Dikter

A captivating search through one family's history, All Wrong Horses on Fire that Go Away in the Rain is a stunning examination of intergenerational trauma and its effect on Indigenous voices. Aftershocks and fragmented memories ricochet through this collection, bringing with them strength, intensity and uninhibited beauty. Recalling pivotal work by Billy-Ray Belcourt, jaye simpson, Joshua Whitehead and Emily Riddle, Sarain Frank Soonias makes his poetic debut with a splash that ripples far outside his own work, and marks the entrance of a new, important voice in contemporary poetry.

Reading Dad's poetry is like taking a walk through his life. It is easy to see there are demons, but there is beauty and love too. Beauty in memories of greyhounds, raging fires, the plight of Indigenous people, the complexities of religious beliefs, and recognising the power of other people's life stories.I remember sitting in the back seat of his car, listening to him speak of Shakespeare and reciting sonnets verbatim. He spoke of Keats and Eliot, of Yeats and Poe, and Yevtushenko and I did my best to comprehend the images of tragedy, love and loss. And now, many years later, when I read Dad's words, I think I understand them.

This study explores how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and Milton among many others appropriated Spenser's long and shorter poems for creating comedy, parody, and satire. Their appropriations, which were widely influential on communities of readers, writers, and intertextual networks from 1590-1660, left an abiding impression of Spenser as a biting satirist. Spenser's Afterlife from Shakespeare to Milton: The Faerie Queene as Intertextual Environment is the first study to combine the reception history of The Faerie Queene with ecocriticism, animal studies, and posthumanist tenets of vital materialism and the power of things. This poem functions as a powerful, nonhuman agent that transforms how readers respond to their environments. The Faerie Queene and its afterlives move readers to perceive flaws in political, social, and religious figureheads and institutions to envision better ones.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of America’s most revered military veteran writers —Bruce Weigl brings readers face-to-face with our country’s legacy of violence, the suffering of combat PTSD, and what it means to be truly haunted.Taking its cue from James Wright’s goal to write “the poetry of a grown man,” the poems in Apostle of Desire juxtapose the peace and comfort offered by the natural world with the bruising intensity of manmade violence. These sudden tonal shifts express a vulnerability and extremity of feeling that strips audiences’ own emotions bare, leading readers to question their roles as bystanders and consumers of violent media.In sharing his intertwining feelings of love and shame for both country and self, Weigl places readers into the role of the watcher and opens a window into the traumas of the Vietnam War and life’s daily battles with PTSD. The honesty of Weigl’s poetry exposes the ghosts of pain while still witnessing the glories of love, nature, and his ongoing experiences with the rich daily life of contemporary Vietnam.Readers will face the solitude of regret and the hopeful pursuit of redemption—remembering the past and looking toward the future.

WINNER OF THE ISABELLA GARDNER AWARDThe daring and deeplysexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with theembodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.Theseunforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost alwayscompromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernessesof unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not bywhat we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” Thesepoems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I”that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our liveswith.Inthis book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with thefetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and atothers self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of thedifficulties and joys of living in relation.

An impressive and though-provoking collection from GRAMMY nominated artist and poet Courtney Marie Andrews.With the same vulnerability and timelessness as her debut collection Old Monarch,Love Is a Dog That Bites When It's Scaredacknowledges the layers to our feelings, experiences, and humanity. Inspired by her own life, Courtney Marie Andrews speaks gently to love and its many layers. She comforts readers with the knowledge that though love is confusing, unorganized, bewitching, and often too hard, it is also magical, and surreal, and always worth it.

In the third and final installment of the Souls Trilogy, acclaimed poet Iain S. Thomas explores what hope feels like after despair.Following on his bestselling collections, The Truth of You and The Secret of You, Thomas's latest volume of over two-hundred poems examines how we find the faith to carry on when everything has been stripped away and all that remains is the coreofwho we are. Enhanced by dramatic ink illustrations in his signature style, The Heart of You explores fear, bravery, intimacy, what we keep, and what we leave behind.

A debut poetry collection drawing on horror-movie tropes to examine the body--both its traumas and its possibilities. Scream / Queen, CD Eskilson's debut poetry collection, examines queerness, mental illness, and transgender identity through the lens of thrillers and B movies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Michael Myers, and the Headless Horseman are just a few of the fright-film villains and monsters that populate this book. Eskilson's formally innovative poems document how a body--a nonbinary transgender body, a chronically ill body, a body carrying trauma--can be understood, accepted, and healed even in a violent sociopolitical climate. Drawing on the language and images of horror cinema, the poems' speakers find strength and the means to survive both family legacy and the pain inflicted on them: "I want to behemoth, be the biggest / violence in the galaxy," says one who thinks about Godzilla and dreams of "learning how to roar." Though an atmosphere of trans panic and state legislation against trans bodies pervades the book, Scream / Queen ultimately conjures a world of hope and tenderness through connection and care. It celebrates all the body's possibilities: the glorious and the monstrous. As a werewolf in the book says, "I kiss the moon; it took so long / to get here."

In 1971, in the wake of George Jackson's killing by San Quentin prison guards, a poem entitled 'Enemy of the Sun' was found among ninety-nine books in the revolutionary's cell. The handwritten poem came to be circulated in Black Panther newspapers under Jackson's name, assumed to be a vestige of his more than a decade long incarceration. But Jackson never wrote the poem; it was authored by the Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qassem and had been included in an anthology of the same title a year before Jackson's death. Originally published by Drum & Spear, the publishing arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance links twelve poets working in a poetics of refusal and of hope. Bearing witness to decades of Zionist occupation, to a diaspora exiled in refugee camps and writers held captive in Israeli jails, the collection offers a means to an end: 'as poetry, yes it sings-as bullets on a mission; it calls for change.' In each poem is a whole life-joy, love, beauty, rage, sorrow, suffering-and in each life is a record of resistance: the traces of a people who refuse to leave their homeland, who time and again alchemize grief into principled struggle. In the intertwined histories of this book, and in the unyielding political edge of the poems themselves, is a long story of solidarity between oppressed peoples: from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria to Vietnam to the United States.

