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This keenly anticipated new collection from the Costa Poetry Award-winner speaks ‘out of fear and grief into splendour and joy’.
Following their award-winning debut, Flèche (2019), comes Mary Jean Chan’s gleaming second collection: Bright Fear. Through poems which engage fearlessly with intertwined themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy, Chan’s latest work explores a family’s evolving dynamics, as well as microaggressions stemming from queerphobia and anti-Asian racism that accompanied the Covid pandemic.
Yet Bright Fear remains deeply attuned to moments of beauty, tenderness and grace. It asks how we might find a home within our own bodies, in places both distant and near, and in the ‘constructed space’ of the poem. The contemplative central sequence, Ars Poetica, traces the radically healing and transformative role of poetry during the poet’s teenage and adult years, culminating in a polyphonic reconciliation of tongues. Throughout, Chan offers us new and galvanising ways to ‘withstand the quotidian tug- / of-war between terror and love’.
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Chan won the 2018 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2017 and 2019, receiving an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. Chan co-edited the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan, and is a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chan serves as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and lives in Oxford.
Most mornings, you see the face
of a boy in the mirror. You
expect to fall in love with him,
someday. Meanwhile, your fingers
brush the wrist of another girl as
you jostle into the assembly hall,
and you understand that sin was
never meant to be easy, only
sweet. What might light up the
pond you sat beside in dreams,
eyeing skin and so much depth it
would be years before you dared?
What curvature of tongue might
you taste, as if another’s breath
were blessing? One night, you find
yourself back there. You dream.
A voice says: Hell is not other
people. You sink, stripped of the
glowing dress you wore for
thousands of days.
(fragment poem)
Bright Fear
by Mary Jean Chan
(Poems)
Publisher: Faber & Faber;
Main edition
3 August 2023
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0571378900
ISBN-13: 978-0571378906
Dimensions: 15.8 x 0.6 x 20.5 cm
Paperback
72 pages
£10.99
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In her first book of poems since the scintillating More Anon: Selected Poems, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura, trenchant sounding out of inner and outer weathers.
What You Want is a book of core landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Meditative, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and shapes an ambient unease.
Whether skying with John Constable or walking on wintry paths in our precarious republic, the poet channels what Wordsworth called “moods of my own mind” while she scans for our common horizon.
Here are poems filled with gulls and harbors, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumored sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways.
From Sappho to the Luminist painter Fitz Henry Lane, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a book alive to the cosmos as well as to our moment, with its many vexations and intermittent illuminations.
In poems of powerful command and delicate invitation, moving from swift notations to sustained sequences, this collection sees McLane testing what (if anything) might “outlast the coming heat.”
And meanwhile, “There’s no end / to beauty and shit.”
Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published eight books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award, and Some Say, Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets, a New York Times Notable Book. Other works include two monographs on British romantic poetics and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech and have recently appeared in the London Review of Books, Poesia, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. Her essays have appeared in the LRB, The New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Her latest book is What You Want: poems, just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Penguin UK.
What You Want.
Poem
by Maureen N. McLane
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2 mei 2023)
Language: English
128 pages
ISBN-10 0374607257
ISBN-13 978-0374607258
Hardcover
$27.00
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Beautiful in the Mouth was selected by Thomas Lux as winner of BOA’s A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize and it debuted in the top ten on the Poetry Foundation bestseller list.
In it, Kuipers combines frank sensuality with sincere emotion, yielding poems that travel from New York City to the American West on a exploration of love and loss.
Set against both literal and figurative geography—the empty bedroom of a dead child, a clear-cut hillside outside a logging town—these poems examine how loss transforms our most unwilling landscapes.
Thomas Lux selected this debut collection as winner of BOA’s A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize.
In his foreword he writes, “I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems.
We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new.”
Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.
Beautiful in the Mouth
(A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America)
by Keetje Kuipers (Author),
Thomas Lux (Foreword)
Paperback
2010
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.; First Edition (April 1, 2010)
Language: English
Paperback: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1934414336
ISBN-13: 978-1934414330
$17.00
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One of Library Journal’s “Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014,” The Keys to the Jail asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires.
With daring leaps and unflinching observations, these richly textured lyrics travel from Montana’s great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that’s lost its way.
The Keys to the Jail asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires.
Keetje Kuipers is a poet of daring leaps and unflinching observations, whose richly textured lyrics travel from Montana’s great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that’s lost its way.
(. . .) Shirtless
in the phosphorescent gloom of streetlamps,
they lie suspended. This is my one good
life—watching the exchange of embraces,
counting the faces assembled outside
the ice-cream shop, sweet tinge of urine by
the bridge above the tracks, broken bike lock
of the gay couple’s hands, desperate clapping
of dark pigeons—who will take it from me?
