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Rachel Long’s much-anticipated debut collection of poems, My Darling from the Lions, explores shame, love and healing through her intimate poetic voice.
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize / the Costa Poetry Award / the Forward Prize for Best First Collection / the Jhalak Prize
British poet Rachel Long’s poems are so razor-sharp and witty that they stand out from the first line. Long is also founder of the Octavia Collective for Womxn of Colour (a ‘community-minded’ collective where women of color can safely (learn to) write poetry, a response to the lack of inclusivity within literature and the academy).
She debuted two years ago with the impressive collection My darling from the lions. This collection was nominated for five different poetry awards and was named one of the 100 must-read books of 2021 by TIME.
There is a vibrancy to her narrative poems that is extraordinary to find in a text; with dizzying precision, Long describes humorous, sensual and surreal scenes.
Sometimes, as a reader, you recognize yourself in the candid, uncomfortable moments Long shares; sometimes, on the contrary, the scenes are alienating. However, Long has a talent for making that alienation come across naturally nonetheless.
The collection can be described as a coming-of-age story, in which the speaker survives a tumultuous childhood and adolescence only to find himself in the confusing maze called adulthood.
Rachel Long creates relatable, human work that is sure to leave an impression that is sure to leave an impression long after she has once again traded the Rotterdam stage of Poetry International for her native London.
Long reveals herself as a razor-sharp and original voice on the issues of sexual politics and cultural inheritance that polarize our current moment. But it’s her refreshing commitment to the power of the individual poem that will leave the reader turning each page in eager anticipation: here is an immediate, wide-awake poetry that entertains royally, without sacrificing a note of its urgency or remarkable skill.
OPEN
This morning she told me
I sleep with my mouth open
and my hands in my hair.
I say, What, Mum, like screaming?
She says, No, baby, like abandon.
Rachel Long is a poet and the founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour, which is housed at Southbank Centre in London. My Darling from the Lions, first published by Picador in 2020, is her debut collection. She was born in London, and resides there today.
My Darling from the Lions:
Poems
by Rachel Long (Author)
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication date: September 21, 2021
Language: English
Print length: 88 pages
ISBN-10: 1951142713
ISBN-13: 978-1951142711
Paperback
$14.98
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In een prachtig parlando, dat schatplichtig is aan de oude Perzische dichters, dicht Sholeh Rezazadeh in Neem ruim zei de zee over de kracht van de natuur en de onmogelijkheid om de ander te kennen.
In haar eerste dichtbundel komen we vertrouwde elementen tegen die ze ook in haar twee lovend ontvangen romans veelvuldig verwerkte: rivieren en zeeën, bomen en bergen, vissen, vogels en vlinders.
Net als in haar romans is de natuur geen achtergrond maar een echt personage, dat ziet en voelt, dat liefheeft en vergeet. De mens zelf is een feilbaar wezen dat wanhopig zoekt naar liefde en verbinding maar zich ook verbaast over het gebrek aan aandacht voor de ander.
Sholeh Rezazadeh (1989) verhuisde in 2015 naar Nederland en begon direct met het leren van de Nederlandse taal. Haar debuutbundel Neem ruim zei de zee kwam in 2024 uit en markeerde niet alleen haar poëtische entree in Nederland maar ook het begin van haar bredere missie: meer poëzie in Nederland. Rezazadeh weet dat poëzie verbindende kracht heeft, iets wat zij tijdens haar leven in Iran heeft ervaren. Poëzie is daar in de spreektaal vervlochten zoals spreekwoorden in het Nederlands.
in welke taal zal ik je woorden geven
zodat we elkaar opnieuw kunnen vinden
in welke blik, welke stilte
gaan we elkaar weer verstaan?
in welke regel moet ik het stotteren van de zon uitleggen
laag na laag, wolk na wolk
als we van elkaar slechts schaduwen herkennen
in welke taal kan ik je omarmen
zodat je blijft
( . . . )
Uit: boekenweekgedicht (cpnb 2025)
Titel: Neem ruim zei de zee.
Gedichten
Auteur: Sholeh Rezazadeh
Taal: Nederlands
ISBN 9789026371554
Genre: Poëzie
Bindwijze: Gebonden
Verschenen: 17-03-2025
72 pagina’s
5e Druk
Uitgever Ambo|Anthos
20,99 euro
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Een jongeman meent zich alles nog te herinneren: hij stapte in een bootje op zoek naar een land met een tandarts, zijn vrouw bleef in het water achter en werd door vissers begraven, en er was ook nog ergens een kind.
