Bøger udgivet af Phoenicia Publishing

In this shining and unsparing new collection, celebrated poet Luisa A. Igloria draws from her own childhood memories, relationships, and keen sensory awareness to create a dreamlike series of pictures in which we, too, may see our growth through the experiences of joys, loss, and the poignant wisdom that comes with age. As poet Sean Thomas Dougherty puts it, Igloria's poems "get to the heart of why poetry is written: the pure lyric impulse of trying to live."

"Waiting to Unfold" offers an unflinching and honest look at the challenges and blessings of early parenthood. Poet and rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote one poem during each week of her son's first year of life, chronicling the wonder and the delight along with the pain of learning to nurse, the exhaustion of sleep deprivation, and the dark descent into -- and eventual ascent out of -- postpartum depression. Barenblat brings her rabbinic training and deep spirituality to bear on this quintessential human experience. She also resists sentimentality or rosy soft-focus. While some of these are poems of wonder, others were written in the trenches. These poems resist and refute the notion that anyone who doesn't savor every instant of exalted motherhood deserves stigma and shame. And they uncover the sweetness folded in with the bitter. By turns serious and funny, aching and transcendent, these poems take an unflinching look at one woman's experience of becoming a mother.

"Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time." --Lee Smith Thaliad, a book-length epic poem written in blank verse, tells the story of a group of children, survivors of an apocalypse, who make an arduous journey of escape and then settle in a deserted rural town on the shores of a beautiful lake. There, they must learn how to survive, using tools and knowledge they discover in the ruins of the town, but also how to live together. At the heart of the story is the young girl Thalia, who gradually grows to womanhood, and into the spiritual role for which she was destined. Following in the great tradition of narrative poetry, Thaliad tells a gripping story populated with sharply-drawn, memorable characters whose struggles illuminate the complexity of human behavior from its most violent to most noble. At the same time, through its accessible language and style, the epic presents wholly contemporary questions about what is necessary not only for physical survival, but for the flourishing of the human spirit.

These forty-one poems, written by Ren Powell between 1998 and 2010, depict a coming of age that begins in a claustrophobic American trailer park and expands into the kind of borderless existence shared by all emigrants and homesick travelers. Throughout this journey, the poet's fears-which are the fears we all harbor-are balanced by her unflinching witness to what is real, just, true, and beautiful. Even in the face of pain and disintegration, the poet refuses to relinquish her humor or her humanity.

Each of the poems in Seventy Faces arose in conversation with the Five Books of Moses. These poems interrogate, explore, and lovingly respond to Torah texts-the uplifting parts alongside the passages which may challenge contemporary liberal theology. Here are responses to the familiar tales of Genesis, the liberation story of Exodus, the priestly details of Leviticus, the desert wisdom of Numbers, and the anticipation of Deuteronomy. These poems balance feminism with respect for classical traditions of interpretation. They enrich any (re)reading of the Bible, and will inspire readers to their own new responses to these familiar texts.

In this largely autobiographical collection of 74 short prose poems, the poet presents her life in three sections. "Angels & Beasts" recalls her early years under the regime of Nicolae Ceasescu, a world of secret terror in which the child interweaves reality and malevolent creatures from Romanian folklore. "The Little Book of Answers" covers the years between the Romanian Revolution (1989) and Serea's emigration to America in 1995. Finally, "The Bank Teller's Name is Jesus" involves the immigrant's impressions of her new home, always colored by the past she carries with her. Serea's masterful use of brevity, surrealism, irony, and black humor allow her to express -and the reader to confront-unspeakable horrors. She is a survivor, but a survivor with wide-open eyes, determined to move forward holding the darkness and light together.

In English property law, "Ancient Lights" refers to an easement on natural light: windows that have been around for more than 20 years may not be blocked. In Dick Jones' Ancient Lights, windows admit light of fierce intensity, undimmed by the passing of decades and the rampant growth of contemporary distractions, and colored by the poet's personal or ancestral framing. The effect can be dazzling.