Dikt

Poetry that finds meaning and connection in the process of creating pottery from clay.   The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter's wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk's process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings of ceramic forms. For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter's hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.

Cyborg Fever addresses timely questions about AI, technology, and their role in shaping relationships. In Cyborg Fever, acclaimed writer Laurie Sheck brings us a probing and lyrical philosophical fiction in the spirit of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing transhumanism. Throughout Cyborg Fever, many strange, surprising facts appear: an artist clones a flower from his DNA and the DNA of a petunia, an astronaut plays golf on the moon, a mathematician on a rest cure rethinks the life of Shakespeare, and particles and antiparticles collide at lightning speed beneath the green hills of Switzerland and France. Threaded throughout, one question lingers: in this age of AI and genetic engineering, how can we come to know more fully what it means to love and be human among the wonders and destructions we have wrought on Earth? At the center of the book is the narrator, Erwin, left as an hours-old infant on the steps of an orphanage where he is named after the renowned physicist Erwin Schrodinger (of the famous Schrodinger's cat experiment). After a traumatic fall into a year-long fever dream, he experiences many visions that take him into many areas of inquiry including the nature of the universe, bioengineering, medical experimentation, cyborgs, AI, and space and time, and ultimately teaches him the nature of love. Along the way, he develops a friendship with a gentle cyborg who has escaped from a Lab involved in covert medical intervention. Guided by the cyborg and a vision of Funes (of Borges's iconic story "Funes the Memorious"), Erwin experiences the Information Age and the promises of AI in all its beauty and, ultimately, its terror, as he watches the cyborg he has come to love devolve into an unfeeling information machine. Throughout, issues of personhood, human attachment, and the dignity of all living beings pervade Erwin's thinking and leave him with a larger understanding and appreciation of what it means to love.

This collection bears witness to ecstasy and grief through persona. By inhabiting the voices of Adam and Eve, Abelard and Heloise, etc., DiNiord reveals the enduring alterity contained within the self. Westminster West traverses the worlds of here and beyond. DiNiord divines "the everydayness of the mystery . . . in which being and making poetry are the same." From posthumous correspondence between Abelard and Heloise to such poems as "Skywriting Over The Rockies," "With A Bone In My Heart," and "I Call Out To You," this collection betrays a mortal charge, bearing witness to what Emily Dickinson called "each ecstatic moment/ to which we must an anguish pay" and which Aridjis in his defiance of death calls "dust in love." Ambitious and masterful, DiNiord renders such ancient subject matter as love, betrayal, landscape, loss, grief, aging, and ecstasy new throughout Westminster West. He transforms the echo chamber of futility, silence, and failure by aspiring to cross over to "the other," whatever it may be, a stone or cloud or lover or garment, or cancerous lung, with a "negative capability" that allows it, no matter its identity, to speak memorably in a way that transcends simple definition and ultimately any personal connection to it. Westminster West is divided into three sections that complement each other in their archetypal themes which range historically, mythologically, and cathectically. The poems in the first section imagine correspondences and dialogues between couples, including Heloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and Calypso, a widower and his deceased wife in the time of Covid, and a lovesick husband in the air above the Rocky Mountains and his beloved on the ground. The second section also features love poems but focuses on more instructional and metaphysical themes that vary from metaphorical pedagogy on the topic of sex to "the harsh advice of loss" to the memory of a young couple's transcendent, romantic walk by a river. Section three moves away from love poems to mortal and environmental themes, including elegies, pastorals, and a concluding confessional credo on the bittersweet reality of poetry's irony and blessing.

Winner of the 2023 Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry, Jalousie works toward a poetics of analysis. The "I-centered," first person, yet experimental poems in Jalousie explore the ways in which expression of the deeply personal experience is both dictated to and altered by rigid societal expectations. The speaker of these highly personal poems can't help but view language as a historical artifact, the DNA of past worlds, as these poems delve into the complexities of sorting out one's individual identity amid broader cultural contexts. Paty's poems attempt to connect the personal, private, intimate persona with elements that are always external-external not only to this poet but to every person. These poems seek to capture fleeting moments of personal connection despite the impossibility of language, the societal dictates of gender roles, the pressures of making a living, the inexorable march of time, and the bewildering strangeness of architectural spaces. At the heart of this collection is "Premise," an extensive poem that weaves in detours through the history of New York City, themes of discard, references to Bruegel's "Wedding Dance," and discussions on representation and memory. The book also contains three full-color illustrations which augment the poet's themes and concerns.

