Dikt

A trans pastor’s transformation of the Scripture inherited from his closeted, fundamentalist father When his dad died, Malcolm Himshoot inherited his father’s bibles. Rereading them, examining his dad’s notes in their margins, Malcolm weaves details of his upbringing and gender identity into the structures and forms of biblical narratives. For Malcolm, coming out meant exile and verbal excommunication; he embodied all his gay father tried to hide. In Reading Secrets, Malcolm travels alongside the ghost of his father, exploring their inherited homophobia and the American culture that shaped their triumphs and tragedies. With these poetic and evocative meditations, Malcolm transforms the Scripture he inherited, and finds a place in it for himself.

From Author Jane Kurtz, winner of the school Library Journal Best Of The Year and numerous other awards. In verse, Oh Give Me a Home relates the story of a girl’s inside-out view of America as she journeys from Ethiopia, searches for friends and belonging. In elementary school, Jane knows that Maji, Ethiopia, cool and green, perched on a mountainside of waterfalls and monkeys, is the perfect place to live. Or it would be perfect if she had a pet or a best friend.  Jane is full of ideas that include schemes for an animal to play with. A real pet, not the dik dik that dies, the monkey that tries to bite her fingers, nor the elusive cat that lives in the shed and has just absconded with her litter of kittens.  But her plans are derailed as Jane learns she is to move back to America with her family.  America and Africa collide as Jane tries to answer the simple question, “Where am I from?” Entering grade school in suburban America for the first time, will she find a best friend a continent away from her real life in Africa? Or is America–where she meets her relatives for laughter and frolicking and big holiday meals–her real home?

The sophomore collection from poet and artist Sarah J. Sloat, whose Hotel Almighty was a NYT Editors’ Choice pick. Classic Crimes is a book of visual poetry sourced from William Roughead’s true-crime classic of the same name. In these erasure poems, “to face cruelty is a ‘melancholy accident,’” and “to sleep…[is] an interlude of little dinners.” Each page bears its own cunning erasure poem adorned in colorful mixed-media collages, the result a joyous and gleeful romp through time.

Behold My Heresies: the latest and highly anticipated poetry collection from Alina Stefanescu.Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu's poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush, at other times stark and shocking. My Heresies probes the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and the result is a hauntological mapping of life, love, family, and womanhood.

The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot to share the joy of poetry. It's a unique poetry book club and every quarter our expert selectors choose the very best new books to deliver to our members across the globe. Our lively quarterly magazine is packed full of sneak preview poems from all the selected poets, alongside exclusive interviews, insightful reviews by the Ledbury Critics and extensive listings of every book and pamphlet published this quarter. Our Autumn 2024 Selections are:Choice Signs, Music - Raymond Antrobus - PicadorRecommendations AGIMAT - Romalyn Ante - PenguinThe Keelie Hawk, Poems in Scots - Kathleen Jamie - PicadorStrange Husbandry - Lorcan Black - SerenBLUFF - Danez Smith - PenguinSpecial Commendation Adam - Gboyega Odubanjo - FaberTranslation Choice Birds, Beasts and a World Made New - Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov, translated by Robert Chandler - Pushkin PressPamphlet Choice Sometimes Real Love Comes Quick and Easy - Janine Bradbury - ignition pressYou can find out more and join our poetry community today at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.

An anthology of new writing by students from Anglia Ruskin University.

A rich collection of poetry that celebrates the beauty and symbolism of the humble flower. From Shakespeare to Heaney, these classic verses celebrate the arrival of spring with the emergence of the snowdrops, to the summer colour of asters, the heady scent of jasmine, and the brazen sunflower.

Set in the beating heart of Family, Rojbin Arjen Yigit's poems are both a questioning of the past and a mirror searching for future possibilities. Grappling with loss, the futility of language and the distances of countries, these poems are an accumulation of the speaker's struggles and senses. Interconnecting locales across generations, they set out what it means to belong and what it means to mean.

In this astonishing volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Award-winner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays-Caliban and Sycorax from The Tempest, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, and the eponymous antihero of Othello-to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century?Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidibé, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words like "fair," "suspect," and "juvenile." He invents a new form of window poems, based on a characterization exercise, to see Shakespeare's Black characters in three dimensions, and finds contemporary parallels in the way these characters are othered, rendered at once undesirable and hypersexualized, a threat and a joke.At once a stunning inquiry into the roots of racist violence and a moving recognition of the joy of Black youth before the world takes hold, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again expresses the preciousness and precarity of life.