Door de shock verliest hij het zicht op de gebeurtenissen, maar zijn verblijfsvergunning hangt af van hoe geloofwaardig zijn rouw klinkt.
In een reeks ongelegenheidsgedichten veegt hij zijn ondervragers met cynische precisie de mantel uit.
Decem
Ongelegenheidsgedichten voor asielverstrekkers
Auteur: Anne Provoost
Poëzie
Bindwijze: Paperback
80 pagina’s
Druk 1e
Taal: Nederlands
Uitgeverij: Querido
NUR: 306
Paperback
ISBN: 9789025317836
Publicatiedatum: 26-09-2024
Prijs: € 20,00
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Watou Arts Festival 2024
makes room for imagination
The city of Poperinge, inspirator Koen Vanmechelen and curators James Putnam and Michaël Vandebril present the 2024 edition of Watou Arts Festival. ‘Landscape of the Imagination’ will take place from July 6 to September 1. Artists and poets will showcase the power of the imagination, in dialogue with each other and with several unique locations in and around the village and castle De Lovie.
Imagination as an engine of change
The new edition of the Watou Arts Festival focuses on the power of the imagination. After two successful editions, Koen Vanmechelen and Michaël Vandebril assume their role, for the third consecutive time, as respectively inspirer and curator of poetry. James Putnam, who has previously (in 2022) assumed the role of visual arts curator, completes the three-member curatorial team.
Many of the artists developed their works in dialogue with Watou’s locality. In the spring of 2023, a record number of 200 artists registered for the open call ‘Patchwwwork’. An international jury – chaired by Koen Vanmechelen and consisting of Dirk Draulans, Jo Coucke, Marjan Doom, James Putnam, Edith Doove, Michaël Vandebril, Sabiha Keyif and Loes Vandromme – selected the participants for the summer camp. Their ideas ‘flow’ from the landscape, which resulted in some twenty new realizations. As a result, theartworks are sometimes playful, but at the same time thought-provoking.
A selection of participating artists*:
Pato Bosich (CL) – Cecile Broekaert (BE) – Monique Broekman (NL) – Linde Carrijn & Dijf Sanders (BE) – Mat Collishaw (GB) – Matthijs De Block (BE) – Lieze De Middeleir (BE) – Werner de Valk (NL) – Joost Elschot (NL) – Karolina Halatek (PL) – Mariko Hori (JP) – John Isaacs (GB) – Lafleur & Bogaert (HT & BE) – Ilya Kabakov (RU) – Carel Lanters & Lee Eun Young (NL & KR) – Mashid Mohadjerin & Jan De Vroede (IR & BE) – Daan Navarrete-van der Pluijm (NL) – Alice Obee (BE) – Mikes Poppe (BE) – Roundhouse Platform (US) – Marina Resende Santos (BR) – Anila Rubiku (AL) – Sanne van Balen (NL) – Lieke van der Meer (NL) – Lie van der Werff (NL) – Laura Vandewynckel (BE) – Koen Vanmechelen (BE) *more to be announced
A selection of participating poets*:
Benno Barnard (NL) – Moya De Feyter (BE) – Dominique De Groen (BE) – Paul Demets (BE) – Al Galidi (NL) – Ingmar Heytze (NL) – Doina Ioanid (RO) – Frank Keizer (NL) – collectief Letterzetter (Imane Karroumi – Loeke Vanhoutteghem – Veronica Schmalz – Alice Boudry – Maite Vanthournout) (BE) –Jens Meijen (BE) – Carl Norac (BE) – Maria van Daalen (NL) – Marjolijn van Heemstra (NL) – Anke Verschueren (BE) – Billie Vos (BE) – Daniëlle Zawadi (NL) – Emma Zuiderveen (NL) *more to be announced
KUNSTENFESTIVAL / ARTSFESTIVAL / WATOU 2024
06/07 TM 01/09/2024
More on website:
https://www.kunstenfestivalwatou.be/
& https://www.poperinge.be/
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In her new collection Who Will Make The Fire, published in association with New River Press, Bellamacina employs metaphors of wind, dawn, trees and fire to explore an interior world.
