Bøger udgivet af Word Works

In poems fierce and lyrical, Umansky reveals what it means to live in a country at war within itself. She points outward to the political arena but also surfs the twists and turns of our collective psyche, our most intimate relationships.

How do we survive the undeserved and incomprehensible violence of the world we are born into? Mohring shows us the childhood and coming of age of a queer boy growing up in rural America, then the man wrestling with the memories. Gritty, vivid, and unflinching, these poems also demonstrate an elegance of style, a formal perfection that reassure the reader that goodness and power can yet come from fear and cruelty.

Crawford's poems explore a world on the cusp of machine dominance in which binary code is poised to overshadow verbal language as the global lingua franca. But the planet depicted in this book is also "binary" in that it is shared between human and machine-as well as teetering on the (similarly binary) cusp of hope and dread. The reader will encounter aspects of many contemporary entanglements between human and machine, such as hunger, racism, and war. Nonetheless, these poems never lose sight of the ephemeral beauty of the everyday.

In poems both dark and playful, wondering and shrewd, Jennifer Richter brings her reader the world we truly inhabit: where everyone is in danger, where awe still thrives, where we can laugh even in the face of our own mortality, where everything and everyone is worth saving. Her dynamic, unpredictable lines will delight with an irreverent and yet classically honed muscularity, even as the breath-taking scope of her subject matter will have each reader looking up from the book with a new way of seeing."In Dear Future, we see the everyday quaked open to expose the seams of life's uncertainty. Each poem becomes its own magnitude of scale-its own pulsating seismologic wave of language-that breaks loose for us to experience. These poems slide on a tightrope of moments compounded by imagery, ideation, and a slickness of language to portal us through space and time." -From the Introduction by Felicia Zamora, Author of I Always Carry My Bones"There's so much I like about this book that I hardly know where to begin. The poet's sense of music is fine, and beautifully honed to the demands of American English, and I admire the variations on form throughout, especially the way the poet never allows the sentence to be what drives the poems but always the line. That alone is a remarkable accomplishment. Also present throughout is an astute reckoning of what lies at the heart of what being human means in the face of a poetic consideration. Even this late in the human picture, she shows us that it is still possible to tell the truth about ourselves and to find beauty there. What endures for me is a quality of voice, that because of its natural beauty and its honesty, convinces the reader to enter the poems, where you will be safe."-Bruce Weigl, author of Among Elms, in Ambush "Dear Future teems with the cadence of panic, with the anticipatory anxiety of mothering children who are growing toward departure, and departing, while navigating a global pandemic, a globe rattled by literal and figurative earthquakes. Charles Francis Richter-he of the Richter scale, and a poet-becomes a comrade in namesake Jennifer Richter's own harrowing attempts to accompany her son as he navigates a serious, persistent depression. '[M]y son used to / sleep on me like a bunny on my belly, ' she writes, and those of us who know the particular pain of looking back on such tenderness, from a frightening present tense, clench our fists in empathy. 'The Underworld Also Swallows Sons, ' she titles perhaps the finest poem in the collection, a sonnet, opening the book's personal realm to the mythic, and with Wordsworth's 'The world is too much with us; late and soon, ' the literary. Her formal expressiveness is vast, offering up unpunctuated, breathless free verse, a cento, an erasure, ekphrasis, and the sonnet. In this vastly human, deeply honest collection, Richter revels in enjambments that jolt us like an earthquake, like love."-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

Poetry: Emily August's debut explodes our ideas about biraciality and why institutions are larded with violence.This ferocious vision of personal and cultural histories enters us through dark-wooded stories, folkloric in their eerie clarity. This brilliant, heartbreaking book confronts race, power, violence, and how we shape one another, daring us to contemplate what it could mean to "put the fear down."

Poet Michael Klein's New & Selected work!Tour the brilliant, wild, and careful career of poet Michael Klein, from a generous serving of new work all the way back to his 1993 debut, titled 1990. The HIV crisis, the ecstasy of our bonds with both the human and the animal worlds, the exquisite complications of longing, love songs to New York and to Provincetown--the varied, rich textures and electrifying honesty of his work bring rare gratification to his readers.

Poetry. New poems by Maryland's Poet Laureate complement selections from 20 of her 26 published collections, 1979-2022.

