The anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft is a deep well of both information and art that offers thought-provoking essays on poetic craft and a unique selection of poetry. Compiled as a follow-up to Sundog Poetry Center’s lecture series of the same name, filmed and televised by Vermont Public Television, this collection will not only be an invaluable resource for creative writing classes, but for writers at all stages of development who might enjoy literary company diving deep into various asp...
"With Voices of Dogtown, James R. Scrimgeour has written an imaginative insiders guide to New Englands most enigmatic setting. Dogtowns distinctive terrain provides the backstitching to a tapestry that Scrimgeour has woven through with the voices of the area's doomed souls and the many scholars and artists the land has inspired. The result is a deeply researched and thoroughly imagined collection celebrating Dogtowns unique character and its unshakeable effect upon those who venture to know this...
Poems that break down, expose, and reconsider our notions of time. This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be close to time—collective t...
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics)
by Langston Hughes
From the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into...
Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for "poem." Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago's debut collection of poems begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience. Tula: Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war. Tula: its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula: can the poem, he seems to ask, bu...
In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life. A bruise becomes a flower and then a flag planted to claim an adopted land; the hull of a Viking ship becomes the fuselage of a plane carrying an immigrating mother home; the da...
Texas Institute of Letters Award finalist for Best First Book of Poetry In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes Ramirez explores living in America as a first-generation American of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, living among conflicting histories. Through the voices of an astronaut, a tennis player, a drag queen, family members, an alternate version of the self, and even a turtle, these propulsive poems embody the many marginalized voices demanding to be remembered in a nation that requires erasure of...
Cruising on the Thames River
by William Browne, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Celia Ross
The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet’s mother’s, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: “If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?” A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all...
Rooms is lyrical and meditative, painterly, erotic and philosophical. The book is thematically and structurally a unity, but a unity of many parts, one and multiple. Rooms, many-chambered, purposeful and highly stylized yet light, light and airy as a beehive. Rooms plays like a late 20th century blues-inflected jazz. There are multiple melodies, linked through motifs and memory: recurrent variations on several themes--childhood, life and death, love, memory and duration. Throughout, you find you...
The austerity of Marzanna Kielar’s mindscape compels with its monochromy. Her poems insistently return to northern Poland cataloguing the sea, fog, wind, lakes, rivers, woods, fields, and crows. “My first homeland is a post-German landscape,” she acknowledges, “with wild rose bushes, stone stables, metal window fittings, red roofs.” Kielar does not comment on Poland’s past or present. Like so many other young Polish poets who started to publish after 1989, she no longer needs to: confronting hi...
