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The poems in Mirabilia test the relationship between art and politics.
They are ekphrastic poems complicated by historical narrative; or, they are political poems, inspired by artworks. The title poem is a tribute to the pangolin, the world’s most-trafficked mammal – implicated, some say, in the evolution of coronavirus.
Written in Fibonacci syllabics, it is also a reflection on Marianne Moore’s poem ‘The Pangolin’, with its sense of nature’s perpetuity – lost in the years since her poem was written. The final sequence ‘Great World Atlas’ tracks the destructive extent of nuclear testing across the world in the 1960s. It was written for Izabela Pluta’s artist’s book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation.
The sequence ‘Tongue’ reflects on da Vinci’s 1478 painting The Benois Madonna, including the circumstances of its creation in the Pazzi conspiracy and the life of Fioretta del Cittadino – perhaps the painting’s model – who gave birth to the child of the murdered man.
Her child was taken; she was written out of the record. In other poems too, Gorton reflects on the experience of the female muse, wife, or mother.
Shortlisted: NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2023
Lisa Gorton has a PhD on the poetry of John Donne from the University of Oxford. She is a poet and novelist, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection Press Release won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry; her second, Hotel Hyperion was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal; and her third, Empirical, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Poetry. Her novel The Life of Houses was the co-winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. She is the author of Cloudland, a novel for children.
Mirabilia
Poetry
by Lisa Gorton
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing (1 August 2022)
Language: English
Paperback: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1922725307
ISBN-13: 978-1922725301
Dimensions: 20 x 14 x 1.5 cm
Price: aus. $ 25.00
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Auf Flügeln des Gesanges . . .
Auf Flügeln des Gesanges,
Herzliebchen, trag ich dich fort,
Fort nach den Fluren des Ganges,
Dort weiß ich den schönsten Ort.
Dort liegt ein rotblühender Garten
Im stillen Mondenschein;
Die Lotosblumen erwarten
Ihr trautes Schwesterlein.
Die Veilchen kichern und kosen,
Und schaun nach den Sternen empor;
Heimlich erzählen die Rosen
Sich duftende Märchen ins Ohr.
Es hüpfen herbei und lauschen
Die frommen, klugen Gazell’n;
Und in der Ferne rauschen
Des heiligen Stromes Well’n.
Dort wollen wir niedersinken
Unter dem Palmenbaum,
Und Liebe und Ruhe trinken
Und träumen seligen Traum.
Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856)
Auf Flügeln des Gesanges . . .
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Confronted with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Jay Hopler–author of the National Book Award-finalist The Abridged History of Rainfall–got to work.
The result of that labor is Still Life, a collection of poems that are heartbreaking, terrifying, and deeply, darkly hilarious.
In an attempt to find meaning in a life ending right before his eyes, Hopler squares off against monsters real and imagined, personal and historical, and tries not to flinch.
This work is no elegy; it’s a testament to courage, love, compassion, and the fierceness of the human heart.
It’s a violently funny but playfully serious fulfillment of what Arseny Tarkovsky called the fundamental purpose of art: a way to prepare for death, be it far in the future or very near at hand.
Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970. He earned a BA in English and American Literature from New York University, an MA in Creative Writing from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in American Studies from Purdue University. His first collection of poetry, Green Squall (2006), was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize; his second collection, The Abridged History of Rainfall (2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.
Hopler’s poems take as their starting point a formal virtuosity rooted in idiosyncrasy, passion of vision, and the beautiful (sometimes not-so-beautiful) violence of emotion. They are by turns plainspoken, erudite, opaque, clear, serious, and broodingly funny. Hopler is a dexterous poet, but never dogmatic. His poems make sense but not points; they think and reel and describe the broken world, without a wasted word. What the likes of G.M. Hopkins and Wallace Stevens and Robert Hayden carried out, Jay Hopler continues and expands upon, to gorgeous effect. According to poet Katie Ford, “Hopler’s vision and voice [are] both painfully complex because of how much of the world he allows to attach to him, to stake its claim on him.” Hopler is also an editor and translator.
His works include The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder for Hire (1998), Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (edited with his spouse, poet and Renaissance scholar Kimberly Johnson, 2013), and The Museum of Small Dark Things: 25 Poems by Georg Trakl (2016).
The recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, two National “Best Books” Award from USA Book News, two Florida Book Awards, a Foreword Reviews Book-of-the-Year Award, and the Rome Prize in Literature, Hopler directs the program in creative writing at the University of South Florida.
