Dumb Luck Other Poems

Christine Kitano’s Dumb Luck & other poems offers a portrait of a thirty-something Asian American woman who finds herself living in the relative safety of upstate New York before and during the pandemic. In one poem the speaker reflects on current events (the ongoing pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, the surge in anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S.) and contrasts these with the peace of rural New York, wondering, “Is this / the reward for good luck, just a more / comfortable survival?” The poems in this collection orbit around this question, providing both lyric and narrative explorations on luck, guilt, and survival. Ultimately, these poems delve into how the otherwise mundane questions of selfhood and identity for a gendered and racialized body take on greater urgency during times of increased social unrest, panic, and violence. Winner of The 2023 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, selected by Alison Pelegrin.

Influenced by the Chinese and Japanese masters, Hamill's Dumb Luck affirms his ability to give us back the world and all its vicissitudes. Here you will find Zen fables, elegies and haiku, bluesy riffs, and poems that celebrate births, marriages, the liberating exile of the poet, as well as verses that present the dumb luck that has peppered the poet's life. Sam Hamill is the author of a dozen volumes of original poetry, as well as three collections of essays. He is the Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press, director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, and contributing editor at The American Poetry Review.

Witty, shrewd, and always a joy to read, John Gierach, “America’s best fishing writer” (Houston Chronicle) and favorite streamside philosopher, has earned the following of “legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life” (Kirkus Reviews). “After five decades, twenty books, and countless columns, [John Gierach] is still a master” (Forbes). Now, in his latest original collection, Gierach shows us why fly-fishing is the perfect antidote to everything that is wrong with the world. “Gierach’s deceptively laconic prose masks an accomplished storyteller…His alert and slightly off-kilter observations place him in the general neighborhood of Mark Twain and James Thurber” (Publishers Weekly). In Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers, Gierach looks back to the long-ago day when he bought his first resident fishing license in Colorado, where the fishing season never ends, and just knew he was in the right place. And he succinctly sums up part of the appeal of his sport when he writes that it is “an acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives.” Lifelong fisherman though he is, Gierach can write with self-deprecating humor about his own fishing misadventures, confessing that despite all his experience, he is still capable of blowing a strike by a fish “in the usual amateur way.” “Arguably the best fishing writer working” (The Wall Street Journal), Gierach offers witty, trenchant observations not just about fly-fishing itself but also about how one’s love of fly-fishing shapes the world that we choose to make for ourselves.

Poems deal with the joys and sorrows of growing up Chinese American, and the prejudice which Chinese Americans sometimes face.

These poems cover over forty years. Writing them is like collecting the bubbles which stream away from the stern of a small boat crossing a vast ocean. They are all different. They are all the same. Fragile, inconsequential bubbles of livingness. The subject matter ranges from Oxford, its colleges and ghosts, to the Far East with its temples, its hunger for life (and cncrete jungles),and its two and a half thousand year old Buddhism. Here, Theravada monks still proclaim, in the Buddha's own language, that "all things are suffering, all things are impermanent, all things are not self. Nibbana is the Highest Happiness." Here is the teeming multiplicity of life and the utter freedom and stillness of the Unconditioned State which runs like a cack through the universe. Through this crack beings escape from the burden of becoming. Through it they return again. From one lifetime to the next. From one moment to the next.

"Pusterla is a contemporary Swiss poet who writes in Italian. This volume is a selection from Pusterla's six most recent books of poetry, published in Italian. The poems create a solid sense of place-mountains, lakes, streams, villages, occasionally a city. They move from precise and delicate observations of creatures, plants, and atmosphere to harshly historical and sociological pieces, wounded by Italy's past and present. They find striking and unpredictable ways into their subjects, often ending on a surprising, crystallized image. And, in the series editors' words, "the translations compel throughout- through their cadence, pacing, assonance, and tactful alliteration-their texture and their touch. The effect of the whole-of the supple verse renderings and the prose poetry- is of lively variety in theme, point of view, and form, and Pusterla/Schutt in this manuscript emerges as an authentic, original, passionate albeit subtle voice.""--

Poetry collection by Carolyn M. Dunn, PhD., a Louisiana Creole whose indigenous ancestry includes Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole descent on her father's side, and Tunica-Choctaw-Biloxi on her mother's.

On the peripheries of UK poetry culture during his lifetime, W. S. Graham is now recognized one of the great poets of the twentieth century. In the first concerted study of Graham's poetics in a generation, David Nowell Smith argues that Graham is exemplary for the poetics of the mid-century: his extension of modernist explorations of rhythm and diction; his interweaving of linguistic and geographic places; his dialogue with the plastic arts; and the tensions that run through his work, between philosophical seriousness and play, solitude and sociality, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the heft and evanescence of poetry's medium. Drawing on newly unearthed archival materials, Nowell Smith orients Graham's poetics around the question of the 'art object'. Graham sought to craft his poems into honed, finished 'objects'; yet he was also aware that the poem's 'finished object' is never wholly finished. Graham's work thus facilitates a broader reflection on language as a medium for art-making.