(. . .)
Dolores Park (fragment)
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Keetje Kuipers’s debut collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and is currently an assistant professor at Auburn University.
Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Oregon Literary Arts.
In 2007 Keetje completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley. She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in 2010 by BOA Editions. It contains poems previously published in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others. You can also listen to her read her work—which has been nominated seven years in a row for the Pushcart Prize—at the online audio archive From the Fishouse. Keetje’s second book, The Keys to the Jail, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in the spring of 2014, and contains poems previously published in American Poetry Review, Jubilat, and the Indiana Review.
Keetje Kuipers was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2009-2011, and she was the Emerging Writing Lecturer at Gettysburg College from 2011-2012. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University where she lives with her family and their dog, Bishop (named after Elizabeth, of course).
Keetje Kuipers
Title: The Keys to the Jail
Poems
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
2014
Language: English
Paperback
96 pages
ISBN-10: 1938160266
ISBN-13: 978-1938160264
$17.00
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De poëzie van Ruth Lasters is aards, wil aards zijn.
In een weloverwogen syntaxis, met een voorkeur voor het onverwachte perspectief en een warm hart voor de zwakkeren, componeert ze versbeelden die afwijkend zijn en energiek, muzikaal en beeldend.
Tijgerbrood gaat over het verlangen om voor altijd toevlucht te kunnen zoeken, op te lossen in pure vorm, in woordenloosheid. De auteur is haar vroegere compartimenten kwijt.
De dichter, leerkracht, kindervrije vrouw, partner, pacifist, klimaattobber en kunstliefhebber werden samengekneed tot één wezen dat haar hoop, bekommernissen en angsten meer en meer durft te erkennen als die van iedereen.
Als brood leven is, zoals men zegt, is tijgerbrood een leven in camouflagevel om als observator ongehinderd de stem te kunnen opvangen van de hele maatschappij.
Auteur(s) : Ruth Lasters
Uitgeverij: Uitgeverij G.A. Van Oorschot
ISBN: 9789028231030
Taal: Nederlands
Uitvoering: Paperback
Aantal pagina’s: 80
Verschijningsdatum: februari 2023
Afmetingen: 220 x 140 x 10 mm.
Paperback 19.50
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One of the English language’s best-loved living poets, in Red: Politics – one of four themed collections – Carol Ann Duffy presents us with her favourites among her political poetry.
Drawing on work written over four decades and arranged chronologically, Duffy also adds to the selection her poem written for Danny Boyle’s Pages of the Sea memorial for The Great War.
It makes for a sequence that is searching, memorializing, healing.
Carol Ann Duffy:
Politics (Poetry)
Picador Publisher
02 March 2023
ISBN: 9781529096910
64 pages
Hardcover
£9.55
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The hidden history of a vulnerable gay man whose life and death were turned into tabloid fodder.
In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David’s gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality.
In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.
With a poet’s eulogistic and psychological intensity, Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable.
It’s impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.
Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a hauntingly poetic narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.
Steven Reigns is a Los Angeles-based poet and educator and was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. Alongside over a dozen chapbooks, he has published the collections Inheritance and Your Dead Body is My Welcome Mat. Reigns holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida, a Master of Clinical Psychology from Antioch University, and is a fourteen-time recipient of The Los Angeles County’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ Artist in Residency Grant. He edited My Life is Poetry, showcasing his students’ work from the first-ever autobiographical poetry workshop for LGBT seniors. Reigns has lectured and taught writing workshops around the country to LGBT youth and people living with HIV. Currently he is touring The Gay Rub, an exhibition of rubbings from LGBT landmarks, facilitates the monthly Lambda Lit Book Club, and is at work on a new collection of poetry.
A Quilt for David Paperback
by Steven Reigns (Author)
2021
Language: English
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Paperback
128 pages
ISBN-10: 0872868818
ISBN-13: 978-0872868816
$11.12
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Genesis P-Orridge, the mind and voice behind Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions, began their artistic journey in the 1960’s writing poetry.
Heartworm Press is proud to present hundreds of never before seen or published poems by this legendary, influential original.
Genesis P-Orridge, the mind and voice behind Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions, began their artistic journey in the 1960’s writing poetry.
This collection introduces Genesis as a thoughtful innovator and irreverent provocateur with over two decades of poetry, from beat to concrete, and shows the progression of the self, beginning the book under the given name of Neil Megson and eventually growing into the enigmatic Genesis P-Orridge.
Heartworm Press is proud to present hundreds of never before seen or published poems including 50 images with an intro by friend and collaborator Wesley Eisold.
