The Bees Make Money in the Lion


Book Description

Poetry. Winner of the 2015 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition, Selected by Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae, & Wendy Xu. "THE BEES MAKE MONEY IN THE LION is a journey across a dizzying landscape of immigrants and androids, of alien romance and elegies. Here we encounter a language that is both familiar and estranging: phones burble, voices tune by 'auto-fable, ' and we are kicked 'in the essay.' Lo Kwa Mei-en is a formalist trickster: her aubades, sonnets, and pastorals are like none you've ever read before, stuttering with rapid- fire rhymes and repetitions, pulling you through unexpected swerves. Reading this remarkable collection is like 'downloading a copy of a consciousness FAQ, ' finding within it a fractured yet powerful voice. 'Voltas fail' and forms falter, but Lo Kwa Mei-en's poems declare: 'here we are, unhurt nowhere, / editing violence until we dawn.'" Timothy Yu "If rapture is a dizzy ecstasy brought on by a love no deeper than a hot mouth, then call me taken in and taken over. Lo Kwa Mei- en's THE BEES MAKE MONEY IN THE LION is bawdiness and bombast, a babel of tongues locked and loaded, vowel-drunk and pledging allegiance to the bones of a lion. These downloaded colonists and conquerors masquerading as citizens romance the future, drag you to the edge by your treacherous light. I want to lick these poems from z to a, wear this sonnet crown like a riddled king of this alien kingdom and its honeyed kingdom come." Traci Brimhall "Lo Kwa Mei-en's second collection rings with 'bravado's vibratto.' Her honeyed roar, itself golden and generously gilding, acknowledges an echo's willingness to submit, and cries 'Lo ' instead: clever reverberation in her 'self- landscape' as she recites 'a fable with no phobia.' Here, the alien non-citizen disassembles the colony by naming its simulacrum of fear in varying degrees of intimacy: the tourist, the migrant, the stranger, the immigrant. This is 'the futurist's job.' In THE BEES MAKE MONEY IN THE LION, the hive serves as metaphor for a postmodern diaspora to be at the mercy of a swarm, compliant within the biblical irresistible, an actor in a dystopian myth disguised as reality. Lo Kwa Mei-en's speaker pledges not to nation but to story. Her exquisite execution of form works to mythify this speaker, rendering her super capable." Ladan Osman"




The American Sonnet


Book Description

"The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays showcases the diversity of the American sonnet. 800 years after the sonnet's invention, this volume celebrates the extraordinary development of the sonnet in the hands of American poets-and those living under US empire-from traditional to experimental, political and personal. Edited by poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, this anthology collects and foregrounds an impressive range of 20th and 21st century sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, and presents these alongside a selection of earlier American sonnets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. The critical essays likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies. Malech and Smith capture the central questions for American sonneteers. Who belongs to the tradition of the American sonnet? How do translation and multicultural and transnational identities complicate the Americanness of the "American" sonnet? How do Black, queer, trans, neurodiverse, working class, Appalachian, and Deaf poets claim the sonnet and how does it serve them? How do American poets experiment with meter, stanza, rhyme, lineation, and visuality to make the sonnet their own? And how are American sonneteers writing about love, loss, and trauma in new ways that change the sonnet tradition? The American Sonnet shows the form continuing to function as a poetic bellwether as centuries of poets use its peculiar confines to negotiate questions of nation, race, class, gender, sexuality, diaspora, and poetic tradition"--




The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry


Book Description

A new poetic century demands a new set of approaches. This Companion shows that American poetry of the twenty-first century, while having important continuities with the poetry of the previous century, takes place in new modes and contexts that require new critical paradigms. Offering a comprehensive introduction to studying the poetry of the new century, this collection highlights the new, multiple centers of gravity that characterize American poetry today. Essays on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries respond to the centrality of issues of race and indigeneity in contemporary American discourse. Other essays explore poetry and feminism, poetry and disability, and queer poetics. The environment, capitalism, and war emerge as poetic preoccupations, alongside a range of styles from spoken word to the avant-garde, and an examination of poetry's place in the creative writing era.




Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater


Book Description

A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.