Poetry. Film Studies. Winner of the 2014 Washington Prize. Crabtree's poems provide a turbulent submersion in contemporary sorrow and despair, and yet you'll have genuine fun in these pages. Weaving Horror anti- heroes from throughout the history of film into his exploration of our dark longings, Crabtree balances the earnest and ironic, the playful and grim, resulting in a voice unlike any other. 'How Not to Be Lonely' might as well be the secret title of this book, or 'How to Be Lonely Better, ' or More Beautifully, or Professionally, with More Anger & Echo & Hollywood Monsters. But be wary: these little lonelinesses aren't soothing: they're boozing and bruising and funny and wooing: they're moving. They've been raised from the dead. They don't know why they're here--again--but they hurt. They're shambling toward you. They want you. They want you to want them back. I think you do. You want them badly. So when they knock, let them in. Let them all in.--Ander Monson Reading these poems, one is astounded at how delicate and tremulous the beauty of a broken heart may be. In this heart, grief is totalitarian. Being broken, the heart of these poems sees no other way but the way of its own affirmative. Their triumph is that very decision to fall into life, into such a space where language makes fractals of frost across the frozen pain.--Feng Sun Chen

"Poetry that answers the questions: How are racism and cancer the same? How can a Black man survive in a world that attacks from inside and outside, both? "--Provided by publisher.

Poetry. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Global yet intimate, this poetry collection takes the reader on journeys of the soul and the mind--as well as from one continent to another and back again. Born in Tanzania, Ayaz Pirani weaves of loss a beautiful cloth, conjuring lands and loves that endure to make us whole in spite of suffering. Says Heather Birrell: In this lovely and loving collection, Pirani positions himself as a kind of plainspoken anti- prophet, bringing human nosiness and gratitude to a number of subjects--displacement and immigration, the oak woods of the Arroyo Seco, a mother's love, a pub in Toronto, 'dark-haired beauties, ' Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater--as well as the more mysterious geographies of the soul. Pirani's images and exhortations will stop up your throat and thrum in your heart. Suzanne Buffman calls this book radical and notes that Pirani maps an austere happiness, and discovers, in love's company, an iridescent interior.

Inspired by science, a gritty and profound engagement with nature, and our fleeting fabrications on this planet, McCabe generates a durable delicacy that will astonish. Says Ilya Kaminsky, "McCabe, knows that darkness doesn't come onward but we are 'falling toward it, and sometimes/it is beautiful, framed in flame.' She is a kind of poet who knows that words, like paper cranes, may carry us, 'feather and bone.' When I read this, I think of Mahmoud Darwish who believed that clarity is the original mystery. In McCabe's clarities, too, lie her deepest surprises, and just like a fisherman in one of her poems, she relies 'on the tacit consonance of ice.' And her music! There is so much astonishment in her syntax, in tonalities. Kathleen Graber adds, "In a collection that honors both the natural and the man-made world, the production of both the field and the artist, the poet asserts that only change is certain. Just as the mind misremembers, clouds, rivers, flesh, and even rocks, dissolve with time. A drop of blood from a small cut is a startling reminder that even the physical body is flowing. Yet in a world in which all matter is destined for ruin, we find a speaker who again and again not only holds the elusive present in her fierce attention but also praises the very processes that, while ushering new fruit from the trees, erase all that has been, including the familiar self."

Poetry. Frannie Lindsay's elegant fifth collection is simultaneously elegiac and celebratory, a tribute to both 'gone things' and the beautiful that remains. Her primary subjects are human, old and diminished and dying; but her expansive vision encompasses the animal and reaches toward the divine, says Martha Collins. Terrence Hayes adds, Here praise is shaped by the fearlessness and fineness that constitute grace. Indeed, Lindsay's astonishing poetry is synonymous with grace. Here is a beautiful book from one of our very best contemporary poets.

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse. If you could cross Adrienne Rich with Gloria Steinem, then steep that poet in the political turmoil of Kurdistan, give her an extra jolt of lyric electricity and courage, you would create Kajal Ahmad, author of these breathtaking poems, translated for the first time into English by a team of young Kurdish women and their leader, poet-translator Levinson-LaBrosse. Says Eve Ensler: These poems by Kajal Ahmad are intoxications, sensual rumblings from the core of a woman's fire, burning through homeland and body, casting off time and space, unveiling, opening a new landscape, a new territory beyond logic or right and wrong. These poems are revolutions of language, a bursting of feminine power. A stunning and revelatory collection. Christopher Merrill calls this book a superb introduction to the work of an acclaimed Kurdish poet, whose chronicles of her walk in the sun mirror the complicated and tragic history of her people, in diverse forms and voices. What a light these poems cast on everyone and everything.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. WINNER OF THE 2015 TENTH GATE PRIZE. Barber's third full-length collection is described by Maggie Dietz as Formally agile and tersely emotive. Dietz continues, To give over to the trustworthy intelligence of these poems, to inhabit the world as Barber sees and painstakingly recreates it, is to come away gratified, and graced by the poet's immense and intricate gifts. WORKS ON PAPER is a brilliant and virtuosic book, unflinching in its incisiveness. Daniel Tobin says Barber possesses a contemplative brilliance rare in contemporary American poetry, while Martha Collins concludes that her poems speak both for and beyond the fragility of existence... seamlessly fusing an often autumnal natural world with delicate evocations of illness, grief, and love.

