Poetry: A Survivor's Guide


Book Description

"A provocative and practical guide, written for students of creative writing as well as literary studies, to an art form that is both loved and feared"--




Poetry: A Survivor's Guide


Book Description

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide has earned high praise from students, teachers, and readers from around the globe for its playful sincerity and idiosyncratic humor and for its approach to a subject both loved and feared. Updated and expanded, including six new sections, the second edition probes a range of strategies for inspiring students and aspiring poets on the ways poetry relates to their own lives. These include the delights and pitfalls of individual meditation, the complications of identity and appropriation, and the uses and utility of poetry as a tool of social change. The second edition also includes a curated companion website for teachers, students, and aspiring poets that features poetry examples, writing prompts and exercises, and resources for publishing poetry.




The Art of Revision


Book Description

The fifteenth volume in the Art of series takes an expansive view of revision—on the page and in life In The Art of Revision: The Last Word, Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently misunderstood subject. He begins by addressing the invisibility of revision—even though it’s an essential part of the writing process, readers typically only see a final draft, leaving the practice shrouded in mystery. To combat this, Davies pulls examples from his novels The Welsh Girl and The Fortunes, as well as from the work of other writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Carmen Machado, and Raymond Carver, shedding light on this slippery subject. Davies also looks beyond literature to work that has been adapted or rewritten, such as books made into films, stories rewritten by another author, and the practice of retconning in comics and film. In an affecting frame story, Davies recounts the story of a violent encounter in his youth, which he then retells over the years, culminating in a final telling at the funeral of his father. In this way, the book arrives at an exhilarating mode of thinking about revision—that it is the writer who must change, as well as the writing. The result is a book that is as useful as it is moving, one that asks writers to reflect upon themselves and their writing.




Say the Name


Book Description

The experiences of a fourteen-year-old girl imprisoned in the Ravensbruck concentration camp during World War II. Illustrated with drawings made secretly by other camp inhabitants.




Bearing Witness


Book Description

This resource guide will help readers locate over 800 first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, art interpretations, and music by Holocaust victims and survivors, as well as videos relating the testimony and experiences of Holocaust survivors. In addition to the few well-known writers, artists, and musicians whose work so eloquently captures their experience during the Holocaust, this guide will introduce the reader to the lives and work of more than 250 lesser known or unrecognized writers, artists, and musicians from many countries who documented their experience of persecution at the hands of the Nazis. This guide will help students gain firsthand knowledge of what it was like to experience the Holocaust and how ordinary people coped and created art and meaning from the ashes of their lives. The entry on each writer, artist, and musician features a biographical sketch and list of his or her works, with full bibliographic data. Entries on literature and videos are annotated and include recommendations for age-appropriateness. The work is divided into five parts: writers of memoirs, diaries and fiction; poets; artists; composers and musicians; and videos that feature testimony by survivors. Each part features an introductory overview of the artists and art created in that genre out of Holocaust experience. Title, artist/writer, and nationality indexes will help the reader select materials, and an index organized by age-appropriate levels will help teachers and librarians to select literature and videos for students.




Dear Girl


Book Description

From a poet and celebrated spoken-word performer comes a debut poetry collection that takes readers on an empowering, lyrical journey exploring truth, silence, wounds, healing, and the resilience we all share. Dear Girl is a journey from girlhood to womanhood through poetry It is the search for truth in silence The freeing of the tongue It is deep wounds and deep healing And the resilience that lies within us It is a love letter To the sisterhood




Cardinal


Book Description

Tyree Daye’s Cardinal is a generous atlas that serves as a poetic “Green Book”— the travel-cum-survival guide for black motorists negotiating racist America in the mid-twentieth century. Interspersed with images of Daye’s family and upbringing, which have been deliberately blurred, it also serves as an imperfect family album. Cardinal traces the South’s burdened interiors and the interiors of a black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home —a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him. With the language of elegy and praise, intoning regional dialect and a deliberately disruptive cadence, Daye carries the voices of ancestors and blues poets, while stretching the established zones of the black American vernacular. In tones at once laden and magically transforming, he self-consciously plots his own Great Migration: “if you see me dancing a twos step/I’m sending a starless code/we’re escaping everywhere.” These are poems to be read aloud.




Can Poetry Save the Earth?


Book Description

In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets- from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder- have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale.




Lifeboat 12


Book Description

“This page-turning true-life adventure is filled with rich and riveting details and a timeless understanding of the things that matter most.”—Dashka Slater, author of The 57 Bus “Brilliantly told in verse, readers will love Ken Sparks.” —Patricia Reilly Giff, two-time Newbery Honor winner “Lyrical, terrifying, and even at times funny. A richly detailed account of a little-known event in World War II.” —Kirkus Reviews “Middle grade Titanic fans, here’s your next read.” —BCCB “An edge-of-your seat survival tale.” —School Library Journal (starred review) A Junior Library Guild Selection The 2019 Golden Kite Middle Grade Fiction Award Winner A 2019 ALSC Notable Children’s Book The 2019–2020 Lectio Book Award Winner The 2020–2021 Florida Sunshine State Young Readers Award List The 2020 Oklahoma Library Association’s Children’s Sequoyah Book Award Winner The Connecticut Book Award Winner In the tradition of The War That Saved My Life and Stella By Starlight, this poignant novel in verse based on true events tells the story of a boy’s harrowing experience on a lifeboat after surviving a torpedo attack during World War II. With Nazis bombing London every night, it’s time for thirteen-year-old Ken to escape. He suspects his stepmother is glad to see him go, but his dad says he’s one of the lucky ones—one of ninety boys and girls to ship out aboard the SS City of Benares to safety in Canada. Life aboard the luxury ship is grand—nine-course meals, new friends, and a life far from the bombs, rations, and his stepmum’s glare. And after five days at sea, the ship’s officers announce that they’re out of danger. They’re wrong. Late that night, an explosion hurls Ken from his bunk. They’ve been hit. Torpedoed! The Benares is sinking fast. Terrified, Ken scrambles aboard Lifeboat 12 with five other boys. Will they get away? Will they survive? Award-winning author Susan Hood brings this little-known World War II story to life in a riveting novel of courage, hope, and compassion. Based on true events and real people, Lifeboat 12 is about believing in one another, knowing that only by banding together will we have any chance to survive.




Paul Celan


Book Description

Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems--including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue"--plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle. Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems. To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."