Daughterrarium


Book Description

Poetry. Women's Studies. "In a dish of fevered poppies, glassy ranunculus, and red tide hunger, the daughter infects herself. She's infected by self, burning up until McMullin's cool hand runs across the DAUGHTERRARIUM's viral waters. Cancer, the crab, a sunrise that won't clot. The neogothic daughter, her many manifestations bleed together in this prize-winning jailbreak. She says t]ake me out of this bed and put me back in the grass, but really she's taking us. Out, back. Give her your hand or get out of her way." --Danielle Pafunda "What are we born into? What does it mean to be loved by God and Earth? What do we owe and to whom? How does one experience the fusion of anger and shame in a mind and body? What do the doctors say to the bodies that are broken? Where do the bodies go when they are taken away from themselves? How does a body heal itself? How does a body degrade itself? How does a body mourn and survive the trauma of fear, pain and abuse? I admire DAUGHTERRARIUM for pushing too far, for making me cringe with its representations of what one human can do to another, of what a body can do to itself. McMullin takes a tenacious look at violence and the abject while also interrogating, with great compassion, the nature of faith, family and growth." --Daniel Borzutzky "'There are those who have hurt you not because you are ignorant, but because you have a heart.' Sheila McMullin's DAUGHTERRARIUM is a collection of the kindest rage I have ever seen. The book chronicles, among its tendernesses, McMullin's refusal to turn the rage onto herself--'How not to blame myself for being fragile?'--and the difficulty of locating what is hurting us, or why, and how to heal a wound that is constantly re-opened. If you believe in rage, if you care deeply about women, then read this brilliant book again and again across your lifetime. Otherwise, 'You have to get out of the way.'" --Sarah Vap




American Bee Journal


Book Description

Includes summarized reports of many bee-keeper associations.




Yearling


Book Description

"Defiant and uncategorizable, Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling, with its teeming species, battles, and passions, read like an illuminated manuscript: mysterious, visceral, awe-full. Hers are some of the most enviable poems I have ever read, and herald Mei-en as the new standard bearer for innovative structure, terrifying acknowledgment, ecstatic statement, and, I daresay, beauty."—Kathy Fagan Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling explores adolescence through a deeply moving and poignantly raw lens. As the speaker ages, so too does the poetry, creating laments for the loss of friendship, the loss of species, and sometimes the loss of humanity itself. Harsh, forlorn and yet effervescent, Mei-en's lyricism perfectly captures the ethos of youth in an unsure world. From "Rara Avis Decoy": Wild diamond rocking on the floor of a predatory boat. Point & say sweet traitor to the wood & water for wanting to be made of both. My name is I know not what I am as a country of mothers & fathers comes down. They call me sleeping beauty. I dream I am in flight, body unfolding, folding, a bullet wounding water again & again—the mysterious love of a father & mother a two-barreled gaze. The gun in my dream speaks my name & sees a beating vein. Takes aim— Lo Kwa Mei-en is from Singapore and Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals, and won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize.




In One Form to Find Another


Book Description

Poetry. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2016 CSU Poetry Center Open Book Prize. "IN ONE FORM TO FIND ANOTHER is an heroically unsettling and compelling textual reenactment of feminine embodiments' lament, contemplation and recalibration of disturbed histories irrevocably intertwined with traumatic experience. In intense, palpable language, Lewty lays bare the somatic registers of complex and fraught circumstances that cling to the body as sensory framework, muscle memory and 'non-bearing loads.' This momentous and powerful book evokes feminist theory and practice, psychoanalytic discourse, and unflinching lyric to render the inscrutable territory of trauma tangible and perceptible. With each nuanced register Lewty cultivates a body politic of powerful disclosure and release." --Brenda Iijima "This is how we feel: the body remembers what the mind wants to forget. Inexplicable physical symptoms--indirect translations of traumatic past events--are rendered into language on medical message boards. In turn, these poems are mysterious lexical symptoms that connect words to feeling. Lewty's book is an inventory of intensity." --Jena Osman "'The past is not gone, but here, hectic, impatient.' IN ONE FORM TO FIND ANOTHER presents the meditative poem as agitated case study or transforms case studies into exquisite poetry, opening the question of what it means, now, to attempt to know. Wise about the many ways we are 'dismantled by memory and want, ' overwhelmed by inadequate explanations, and restlessly looking for a way to tell the dancer from 'a trance-state where you stop and turn, correct and rebuild, ' the poet returns us to writing's origin as address ('Dear Grapheme'), involving her reader intimately in the making of meaning. In this collection one form of memory (traumatic, embodied) is used to build a dwelling 'wherein attachment can occur.' I am in love with Lewty's lyric brilliance and attracted to this book as 'I am attracted to any real place...'" --Laura Mullen




The One Year Devotions for Active Boys


Book Description

A daily devotional for high-energy boys combines lighthearted, engaging spiritual messages with scriptural excerpts and themed jokes, riddles, puzzles and hands-on activity suggestions that reveal how to apply biblical principles to everyday challenges. Original. Simultaneous eBook.