Five Flights Up


Book Description

A flop house, a pumping station, a maid's room, a homeless center, a former brothel, a Richard Meier building, a circus trailer, a sail boat, a skyscraper, buildings named Esther and Loraine—just a few of the places New Yorkers call home. For the past eight years writer Toni Schlesinger has been bringing us these "conversation places" in her weekly column in the Village Voice. Through her incisive questioning, original writing, and comic parallel reveries, Schlesinger creates miniature documentaries on the lives, passions, hopes, and heartbreaks of many of New York City's millions




Five Flights Up


Book Description

"How can you be sick of living in "Paris"?" Life unravels when American psychotherapist Kristin Louise Duncombe faces being uprooted again-to follow her husband from their secure nest in Paris to bourgeois Lyon. The result is a touchstone memoir for anyone facing a move, dealing with marital ghosts, or confronting the professional death of starting anew. Duncombe's unique specialty is helping "trailing spouses" maintain their sanity while following their other half around the globe. But she must reconfigure everything she thought she knew about her "expat expertise" when her child sinks into existential crisis, addiction to Lyonnais cream puffs blooms, and tea time is to be had with glamorous French moms whose sex lives include swingers' parties. This boisterous, big-hearted book provides a compelling glimpse into love, family, and sex in France, and a modern family grappling with the inevitable downs - and ups - of building a new life. "An insightful memoir of life in France in which the author and her multi-cultural family embrace the wisdom, step by step, that home is where the heart is."-Meg Bortin, author of "Desperate to be a Housewife" ""Five Flights Up "is hilarious and brave. With her trademark honesty, Kristin Louise Duncombe reveals the imperfect yet privileged world of being a foreigner in France."-Lizzie Harwood, author of "Xamnesia" "A must-read for any woman coping with monumental transitions, and who has felt they have lost their way along this trajectory we call life."-Samantha Verant, author of "Seven Letters from Paris""




Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art


Book Description

"As the first book-length collection to focus on Elizabeth Bishop, this book has become an essential resource on this poet--now recognized as one of America's greatest artists--whose poetry, as Harold Bloom says in his foreword, stands "at the edge where what is most worth saying is all but impossible to say." The volume includes major essays by David Kalstone, Helen Vendler, and Robert Pinsky, among others; a chronology of short articles and reviews, poems, memoirs, and memorials, many by major poets (among them Bishop's three most notable supporters--Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell); and an illuminating selection of work by Bishop herself, some of which is unavailable anywhere else." -- Publisher's description.




Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop


Book Description

This book opens a welcome new direction in Elizabeth Bishop studies and in the study of women poets generally, by urging a more thorough scrutiny of artistic memory. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis balances consideration of Bishop's life in the United States with discussion of how her Canadian upbringing influenced her art.




Elizabeth Bishop


Book Description

Elizabeth Bishop: A Biography of a Poetry is a fascinating account of one of the most influential and beloved poets of the past fifty years. Writing a clean, spare poetry of elegance, lucidity, and great charm, Bishop appears to offer small insight into her private life, wryly remarking that confessional poets 'overdo the morbidity.'




Jet


Book Description

The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.




The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet


Book Description

In The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet, Elizabeth Dodd explores the lives and work of four women poets of the twentieth century - H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck. Dodd argues that sexist and male-dominated cultural forces in their personal and professional lives challenged these women to find a unique mode of expression in their poetry, a practice Dodd defines as personal classicism. Dodd uses the term personal classicism to examine modern and contemporary poetry that appears torn between two major modes of poetic sensibility, the Romantic and the Classical. While the four poets she addresses exhibit a poetic sensibility that is primarily Romantic - valuing Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; adopting a natural, spoken tone; and relying on personal subject matter - they have nonetheless employed masking and controlling strategies that are more nearly Classical. Combining feminist theory and biographical studies with close readings of individual poems, Dodd moves historically from H. D., one of the best-known Imagists, through the Confessional movement, to the major contemporary poet Louise Gluck. In the final chapter Dodd brings us to the present, where she finds women writers still struggling with the recent Confessional legacy of such highly anthologized poets as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet combines thoughtful consideration of both formal and theoretical issues in a graceful prose that reaffirms poetry as an art vitally connected to life. It will be of significant interest to students of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as to those concerned with women's studies.




Flight of the Puffin


Book Description

One small act of kindness ripples out to connect four kids in this stirring novel by the author of the beloved The Benefits of Being an Octopus. Libby comes from a long line of bullies. She wants to be different, but sometimes that doesn’t work out. To bolster herself, she makes a card with the message You are amazing. That card sets off a chain reaction that ends up making a difference in the lives of some kids who could also use a boost—be it from dealing with bullies, unaccepting families, or the hole that grief leaves. Receiving an encouraging message helps each kid summon up the thing they need most, whether it’s bravery, empathy, or understanding. Because it helps them realize they matter—and that they're not flying solo anymore.




Elizabeth Bishop


Book Description

In this book, the first study of Elizabeth Bishop's whole career, Travisano explores her development as an artist. Through sensitive reading of the poems, supported by comparison with Bishop's letters, interviews, stories, memoirs, and critical essays, he defines the traditions that shaped Bishop's introspective early work and the evolution of her later work toward a more public style.




Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination


Book Description

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive—if hitherto overlooked—engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both. The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as 'modern' (and often 'international style') architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture—and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.