Bøger udgivet af Word Works

Anthology celebrating 40 years of publishing fine books of poetry, with a writing prompt accompanying each poem.

Poetry. Women's Studies. Jewish Studies. Always original, intelligent, hilarious, Ungar serves us another chapter in the on- going saga of life-on- Earth. Her deft and inventive mixtures of science, family, history, pop-culture, philosophy, and art keep the reader swimming deeper and deeper into the human experience, amazed at the landmarks both familiar and surprising. "This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it's so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there."--Kirkus, starred review "A very elegiac mood courses through these lines, enlivening them with wisdom. Like any great seeker, Ungar pursues the truth beneath surfaces available to the naked eye. Reading these poems, we are seized by the worlds she reveals. It is the feeling we call ravishment."--Greg Pardlo "Ungar paints unforgettable images--water-spider shoes, sepia knickers and a shining white shirt, the near-endangered Waccamaw fatmucket and Ozark hellbender--that leave us 'chanting to the sky' then diving to see what we 'can retrieve / from the deep floor where / pearls are formed in secret.'"--Meg Kearney

Poetry. Italian History. Washington Prize winner, second edition. John Bradley's persona Roberto Zingarello allows him to become post-war Italy: in love, revenge, and confusion, he sings loose the past, questioning and questing into the uncertain future. "We need more characters like Zingarello in American poetry and more poets like Bradley who will step out of bounds to shake us with writing that is so different and important."--Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review "Bradley enters the world of fictive poetry, and we are the richer for it. In Zingarello, Bradley has created a voice big enough to express the human dream of transcending history."--Bill Tremblay

Poetry. Braiding narratives that sing and songs that speak multiple points of view, Ragan creates the at-sea world of those who leave one culture for another, one language for another. She shows how one human experience ultimately mirrors what it means to be human in any time, any place. "[READING THE GROUND] will seize your attention and repay you on every page. These poems give us 'Lessons in the Slovak Language'--which is to say, lessons in every mother's tongue. They rise out of the great American tale of immigration, embrace the great American mill-town of the twentieth century, and make the great American journey to an unknown old country that grants us far more than nostalgia, more even than the blaze-crush of 1969's Prague Spring. Ragan's consummately woven text is a 21st century book: a brilliant meta-poem; a double- helix of artful words; a gathering that satisfies, sings, erupts."--Jeanne Larsen

Poetry. With irreverent wordplay, Hagerty digs to the roots of language itself, showing the unbreakable links between our inner and outer worlds, and between the world that is "real" and the worlds we can imagine. Her fearless alter-ego, Twinzilla, reawakens in even the most jaded post-modern reader all the powerful fizz our planet needs. "The poems in TWINZILLA are smart, teasing, dead-serious, marked by keen intelligence and inventive language. Hagerty takes us into a world where 'metaphysics are like candy.' Her narratives leap, inventive and rewarding, embracing motherhood and daughter- hood, scrutinizing questions of meaning and embodiment, weaving from the elegiac to the wryly joyful, showing forth the ways we shadow our own selves."--Jeanne Larsen

Poetry. THE WHOLE FIELD STILL MOVING INSIDE IT is a tour de force that returns us to our native roots: connected to the land, knowing the heft of our work, the souls in our food, the vitality of our history. Selected from 324 submissions to the annual Washington Prize competition, this is Bashaw's first book. James Longenbach says, "To say that Molly Bashaw has written a book inhabiting the most gritty details of farm life is like saying that Melville wrote the best-ever book about whaling: it's true, but the result of her inhabitation is not reportage but myth-making of the highest imaginative level. The poems feel simultaneously earth-bound and surreal, most convincingly worldly when their language is most exquisitely unhinged. Molly Bashaw is an artist of the American sublime: greet her at the beginning of a great career." Lee Sharkey promises an "intoxication with the physical substance of both language and the living earth. The further we read, the more deeply we understand her assertion that 'the farm is everywhere, a constellation.'"

2007 Washington Prize winner, a second edition. Song, incantation, and a disarming but everyday mysticism infuse the poems of Prartho Sereno. She creates a universe that is both exotic and familiar. Says Dorianne Laux, "There is a spark and swing in these poems, a touch of the surreal, and a great gust of soul...a joy to read."

Poetry. Introduction by Nick Flynn. With his deft and timeless blend of the lyrical and narrative, Fred Marchant explores the wars inside us and the ones we wage in the world: spiritual, familial, political."In the spirit of Wilfred Owen, TIPPING POINT is a book seared by personal and historical fact. Many artists are eager to assume the mantle of 'witness,' as if will or ambition could do the work of experience and imagination. In contrast, the gravity, modesty, and moral questioning in Marchant's poems reveal a mind committed to a version of history that is resolutely human scale."--Tom Sleigh"Explicit in its detailing, subtly graded in its responsiveness, TIPPING POINT is also a kind of latter-day metaphysics of morals. Marchant searches out the hidden springs of action and yet never loses sight of the larger contexts in which our deeds and gestures come to matter. An honest, earned book."--Sven Birkerts

Poetry. "The poems in Bernadette Geyer's THE SCABBARD OF HER THROAT are saturated by touch: fingers on a throat, hand on a door, wasp, clasped to a cicada's back, fever to bodies, daughters to mothers, mythologies to linoleum. Her lines soothed, they bruised, they entered my ear and held."?Cornelius Eady

Poetry. Winner of the Washington Prize for 2013. A pregnancy memoir that unfolds through a series of poems about art, the book engages images of maternity--from the Madonna to the monster--to explore kinship, community, and mortality. The radical changes of a woman's body and role transform not just the individual but art, culture, and language themselves.

Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Washington Prize. This collection opens small doors into many-mirrored rooms full of sky and unexpected flight. Film noir, Zen mystery, and post-modern wit collide and mingle in radiant, playful poems that examine the nature of creation and our many reasons for hope. David Baker describes the book as "an array of miniature wonders, like a geode cracked open, full of shining facets, each with its own hue and razor-sharp angles." Leslie McGrath adds, "Good guys and bad guys, arsonists and patient moths and tentacled motherfuckers crowd these poems--often quite brief and always full of beautiful mystery."

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Goldberg. Moshe Dor's poems breathe, smell and taste like Israel. They express the pressures of living in a land constantly under siege, where hope and terror live side by side, where there is a fierce hatred of war and a fierce craving for peace. Here current events unfold in biblical landscapes. This is also a book about love--the love for a woman as well as a motherland. Cover art by Mordechai Ardon.