Prisoner to Poet


Book Description

Ever wonder what a man thinks when he can't provide for himself? Have you ever thought about what will happen to a man when taken out of his comfort zone? What happens when his body is incarcerated and his mind roams free. Take a journey thru the eyes of a man born and raised in Jacksonville, FL. After being a resident of the Department of Corrections only two things happen. You become better or worse because you will never be the same. Poetry became his escape from the insanity that surrounded him. The pen and paper became the release of anger and frustration. Now it's time to share it with the world.




Felon: Poems


Book Description

Winner of the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize “A powerful work of lyric art.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion.




Prison Poems


Book Description

Adapted from the Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani based on translations by Violette and Ali Nakhjavani, these poems testify to the courage and the despair, the misery and the hopes of thousands of Iranians struggling to survive conditions of extreme oppression.




Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Prison Poems


Book Description

From his prison cell, where he awaited execution for conspiring to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Bonhoeffer wrote 10 powerful poems, charged with white-hot emotions and disarming candor of a man who lived and ultimately died by the truth.




For a Song and a Hundred Songs


Book Description

From the renowned Chinese poet in exile comes a gorgeous and shocking account of his years in prison following the Tiananmen Square protests.




Poems from Prison and Life


Book Description

These poems were written in prison, in the depth of night, by the poor light of a peculiar lamp, assembled from an old inkwell, a little alcohol that I smuggled from the sick bay and a wick plaited from the lace of an espadrille. Afterwards when eyes and keys were waking up, I would hide my words in a shoe and while walking in the prison yard, on a circular path that led nowhere, I would memorise the poems, giving them form and harmony...' The Spanish Communist poet Marcos Ana (1920-2016) was Spain's longest serving political prisoner. Captured by Italian troops at the end of the Civil War, he spent the next 23 years in Franco's prisons, often in solitary confinement. In prison he started writing poems, which were smuggled out and published as Poemas desde la cercel (1960). Ana was eventually released in 1961, following an international campaign led by Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yves Montand, Pablo Picasso and Joan Baez. Che Guevara was carrying one of Ana's books when he was executed. Clear, musical, painful and compelling, Poems from Prison and Life is the first English translation of Ana's last book, published when he was 91, in order to 'open a path of fire and rebellion in the hearts and minds of the new generations, in whose furrows we have sown our history.'




Prisoner of Love: A Poetry Chapbook


Book Description

This collection of poems navigates love’s place in the human experience. I place emphasis on “the place of love” because I believe that every poet is driven by a certain shade of love to birth the deepest of poetic pieces. For example, the poet, JP Clark, was driven by the “place of love” to write “Ibadan”. In this collection, the poet uses simple diction to navigate deep and complicated human emotions. We see that in the poem, “Seeds of Love”: The foundation of our love wasn’t strong; it was built on sinking sands, and as hail and sandstorms threatened, our love crashed like a sandcastle. And I think this is what makes this collection unique. Here, we see a poet who is content with the simplicity of language, the lightness of metaphors to express emotions. The poems find their relativity in the softness of their language. As expected, in exploring the “place of love”, these love poems are not just about the flowery feeling and the butterflies that love elicits; no, they mention the heartbreak, the hurt that comes along with it, for is love not about pain and betrayal too? This collection is not only about the “place of love”; as I mentioned earlier, driven by another shade of love, the poet also explores the “love of body” as seen in the poem, “My Body”: I have learnt to love my body with its scars, to treat it like a prized ornament, to worship it and give it the care it deserves. I have learnt to love myself. You will also see poems about the “love of place”, where the poet dissects the soul of his nation, where he mourns a nation that sends her children out to the harsh experience of becoming immigrants in another country. In all, this is a graceful collection of poems, thematically linked in their concerns, yet diverse in the kinds of emotions each one will provoke in the reader.




To Althea from Prison


Book Description




Poems of Nazim Hikmet


Book Description

The definitive selection by the first and foremost modern Turkish poet.




The Black Poets


Book Description

"The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley Randall




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