Still Life
Jay Hopler (Author)
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Publish Date: June 07, 2022
Dimensions
6.36 X 8.5 X 0.46 inches
Language English
Hardcover
EAN/UPC 9781952119378
Price $18.00
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Im süßen Traum,
bei stiller Nacht
Im süßen Traum, bei stiller Nacht,
Da kam zu mir, mit Zaubermacht,
Mit Zaubermacht, die Liebste mein,
Sie kam zu mir ins Kämmerlein.
Ich schau sie an, das holde Bild!
Ich schau sie an, sie lächelt mild,
Und lächelt, bis das Herz mir schwoll,
Und stürmisch kühn das Wort entquoll:
»Nimm hin, nimm alles, was ich hab,
Mein Liebstes tret ich gern dir ab,
Dürft ich dafür dein Buhle sein,
Von Mitternacht bis Hahnenschrein.«
Da staunt’ mich an gar seltsamlich,
So lieb, so weh und inniglich,
Und sprach zu mir die schöne Maid:
»Oh, gib mir deine Seligkeit!«
»Mein Leben süß, mein junges Blut,
Gäb ich, mit Freud’ und wohlgemut,
Für dich, o Mädchen, engelgleich –
Doch nimmermehr das Himmelreich.«
Wohl braust hervor mein rasches Wort,
Doch blühet schöner immerfort,
Und immer spricht die schöne Maid:
»Oh, gib mir deine Seligkeit!«
Dumpf dröhnt dies Wort mir ins Gehör,
Und schleudert mir ein Glutenmeer
Wohl in der Seele tiefsten Raum;
Ich atme schwer, ich atme kaum. –
Das waren weiße Engelein,
Umglänzt von goldnem Glorienschein;
Nun aber stürmte wild herauf
Ein gräulich schwarzer Koboldhauf’.
Die rangen mit den Engelein,
Und drängten fort die Engelein;
Und endlich auch die schwarze Schar
In Nebelduft zerronnen war. –
Ich aber wollt in Lust vergehn,
Ich hielt im Arm mein Liebchen schön;
Sie schmiegt sich an mich wie ein Reh,
Doch weint sie auch mit bitterm Weh.
Feins Liebchen weint; ich weiß warum,
Und küß ihr Rosenmündlein stumm. –
»O still, feins Lieb, die Tränenflut,
Ergib dich meiner Liebesglut!
Ergib dich meiner Liebesglut-«
Da plötzlich starrt zu Eis mein Blut;
Laut bebet auf der Erde Grund,
Und öffnet gähnend sich ein Schlund.
Und aus dem schwarzen Schlunde steigt
Die schwarze Schar; – feins Lieb erbleicht!
Aus meinen Armen schwand feins Lieb;
Ich ganz alleine stehenblieb.
Da tanzt im Kreise wunderbar,
Um mich herum, die schwarze Schar,
Und drängt heran, erfaßt mich bald,
und gellend Hohngelächter schallt.
Und immer enger wird der Kreis,
Und immer summt die Schauerweis’:
»Du gabest hin die Seligkeit,
Gehörst uns nun in Ewigkeit!«
Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856)
Im süßen Traum, bei stiller Nacht
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Deutschland.
Ein Wintermärchen
Im traurigen Monat November war’s,
Die Tage wurden trüber,
Der Wind riß von den Bäumen das Laub,
Da reist ich nach Deutschland hinüber.
Und als ich an die Grenze kam,
Da fühlt ich ein stärkeres Klopfen
In meiner Brust, ich glaube sogar
Die Augen begunnen zu tropfen.
Und als ich die deutsche Sprache vernahm,
Da ward mir seltsam zumute;
Ich meinte nicht anders, als ob das Herz
Recht angenehm verblute.
Ein kleines Harfenmädchen sang.
Sie sang mit wahrem Gefühle
Und falscher Stimme, doch ward ich sehr
Gerühret von ihrem Spiele.
Sie sang von Liebe und Liebesgram,
Aufopfrung und Wiederfinden
Dort oben, in jener besseren Welt,
Wo alle Leiden schwinden.
Sie sang vom irdischen Jammertal,
Von Freuden, die bald zerronnen,
Vom Jenseits, wo die Seele schwelgt
Verklärt in ew’gen Wonnen.
Sie sang das alte Entsagungslied,
Das Eiapopeia vom Himmel,
Womit man einlullt, wenn es greint,
Das Volk, den großen Lümmel.
Ich kenne die Weise, ich kenne den Text,
Ich kenn auch die Herren Verfasser;
Ich weiß, sie tranken heimlich Wein
Und predigten öffentlich Wasser.
