bodily injury, intimate memories, immigration status, family members, and the self.After the accident I turned outall of the lights in the room while I watched,concussed, from the mirror. I edged like a feverwith nothing on the tip of my tongue.

"Although grief is at the forefront of these poems, The Wild Delight of Wild Things is a simple love letter to Turner's late wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016). The poems are also a love letter to our planet during the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Intertwining this immense grief, Turner explores the hybrid borderlands of genre, and the meditations on love and loss blur the boundaries between poetry and lyric prose. In Italian, the word "stanza" is rooted in the word "room." And so, stanza by stanza, room by room, page by page, we draft ourselves forward into the imagination, our arms filled with all that we can carry from the days gone by. This is the art of survival. Profound grief teaches us how to dwell in the house of memory--that vibrant temporal landscape of the past--where we might live with the dead we love once more"--

"Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I Am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is a comment on writing itself. What have words done? When does writing become a form of disengagement, or worse, violence? The book is an exercise in paring the state down to its true logic of violence and imagining what can happen next. There are many contradictions-Although the protagonist teaches the same science that was used to justify enslavement and a racial caste system, she knows she will die at the hands of science and denies the state the last word by penning her own death certificate. As an educator and knowledge worker, she is an overseer of the same racist, misogynistic, and homophobic systems that terrorize her. Yet, she musters the courage to kill Kurtz, a primordial vision of white terror. She is Black and queer and fat and angry and chill and witty and joyful and depressed and lovely and flawed and an (im)perfect dagger to the heart of white supremacist capitalism"--

"Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn't hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life-even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question 'What isn't hell?' and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a 'redvioletcerulean handkerchief'"--

"Feast offers abundance and nourishment through language, and reaches toward a place an immigrant might call home. The poems in this collection-many of which revolve around food and its cultural significances-examine the brown body's relationship with nourishment. Poems delve into what it means to be brown in a white world, and how that encourages (or restricts) growth. Feeds its readers by employing lush sonics and imagery unafraid of being Filipino and of being Asian American"--

"By turns poignant and hopeful, raging and joyful, Small hours interweaves the personal and the political, connecting family history to moments within a larger historical arc of injustice and oppression. The poems in this collection bear witness to those whose stories have fallen into the fractures of history and been lost. The poems ask us to recall the tyrants of the past as similar abuses of power repeat themselves in the present. Forgiveness and understanding vie with the memory of events that can never be redressed, only remembered, and sometimes redeemed"--

Sadoff's eighth poetry collection seeks to understand why cultural norms have kept people from their fullest, most engaged selves.

Translated from Hebrew, these poems are a genuine depiction of personal familial grief from an Israeli perspective.

Insightful poems full of rich, historical detail, and musings on the world's random elegance. Roots of memory and nostalgia become the architecture of the mind as Thomson explores the past to better grasp the future.

Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality. The book is largely a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large.

Titled after a small gallery of the same name found in Rome, the poems are devoted to meditations on religious relics and works of art. They explore the narrative power these objects carry-the way we imbue totemic figures with both meaning and story, and the potential they have to define the world.

"Sugar Work chronicles the complexities of womanhood, race, and gender that arose from growing up around sex work in Atlanta, Georgia in the late 1990s. Poems investigate beauty and whiteness, the aftermath of sexual trauma on the female body, divorce, desire, and art itself. Narrative poems reflect on female sexuality and self-acceptance after a complex childhood, informing the speaker's ever-changing relationship with love"--