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Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott anchor this groundbreaking, soulful poetry collection. Imagine a night of a hundred poets reading their work to an audience of intensely engaged, responsive, and lively people—say three thousand of them. They are a loud bunch when it is time to make noise, but they are silent as congregants at prayer when the poets’ language entrances them. Imagine the reading taking place under a tent pitched on a grassy lawn that overlooks the Caribbean Sea. Imagine that this is not the north coast of Jamaica, with its cliche of white sands and coconut trees, a place glutted with cruise ship passengers and bewildered tourists; imagine instead a rugged coastline, a landscape full of the kind of character we find in the weather-beaten faces of wise old folk; imagine fishermen, farmers, ordinary workers, schoolchildren, and traveling people moving around as if they have been in this place forever and as if they all belong . . . Imagine one hundred poets, some whose names you know and some you have never heard of, stepping onto the stage, opening their mouths and hearts, and singing out poems of great variety, complexity, beauty, and passion . . . Imagine laughter and tears, imagine sighs of familiarity and moans of pain, imagine tragedies enacted in the words that move through the shelter of the tent; imagine a poem like a fist, or a sharply painful open palm, or the tender caress of fingers, or the firm grasp of a handshake. Imagine stories dropping like seeds into the ground and growing rapidly and wildly all around you. This is the setting and mood of the greatest little festival in the greatest little village in the greatest little country in the world, and this anthology is what the festival would look like were all 100 poets who have read at Calabash over the years to come together on a late-May weekend to read. So Much Things to Say is a unique gathering of a group of poets who represent at least one reckoning of the place of contemporary poetry in 2010. Contributors include Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Martin Espada, Terrance Hayes, Valzyna Mort, Sonia Sanchez, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Staceyann Chin, and 88 others.
In What's a Black Critic to Do II, literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse once again gathers together profiles, reviews, interviews, and essays that examine race, culture, and multiculturalism through the lens of literature. This collection, featuring well-known writers, such as Lawrence Hill, Afua Cooper, Christopher Paul Curtis, Natasha Trethewey, Toni Morrison, David Chariandy, Joseph Boyden, and Kwame Dawes. What's a Black Critic to Do II is of especial interest to black readers as well as teachers, librarians, and book clubs. This companion to 2003's What's a Black Critic to Do? constitutes a candid conversation about race in an ostensibly "post-racial" world.
The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to South Carolina Writers expands the range of writers included in the landmark South Carolina Encyclopedia. This guide updates the entries on writers featured in the original encyclopedia and augments that list substantially with dozens of new essays on additional authors from the late eighteenth century to the present who have contributed to the Palmetto State's distinctive literary heritage. Each profile in this concise reference includes essential biographical facts and critical assessments to place the featured writers in the larger context of South Carolina's literary tradition. The guide comprises 128 entries written by more than sixty-nine literary scholars, and it also highlights the sixty-nine writers inducted thus far into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, which serves as the state's literary hall of fame. Rich in natural beauty and historic complexity, South Carolina has long been a source of inspiration for writers. The talented novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, journalists, historians, and other writers featured here represent the countless individuals who have shared tales and lore of South Carolina. The guide includes a foreword by George Singleton, author of two novels, four short story collections and one nonfiction book, and a 2010 inductee of the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, finalist. "Dawes's verse has an expressive power and lyric resonance that can be attributed to a trans-Atlantic consciousness weaned on the spiritual sources of reggae."--New York Times Book Review "Raised in Jamaica, Dawes takes some of his cues, and this book's title, from reggae music. But his voice in these long and short poems and sequences selected from each of his many books, which began appearing in the mid-1990s, is crystal clear, accessible and serious, mixing a timeless myth-making energy with a strong contemporary conscience..." --National Public Radio "This first U.S. selection from the Jamaica-bred, Nebraska-based poet (he also has a reputation in Britain) is his 16th book of verse in just 20 years; it reveals a writer syncretic, effusive, affectionate, alert to familial joys, but also sensitive to history, above all to the struggles of African diasporic history--the Middle Passage, sharecropper-era South Carolina, the Kingston of Bob Marley, whose song gives this big book its title. Dawes is at home with cityscape and seascape, patois and transatlantic tradition." --Publishers Weekly " Dawes] is highly original and intelligent, possessing poetic sensibility that is rooted and sound, unshakeable and unstopped, both in its vibrancy and direction. He writes poetry as it ought to be written."--World Literature Today "Dawes asserts himself as man and artist and finally, with grace achieved and grace said, sits down to begin life's tragic feast . . . a writer of major significance."--Brag Book "The notion of a reggae aesthetic--of the language moving to a different rhythm, under different kinds of pressure . . . underpins all Dawes' work as poet."--Stewart Brown Born in Ghana, raised in Jamaica, and educated in Canada, Kwame Dawes is a dynamic and electrifying poet. In this generous collection, new poems appear with the best work from fifteen previous volumes. Deeply nuanced in exploring the human condition, Dawes' poems are filled with complex emotion and consistently remind us what it means to be a global citizen. From "The Lessons": Fingers can be trained to make shapes that, pressed just right on the gleaming keys, will make a sound that can stay tears or cause them to flow for days. Anyone can learn to make some music, but not all have the heart to beat out the tunes that will turn us inside out. . . Kwame Dawes is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, two novels, four anthologies, and numerous essays and plays. In 2009 he won an Emmy Award for his interactive website, LiveHopeLove.com. Since 2011 he has taught at the University of Nebraska, and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry "The Caribbean policeman is a character both foreign and familiar at the center of this intimate debut poetry collection. Combining Jamaican patois and American English, it tells the story of violence, loss, and recovery in the wake of colonialism." --O, the Oprah Magazine One of LargeUp's Ten Great Books by Caribbean Authors in 2015 "Jamaican-born Channer draws on the rich cultural heritage of the Caribbean and his own unique experience