Telephone: Essays in Two Voices


Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. "TELEPHONE is, for me, a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This is a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from."--Hanif Abdurraqib "Miller and Wade's TELEPHONE is a polyphonic emergency. These divinely nostalgic and politely oracular essays,--are they essays? watch them essai,--pursue the maximum boundaries of genre, and there, in the peripheries, together, we reach into our pockets to read their decoded message: I love."--Lily Hoang "Wade and Miller's collaborative essay collection, TELEPHONE, stretches the possibilities of the form, creating a kind of thought puzzle that you're happy to never truly solve. Their voices bounce and blend, weave and bob, in a way that seems almost impossible and magical. TELEPHONE is a testament to the power of voice and the beauty of collaborative art."--Steven Church "TELEPHONE is unusual, thoughtful and compelling. The two voices together are clever, passionate, entertaining and intriguing. TELEPHONE pushes the boundaries and demonstrates the power and potential of the creative nonfiction genre."--Lee Gutkind "Miller and Wade's marvelous TELEPHONE takes the ordinary--cars, exercise, toys, sex--and elevates it to the extraordinary. Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation. TELEPHONE stuns us with its burnished music, its use of form, and its brilliant musings on seemingly quotidian subjects. In these twin-voiced essays is a celebration of narrative's thrall, but also a liberation blueprint that frees us from the tyranny of a single self, a single story."--James Allen Hall




The Multiple Telegraph


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The Pen and the Bell


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Notes from No Man's Land


Book Description

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man’s Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies, and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays—teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. Notes from No Man’s Land is an essential portrait of America that established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists of our time.




The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice


Book Description

An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (Neil Genzlinger, New York Times) demystifies the elusive element of voice. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. In short, essayistic chapters and an appendix of thirty stimulating exercises, The Art of Voice explores the myriad ways to create a distinctive poetic voice, including vernacular, authoritative statement, speech register, tone-shifting, and using secondary voices. “Rich with lively examples” (New York Times Book Review), The Art of Voice provides a compelling introduction to contemporary poetry and an invaluable guide for any practicing writer.




The Voice Over


Book Description

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.




The Next Draft


Book Description

The Next Draft: Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop brings together a selection of the “morning talks” delivered by the renowned authors who teach at the prestigious Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. These morning talks are a highlight of the residencies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, featuring inspiring, innovative approaches to writing and literature across genres. For this collection, Brenda Miller has selected essays that feature diverse and illustrious writers such as Geffrey Davis, Marjorie Sandor, Barrie Jean Borich, Jenny Johnson, Oliver de la Paz, Lia Purpura, Kent Myers, Rebecca McClanahan, and others. Ranging from reading and writing in the Jewish tradition of midrash to the role of the writer as cultural critic in the 21st century, The Next Draft brings to life the kind of intellectual and creative excitement that underlies the intensive MFA experience at Pacific Lutheran University. Not only do these talks show innovative approaches to writing and literature across genres, they inspire the reader to think about how to read differently and thus bring their own work to a new level.




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"




Bending Genre


Book Description

Ever since the term "creative nonfiction" first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways. Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer's innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground. Features in the second edition: -Updated introduction to the new edition -Expanded sections on Hybrids, Structures, and "Unconventions" -A new section on Resistances -50 essays in all




Codependence


Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Fearless, haunting, and transcendently honest, Amy Long's CODEPENDENCE is a memoir of pain and its paradoxes. Long documents her coming of age as an ambitious young writer plagued by chronic headache and entangled with a boyfriend's opioid addiction. The essays that result explore the complexities of care, hurt, and hope with elegance and precision. Long exposes her every nerve, crafting a story both intimate and deeply relevant. An essential book for the opioid era.