A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera"


Book Description

A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.




Dien Cai Dau


Book Description

This collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is “a major contribution to the body of literature grappling with Vietnam” (Poetry). Yusef Komunyakaa is renowned for his ability to blend memory and history with strikingly evocative poetic imagery. Born in the rural community of Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross and received a Bronze Star for his service as a journalist. In Dien Cai Dau, he applies this unique sensibility to his experience of the Vietnam War. The resulting poems have been called some of the finest Vietnam testimony ever documented in verse or prose. “So finely tuned are Komunyakaa’s images, so faultless his vision, that the reader sees precisely what the poet recalls . . . A powerful must-read for those who have forgotten those days.” ―Booklist




Fault Lines


Book Description

In this evocative memoir, an acclaimed Indian poet explores writing, memory, and place in a post-9/11 world. Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Fault Lines follows one woman’s evolution as a writer at home—and in exile—across continents and cultures. Meena Alexander was born into a privileged childhood in India and grew into a turbulent adolescence in the Sudan, before moving to England and then New York City. With poetic insight and devastating honesty, Alexander explores how trauma and recovery shaped the entire landscape of her memory: of her family, her writing process, and her very self. This new edition, published on the two-year anniversary of Alexander's passing in 2018, will feature a commemorative afterword celebrating her legacy. "Alexander's writing is imbued with a poetic grace shot through with an inner violence, like a shimmering piece of two-toned silk." —Ms. Magazine "Evocative and moving." —Publishers Weekly “One of the most important literary voices in South Asian American writing and American letters broadly writ, Meena Alexander’s close examination of exile and migration lays bare the heart of a poet.” —Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son




Dulce Et Decorum Est


Book Description




The Tet Offensive


Book Description

In this account of one of the worst intelligence failures in American history, James J. Wirtz explains why U.S. forces were surprised by the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968. Wirtz reconstructs the turning point of the Vietnam War in unprecedented detail. Drawing upon Vietcong and recently declassified U.S. sources, he is able to trace the strategy and unfolding of the Tet campaign as well as the U.S. response.




Outline of American Literature


Book Description

The Outline of American literature, newly revised, traces the paths of American narrative, fiction, poetry and drama as they move from pre-colonial times into the present, through such literary movements as romanticism, realism and experimentation. Contents: 1) Early American and Colonial Period to 1776. 2) Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820. 3) The Romantic Period, 1820-1860, Essayists and Poets. 4) The Romantic Period, 1820-1860, Fiction. 5) The Rise of Realism: 1860-1914. 6) Modernism and Experimentation: 1914-1945. 7) American Poetry, 1945-1990: The Anti-Tradition. 8) American Prose, 1945-1990: Realism and Experimentation. 9) Contemporary American Poetry. 10) Contemporary American Literature.




Magic City


Book Description

An award-winning poet evokes his childhood in Louisiana.




Pecos Bill


Book Description

Relates some of the legends of Pecos Bill, from the moment he bounced out of his family's covered wagon to the day his long-lost brother appears and explains that Bill is not like the coyotes that have raised him.




Neon Vernacular


Book Description

This Pulitzer Prize–winning collection pairs twelve new poems with work from seven previous volumes by “one of the most extraordinary poets writing today” (Kenyon Review). The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa traverses psychological and physical landscapes, mining personal memory to understand the historical and social contexts that shape experience. Neon Vernacular charts the development of his characteristic themes and concerns by gathering work from seven of his previous collections, along with a dozen new poems that continue the autobiographical trajectory of his previous collection, Magic City. Here, Komunyakaa shares an intimate and evocative life journey, from his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana—once a center of Klan activity and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts—to his stormy relationship with his father, his high school football days, and his experience of the Vietnam War and his difficult return home. Many of the poems collected here are drawn from limited editions and are no longer available.




Torque


Book Description




Recent Books