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$16.74
In language wild and restrained, opulent and precise, these sonnets make something lasting, even beautiful, from tragedy—personal and national. Diane Raptosh’s collection of sonnets, I Eric America, combines elements of family trauma (her brother Eric’s survival of a plane crash and subsequent paraplegia) with disturbances on the national stage. Equal parts origin story, myth, and song, the book unfolds from the premise that “America is the nation-expression of / a severely traumatized person.” Throughout their singing, the poems seek to heal, transmute and transform.Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
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$17.67
Dostoyevsky said, Beauty saves, and in Jacqueline Gay Walley’s The Waw, a woman leaves her New York life to follow an image she has seen of a small town of great beauty by the sea in England. She does not quite know why she does this and is frequently asked and gives different answers. There she encounters remarkable people of strength with whom she explores music, love, dignity, and the gifts of solitude coupled with the gifts of community. She finds herself in love and more open than ever before. All of this put together strips her down to her essence, where the beauty of the place and people are able to transform her to a better self.Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
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$18.60
In her unique collection, Funeral Playlist, Sarah Gorham explores twelve musical works that might be featured at a funeral in the future. The essays engage the songs in writing, using the Playlist to examine the interplay between music, prose, and mortality. A series of memoir-like interstices reveal what art and artmaking can do to connect these subjects. The musical selections range widely—from Mozart’s “Benedictus” (The Requiem) to Nina Simone’s rendition of Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair. Caccini’s 17th century madrigal Amarilli, mia bella, as performed by Cecilia Bartoli. Matthew Houck’s (aka Phosphorescent) brings us something from the South in Be Dark Night, and the Wailin’ Jennys add their simple, gorgeous version of The Parting Song. But there’s also the song of a mourning dove, and the nonchalance of a human hum. All may become a medium of transcendence for the living (and, possibly, the departed).Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
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American Mother is the heart-rending story of a mother who, in the course of confronting her son’s killer, gets to the elemental heart of violence and forgiveness. Diane Foley is the mother of Jim, a freelance journalist captured and beheaded by ISIS in 2014, an image which became one of the most iconic of the 21st century. Seven years later, Diane gets the chance to spend three days with the murderer of her son in a Virginia courthouse, inspiring her to tell her life story. What unfolds is one of the most compelling narratives in recent literary history, channelled into searing reality by National Book Award-winner Colum McCann, who brings us on a journey of strength, resilience and radical empathy.
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“Blessed be sin if it teaches men shame,” wrote Georges Benanos. Sinnerman continues Michael Waters’ exploration of trespass as a mode of worship in poems that “delight in wit and wordplay” (The Gettysburg Review) and display “raucous devotion” while assuming “a divine erotic presence even in his more harrowing poems” (The Georgia Review). A fire escape, a fire hydrant, a father’s comb, the mosaic of a bull in an Italian shopping mall, a soul in flight—all assume resonance “that they may shine more darkly” in the light of Waters’ words. If sin is “seen as good once gone,” these poems weigh our attraction to transgression against our desire for forgiveness. Novelistic in depth and reach, elegiac in its embrace of the living and the dead, raw in its fraught vulnerability, and cunning in its explosive and tongue-delighting sound play, Sinnerman seems poised between the here-and-now and the invisible it invites and confronts.
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Darrell Bourque’s poetry collection is a set of jazz-infl ected ghazals tied to epigraphs from Colum McCann’s award-winning novel Apeirogon and illuminated with Bill Gingles’ abstract expressionist paintings. Predominately rooted in the tragic losses in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian families, the poems braid those losses into parallel losses in geo-political race, ethnic, class, and caste conflicts.
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Bon Courage is an exhilarating journey through a layered intellectual landscape textured with a range of political and personal enthusiasms, and emboldened by a passionate defense of the disregarded. Wide ranging and inclusive in the essay mode, deep and revealing as a memoir, with the dynamics and layering of great fiction. As if that’s not enough, it sings. Ru Freeman participates intimately while bringing global perspectives to subjects as diverse as Bowie and Dylan, Palestine, 9/11, hairstyles, personal and cultural identity, motherhood, and #MeToo. A resplendent and compendious exploration of great empathy, insight, and bon courage indeed. Th is is a book that is going to make a difference.
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In a world that expects women to take care of everyone else except themselves, and find validation and value in such self-negation, Felice Belle’s Viscera is an unflinching practice and declaration of defining oneself for oneself, with radical acceptance of the great, and challenging, consequences of doing so. Viscera is poetry for people who think they hate poetry—quirky, accessible and pop culture obsessed…for fans of 90 Day Fiancé and Ntozake Shange…an urban (self) love story for anyone who has ever felt like an other…a celebration of what Jonathan Lethem calls the “frivolous Now.”
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Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage is high-thrills poetry; set in a funhouse Manhattan apocalypse; a mixture of pregnancy, sleep-training and violence. A sequel to Mr. Either/Or (Etruscan Press, 2017), this verse-novel features “you” the reader as a secret agent in Manhattan in which poetic rhythms cue and accompany action-scenes. “You” and your girlfriend Li-ling Levine save the world from villains fighting for anarchy and the end of the human race.
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For our fourth Tribus, we present Fates, in which three poets—Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, and D. M. Spitzer—weave destinies by reimagining stories from the past. The books of Fates resist retellings. Instead, they reopen stories we have been carrying with us. They explore the limits and possibilities of form, testing the poetic line. And they invite new voices to disturb the universe. Each book of this Tribus, at once a daring translation and a rich original work of art, offers a distinct poetic voice. Yet, when read together, the books of Fates transform into a collective love song, three disparate poets all singing resolute, all singing luminous.
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This broadside was produced to celebrate the publication of J. Michael Lennon’s essay collection Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature. It was designed and printed by Christine Medley at her studio in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Using a combination of wood and metal type, Medley printed the broadside on a Showcard poster press. The inks are gold metallic and black. This is one of nine signed broadsides.
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Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2,000+ year-old veil inspired by a range of Ovidian myths while resisting a direct conversion of the work. This collection explores the Black psyche, body, and soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization. In a poetic range of forms, voices, and rhythms, the reader is bathed in ancestral memory, myth, and sense of the timeless of the shapeshifting, resilient Black body.
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This book of essays by Norman Mailer’s biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Th rough the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon’s remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.