Breathe: Reflections and Poetry from the 2020 Lockdown


Book Description

When COVID-19 landed at our doorstep last spring, we collectively felt the heaviness of a global crisis not seen before in our lifetime. Schools shutdown, businesses closed down, borders sealed up, jobs became virtual, and we barricaded ourselves inside our homes waiting to be told that it's over. Waiting and watching the news. But then the news began spewing staggering numbers and heartbreaking images... hour by hour, day after day. Under the immense emotional toil, Tumkeen spent nights awake with anxiety and days tensing up every time she heard an ambulance siren speed down the road. It is then when she decided that she would transform the burden of living under a lockdown into a chance of leaning into gratitude and hope. And a challenge to herself was born. Tumkeen spent the next 30 days taking the troubles of her heart and turning them into lessons of healing and growth. She shared some of them but there was so much more going on in her heart. She began writing poetry as well. She compiled all of these reflections and poetry and decided to turn them into a book... her first book. A chance to seize the moment and not only grow personally but to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a published author, under the guidance of award-winning author Na'ima B Robert. Breathe - Reflections and Poetry from the 2020 Lockdown is a book that highlights the emotional journey of a mother surviving a pandemic lockdown with her family. From gratitude to fears, hope to stress, faith to worry. From appreciating brave souls who cared for sick ones to lonely ones who spent months distanced from the world. At a time when every breath counts, we are reminded of the blessing and healing that comes when we choose to breathe.




David's Crown


Book Description

As well as the name of a virus, a corona is a crown, the pearly glow around the sun in certain astronomical conditions and a poetic form where interlinking lines connect a sequence. It is the perfect name therefore for this new collection of 150 poems by the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite, each one written in response to the Bible’s 150 psalms as they appear in William Coverdale’s timeless translation. The Psalms express every human emotion with disarming honesty, as anger and thankfulness alike are directed at God. All of life is here with its moments of beauty and its times of despair and shame. Like the Psalms themselves, the poems do not avoid the cursing and glorying over the downfall of your enemies, but wrestle honestly with them as we do when we come to say them.




And the People Stayed Home (Family Book, Coronavirus Kids Book, Nature Book)


Book Description

“Kitty O’Meara…offers us wisdom that can help during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. She is challenging us to grow."—Deepak Chopra, MD, author, Metahuman “Kitty O'Meara is the poet laureate of the pandemic"—O, The Oprah Magazine "An eloquent, heartwarming reflection that will resonate with generations to come… encouragement for a brighter tomorrow."—Kate Winslet "And the People Stayed Home is an uplifting perspective on the resilience of the human spirit and the healing potential we have to change our world for the better." ––Shelf Awareness “Images of nature healing show the author’s vision of hope for the future…The accessible prose and beautiful images make this a natural selection for young readers, but older ones may appreciate the work’s deeper meaning.”— Kirkus Reviews “This is a perfectly illustrated version of a poem that continues to be relevant.”—School Library Journal “A stunning and peaceful offering of introspection and hope.”—The Children’s Book Review Ten Best Children’s Books of 2020: "A calming, optimistic read, and a salve for children trying their best to navigate this time." —Smithsonian Magazine “It captured the kind of optimism people need right now.”—Esquire (UK) “Thank you, Kitty O'Meara…for pointing out that at this very moment, this very day, we can seize the opportunity to restore wholeness to our world."—Sy Montgomery, bestselling author of The Good Good Pig and The Soul of an Octopus “A poem by American writer Kitty O’Meara has deservedly gone viral.”—Edinburgh Evening News And the People Stayed Home is a beautifully produced picture book featuring Kitty O’Meara’s popular, globally viral prose poem about the coronavirus pandemic, which has a hopeful and timeless message. Kitty O’Meara, author of And the People Stayed Home, has been called the “poet laureate of the pandemic.” This illustrated children’s book (ages 4-8) will also appeal to readers of all ages. O’Meara’s thoughtful poem about the pandemic, quarantine, and the future suggests there is meaning to be found in our shared experience of the coronavirus and conveys an optimistic message about the possibility of profound healing for people and the planet. Her words encourage us to look within, listen deeply, and connect with ourselves and the earth in order to heal. O’Meara, a former teacher and chaplain and a spiritual director, clearly captures important aspects of the pandemic experience. Her words, written in March 2020 and shared on Facebook, immediately resonated nationally and internationally and were widely circulated on social media, covered in mainstream news media, and inspired an outpouring of creativity from musicians, dancers, artists, filmmakers, and more. The many highlights include an original composition by John Corigliano that was premiered by Renée Fleming.




The Singing Bowl


Book Description

Malcolm Guite’s eagerly awaited second poetry collection 'The Singing Bowl' takes is name from the breathtakingly beautiful opening poem, a sonnet which connects poetry and prayer. It includes poems that seek beauty and transfiguration in contemporary life; sonnets inspired by Francis and other outstanding saints; poems centred on love (which might be used at weddings), others on parting and mortality (which might be used at funerals). A further group, ‘Jamming your Machine’, searches for the life of the spirit in the midst of the modern era and includes an ode to an iphone.




Mothers, Mothering, and COVID-19


Book Description

There has been little public discussion on the devastating impact of Covid-19 on mothers, or a public acknowledgement that mothering is frontline work in this pandemic. This collection of 45 chapters and with 70 contributors is the first to explore the impact of the pandemic on mothers' care and wage labour in the context of employment, schooling, communities, families, and the relationships of parents and children. With a global perspective and from the standpoint of single, partnered, queer, racialized, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, disabled, and birthing mothers, the volume examines the increasing complexity and demands of childcare, domestic labour, elder care, and home schooling under the pandemic protocols; the intricacies and difficulties of performing wage labour at home; the impact of the pandemic on mothers' employment; and the strategies mothers have used to manage the competing demands of care and wage labour under COVID-19. By way of creative art, poetry, photography, and creative writing along with scholarly research, the collection seeks to make visible what has been invisibilized and render audible what has been silenced: the care and crisis of motherwork through and after the COVID-19 pandemic.




Pandemic Poems


Book Description

Each of Olive Senior's pandemic poems is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave. This accessible A to Z captures the zeitgeist of 2020, providing a timeline of events as the language and preoccupations changed in response to the pandemic.




The Long Pause and the Short Breath


Book Description

A stunning debut collection of poems and photography that will make you pause and take your breath away.With a keen artist's eye and laser sharp insights, Nicole Freezer Rubens takes you inside the pandemic bubble of New York City through the lockdown, the endless sirens, the protests, the salutes to those who cared for us, the loss of lives and freedoms, and then out the other side when the quarantine was finally lifted. The stark and often shocking beauty of her photographs tell the story of a city on pause-but it's the photos combined with the poetry that speaks volumes of lives upended that takes your breath away. You'll be swept up in a tidal wave of emotions and a love story to the "eternal flame of New York City that can never be extinguished."




Be Holding


Book Description

Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers, as well as over his career in both the NBA and ABA. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.




Poems of Healing


Book Description

A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual. From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.




After Prayer


Book Description

This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works. At the heart of this collection is a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert’s exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', each one describing prayer in an arresting metaphor such as ‘the church's banquet’, ‘reversed thunder’, ‘the Milky Way’, ‘the bird of paradise’ and ‘something understood’. In conversation with each of these, Malcolm’s sonnets offer profound insights into the nature of communion with God in all circumstances and conditions. Recognising that all poetry is a pursuit of prayer, After Prayer also includes forty five more widely ranging new poems, including a sonnet sequence on the seven heavens.