First published in 1967, Poets of the Early Seventeenth Century is a representative selection of shorter poems written during the first half of the seventeenth century by principal poets of this period. This is a must read for students of English literature and English poetry.

In Other Times, Midnight, her debut collection, Andrea Ballou explores the aftermath of loss-death, divorce, and departures-and asks the toughest questions: how do we contend with grief and remorse, and where does the spirit go to wait out trauma? Ballou's poems fight our "impulse to not speak," aware that naming, and that speech itself, is a matter of life and death. Her startling and often humorous images rooted in the fields, forests and domesticity of rural life are juxtaposed with oblique, at times irreverent, adaptations of Celtic and Greek myth and biblical stories. For Ballou, language is both tool and weapon, as useful and durable as a hoe, wheelbarrow, sword, thread. Caught "in the mouth of midnight," these poems wrestle with the numinous, their voices-cranky and cajoling, always compassionate and vulnerable-urging us toward the fullness of being human, daring us, despite it all, to love again.

The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time."For many ill-informed people, the name 'André Breton' is synonymous with surrealism. They are right. Without Breton, surrealism, even assuming it existed, would have been nothing more than a literary school. With him, it was a way of life."—Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the MetroAs leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, Cavalier Perspective, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled "articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews," written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, Cavalier Perspective is considered Breton's final book.Over 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. Cavalier Perspective finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of "strict temporal limits," Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.More than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an "inaugurator of discourse" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and Cavalier Perspective is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.

In his final book, poet Neeli Cherkovski paints a portrait of his life through luminous details of encounters with his illustrious comrades."A prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture."—New York TimesTo be published on what would have been his 80th birthday, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski's perspective in 1959 and 2023. The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.

Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions.Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.This is Rabah's first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah's poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one's relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates—sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair—the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.

The Peruvian poet César Vallejo-one of Latin America's most famous poets-was involved in various literary circles and began publishing his poems in 1914 in magazines, after discovering the works of Walt Whitman, the French symbolists, and the modernist Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario. He brought out his first book of poems in 1919, Los heraldos negros, and in 1922, he published his famous Trilce, which met a cool reception. Vallejo spent many years of his life in Europe-in Paris and Spain. Like many of the surrealists, he became a Marxist, and he was an ardent supporter of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. In his poems, Vallejo poignantly describes human misery, isolation, and anguish. As the translator Margaret Jull Costa explains: "Vallejo edited and redrafted and honed his poetry. This is the only way in which he could describe the antithetical, paradoxical, oxymoronic universe he was living in, by using language at full tilt, making it perform all kinds of acrobatics. The resulting poems often defy interpretation..." This marvelous new bilingual selection of poems spanning his career up to his early death confirms Robert Hass's assessment that Vallejo was "one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, a heartbreaking and groundbreaking writer."

The incendiary, sensual poems of Essex Hemphill, now in a new landmark selection

Thirty years in the making, 'Hometown' was left unpublished at the death of its author, who regarded it as his most important work. Published here for the first time, alongside the rest of his poetry, including some uncollected pieces, this poem will restore Lyman Andrews's place among the great American poets of the twentieth century.

My wife and I have been married for fifty-three years. We have two grown children and six grandchildren, all girls. I recently retired from Hospital and First Responder Chaplaincy with Fire and Police. This volume is about my experiences as a crisis chaplain.Over the years, I have written simple poetry for family and friends. While preaching in ten countries, I have sent email logs of the day's events. During the COVID-19 crisis, I was encouraged to write a page or two on subjects unrelated to COVID-19 and email it to select hospital staff.Combining these elements, we present Casting Shadows at Midnight: Poetry, Musings, and Writings of a Crisis Chaplain.Many of the poems are written to my Bride of fifty-three years. Some were written while riding with the police and fire departments, and others were generic.In the Musing section, we share thoughts and impressions from multiple crisis scenarios. A sampling of these Musings includes impressions from overseas travels teaching Chaplaincy.Writings are items that came out of the COVID-19 crisis.The reader will find a little humor, light drama, and theology, along with personal notes and tidbits that mean something to me. I must admit that I'm neither a skilled comedian nor detailed enough to produce a classic mystery novel. I'm also not an expert theologian who can write a heavy volume to settle the inerrancy question that has plagued people for years.However, I am knowledgeable enough to write about topics that interest many readers. Some of the writing is deeply emotional and personal. The poetry will not win many awards but will be heartfelt.Born in Collin County, Texas, Rickey grew up in a tiny town of 254 residents. There were sixteen in his high school graduating class. He attended East Texas Baptist College for two years and then transferred to Dallas Baptist College, where he met his bride, Julie. Their marriage is almost fifty-three years long and growing.He and Julie pastored churches in Missouri and Texas. He became a chaplain with the Plano Police Department, continued with the McKinney, Texas Police Department, and finally retired from the Department of Public Safety as a Chaplain and the Dallas Police Department as a chaplain trainer.Undeterred by the demands of his career, Rickey pursued further education, earning a master's degree from Luther Rice Seminary and a doctorate from Master's International School of Divinity. These academic achievements have equipped him to focus on his current role, providing chaplaincy services to patients and their families.Since retiring from Hospital Chaplaincy, Rickey has enjoyed grandchildren. His son Stephen has two marvelous stepdaughters, and his daughter Christy has two beautiful sets of twin girls. The bigs are identical, and the littles are fraternal.

