Chicago Poems


Book Description

Written in the poet's unique personal idiom, these early poems include "Chicago," "Fog," "Who Am I?" "Under the Harvest Moon," plus more on war, love, death, loneliness and the beauty of nature.




Citizen Illegal


Book Description

“Olivarez steps into the ‘inbetween’ standing between Mexico and America in these compelling, emotional poems. Written with humor and sincerity” (Newsweek). Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek and NPR. In this “devastating debut” (Publishers Weekly), poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in, with a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch. “The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez celebrates his Mexican-American identity and examines how those two sides conflict in a striking collection of poems.” —USA Today




The City Visible


Book Description

Poetry. This anthology brings together a sampling of some of the best poets working in Chicago and the surrounding region. From all corners of the city, these poets are crafting a voice for Chicago literature in the new century. "When Carl Sandburg asked in his Chicago Poems, close to a hundred years ago, for 'a voice to speak to me in the day end, / A hand to touch me in the dark room / Breaking the long loneliness, ' little did he know his city would be so fully and lovingly answered and so honored. Chicago is once again transformed by poetry. Here in these myriad acts of imagination, the poets of THE CITY VISIBLE give to it again, in Shakespeare's terms, 'a local habitation and a name'"--Peter Gizzi




The Resistance to Poetry


Book Description

Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning—metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Glück, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means—on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it. A graceful and skilled study, The Resistance to Poetry honors poetry by allowing it to be what it is. This book arrives at a critical moment—at a time when many people are trying to mold and market poetry into something it is not.




The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Short Fiction - Second Edition


Book Description

Designed for courses taught at the introductory level in Canadian universities and colleges, this new anthology provides a rich selection of literary texts. Unlike many other such anthologies, it includes literary non-fiction as well as poetry, short fiction, and drama. In each genre the anthology includes a vibrant mix of classic and contemporary works. Each work is accompanied by an introductory headnote and by explanatory notes, and each genre is prefaced by a substantial introduction. Companion websites include genre-specific quizzes and discussion questions for students and instructors. Pedagogically current and uncommon in its breadth of representation, The Broadview Introduction to Literature invites students into the world of literary study in a truly distinctive way. The second edition of The Broadview Anthology of Literature: Short Fiction includes new stories by Haruki Murakami, Octavia Butler, Lynn Coady, Leeanne Betasamosake Simpson, and more.




Ground Zero


Book Description

Inception and implosion, Chicago’s grit and grandiosity all come together in the finite poetic power of the original Slam igniter, renowned poet Marc Kelly Smith and his retrospect denotation, Ground Zero. A cultural, community, and adversarial figure, Smith has challenged the status quo and raised new questions about an environment in a state of continuous calamity. Smith’s power and influence have inspired celebrated figures who cut their teeth on both the stage and the page under his watchful eye—always speaking in the traditions of Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks. Ground Zero challenges but pays homage to the thousand underbellies of Chicago with Smith’s wicked, cigarette-in-the-beer language: “I ain’t diggin’ no concrete coffin, / No backyard mausoleum / To keep me a pickle sweet aplenty / Plied with sardines and pork sausage wieners / Livin’ out the chance that some bubble-flesh victim / Will come puckered up and scabby lipped / To kiss me in the name of a new mankind.” Ground Zero leaves no doubt. The Slampapi / instigator / visionary / you-may-love-me-or-hate-me-but-my-history-will-always-be-chiseled-in-everything-the-poetry-world-does-next collects a survey of his land and his experience, no matter how beautiful or flawed. This book lets the landmines of imagery and Chicago’s slow and uneasy drawl showcase one of our most original voices.




Stranger on Earth


Book Description

"Jones writes brief, simple poems about isolated incidents while gracefully alluding to the complex relationships underlying them." --Publishers Weekly "Skillful, direct, and surprisingly delicate." --The Village Voice "A poet of uncommon perceptual gifts." --Library Journal Richard Jones's prodigious volume travels the wide arc of a lifetime in Proustian detail. He remembers a peripatetic upbringing, travels to London and Paris, separation from and reunion with his wife in the Italian countryside, morning tea with his daughter and trail runs with his sons, flights with a pioneering aviator father and conversations with a deaf mother. "Impossible task, staying alive," Jones writes, and yet a perspicacious examination of the life we have lived yields clarity andenrichment. Finding poetry in what went before,Stranger on Earth opens the door to what Proust calls "those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter." Richard Joneshas published eleven books of poetry and his poems have been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered." He is the founder and editor of Poetry East, and he teaches at DePaul University in Chicago, where he lives with his family.




The Dream Keeper and Other Poems


Book Description

Illus. in black-and-white. This classic collection of poetry is available in a handsome new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after The Dream Keeper was first published. In a larger format, featuring Brian Pinkney's scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes's inspirational message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932.




Respect the Mic


Book Description

An expansive, moving poetry anthology, representing 20 years of poetry from students and alumni of Chicago's Oak Park River Forest High School Spoken Word Club. "Poets I know sometimes joke that the poetry club at Oak Park River Forest High School is the best MFA program in the Chicagoland area. Like all great jokes, this one is dead serious." -Eve L. Ewing, award-winning poet, playwright, scholar, and sociologist For Chicago's Oak Park and River Forest High School's Spoken Word Club, there is one phrase that reigns supreme: Respect the Mic. It's been the club's call to arms since its inception in 1999. As its founder Peter Kahn says, "It's a call of pride and history and tradition and hope." This vivid new collection of poetry and prose -- curated by award-winning and bestselling poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan "Sully" Sullivan -- illuminates just that, uplifting the incredible legacy this community has cultivated. Among the dozens of current students and alumni, Respect the Mic features work by NBA champion Iman Shumpert, National Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson, National Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson, National Student Poet Natalie Richardson, comedian Langston Kerman, and more. In its pages, you hear the sprawling echoes of students, siblings, lovers, new parents, athletes, entertainers, scientists, and more --all sharing a deep appreciation for the power of storytelling. A celebration of the past, a balm for the present, and a blueprint for the future, Respect the Mic offers a tender, intimate portrait of American life, and conveys how in a world increasingly defined by separation, poetry has the capacity to bind us together.




A Street in Bronzeville


Book Description

Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most accomplished and acclaimed poets of the last century, the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first black woman to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—the forerunner of the U.S. Poet Laureate. Here, in an exclusive Library of America E-Book Classic edition, is her groundbreaking first book of poems, a searing portrait of Chicago’s South Side. “I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street,” she later said. “There was my material.”