Contemporary Costa Rican Poetry


Book Description

This is the first Spanish/English bilingual anthology of contemporary Costa Rican poetry ever published. It contains a careful selection of poetry published since 1990, and includes Costa Rica's finest poets and most representative current trends. Although not well known outside Costa Rica, this is outstanding poetry due not only to its thematic and stylistic variety, but also to its integration of the main tendencies of contemporary Spanish-language poetry. Victor S. Drescher's painstaking work translating the cultural, linguistic and stylistic features of the originals has made it possible for the English reader to recreate the essential aspects of the world-view that these poems reflect and represent. This anthology makes a substantial contribution to the world of letters by enabling English readers to become familiar with a representative sample of Costa Rican poetry in particular, and with Latin American poetry in general.




World Literature in Spanish [3 volumes]


Book Description

Containing roughly 850 entries about Spanish-language literature throughout the world, this expansive work provides coverage of the varied countries, ethnicities, time periods, literary movements, and genres of these writings. Providing a thorough introduction to Spanish-language literature worldwide and across time is a tall order. However, World Literature in Spanish: An Encyclopedia contains roughly 850 entries on both major and minor authors, themes, genres, and topics of Spanish literature from the Middle Ages to the present day, affording an amazingly comprehensive reference collection in a single work. This encyclopedia describes the growing diversity within national borders, the increasing interdependence among nations, and the myriad impacts of Spanish literature across the globe. All countries that produce literature in Spanish in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia are represented, covering both canonical authors and emerging contemporary writers and trends. Underrepresented writings—such as texts by women writers, queer and Afro-Hispanic texts, children's literature, and works on relevant but less studied topics such as sports and nationalism—also appear. While writings throughout the centuries are covered, those of the 20th and 21st centuries receive special consideration.




Black Costa Rica


Book Description

The book you hold in your hands is an interdisciplinary study on diaspora literacy in Afro-Central America. An exploration through various imaginings of times past, this study is concerned with how oxymoron, metonymy, and multilingualism deploy pluricentrical belonging. By exploring the interlocking of multiple roots that have developed on account of routes, rhizomatic historical imaginations are unearthed here so as to imagine an other Costa Rica. A Black Costa Rica.




Post-Conflict Central American Literature


Book Description

Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong studies often-overlooked contemporary poetry. Through the exploration of poetry and a select number of short stories, this book contemplates the meanings of home, belonging, and the homeland in post-conflict, globalizing, and neoliberal El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Aparicio analyzes literary representations of and meditations on the current conditions as well as the recent pasts of Central American homelands. Additionally, the book highlights aesthetic renditions of home at the same time that it engages with and is grounded in contemporary Central American cultures, politics, and societies. In effect, this book contests hegemonic and apparently commonsense views that assert that globalization produces global citizenship and globalized experiences. Instead it argues that a palpable desire for home and belonging survives and thrives in rapidly globalizing Central American homelands.




Introspection and Contemporary Poetry


Book Description

In this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experiment--from the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montage--like methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W. S. Merwin to the radical plainness of Frank Bidart. Williamson examines these and other poets from a psychological perspective, giving an especially striking reading of Sylvia Plath.




The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry


Book Description

This book argues that there are deep connections between ‘poetic’ thinking and the sensitive recognition of creaturely others. It explores this proposition in relation to four poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, and Les Murray. Through a series of close readings, and by paying close attention to issues of sound, rhythm, simile, metaphor, and image, it explores how poetry cultivates a special openness towards animal others. The thinking behind this book is inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. In particular, it takes up that book’s suggestion that poetry invites us to relate to animals in an open-ended and sympathetic manner. Poets, according to Elizabeth Costello, the book’s protagonist, ‘return the living, electric being to language’, and, doing so, compel us to open our hearts towards animals and the claims they make upon us. There are special affinities, for her, between the music of poetry and the recognition of others. But what might it mean to say that poets to return life to language? And why might this have any bearing on our relationship with animals? Beyond offering many suggestive starting points, Elizabeth Costello says very little about the nature of poetry’s special relationship with the animal; one aim of this study, then, is to ask of what this relationship consists, not least by examining the various ways poets have bodied forth animals in language.




Who's Who in Twentieth Century World Poetry


Book Description

The definitive biographical guide to poetry throughout the world in the twentieth century and the only book of its kind to look at non-English language poets in such detail. Written in lively prose, with over 900 entries by over 75 international contributors, it brings a uniquely global perspective to bear on modern verse, encapsulating the lives and works of a vast array of poets in precise, compact detail alongside expert critical comment. Who's Who in Twentieth Century World Poetry is a scholarly and hugely enjoyable guide through the diverse arena of modern international poetry.




These are Not Sweet Girls


Book Description

"Flowing effortlessly from the erotic to the political...Agosin has chosen poems that delight and inspire." --Ms. Magazine




On Modern Poetry


Book Description

Guido Mazzoni tells the story of poetry's revolution in the modern age. The chief transformation was the rise of the lyric as it is now conceived: a genre in which a first-person speaker talks about itself. Mazzoni argues that modern poetry embodies the age of the individual and has wrought profound changes in the expectations of readers.




Equestrian Monuments


Book Description

Poetry. Translated by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim. In Luis Chaves's EQUESTRIAN MONUMENTS, the stately figure of a former president, Leon CortÈs, is counterbalanced by a cast of mock-heroic or non-normative foils: a cross-dresser, a singleton, homunculus, thief, and gardener. Dialogue from The Exorcist coexists alongside lines from the Latin Kyrie, Rex, while sweeping statements about entire generations, continents, and genres find a basis in the most intimate details of home-life. The intersections are uncanny, sometimes hilarious, often sad and unsettling. Chaves's hyper-caffeinated imagination renders each image in this remarkable collection in a way that orients the reader and provides a moment's stasis and clarity before "the waves come and the waves erase it."




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