Download Free Write About An Empty Birdcage Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Write About An Empty Birdcage and write the review.

With an ironic swish of the skirt, Elaina M. Ellis has delivered a sweetly strange first collection of poems. Reinventing femininity with each teasing line-break, Ellis pulls sexuality from form, and vulnerability from meter. By turns playful, blunt, and prayerful, Write About an Empty Birdcage documents the painful end of a romantic relationship; revels in the budding of new desire; and ultimately allows hope to climb quietly in through the back window. The poems which explicitly explore identity -- femaleness, Jewishness, queerness -- do so with a critique of power that blends humor, bloodied confession, and a reverence for tension. Ellis is a new poet to watch out for, neither belonging to the full-open swing of spoken word, nor to the inaccessibility of academia: the sonnet is a torch song, the prose poem is a fist. Here you find all the fleshy reveal of the truth, without the ease of nakedness. Write About an Empty Birdcage is a book of poetry that is worth the work of undressing. Elaina M. Ellis has a voice that cuts through wool. Rich in sound and sense, meaning and madness, she signals and signifies. Her imagery comes from a place of truth and her people sweat and breathe. Hers is a talent that can set the world on fire. -Jenny Factor, Antioch University Los Angeles
Popular in queer communities, anti-war organizations, college campuses and women/gender studies programs, Andrea Gibson's second book of poems, The Madness Vase's topics range from hate crimes to playgrounds, from international conflict to hometowns, from falling in love to the desperation of loneliness. Gibson's work seizes us by the collar and hauls us inside some of her darkest moments, then releases out the other side. Moments later, we find ourselves inhaling words that fill us with light. Their luminous imagery is a buoy that allows us to resurface from their world, clutching new possibilities of our own, and linger in our psyches and entreat us to action. They challenge us to grow into our own skin. By the time you finish reading The Madness Vase, you too will believe, "Folks like us/We've got shoulder blades that rust in the rain/But they are still G-sharp/Whenever our spinal chords are tuned to the key of redemption/So go ahead world/Pick us/To make things better."
C.R. Avery's audaciously charismatic second book, 38 Bar Blues, is a tome of poetry loaded with bar stool musicality and brass knuckle poetry. Welcome to a clear glimpse into a motel 50 miles outside of town, a window into the life of a modern troubadour and the courage of a young father trying to keep the highway of diamonds shining while singing the song of innocence. C.R. Avery's writing flows like a Tennessee Williams stage play, from haiku-size poems to longer erotic tales that sink the reader deeper into backstage smoke of Avery’s worlds. 38 Bar Blues is like a Bob Dylan setlist; a play constructed like a Charlie Chaplain silent film; a book built to make the reader laugh and cry. It all comes out as true music. 38 Bar Blues is the perfectly crafted journal of a living legend. Enter the back-room of an old Italian cafe, where dirty dirty politics, outlaw love, and outrageous beauty are all in the cards.
Over The Anvil We Stretch contains swampy, powerful poems that are as exciting as the pocket knife you got for your birthday, the three legged frog on the lawn and the jar of marbles your mother kept in the kitchen. Mojgani's poems are the sound of the river and the stars burning above. He manages to capture the axe in the stump with blood still on the handle. Anis Mojgani has drawn a map of the country in the shape of his wild surreal poems. These are memories of a life, captured through the blue green filter of the bayou. Mojgani's latest poems are tinged with the sound of crickets spying on us in the darkness. They move forward honestly, brutally and sweetly. The reader will be led into briar patches as well as the moonlight just on the other side. Anvil is a book of poetic truth, packed with humor and insight. It is a juggling act of the epic and the intimate. I read it and it echoes. Shut up so I can hear more. -David Gordon Green, filmmaker, All the Real Girls and The Pineapple Express Anis Mojgani, Andrea Gibson, and other young poets of their talent are the future of American poetry and frankly, that fills me with joy! --Thomas Lux, Guggenheim Fellow & recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book Split Horizons He’s probably the best poetry slammer alive. The intellect, optimism and humility with which he speaks feel like proof of the relevance of “spoken word” as a genre. He processes the world in slices of beauty, frustration and sympathy... -Willamette Week Newspaper
After losing her sister to heart failure, Karen Finneyfrock was unable to write poems for three years. Her voice came back, whispering at first, then screaming. Ceremony for the Choking Ghost contains the sound of that voice returning, bringing poems about grief and its effect on the body, the body politic, memory and, of course, poems about love. From the intensely personal, “How My Family Grieved,” to the political, “What Lot’s Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn’t a Pillar of Salt),” Finneyfrock engages the reader with the chiseled images of a precise storyteller. Finneyfrock writes poetry with muscular verve and narrative push. The depth and breadth suggested in just a few polished images placed next to each other will make you reconsider what poetry can do. -Paul Constant, editor The Stranger If you've never enjoyed poetry once in your whole life-if even the word "poetry" makes you want to fall asleep, or die-you should read Karen Finneyfrock's new book of poetry, Ceremony for the Choking Ghost. -Paul Constant, editor The Stranger ...Finneyfrock's poems, then, are Shields's perfect novels: a shelf full of long, elaborate, heartfelt books that have been whittled down to their bare, sharp skeletons. -Paul Constant, editor “The Stranger”