A personal book about love, loss, nature, depression and recovery, the wind in Who Will Make The Fire becomes the biographer of the self; a way to trace this everevolving garden, that must die, again and again, like a wild bird shedding its unimaginable feathers.
Who Will Make The Fire questions what it is to really live, to live with stillness and fire; to combat the digital world and to get back to the earth and let the hidden circle of nature find its way back into the self.
‘Dreamlike, with bite. Bellamacina’s work is brutal, floral, blood-soaked and knowing, in the way that nature is both cruel and beautiful.’ ― Florence Welch
Greta Bellamacina published her first collection ‘Kaleidoscope’ in 2011. In 2014 she was short-listed as the Young Poet Laureate of London. In 2015 she edited ‘A Collection of Contemporary British Love Poetry’ a survey of British love poetry from Ted Hughes til now, it features the work of Wendy Cope, Emily Berry, Annie Freud and Sam Riviere. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in LA. and Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine says Greta, ” is garnering critical acclaim for her way with words and her ability to translate the classic poetic form into the contemporary creative landscape.” Greta’s new collection “Perishing Tame” is a dazzling and frank meditation on motherhood, female identity, ennui and love. Greta and her work have featured in The Guardian, The Times, The Evening Standard, Dazed & Confused, I-D Magazine, Interview Magazine, British Vogue, Elle , Wonderland, and Hunger Magazine. She has performed her poetry on CNN, BBC World News, BBC Radio 4 , BBC London, BBC Radio 2 with Jonathan Ross and BBC Radio 3 on The Verb poetry show.
Greta Bellamacina:
Who Will Make the Fire
Publisher: Cheerio Publishing
Publication Date: 20 Jun. 2024
Language: English
Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1739440595
ISBN-13 978-1739440596
£12.99
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“Sla je op de vlucht om iemand te vergeten of om diegene juist dicht bij je te houden? Zul je diens lelijke kopjes ooit terugvinden in de kringloopwinkel? Hoeveel koeiendagen heb je nodig voor je weet hoe je moet rouwen?”
De dood waart in verschillende gedaantes rond door de derde dichtbundel van Kira Wuck.
Gelukkig weet zij ook hoe je verdriet kunt verleggen. Troost blijkt onder meer te vinden bij andere lichamen, een heelal boven je bed of in de Burger King.
Soms moet je simpelweg weer eens echt goed naar jezelf kijken, om te zien :
‘hoe mijn ledematen zich konden uitvouwen zodat ze jou zachtjes konden raken als het riet’.
Kira Wuck (1978) is dochter van een Finse moeder en een Indonesische vader. Ze groeide op in Amsterdam, maar voelt zich thuis bij het absurdisme en de melancholie uit de noordelijke landen. Voor haar poëziedebuut Finse meisjes ontving ze de Lucy B. en C.W. van der Hoogtprijs en nominaties voor de C. Buddingh’-Prijs en de Jo Peters PoëziePrijs. Ook haar verhalenbundel Noodlanding, haar tweede dichtbundel De zee heeft honger en haar debuutroman Knikkerkoning werden zeer goed ontvangen.
Koeiendagen
Kira Wuck (auteur)
Uitgever: De Geus
Eerste editie (18 januari 2024)
Taal: Nederlands
Paperback: 64 pagina’s
ISBN-10: 9044549863
ISBN-13: 978-9044549867
Afmetingen: 15 x 22 cm
Paperback
€18,99
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Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection.
Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?
Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers―John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust―to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past.
Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
Maya C. Popa is a naturally gifted poet, lucidly engaged with the most profound questions we face in our collective responsibilities and our relations with each other. She writes with love and wonder of a world poised at a perilous moment: “My children, will they exist by the time / it’s irreversible?” she asks. “Will they live / astonished at the thought of ice / not pulled from the mouth of a machine?”
To read her poems is to pause again and again at the precision of imagery, breadth of ideas, and the warmth and generousness of her lyric voice.
Maya C. Popa is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems
by Maya C. Popa (Author)
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
November 8, 2022
Language: English
Hardcover: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1324021365
ISBN-13: 978-1324021360
Hardcover $21.49
Paperback $15.99
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To Winter
Stay, season of calm love and soulful snows!
There is a subtle sweetness in the sun,
The ripples on the stream’s breast gaily run,
The wind more boisterously by me blows,
And each succeeding day now longer grows.