Ein neues Lied, ein besseres Lied,
O Freunde, will ich euch dichten!
Wir wollen hier auf Erden schon
Das Himmelreich errichten.
Wir wollen auf Erden glücklich sein,
Und wollen nicht mehr darben;
Verschlemmen soll nicht der faule Bauch,
Was fleißige Hände erwarben.
Es wächst hienieden Brot genug
Für alle Menschenkinder,
Auch Rosen und Myrten, Schönheit und Lust,
Und Zuckererbsen nicht minder.
Ja, Zuckererbsen für jedermann,
Sobald die Schoten platzen!
Den Himmel überlassen wir
Den Engeln und den Spatzen.
Und wachsen uns Flügel nach dem Tod,
So wollen wir euch besuchen
Dort oben, und wir, wir essen mit euch
Die seligsten Torten und Kuchen.
Ein neues Lied, ein besseres Lied!
Es klingt wie Flöten und Geigen!
Das Miserere ist vorbei,
Die Sterbeglocken schweigen.
Die Jungfer Europa ist verlobt
Mit dem schönen Geniusse
Der Freiheit, sie liegen einander im Arm,
Sie schwelgen im ersten Kusse.
Und fehlt der Pfaffensegen dabei,
Die Ehe wird gültig nicht minder –
Es lebe Bräutigam und Braut,
Und ihre zukünftigen Kinder!
Ein Hochzeitkarmen ist mein Lied,
Das bessere, das neue!
In meiner Seele gehen auf
Die Sterne der höchsten Weihe –
Begeisterte Sterne, sie lodern wild,
Zerfließen in Flammenbächen –
Ich fühle mich wunderbar erstarkt,
Ich könnte Eichen zerbrechen!
Seit ich auf deutsche Erde trat,
Durchströmen mich Zaubersäfte –
Der Riese hat wieder die Mutter berührt,
Und es wuchsen ihm neu die Kräfte.
Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856)
Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen
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Interweaving elegy, indictment, and hope into a love letter to California, Look at This Blue examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril.
Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives–human, plant, and animal–in a century marked by climate emergency.
Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America’s continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke’s cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a Fulbright scholar, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award recipient, recent Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, and U.S. Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellow, has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. Following former fieldworker retraining in Santa Paula and Ventura in the mid-1980s, she began teaching, and she is now a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Hedge Coke is the editor of ten anthologies and has served as an editor and guest editor for several magazines and journals, most recently World Literature Today. The social media hashtag #poempromptsforthepandemic hosts hundreds of original prompts she crafted as public outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic. A career community advocate and organizer, she most recently directed UCR’s Writers Week, the Along the Chaparral/Pūowaina project, and the Sandhill Crane Migration Retreat and Festival.
Look at This Blue
Author: Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Language: English
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pages: 168
Publish Date: March 29, 2022
Type: Paperback
EAN/UPC 9781566896207
Price: $16.95
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Friedrike
1
Verlaß Berlin, mit seinem dicken Sande
Und dünnen Tee und überwitz’gen Leuten,
Die Gott und Welt, und was sie selbst bedeuten,
Begriffen längst mit Hegelschem Verstande.
Komm mit nach Indien, nach dem Sonnenlande,
Wo Ambrablüten ihren Duft verbreiten,
Die Pilgerscharen nach dem Ganges schreiten,
Andächtig und im weißen Festgewande.
Dort, wo die Palmen wehn, die Wellen blinken,
Am heil’gen Ufer Lotosblumen ragen
Empor zu Indras Burg, der ewig blauen;
Dort will ich gläubig vor dir niedersinken,
Und deine Füße drücken, und dir sagen:
»Madame! Sie sind die schönste aller Frauen!«
2
Der Ganges rauscht, mit klugen Augen schauen
Die Antilopen aus dem Laub, sie springen
Herbei mutwillig, ihre bunten Schwingen
Entfaltend, wandeln stolzgespreizte Pfauen.
Tief aus dem Herzen der bestrahlten Auen
Blumengeschlechter, viele neue, dringen,
Sehnsuchtberauscht ertönt Kokilas Singen –
Ja, du bist schön, du schönste aller Frauen!
Gott Kama lauscht aus allen deinen Zügen,
Er wohnt in deines Busens weißen Zelten,
Und haucht aus dir die lieblichsten Gesänge;
Ich sah Wassant auf deinen Lippen liegen,
In deinem Aug’ entdeck ich neue Welten,
Und in der eignen Welt wird’s mir zu enge.
