A Touch of the Poet


Book Description

THE STORY: As told by Chapman, (NY News): The time of the play is 1828, and the setting is a tavern in a village near Boston. The tavern is owned by a tempestuous Irishman, Con Melody, who is as proud as he is ill-tempered. He had been born with w




Poetry's Touch


Book Description

To whom does a poem speak? Do poems really communicate with those they address? Is reading poems like overhearing? Like intimate conversation? Like performing a script? William Waters pursues these questions by closely reading a selection of poems that say "you" to a human being: to the reader, to the beloved, or to the dead. In any account of reading lyric poetry, Waters argues, there will be places where the participant roles of speaker, intended hearer, and bystander melt together or away; these are moments of wonder.Looking both at poetry's "you" and at how readers encounter it, Waters asserts that poetic address shows literature pressing for a close relation with those into whose hands it may fall. What is at stake for us as readers and critics is our ability to acknowledge the claims made on us by the works of art with which we engage. In second-person poems, in a poem's touch, we may come to see why poetry matters to us, and how we, in turn, come to feel answerable to it. Poetry's Touch takes as a central thread the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, a writer whose work is unusually self-conscious about poetic address. The book also draws examples from a gamut of European and American poems, ranging from archaic Greek inscriptions to Keats, Dickinson, and Ashbery.




The Poet X


Book Description

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award! Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent. “Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice.” —Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation “An incredibly potent debut.” —Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost “Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street This young adult novel, a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List, is an excellent choice for accelerated tween readers in grades 6 to 8. Plus don't miss Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land!




The King's Touch


Book Description

A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic. Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue. The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?” In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.




The Revolution Will Rhyme


Book Description

The revolution will be led by Black women who are just tired enough to do it ourselves Welcome to the revolution! In her second collection, Jillian Hanesworth explores the idea of revolutionary change through a personal and community lens. The internal revolution details some of her most personal thoughts, insecurities, pains, and triumphs, while the external revolution displays her work and love for her community by speaking truth to power, calling for change, recounting history, and empowering people to walk in their own light. This book also features a transcribed conversation with Dr. Cornel West about using the arts to build political power. The revolution starts now.




Touch


Book Description

Henri Cole's last three books have shown a continuously mounting talent. In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother's death, a lover's addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole's new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry. Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.




This is a Poem that Heals Fish


Book Description

After his mother, hurrying to her tuba lesson, tells him that a poem will cure his pet fish's boredom, a little boy tries to find out what a poem is by asking friends, neighbors, and other members of his family.




The Work of Hands


Book Description




For Now


Book Description

Classic meets contemporary in James Richardson’s ninth collection. Writers from Bashō to Hardy, from Merwin to Porchia, inspire meditations on everything from artichokes to cosmology that somehow morph into fables of limitation and desire. This “new poetry made the old way” takes seriously the task of lightening and illuminating our experience, and especially, of distilling it. As Richardson writes, “The road not taken also would have gotten me home.” More than sixty poems of ten lines or fewer, and two sequences of Richardson’s trademark aphorisms and “ten-second essays,” are set alongside surging lyric meditations and odes. For Now celebrates nows of every length, from the sweep of cosmic evolution, to the span of a life, to the glint of dew on a cold shovel.




More Stately Mansions


Book Description

This new edition of O'Neill's unfinished play coincides with the centenary of his birth and includes a substantial amount of material - including an entire scene - that was missing when it was prepared after the playwright's death, but which, Martha Bower argues, he had intended for inclusion.