Lawyer Poets And That World We Call Law

All of the 40+ poets represented in this anthology either are or have been practicing lawyers and/or judges. Some are now working in academia, but most are still involved in law one way or another. In addition to those listed as authors on the title page of this amazon site, the anthology includes work by Paul Homer, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth King, John Charles Kleefeld, Richard Krech, Bruce Laxalt, David Leightty, John Levy, Greg McBride, James McKenna, Betsy McKenzie, Joyce Meyers, Jesse Mountjoy, Tim Nolan, Simon Perchik, Carl Reisman, Charles Reynard, Steven M. Richman, Lee Robinson, Kristen Roedell, Barbara B. Rollins, Lawrence Russ, Michael Sowder, Ann Tweedy, Charles Williams, Kathleen Winte, and Warren Wolfson.

The first three books by the author of Into It Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes. Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets. "His poetry works along the front lines, reconnoitering and marking down the slightest moves. If poets can, when confronting the endless shocks and snarls of urban and international life, resist flinching or turning away, they deserve our attention. If what they say about that world comes from a place of vigilance and concern . . . they have earned our admiration." --David Yezzi, Parnassus "A poet of fierce . . . intensity . . . Joseph writes with an authenticity that is earned, not just acquired." --David Lehman, The Washington Post Book World "Joseph's poems cut to the quick . . . They gleam with the sharp edge of their truth; they are hard to forget." --James Finn Cotter, The Hudson Review

The perfect gift for the lawyers in your life -- for law school graduation, birthdays, firm holiday gifts, retirement, or just because. More than 70 vignettes from life in the practice of law are rendered here as wryly humorous poems. Each one stands alone as the sort of snapshot one lawyer might forward along to another for a laugh or a knowing nod. Together, they comprise a collection to be treasured by anyone who has lived through law school, first jobs, thrilling victories, eye-opening disappointments, and the lifestyle particular to this career choice. This book is not about laughing at lawyers. It's about laughing with them. It's for everyone who's in on the joke: Everyone who has witnessed the madness and met the quirky characters in this field. Everyone who, even just for a second, has wondered if they should have gone to medical school, culinary school... anything other than law school. Everyone who has ever sat down at the end of an evening and thought, "No one would even believe me if I told them about my day." We believe you. Editorial reviews: "In many of the poems, the authors capture perfectly the oddities of law practice and law school. 'Sisterhood' may be one of the most insightful poems that could be enjoyed within any profession. These poems... took the mundane and made it soar." - Arizona Bar Association "A book of candid truths and palpable honesty, with a sincerity that can only come from experience." - North Carolina Bar Association "A must-read for lawyers persisting in long-term practice who like to keep it light, who continue to muse on the sometimes bizarre world in which a lawyer finds himself or herself, and who simply enjoy a good poem." - Colorado Bar Association Featured on Above the Law and Bitter Lawyer. Named the SmallLaw Pick of the Week by TechnoLawyer. (Authors donate a portion of book proceeds to WomensLaw.org, The WomensLaw Project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.)

Winner of the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."

Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.

Frances Driscoll grew up in New England. She is the author of two collections of poems- TALK TO ME and THE RAPE POEMS and is published widely in literary journals. Frances Driscoll s work is used by trauma therapists, social workers, sexual assault awareness trainings for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. National Guard. Her work is taught in a number of schools in a variety of disciplines, adapted for several stage productions, and is the subject of Justine Gieni s University of Regina English master s thesis, Hysterical (r)evoluton: The Creation of Embodied Language and Amy Griffiths University of Minnesota English Ph.D. dissertation, In a Shattered Language: a feminist poetics of trauma. You can hear Driscoll read some of The Rape Poems and Seaglass Picnic poems at Mark Ari s website Eat-Magazine.com.

Kunuar is a volume of fifty-two poems framed by the feminist and postcolonial sensibilities of the Portuguese author, Luísa Coelho. In a painful but playful manner she describes her re-discovery, in a post-colonial era, of Luanda, the capital of Angola, the country of her birth. Memory crafts a vivid dialogue between today and yesterday that sheds light on the remains of colonial Luanda s history. Kunuar, the title of both the book and the concluding poem, refers to the small spots on the street where secondhand clothes are sold to the large penniless population of Luanda. The image of a poor mother distressed because she cannot afford even castoff clothes becomes an icon of the poverty of a city and a country, but her pain is assuaged by the urine of her baby running down her back and warming her. This powerful image points to many others in the collection, in which the recurrent theme of love of mother and child is one of the few sources of hope in the midst of misery and grinding poverty in a post-colonial country that is the second producer of diamonds and petroleum in sub-Saharan Africa. Like this moving and beautiful image, Coelho s poetic writing offers in a very subtle way an enchanting testimony about the past as well as the current oppressive conditions of Luanda after four centuries of Portuguese colonial order, Angola s independence in 1975, followed by its intense civil war from 1975 to 2002.

InChasing Steam, Jamie Stern traces the life of her grandmother, Esther, from war-torn Bialystok, Poland to Paterson, New Jersey. From Esther's birth in 1906 to her first job in America selling oranges. From the Paterson opera coach with a school of speech and drama to the poetry of Wordsworth, Longfellow and Shakespeare. Sustaining loves carried through her long and determined life, with a leather purse holding dinner rolls and a deck of cards hiding 52 twenty dollar bills. Jamie Stern conjures Esther for the sheer pleasure of her company and chases her through a life, always hard, always hidden, getting as close as she could: Since I was taller than Esther on her knees, /I bent over until our shoulders touched./Until our eyes were level./ Until her breath stopped at my cheek.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.