3
Der Ganges rauscht, der große Ganges schwillt,
Der Himalaja strahlt im Abendscheine,
Und aus der Nacht der Banianenhaine
Die Elefantenherde stürzt und brüllt –
Ein Bild! Ein Bild! Mein Pferd für’n gutes Bild!
Womit ich dich vergleiche, Schöne, Feine,
Dich Unvergleichliche, dich Gute, Reine,
Die mir das Herz mit heitrer Lust erfüllt!
Vergebens siehst du mich nach Bildern schweifen,
Und siehst mich mit Gefühl und Reimen ringen –
Und, ach! du lächelst gar ob meiner Qual!
Doch lächle nur! Denn wenn du lächelst, greifen
Gandarven nach der Zither, und sie singen
Dort oben in dem goldnen Sonnensaal.
Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856)
Friedrike
1823
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“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.”
Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.”
She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.
These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.”
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Her work is published in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is a 2021 NEA Literature Fellow. Their debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), was the winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
Poems
By torrin a. greathouse
Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Language: English
Paperback: 88 pages
ISBN-10: 1571315276
ISBN-13: 978-1571315274
Publish. Date: 12/22/2020
$16.00
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A man returns home to the hearts of the great spaces.
He recounts his life, which he burned by both ends and which reveals another History of America. Also, through his own history and his characters, he tells his relationship to the world.
Through this spiritual and joyful testament, from Livingston MO to Patagonia AZ, he invites you to go back to basics and live in harmony with Nature.
This man is one of the greatest American writers and poets. His name is Jim Harrison.
Jim Harrison was born in 1937 in Grayling, Michigan, USA. He was a writer, poet and producer, known for Wolf (1994), Revenge (1990) and Legends of the Fall (1994). He died in 2016 in Patagonia, Arizona, USA.
‘Seule la terre est éternelle’
Documentary 2019
1h 56m
Directors: François Busnel & Adrien Soland
Writer: François Busnel
Stars: Jim Harrison, Louise Erdrich, Jim Fergus
François Busnel is a writer and producer, known for Seule la terre est éternelle (2019), Les Grands Mythes (2014) and Mythologies (2001).
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For more than 30 years, S corresponds with her first love, J.
There is one story she does not tell: one about three men and an alley. She learns a new story: one in which she is unable to leave the two blocks surrounding her house, and unable to tell J exactly what happened to her. Isolated by trauma and depression, S finds a way back into her skin through the strangers she meets online for sex.
The retellings of her adventures titillate J, who urges her on to more encounters. As in the 1001 Nights, this is a story made of stories: S’s own stories are interrupted and overwritten by similar, culturally reified stories. S’s life becomes scenes from everything from The Graduate and The Story of O to the words of Charles Manson and the Bible.
What emerges in words, invocations and collage is a grasping at presence and absence in the age of the internet: to be read in real time is life, and the blank screen is death.
San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author and editor of 10 books, most recently the short stories “Pretty Much Dead. She is also the author of five books of poetry, two anthologies, and a graphic novel with artist Diane DiMassa. She is also the co-editor (with Lisa Kester) of Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words, letters from the “First Female Serial Killer” from Death Row to her childhood best friend.
She is the winner of the Acker Award, the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry, the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, and a five-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
Gottlieb teaches graduate-level creative writing, and has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at all levels around the country. She received her MFA from Mills College.
Saint 1001
by Daphne Gottlieb
Publisher: MadHat Press
2021
Language: English
Paperback: 264 pages
ISBN-10: 1952335256
ISBN-13: 978-1952335259
$21.95
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“When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.”
On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest.
What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own.
Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. ‘A Ghost in the Throat’ was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and was voted Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it has been described as “powerful” (New York Times), “captivatingly original” (The Guardian) and a “masterpiece” (Sunday Business Post). Doireann is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others.
A Ghost in the Throat
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Author)
Publisher: Biblioasis
2021
Language: English
Paperbac : 336 pages
ISBN-10: 1771964111
ISBN-13: 978-1771964111
Paperback
$15.99
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To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical.
To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season.
This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.
Carlie Hoffman is a poet and translator from New Jersey. Her honors include a 92Y Discovery Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. This Alaska is her first book. She lives in New York City.
This Alaska
by Carlie Hoffman
Publisher: Four Way Books
15 september 2021
Poetry
English
Paperback
76 pages
ISBN-10: 1945588926
ISBN-13: 978-1945588921
€ 21,36
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