Poetry. Science Fiction. Environmental Studies. Lyrical sci-fi prose poems evoke a future where we have forgotten the details of our current world, yet retain the instincts for beauty and the natural world that might save us. Says Claudia Keelan, Set in a post-human landscape, in poems dominated by the proscriptive syntax of the sentence, the job of the dis-membered workers is to proceed, disconnecting from body and the words that proscribed singularity, to automaton. Directed by voices from myriad loudspeakers away from the words that defined their humanism, the remnant people in this apocalyptic second collection still look for connection to the derogated earth, dreaming 'our legs were fields of poppies, ' still 'tell the land we pray for it every night.' This is a book whose method is its warning. Cole Swensen adds, Sharply chiseled prose blocks build into a world insidiously sinister and delicately haunting, a world built of details accruing an eerie chorus. But amid an atmosphere of slow-motion terror, there is also hope--because there is agency. There is a 'we, ' and we have a plan. And we have a map. Bennett has given us a finely tuned emotional primer for dark times.

Poetry. Art. Winner of the 2014 Tenth Gate Prize, IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT unfolds what it means to read--read deeply, read fully, read for our lives. Says Tenth Gate Series Editor, Leslie McGrath, Lisa Sewell's poems are shot through with an adhesive intelligence born of the accretion of craft, discernment, and engagement with the world. Arthur Sze describes the poems here as spellbindingly present, while Linda Gregerson says, These poems are urgent; they are fresh; they acknowledge no divisions in the world, not between the landscape and the printed page, not between her neighbor's suffering and her own being spared, not between the private and the public worlds. And this is the IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT espoused in each and every line: connection in its purest form.

Poetry. Veterans. War. Jewish Studies. Covalence explores what it means to come home--from war, from loneliness, from questions too immense to answer. Says Hilary Tham Capital Collection judge Michael Klein, Covalence is one of the most original manuscripts I've ever read. Completely haunted--read: motivated--by history, war and, as it happens, life in a Veteran's hospital, the book succeeds as a kind of homage not only to the triumph over adversity, but what it means to live between the living you make and the living you just barely survive. And the poems here are filled with surprising imagery and speech. It is, finally, a book about how to be brave. Fred Marchant adds, The poems in Joseph Zealberg's Covalence explore many painful forms of spiritual and social alienation that accompany what we now call 'the moral harm' done by traumatizing violence. From poems that address family experiences during World War II to those that address the experience of veterans of our most recent wars, this book's verbal and imaginative energies help renew our sense of how crucial to life the 'covalent' bonds between us actually are, and help us remember that we must, as Auden once wrote, 'love one another or die.'

Debora Kuan interrogates what it means to be a woman of color who is both a captive of and captivated by the gravitational pull of a man's world. Deploying the figure of the moon goddess Chang-E of Chinese legend as a proxy, Kuan explores the experiences of internalized racism, misogyny, and invisibility that arise from a decentered, alien status. In this third and most intimate collection yet, through rewritten fairy tales, word finds, Mad Libs, chess matches, magic lessons, rhyming tercets and quatrains, prose poems, and still lifes--cultural artifacts of an American childhood and the white hegemony--Kuan charts her journey from girlhood to motherhood, each stage marked by a phase of the moon. These are breathtaking poems you'll return to again and again, as they reveal not only the compromises of a life lived in a liminal space, but also the power, grace, and beauty it takes to thrive there.