The birds a gladder music have begun,
The squirrel, full of mischief and of fun,
From maples’ topmost branch the brown twig throws.
I read these pregnant signs, know what they mean:
I know that thou art making ready to go.
Oh stay! I fled a land where fields are green
Always, and palms wave gently to and fro,
And winds are balmy, blue brooks ever sheen,
To ease my heart of its impassioned woe.
Claude McKay
(1889 – 1948)
To Winter
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A dynamic, moving hybrid work that celebrates Black youth, often too fleeting, and examines Black lives lost to police violence.
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.
A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015).
When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again:
Poems by A. Van Jordan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 6, 2023)
Language: English
Hardcover
144 pages
ISBN-10 : 1324050934
ISBN-13 : 978-1324050933
Price $26.95
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Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize Listed in The Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2022.
Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in PoetryAmerican Book Award-winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.
Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, dg okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities.
Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
dg nanouk okpik was born and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She graduated from Salish Kootenai College with an AFA in Liberal Arts and Liberal Studies, and later attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, graduating with an AFA and a BFA in Creative Writing before receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast College. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012).
Blood Snow
by Dg Nanouk Okpik
Publisher: Wave Books
Publish Date: October 18, 2022
Pages 96
Language: English
Paperback
EAN/UPC: 9781950268634
BISAC Categories:
Native American
Women Authors
Price $18.00
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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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Kunstenfestival Watou vindt plaats van 1 juli tot en met 3 september 2023 en krijgt de slagzin /kom.po’zi.ci.o:/ mee. Dertig kunstenaars en twintig dichters ‘componeren’ nieuw in situ werk.
Het kunstenfestival pakt dit jaar ook uit met enkele nieuwe locaties, een podcast met Jelle Van Riet en een poëziefietsroute met oorlogsgedichten.
Het startschot van het kunstenfestival werd gegeven met de lancering van een open call in de lente van 2022. 170 kunstenaars uit binnen- en buitenland stelden zich vorig jaar kandidaat voor Patchwwwork.
Een interdisciplinaire en internationale jury selecteerde dertig kunstenaars die in de zomer van 2022 in het dorp kampeerden. Ze gingen in dialoog met de inwoners, voelden het landschap en dompelden zich onder in het festival dat die zomer plaatsvond. Op basis van hun ervaringen, werkten ze projectvoorstellen uit voor nieuwe installaties. Uit deze voorstellen selecteerde de jury 19 projecten die te zien zijn op Kunstenfestival Watou 2023.
Deelnemende kunstenaars
Beatrijs Albers en Reggy Timmermans (BE) – Niels Albers (NL) – Funda Zeynep Ayguler (DE) – Iwert Bernakiewicz (BE) – Sven Boel (BE) – Cloé Decroix (FR) – Alexandra Dementieva (BE) – Niel de Vries (NL) – Griet Dobbels (BE) – Philippe Druez (BE) – Juls Gabs (UK) – Benoît Géhanne (FR) – Marilyne Grimmer (FR) – Marc Hamandjian (FR) – Nathalie Hunter (BE) – Maarten Inghels (BE) – Pierre Mertens (BE) – Charlotte Mumm (DE) – Öznur Özturk (BE) – Alain Platel en Berlinde De Bruyckere (BE) – Jiajia Qi (NL) – Henk Schut (NL) – Robert Ssempijja (UG) – Joris Vermassen (BE) – Koen Vanmechelen (BE) – Louisiana Van Onna (NL) – Wouter Vanderstede en Peter Simon (BE) – Various Artists – Esther Venrooij (NL) – ZONDERWERK (BE)
& Dichters
Alara Adilow (NL) – Anna Broeksma (NL) – Joost Decorte (BE) – Lotte Dodion (BE) – Radna Fabias (NL) – Marie Ginet (FR) – Max Greyson (BE) – Luuk Gruwez (BE) – Maarten Inghels (BE) – Ilya Kaminsky (US/UKR) – Mustafa Kör (BE) – Caroline Lamarche (BE) – Marije Langelaar (NL) – Delphine Lecompte (BE) – Lisette Lombé (BE) – Gerry Loose (UK) – Nisrine Mbarki (NL) – Tijl Nuyts (BE) – Johanna Pas (BE) – Siel Verhanneman (BE)
Kunstenfestival Watou 2023
More on website:
https://www.kunstenfestivalwatou.be/
& https://www.poperinge.be/
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