Bøker i Phoenix Poets-serien

""There's a language for other / languages," writes Rachel DeWoskin in "Two Menus" in a poem titled "Foreigners." But what if the "foreigner" referred to exists within us? Indeed, how do we reconcile our multiple selves, the ones we're born into with those that we develop far from childhood histories and familiar geographies? How do we reconcile the language of our parents with the ones we ourselves adopt as adults? "Two Menus" shows us what it's like to live between languages (English and Chinese) and cultures (the US and China), between histories (youth and adulthood), and how thinking in different languages and locales, over time, shifts our perspectives and our forms of expression. In traditional lyrics and experimental forms, in language that reflects the awkwardness of human communication itself, DeWoskin crosses back and forth between the divided worlds of the self, exploring the elusiveness of understanding in the midst of contradictory social norms. The result is a unique book of poems, partaking in equal parts of humor and bitterness, confusion and delight"--

Imagine you are a Palestinian who came to America as a young man, eventually finding yourself caught between the country you live in with your wife and daughter, and the home--and parents--you left behind. Imagine living every day in your nonnative language and becoming estranged from your native tongue, which you use less and less as you become more ensconced in the United States. This is the story told by Ahmad Almallah in Bitter English, an autobiography-in-verse that explores the central role language plays in how we construct our identities and how our cultures construct them for us. Through finely crafted poems that utilize a plainspoken roughness to keep the reader slightly disoriented, Almallah replicates his own verbal and cultural experience of existing between languages and societies. There is a sense of displacement to these poems as Almallah recounts the amusing, sad, and perilous moments of day-to-day living in exile. At the heart of Bitter English is a sense of loss, both of home and of his mother, whose struggle with Alzheimer's becomes a reflection of his own reality in exile. Filled with wit, humor, and sharp observations of the world, Bitter English brings a fresh poetic voice to the American immigrant experience.

How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? The Bower engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker's year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with her young daughter. The speaker immerses herself in the history of Irish politics--including the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles--and gathers stories of a painful, divisive past from museum exhibits, newspapers, neighbors, friends, local musicians, and cabbies. Quietly meditative, brooding, and heart-wrenching, these poems place intimate moments between mother and daughter alongside images of nationalistic violence and the angers that underlie our daily interactions. A deep dive into sectarianism and forgiveness, this timely and nuanced book examines the many ways we are all implicated in the impulse to "protect our own" and asks how we manage the histories that divide us.

"My Bishop and Other Poems" oscillates between shorter lyrics, which represent the interior or private life, and two long prose poems, which represent the social, external world.

Guided by a moral vision to document human experience, this unique collection takes raw historical materials--newspaper articles, autobiography and letters, court testimony, a convict ledger, and even a menu--and shapes them into sonnets, ballads, free verse, and prose poems.

This volume brings together James McMichael's poetry and includes works that have previously remained unpublished. James McMichael is the recipient of a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award.

A collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits--well, I mean, sorry, yes--prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.

This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man's son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.

It has been seventeen years since Lloyd Schwartz has published a book of original poems, so there is much anticipation from his fans. In "Little Kisses," Schwartz takes his characteristic tragi-comic view of life to some unexpected and sometimes disturbing places. Here we find heart-breaking and comic poems about personal loss (the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, for example, or his mother s failing memory, or a precious gold ring gone missing); uneasy love poems and poems about family; and poems about identity, travel, and art with all their potentially recuperative powers. The book also contains some memorable translations, jokes, and wordplay, as well as formal surprises, all of which Schwartz s readers have come to relish in his verse. His books have been all too few and far between; this new one after so very long is sure to be greeted by an eager readership."