Poetry. Selected by Timothy Liu for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Madden's mastery of the American lyric combines intellect, heart, and courage as he explores growing up queer in the rural fundamentalist South. The poems anatomize a society of shaming and shunning under the guise of love, fighting free to the theme of finding where we belong. The poems work deep into the linguistic textures of his subjects, from queer love to the loss of a parent. The figure of the pooka (or puca) haunts the pages, embodying both good and bad luck, sorrow and hope.Says Timothy Liu: "This book redeems the curse of where and what we are born into by conjuring spells. Bestial. Animistic. The poet retroactively strutting around his flanks like a mythic centaur, or if you like, a domestic ass. This book flies in the face of making the rough places plain and the crooked straight. You won't have to have grown up queer in the deep rural South to be touched by the lyrical antics that go on here, this alternative gospel spreading its haunches in the hay till every knee bow, every tongue confess, this chorus of Hallelujah inflected/infected by its own down and dirty twang."Nathalie Anderson adds: "Pooka, wolf, coyote: what if we're the monster our parents warn us against? Ed Madden's poems about growing up queer in the rural fundamentalist South anatomize a society of shaming and shunning under the guise of love - the mother who 'grinds her children, ' 'crushes them'; the father with 'his head encased by a tiny church - as if the church were a vise, a mask, a hood.' Drawing on Irish folklore, on fairy tales, on Bible stories, Madden evokes an inner landscape at once real and surreal, at once loving and diminishing. His poems indict that community - 'you did not remember what big teeth they had, / what claws' - and gesture also toward the fascination of the forbidden - 'What he wore that day was darkness, / a silver shimmer of teeth.' Within this closed rural world, heteronormity sours into self-disgust, and desire terrifies: 'some of us were made to be ridden, riddled, riven.' Yet in tracing the 'practices' of a certain sort of situated fundamentalism, Madden refuses its dread and so redefines and recuperates the supposedly 'monstrous': 'I am not / handsome. I am not wholesome. I am not holy. I am not coming home.' These poems shine, they bite, they bristle and ripple and chuckle and spur. They turn shame aside to offer instead 'the man I will meet, ' 'the brush of his mouth, ' 'the hot water bottle of him.' Oh yes, they satisfy."

Poetry. The Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Kevin McLellan shows us the fissures in life and language, and takes those gaps as queer opportunities for self and word, so that, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, we find ourselves more truly and more strange. Here, as loneliness collects, music and silence intertwine, revealing patterns in the ordinary that are at once austere and playful, patterns that invite us to join in this project of reclaiming the unrequited.Says Gabrielle Calvocoressi, "Vulnerable, sexy, hopeful, and in every way human, Kevin McLellan's in other words you / is a wonder. I was brought so deeply into the intimacy, the neighborliness of the worlds McLellan opens to. In this beautiful book the invitation of the / is also testament to a world where AIDS and so many ruptures have robbed us of generations: that devastation, that yearning for new connection. But how? How do we keep reaching out, running through the rain past the neighbors, asking someone to meet for a cheese and pickle sandwich? I loved these poems and felt like crying almost the whole time. Is this elegy? Insofar as it is also deep, deep celebration. The world goes on somehow. This book is the somehow."Timothy Liu adds, "This book traffics in the second person. These queer meditations are both directly addressed to and overheard by a beloved You-Self / Other / Reader conjoined in a dance of enjambed vocables, a syntactic pas de deux of monostiches and couplets punctuated by fragmentary prose epistles. We are reminded of the demands that the libido makes, the joys of (w)rote habits ruptured by the new, all of it backed up by an Eighties soundtrack pulsing hard out of the Castro all the way to the U.K. So fasten your seatbelts. The you you left with will not be the same you upon return."

Poetry. Translation. Uruguayan poet Laura Cesarco Eglin presents poems both urgent and dreamlike as she contends with a father's death and savors the intensity of daily reality."These poems excel in the art of astonishing transformation. Lipstick becomes a remembrance of the selection line of life versus death in the Holocaust. An eyelash becomes the site of all hope, glued to the chest, and brushing hair turns into a chance to learn 'eccentricity in community.' These beautiful translations seem to know their own irresistibility, as they capture the poet's understanding that her work will be translated: 'these tears that escape translation / but are in fact translated as I say-Help me.' It may be simpler to call this book Uruguayan poetry or Jewish poetry, but it is more accurate to say, here is Laura Cesarco Eglin, a poet of eyelashes, hopes, and the world itself." -Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible "The shadow of her father's death and that of her European Jewish ancestry haunts this lyrical collection, Reborn in Ink, by the contemporary Uruguayan poet Laura Cesarco Eglin, which is always alert to the power of the unsaid evoked by words. The poems are deftly translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Catherine Jagoe, who are mindful that 'the pauses make / the reading.' The elegiac tone of these beautiful poems attests to poetry's ability to transform loss into rebirth." -Sharon Dolin, author of Manual for Living, translator of Book of Minutes "Laura Cesarco deals with daily life, personal observations, and reflections; in her poems language becomes a testing ground. She constantly uses the sounds of words, making them heard as the text unfolds. An inspired book." -Roberto Appratto, author of Levemente ondulado

Poetry. Selected by Cynthia Arrieu-King for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Chaney's poems travel a landscape of joy and rage, self and society, this very moment and all our troubled history. Each poem presents itself uniquely, sometimes in a form never seen before, reminiscent of scat and improvisational jazz or dance. Chaney explores our encounters with the body, with the self's body, and the body politic, creating, according to Arrieu-King, "a matrix for transformations," especially the transformations of Black women.