Coins and weapons, lost jewels and carved faces. Full of archaeology and history, mystery and surprises - museum treasures and ancient discoveries inspire this stunning new collection of short stories and poetry. Featuring items from the Corinium Museum collection

A surreal story in verse that follows a woman facing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside ecological crisis and crumbling social norms.   Jennifer Hasegawa's NAOMIE ANOMIE, A Biography of Infinite Will, is an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological crisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.   Feeling ever-increasing existential strain leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and culminating in her decision to no longer venture outside of her apartment, Naomie is not surprised to find her name is an anagram for anomie, a term for the breakdown of social norms. In these pages is a meticulous account of everything that went wrong in Naomie's five decades of life. We find retellings of a life's most significant moments-not because they are sources of pride, but because they stand as the only decipherable moments of humanity amid a world of static. This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.

Poetry that considers the nature of relationships in an age mediated by social media and impacted by violence.   This is a collection of poems about how we find and cultivate love amid wars, including wars that often go ignored. Throughout Bloodletting, Kimberly Reyes considers how we define love and who gets to experience it, paying special attention to the ways that race and sex influence how we are perceived and valued by society. Through the voice of a Black woman coming to terms with her own perspectives on relationship-building, Reyes shows the damage that contemporary culture can do to women, and Black women in particular. Resisting passivity, Reyes's poetry cuts through pervasive doom scrolling, virtue signaling, and parasocial relationships, inviting readers to remember what care is really supposed to feel like.

Poetry and prose that takes on multiple forms to celebrate queer polyamorous families.   Liza Flum's Hover focuses on queer polyamorous families, considering the ways people in radical family structures are both highly visible and erased. From hummingbirds to stars, historical records, and cemetery monuments, Flum searches for images to represent lives and loves like her own and to find lasting traces of queer and chosen family. In the poetic lexicon of Hover, hummingbirds become emblems of ungraspable survival and vitality, while records on paper and in stone afford enduring, though limited, representations.   The book explores sexuality, love, reproductive choice, and infertility in sonnets and expansive prose meditations. Linked stanzas, which act as little rooms, suggest the intermingling of bedrooms, doctor's offices, and hospital rooms. The many forms in this collection claim space, both on the page and in poetic discourse, to make the intimate outwardly visible.

A poetic documentation of imperial structures through the story of a shipwrecked Spanish trade vessel.   In this work of hybrid historiography, Sam Creely modulates the English sentence to map the ways anglophone imperial self-fashioning moves in and out of social coherence, investigating how syntactic requirements reflect colonial history and how the rules of language structure thought. Through scenes including intimate encounters with dye, fabric, and garments, Creely reveals the sexual and racial grammars of empire.  Inventorys takes as its point of departure the voyage, shipwreck, and eventual excavation of the Spanish trade vessel El Nuevo Constante. Animated by the image of sixty thousand pounds of dye bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, this six-part poetic documentation follows the wreckage of the Constante linguistically, moving among early modern lexicography, and ultimately toward enmeshed histories of catalog, fabrication, and revision.  Inventorys is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest, selected by Shane McCrae.

A collection of poems and essays that embrace musicality and locate the patterns of ancient songs in the body, nature, and world events.   Alibi, in Latin, meant "elsewhere," and "lullaby"-from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by-has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of "thrill, dread, certainty."   In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, "empathy through distress," unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.

Poetry that considers how we live with constant shifts, positioning alchemy as an example of endless change.   The poetry of Laynie Browne's Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.