My Secret Life is the first book in English translation by one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, Krisztina Tóth is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English. The poems in My Secret Life were selected by her from three of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems. Tóth is, and has been for several years, a major figure in Hungarian writing and, being a major figure with an important public voice, she has also been, and is now, subject to unrelenting attacks by the government-funded, government-supporting, gutter press. She has been self-exiled in England but is moving to Switzerland shortly. Originally attacked for suggesting that a couple of standard pieces of literature might be removed from the school syllabus and replaced by writing by living women authors, her life has become the subject of the sort of storm of defamation already practised on others perceived to be threatening the values of the government.

Conceived while collaborating with a Dutch artist on a project in Death Valley, California, Charlotte Van den Broeck's The Inside of a Stone explores desert landscapes and womanhood - and the emotional resonance between the two - while reconceptualising their metaphorical relationship. With close observation and striking images she engages with the arid, eroded landscape. In other poems she considers sexual violence while watching a pair of mating turtles, imagines an alternative emotional life for Ilsebill, the fisherman's wife from the Grimm fairytale, and explores medieval poet Hildegard of Bingen's magical healing.After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe's most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first two collections, Chameleon and Nachtroer, were published together in David Colmer's English translation by Bloodaxe in 2020. The Inside of a Stone marks a departure from the themes of those earlier books, which often return to childhood and youth in urban and European landscapes.

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now one of her country's strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceaușescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of a moral consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government. The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana's early collections published from 1964 to 1981, as well as including uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. It follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter - Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021) in completing Bloodaxe's presentation of Blandiana's collected poems to date in English translation. She published these poems during the brief period of political thaw of Romania's communist regime, when aestheticism took on a more subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art. In her early poems, Blandiana's voice articulates a pure and vibrant spiritual language of unmistakable ethical clarity, calling for moral regeneration in the face of indifference. Their ethical idealism and steadfastness override the many masks of degradation. These youthful books announce from the outset the sense of responsibility and faith in the survival of the collective soul that has always characterised Blandiana's poetry.

Rhymes for the politically incorrect, passionate lefty andchronically nostalgic.

Showcases Ezra Pound's close involvement with the arts throughout his career This volume of new, interdisciplinary scholarship investigates the arts with which Pound had a lifelong interaction including architecture, ballet, cinema, music, painting, photography and sculpture. Divided into 5 historically and thematically arranged sections, the 28 chapters foreground the shifting significance of art forms throughout Pound's life, which he spent in London, Paris, Rapallo and Washington. The Companion maps Pound's practices of engagement with the arts, deepening areas of study that have recently emerged, such as his musical compositions. At the same time, it opens up new fields, particularly Pound's interaction with the performing arts: opera, dance, and cinema. The book demonstrates overall that Ezra Pound was no mere spectator of the modernist revolution in the arts; rather he was an agent of change, a doer and promoter who also had a deep emotional response to the arts. Roxana Preda is Researcher and Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Examines ʿAttar's didactic poetry in historical context from a rhetorical, reader-centered perspective

The collection addresses shared, topical challenges like identity, gender roles, belonging and family, at a time of shifting, heightened uncertainty. Themes which affect all of us like toxic masculinity, family disfunction, war, and climate, in fiercely imaginative, jagged, yet compassionate, sometimes absurdist, surreal fashion.

Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World delves into the chaos of the modern world, and searches for resilience in the face of environmental and societal devastation. Dripping with images of ancient ruins and mythological figures, these poems serve as vignettes of fatherhood, love, and desire against the backdrop of apocalyptic events.Through the documentation of ongoing violence and natural phenomena, Fasano depicts the ever-present anxieties of parenting with concision and compassion. The Last Song of the World is a love letter to the world that could be—a world as tender as it is bold, as loving as it is brutal, as beautiful as it is horrendous.

Winner of the Blessing the Boats SelectionForeword by Aracelis GirmayCharleen McClure’s d-sorientation wanders the landscape of loss with a weathered eye and a clenched fist. Delving deep into personal hauntologies, McClure’s speakers are dislocated—their observations and interrogations are quietly desperate as they navigate history, relationships, and dig for their roots. The lexicon of McClure’s poetry is one of intimacy and outrage, one that challenges the reader to consider their own belonging.Through bold lyric poems that beat with brutality yet glow with softness, McClure’s debut collection is a compass, pointing the reader towards reclamation.

In True Believer, Jeff Kass intertwines fiction with reality as he delves into the origins of the Marvel superheroes, explores how the Marvel saga informed his own worldview, and implores us all to continue to believe in the forces of goodThrough lyric and narrative poems, formal and informal verse, and even a trio of limericks, Kass’s poems both retell classic comic book tales and recall his personal experiences being a True Believer—attending New York City Comic-Con with his childhood friends, wishing he could control the weather while coaching his son’s baseball team, and growing up reading about the Jewishness of The Thing, the Golem-like member of The Fantastic Four, which impacted Kass’s understanding of his own identity.An ode to what Stan Lee called his devoted readers, True Believer is a call to arms and an invitation to discover the heroic in ourselves. If we can’t be super-powered heroes, we can endeavor to be what those heroes embody: perseverance despite personal doubt, determination in the face of calamitous odds, and faith in the notion that humanity is worth saving.