The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All


Book Description

"Wright shrinks back from nothing."—The Village Voice "Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."—The New York Times Book Review "Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."—The New Yorker "C.D. Wright is one of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets."—Publishers Weekly A companion to her astonishing collection of prose Cooling Time, C.D. Wright argues for poetry as a way of being and seeing, and calls it "the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine." Wright's passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetry is poetry. From "In a Word": I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money… C.D. Wright's most recent volume, One With Others, was a National Book Award finalist. Among her many honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.




News of War


Book Description

A new work of scholarship that considers several of the most prominent poets writing from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to the end of World War II.




Trouble Songs


Book Description

Poet, critic, and hybrid-genre artist Johnson tracks the use of trouble in word, concept, and practice in this debut of brief, elliptical, lyric essays. He moves through a wide swath of 20th- and 21st-century music, always alert to a sense of melancholy shared among songwriters, their songs, and their listeners in the ever-growing web of popular music. "When we say 'trouble,' we refer to the history of trouble whether or not we have it in mind. When we sing trouble, we sing (with) history," Johnson writes. "A Trouble Song is a complaint, a grievance, an aside, a come-on, a confession, an admission, a resignation, a plea. It's an invitation-to sorrow." The effect of all this trouble is dizzying. Highly annotated-often to personal, humorous, and hidden effects-the book weaves among genres, chronologies, and various forms of trouble to ask "Where are we in song? Who are we in song?" Johnson suggests that an answer lies somewhere in the locus of singer, song, and listener-the "essential relations in the Trouble Song." Detouring into philosophy, cultural theory, and verse, Johnson works multilaterally to explore what trouble in popular music does to connect listeners, embolden them, and open a space from which trouble can be addressed across time.




A House Called Tomorrow


Book Description

Copper Canyon Press celebrates its first 50 years of poetry publishing in anticipation of the next 50 years. Poetry is vital to language and living. This anthology celebrates 50 years of Copper Canyon Press publications, one extraordinary poem at a time. Since its founding, Copper Canyon has been entirely dedicated to publishing poetry books; here Editor in Chief Michael Wiegers invites press staff and board—past and present—to help curate a retrospective. The result is a collection of beloved poems from books spanning half a century: representing Pulitzer Prize-winning books, debut collections, works in translation, and rare books from Copper Canyon’s early days. This book is a tribute to Copper Canyon poets and readers everywhere, because, as Gregory Orr writes, “Certain poems / In an uncertain world— / The ones we cling to: // They bring us back.”




Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity


Book Description

Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity looks at contemporary Freudian and post-Freudian theory through an intersubjective lens. Bruce Reis offers views on how psychoanalytic conceptions from the last century uniquely manifest in the consulting rooms of this century – how analytic technique has radically evolved through developing Freud’s original insights into dreaming, and hallucinosis; and how the presentation of today’s analysands calls for analyst’s use of themselves in unprecedented new ways. Taking up bedrock analytic concepts such as the death instinct, repetition, trauma and the place of speech and of silence, Reis brings a diversely inspired, twenty-first century analytic sensibility to his reworking of these concepts and illustrates them clinically in a process-oriented approach. Here the unconscious intersubjective relation takes on transformative power, resulting in the analyst’s experience of hybridized chimerical monsters, creative seizures, reveries and intuitions that inform clinical realities outside of verbal or conscious discourse -- where change occurs in analysis. Drawing on an unusually broad selection of major international influences, Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists across the schools of thought.




I, Divided


Book Description

An underlying cynicism lies at the heart of the questions asked by Chelsea Dingman’s I, Divided: What is a life worth? Today. Now. Why is that? Who gives anyone permission to be? And how is that determined? In poems that use the science behind chaos theory as a lens for examining illness and agency, Dingman explores the divide between determination and accident, whereby the body becomes a site of exploration as well as elegy in cases of disease such as traumatic brain injury, cancer, and addiction. Much like weather patterns, inherited histories of violence and disease are cyclical. They remain at once determined and yet undetermined, becoming ultimately chaotic. The “I” of the title is fractured over several divides, subordinated to illness and to a past that is invariable, though finally morphs as an agent of change. I, Divided operates as if within a swirling hurricane, beginning and ending amid the same human concerns, tracing a life cycle and its repetition.




The Book of Delights


Book Description

“Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world—his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees. This is not a book of how-to or inspiration, though it could be read that way. Fans of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Kiese Laymon will revel in Gay’s voice, and his insights. The Book of Delights is about our connection to the world, to each other, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Gay’s pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.




ShallCross


Book Description

"Through more than a dozen collections, C.D. Wright pushed the bounds of imagination as she explored desire, loss and physical sensation. Her posthumously published book, ShallCross features seven poem sequences that show her tremendous range in style and approach. As she considers, among other topics, some dark intuitions about human nature, she also nudges readers to question who is telling the story and where one’s thought can lead."—The Washington Post "Wright gets better with each book, expanding the reach of her art; it seems it could take in anything."—Publishers Weekly "Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."—New York Times Book Review "C.D. Wright is entirely her own poet, a true original."—The Gettysburg Review In a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet. From "Obscurity and Elegance": Whether or not the park was safe she was going in. A study concluded, for a park to be successful there had to be women. The man next to the monument must have broken away from her. Perhaps years before. That the bond had been carnal is obvious. He said he was just out clearing his head… C.D. Wright (1949-2016) taught at Brown University for decades and published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, including One With Others, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award; One Big Self: An Investigation; and Rising Falling Hovering. Among her many honors are the Griffin International Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.




Pain Studies


Book Description

“A fascinating, totally seductive read!” —Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays and On Immunity: An Inoculation “A book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart. . . . Irreverent and astute. . . . Pain Studies will change how you think about living with a body.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck and Bowlaway “A thrilling investigation into pain, language, and Olstein’s own exile from what Woolf called ‘the army of the upright.’ On a search path through art, science, poetry, and prime-time television, Olstein aims her knife-bright compassion at the very thing we’re all running from. Pain Studies is a masterpiece.” —Leni Zumas, author of The Listeners and Red Clocks In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Lisa Olstein teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of four poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press. Pain Studies is her first book of creative nonfiction.




The Iowa Review


Book Description