Genesis P-Orridge (1950 – 2020) was a singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, and occultist who rose to notability as the founder of the COUM Transmissions artistic collective and lead vocalist of seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle. P-Orridge was also a founding member of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth occult group, and fronted the experimental band Psychic TV.
Coumplete Poems – 1960’s & 70’s
by Genesis P-Orridge
Pub Date: 05/01/2023
Publisher: Heartworm Press
ISBN 979-8-9859385-2-4
SKU#: D19A
Binding: Paperback
Pages:212
Price: $ 28.00
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From “one of the essential voices in American poetry” (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present.
The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.
a “Working Life” is a book transfixed by the everyday: the “sweet accumulation” of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover’s foot on the bed.
These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lock-downs.
Myles’s lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.
With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a “Working Life” shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.
Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include Pathetic Literature, For Now (an essay/talk about writing), Evolution, Afterglow (a dog memoir), I Must Be Living Twice: new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. The Trip, their super-8 puppet road film can be seen on YouTube. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.
a “Working Life”
Author: Eileen Myles
Poetry
Language: English
Publisher: Grove Press
Publication Date: 2023-04-18
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780802161895
ISBN-10: 0802161898
Pages: 288
List Price: $26.00
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Suicide is often framed as betrayal, even though we live in a world that betrays us.
When this world tells us that death is better, what does it mean to have faith in life?
JUDAS & SUICIDE is a poetry collection navigating religion and suicidality.
It approaches these topics through the lens of Black family and community, sadness, medication, sexual violence, the prison industrial complex, media, and Bible verses.
JUDAS & SUICIDE explores how to be convinced to stay alive without feeling obligated to.
Maya Williams (ey/em, they/them, and she/her) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow and the seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine.
Judas & Suicide
Poems
by Maya Williams
Publ. Date: 5/23/2023
Publisher: Game Over Books
ISBN: 979-8-9878871-0-3
Binding: PAPERBACK
Pages: 80
Price: $ 18.00
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Hoe betoverend te kunnen spreken met alle dingen.
In haar tweede dichtbundel Anker Kruis Hart belicht Sofie Verdoodt de voortdurende metamorfose van mens, dier en ding. Erotiek, verlies en moederschap raken hierbij verknoopt.
Net wanneer de tijd niets meer overlaat om te wissen, gooit Verdoodt haar anker uit. Van veraf of van heel dichtbij aanschouwen we de grote oversteek, de zielsverhuizing, of de gedaantewissel van een reeks personages, waaronder een lyrisch ‘ik’.
Deze gedichten zijn als intieme brieven of elegieën voor personages die uit de eigen as blijven verrijzen. Sofie Verdoodt (1983) debuteerde in 2014 bij PoëzieCentrum met Doodwater.
Haar werk verscheen in tijdschriften en bloemlezingen als Poëziekrant, De Brakke Hond, Nieuw Groot Verzenboek, De Volksverheffing en De Grote Inkijk. Ze werkte mee aan muzikale projecten van BARST en Amenra. Als doctor in de kunstwetenschappen doceert ze en schrijft ze essays over film en kunst.
Anker Kruis Hart
Gedichten
Auteur: Sofie Verdoodt
Uitgeverij: Poeziecentrum VZW
Taal: Nederlands
ISBN: 9789056553579
Uitvoering: Paperback
Aantal pagina’s: 42
2023
Afmetingen: 200x150x5 mm.
20,00 euro
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Available for the first time in paperback, How To Be Invisible collects the seminal lyrics of Kate Bush, selected by the artist and brought together in a beautiful edition with cover artwork from Jim Kay.
Selected and arranged by the author, How To Be Invisible presents the lyrics of Kate Bush in a beautiful new paperback edition featuring a new cover by illustrator Jim Kay.
‘The greatest singer-songwriter of the past 40 years, whose work is complex, ethereal and filled with so many secrets that one can listen to the albums for decades and still discover new delights every time[…] there’s not a spare word anywhere in Bush’s work. Everything means something.’ – Irish Times
Kate Bush is an English singer, songwriter, musician, dancer and record producer. Rising to prominence with her debut single ‘Wuthering Heights’, she has released ten studio albums, all of which have charted in the UK Top Ten. She has been nominated for thirteen Brit Awards, winning for Best British Female Artist in 1987, and has been nominated for three Grammy Awards. In 2002 she received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, was appointed a CBE in the 2013 New Years Honours, and was twice-nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. How to Be Invisible, a collection of Bush’s lyrics, was published by Faber & Faber in 2018 and was a Rough Trade and Belfast Telegraph Book of the Year.
How To Be Invisible
Kate Bush (author)
New introduction by Kate Bush
Language: English
Paperback
224 Pages
Published: 06/04/2023
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN-13: 9780571383023
ISBN-10: 0571383025
Number of pages: 224
$19.95
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