“Tender, jarring and deeply human, Live For A Living is a book of poetry that is pulsing with the same electricity and honesty found in Buddy’s live performances.” - Andrea Gibson; International Poet-Activist
In Mindy Nettifee's second book, Rise of the Trust Fall, her poems possess a magic that can only come from a seasoned writer willing to share more on the page than she’s comfortable with. Whether exploring the strange alchemy of healing, the perils of self-actualization, or the contemporary experience of womanhood, the poems in this daring collection are gorgeous and vibrant, bitingly funny, and unflinchingly honest. Rise of the Trust Fall challenges more than our understanding of ourselves. It calls us to connect to our humanity, to celebrate its flaws, and then to demand more of it, in every well crafted line. Rise of the Trust Fall by Mindy Nettifee is the linguistic orgasm we've all been waiting for, no clit-stims necessary. -BUST Magazine Mindy Nettifee is destined to be the next Dorothy Parker. -Poetic Diversity When award-winning poet Mindy Nettifee speaks...you’re powerless-you have no choice but to raise your wine glass high over your osmosis head and join her pledge of allegiance to graphic truth. Her poems have the grace of cursive letters and the guts of a truck driver. -District Weekly
These Are The Breaks is the debut essay collection of NEA award-winning playwright, HBO Def Poet, and critically acclaimed “indie” rapper, Idris Goodwin. Diverse in scope and wickedly satirical, Goodwin’s poetic essays sample race, class, and culture, transcending the page with hip-hop musicality. A rhythmic blend of biting wit and break-beat poetry, Goodwin’s prose pulses with purpose. Remixing broken dreams and distorted legacies, Goodwin cross-fades past and present, personal and political: Motown’s last vinyl factory juxtaposes against Bronx rap legends battling in open-air arenas; Chicago’s Public School system contrasts against Santa Fe’s tourism industry; an Egyptian child drowns in the Dead Sea as Nat Turner sprints across Death Valley. These Are The Breaks is the literary mixtape of our cacophonous times. These Are The Breaks creates a new literature entirely fresh, authentic and important. Essays from one of hip-hop’s deftest public intellectuals contributing to the fields of prose, creative memoir, race theory, and music history. -Kevin Coval, “Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica) Street smart, culturally sophisticated, ironic, and iconoclastic Idris Goodwin is one of the most talented and multifaceted young artists working today. His work, like the best art practices, helps us to see what we thought was obvious in a new and different way. -Calvin Forbes, “The Shine Poems,” (A) refreshing... powerful and down-to-earth voice. -National Public Radio
Hello teachers! We know you work hard. Besides ninjas, you have the hardest job in the world. Between the teaching, the testing, the grading, and the nurturing it’s difficult to seek out new materials for your classroom. We are here to help. As poets and teachers, we know the power of the spoken word in the classroom. All you have to do is attend a youth slam or find a clip of one online and you will see the positive impact modern poetry has on our young people. It is able to engage students from any background in a way that classical poetry simply cannot touch. A complaint we’ve heard from many teachers is that they would love to use spoken word in their classrooms but they are afraid of getting in trouble with rough language and themes. So behold! We asked some of the best contemporary spoken word and slam poets to give us poems that would be appropriate for the classroom. This means you will not have to sift through this book with a highlighter to try and find the F’s and the S’s and the B’s and the Z’s. We’ve provided poems from national slam champs, world slam champs, fellow teachers, and poets we feel are the best of what’s around. We’ve also included some amazing lessons in its companion book for the teacher, sold separately.
Author Lea Deschenes' collection of honest, inquisitive poetry takes readers on a tour from the front steps in her native New England to uncharted jungles and beyond the edge of the universe, accompanied by Einstein, Marcus Aurelius and Rumi. Poetically, she balances precise craft with heartfelt meaning. From studies of a culture moving at the speed of light to meditations upon capital-L Love, The Constant Velocity of Trains finds its heart in relativity: the intersecting, interlocking, and often exasperating perspectives that make up reality. Lea Deschenes is flirting with perfection. It’s taken much too long for her words to reach a larger audience, an audience that’s been searching fruitlessly for what her work has always offered – bold glimpses of what exhilarates, frightens and moves us. -Patricia Smith, “Blood Dazzler” Lea Deschenes throws the well-aimed stone of her poetry through the glass houses of hypocrisy and human coldness... she is at all times intelligent, tender, and wedded to the quest for self-knowledge...There's wisdom at work, and at play, in this book. -Alicia Ostriker, “No Heaven" every poem feels entirely free to find its own voice, its own form. ...this latest volume adds an absolute precision in charting our emotional minefields; a wisdom and a surety of touch that make these poems utterly convincing. -Jack McCarthy, “Good Night”