for this energetic, linguistically inventive first collection of poetry....Channer's lyrics pop and reel in sheer musicality....A dextrous, ambitious collection that delivers enough acoustic acrobatics to keep readers transfixed 'till the starlings sing out.'" --Booklist "Channer...skillfully examines the brutality that permeates Jamaica's history in this moving debut poetry collection....Channer's poems rise to present the reader with a panoramic view of a place 'built on old foundations of violence, ' of 'geographies where genocide and massacre/hang like smoke from coal fires.'" --Publishers Weekly " Channer's] technique and foresight bring the underlying story of the collection, and the history he expounds, into full daylight and the collection succeeds in revealing a life and history as an essay might, but with the beauty of lyric added to narrative in an exercise that is cohesive in its ability to maintain its trajectory. It is a notable accomplishment." --New York Journal of Books "Jamaica's Colin Channer has been mixing patois in his romantic tales since his 1998 debut novel, Waiting In Vain. In 2015, he blessed us with Providential (Akashic), a poetry collection that touches on the full range of Jamaican languages and dreams." --LargeUp "Fear stalks everyone, police and pursued, and Channer's poems arrest us to that truth in syncopated, shocking fevers." --Caribbean Beat Magazine " Channer's] strongest offering yet....Providential perfectly clothes the written word with matching tone and atmosphere. Welcome to the hallowed halls of Fine Poetry " --Kaieteur News (Guyana) "Channer has written a fine set of poems that, like classical myth, start with the search for the lost father and end with the found son, the poet in the process replacing the lost father with a found self." --Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter "The voices and irrepressible human dance of the clan pulsing at this book's center leave me breathless and I realize how close the voices are to my own, how much I crave this dance." --Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah Channer's debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humor, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection. Combined with a capacity to offer physical landscapes with painterly sensitivity and care, a graceful mining of the nuances of Jamaican patwa and American English, and a judicious use of metaphor and similie, Providential is a work of "heartical" insight and vulnerability. Not since Claude McKay's Constab Ballads of 1912 has a writer attempted to tackle the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman. Now, over a century later, Channer draws on his own knowledge of Jamaican culture, on his complex relationship with his father (a Jamaican policeman), and frames these poems within the constantly humane principles of Rasta and reggae. The poems within Providential manage to turn the intricate relationships between a man and his father, a man and his mother, and man and his country, and a man and his children into something akin to grace.
"Mort is a fireball. . . . Personal, political, and passionate, Mort's poetry will surely sustain many reading audiences. Highly recommended."—Library Journal "A one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight."—Midwest Book Review "Mort's style—tough and terse almost to the point of aphorism—recalls the great Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska."—Los Angeles Times Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic Belarusian poet, and Collected Body is her first collection composed in English. Whether writing about sex, relatives, violence, or fish markets as opera, Mort insists on vibrant, dark truths. "Death hands you every new day like a golden coin," she writes, then warns that as the bribe grows "it gets harder to turn down." "Preface" on a bare tree— a red beast, so still, it has become the tree. now it's the tree that prowls over the beast, a cautious beast itself. a stone thrown at its breast is so fast—the stone has become the beast. now it's the beast that throws itself like a stone, blood like a dog-rose tree on a windy day, and the moon is trying on your face for the annual masquerade of the dead. death decides to wait to hear more. so death mews: first—your story, then—me. Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. Her American debut, Factory of Tears, appeared in 2008 and she was featured on the cover of Poets & Writers. She has received many honors and awards, including a Civitella Raineri fellowship. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
The second collection by "one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean" (The Globe and Mail). Assured but chance-inflected, ever rooted in the local but always world-aware, Console reconsiders languages, geographies, and memories as luminous soundscapes. With lyric dexterity, Colin Channer jolts old notions of New England, cross-fading from the Berkshires to Anguilla, from Connecticut to Senegal. A dissolve to the poet’s childhood in Jamaica occurs after glimpsing an old record player in Providence, leading to the title poem’s meditations on reggae, religion, marriage, justice, and transgressions in the home. With allusive links to photography, music, sea mammals, mistranslation, and the universal ritual of “the walk,” Console reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out. Includes 8 black-and-white photographs
A suite of poems about a percussionist in 1970 Spanish Harlem music circles, from the author of The Crazy Bunch A National Book Critics Circle 2014 Finalist for Poetry Through dream song and elegy, alternate takes and tempos, prizewinning poet Willie Perdomo’s third collection crackles with vitality and dynamism as it imagines the life of a percussionist, rebuilding the landscape of his apprenticeship, love, diaspora, and death. At the beginning of his infernal journey, Shorty Bon Bon recalls his live studio recording with a classic 1970s descarga band, sharing his recollection with an unidentified poet. This opening section is followed by a call-and-response with his greatest love, a singer named Rose, and a visit to Puerto Rico that inhabits a surreal nationalistic dreamscape, before a final jam session where Shorty recognizes his end and a trio of voices seek to converge on his elegy.
Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott anchor this groundbreaking, soulful poetry collection.
"A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pithy, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems." --Tricycle: The Buddhist Review Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life. Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet's death, have been translated into English here, the vast majority of them for the first time. Yoel Hoffmann explores the attitudes and customs surrounding death in historical and present-day Japan and gives examples of how these have been reflected in the nation's literature in general. The development of writing jisei is then examined--from the longing poems of the early nobility and the more "masculine" verses of the samurai to the satirical death poems of later centuries. Zen Buddhist ideas about death are also described as a preface to the collection of Chinese death poems by Zen monks that are also included. Finally, the last section contains three hundred twenty haiku, some of which have never been assembled before, in English translation and romanized in Japanese.