For Deaf and Disabled writers, the context is immutable. Deaf and Disabled people are currently being scapegoated, silenced and dehumanised in the media and by politicians. Our human and legal rights are being violated. Disabled people are being forced to fight for our survival. Beyond is a collection of work by Welsh Deaf and Disabled... -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

The most important Swiss poet of the nineteenth century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer is regarded as a crucial figure in the transition of German-language poetry from the Romanticism of Heine, Novalis and Eichendorff to the Symbolism of Rilke and Stefan George.

TERROR COUNTER is a debut collection of poems which acts against the many languages—interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical—constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians. It moves through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, attempting to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood. The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life. TERROR COUNTER asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?

A political, poetic excavation of the human landscape, charting the history of geography through the historic movement of its residents' bodies and complicated habits.Through intertextual intervention, this anti-linear collection reconceives the archives of Phoenix, Arizona to create a counter-map of the city and its trajectories of supremacist violence. [gamerover] tracks trajectories of colonial enterprizes, from the Arizona State Fair to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the Tornillo Detention Center in Texas, investigating the oppressions of each imperial form in spaces of recreation, exhibition, and spectacle. Understanding the landscape as an ever-moving hypertext, these poems challenge entrenched means of representation, uses of public space, and positions of witness.

Best Literary Translations (BLT) is a new, annual anthology that celebrates world literatures in English translation and honors the literary journals that publish that work.Best Literary Translations 2025 features poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages, brought into English by forty-five of the most talented translators working today. The four co-editors chose a long list of finalists from several hundred nominations.Guest Editor Cristina Rivera Garza selected both contemporary and historical works for this edition. BLT’s poems, short stories, essays, and hybrid works were drawn from submissions that spanned dozens of countries and languages. Featuring work from the top literary journals with US-based editors, ranging from ANMLY to World Literature Today, BLT honors some of the excellent literature created by a diverse range of authors and translators. This anthology redefines the canon of global literatures in English translation, showcasing the brave and brilliant work of contemporary translators and editors.

Nominated for the 2024 Nordic Council Literature Prize, Kim Simonsen introduces a new perspective to Faroese literature rooted in the materiality of all natural organisms. The rhetorical title of the collection posits the crisis that is underway. Simonsen asks: as a species among species, all comprised of the matter of the universe, how has our compulsion to hierarchically categorize everything estranged us from ourselves, each other, and the rest of this world? Simonsen challenges our anthropocentric pursuit of knowledge, exploring the human relationship with itself as an element of the natural world. The collection follows the process as the narrator reckons with estrangement from his fellow organisms, and turns to the greater materiality of the world to find continuity, connection, and solace.

How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning? Rachel Richardson's third collection, Smother, interrogates this impossible question. The poet, raising young daughters and grieving the death of a friend, documents a string of record-breaking fires across the California landscape and the rage, sorrow, and detachment that follow amidst the pervasive smoke. Environmental and physical predation-on the earth and on the female body-weave through the book in layers.But these are not poems of giving up. The poems in Smother gather accomplices in grief and mothering, seek out guides and girlfriends, remember the dead, keep watch at the firebreaks, and plant new trees on the burn scars. From lyric forms to moments of prose and documentary collage, these poems sing their song of resistance made from the music that is available to us now.