The Secret Rose (1897) is a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats. Written in response to demands that the poet write ¿a really national poem or romance,¿ The Secret Rose exhibits Yeats¿ devotion to personal mythology and occult orders, and is a brilliant display of symbolism by one of Irish literature¿s premier poets.¿To the Secret Rose¿ opens the collection. The poem, inspired by Yeats¿ membership in the Rosicrucian Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, uses symbolism to evoke religion, myth, and history. The ¿Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose¿ is an image of utopian longing, an ideal moment the poet awaits, envisions, and longs for. ¿The Crucifixion of the Outcast¿ is a parable in which a wandering bard is led by Christian brothers to his execution. As his cross is set in the earth, he offers a portion of his last meal to the beggars who have gathered to watch. When he is nailed to the cross, however, he finds that mercy without humility is a seed that cannot grow. In ¿The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows,¿ Puritan soldiers storm an abbey and attack a group of friars. Before he dies, the abbot raises the cross upon the altar, and promises divine vengeance. Immediately afterward, the soldiers are told that two messengers have escaped on horseback to warn and gather the people for a counterattack. The Secret Rose explores themes of faith and persecution while illuminating the proximity of life and myth for a poet whose subject is the soul.With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats¿s The Secret Rose is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Countess Cathleen (1892) is a verse drama by W.B. Yeats. Dedicated to Maud Gonne, an actress and revolutionary whom Yeats unsuccessfully courted for years, The Countess Cathleen underwent several editions before being performed in its final version at Dublin¿s Abbey Theatre in 1911.Based on an Irish legend, the play, set during a period of intense famine, follows a land-owning Countess who decides to sacrifice her wealth and property in order to save the starving Irish people. As dusk gathers, a family prepares for dinner in their rural home. The fire is lit, and Shemus, the father, has returned home from a day of hunting with nothing to show for it. As they scrounge what they can to make themselves a meal, the Countess Cathleen arrives to ask them for directions. Touched by their suffering, the Countess returns home and begins to wonder what she can do to alleviate their difficult circumstances. Impatient, Shemus yells to the darkening woods to welcome whatever being, angel or devil, that would bring them money or something to eat. When two merchants arrive offering him gold for his services, it appears that the Countess, despite her good intentions, may already be too late. The Countess Cathleen is a drama written in blank verse that explores themes of poverty, faith, and Irish independence.With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats¿s The Countess Cathleen is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

Spring and All (1923) is a book of poems by William Carlos Williams. Predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his works, often comprised of a seamless blend of both forms of writing. In Spring and All, the closest thing to a manifesto he wrote, Williams addresses the nature of his modern poetics which not only pursues a particularly American idiom, but attempts to capture the relationship between language and the world it describes. Part essay, part poem, Spring and All is a landmark of American literature from a poet whose daring search for the outer limits of life both redefined and expanded the meaning of language itself. ¿There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.¿ In Spring and All, Williams identifies the incomprehensible nature of consciousness as the single most important subject of poetry. Accused of being ¿heartless¿ and ¿cruel,¿ of producing ¿positively repellant¿ works of art in order to ¿make fun of humanity,¿ Williams doesn¿t so much defend himself as dig in his heels. His poetry is addressed ¿[t]o the imagination¿ itself; it seeks to break down the ¿the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment.¿ When he states that ¿so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow,¿ he refers to the need to understand the nature of language, which keeps us in touch with the world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Carlos Williams¿ Spring and All is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Poems that ask an urgent question:  how might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death without becoming complicit in the commodification of Black trauma? Phantom Number listens for an absent voice. To survive and answer to her best friend and fellow poet April Freely's death, Spring Ulmer rips meaning apart in her poems, then repairs it, only to rip it up again. Words bend, meaning shifts-abstraction a tool Ulmer wields to better get at the question at the heart of Phantom Number: How might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death at a time when the push is to write Black joy as antidote to the commodification of Black trauma? Ulmer understands her position is suspect yet cannot shirk her love or rage. Ulmer asks the reader to do the work or else. Her abstracted poems vibrate, emotion emerging from a poem made rag. Ulmer's abecedarium long form holds these fragments, inviting lines into an order of alliteration and words into an otherwise coherence, a belonging that has nothing to do with their origin. Phantom Number finds in abstraction a radical wail.

The second volume in a beautiful series presenting new collections of poems by great craftsmen of the past. This volume comprises poems by R Williams Parry and is edited by Elis Dafydd for Cyhoeddiadau Barddas. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru