Meditation And Observation A Collection Of Poetry And Prose

A collection of poetry and prose on daily observations and reflections, from music to school to the changing seasons.

A collection of poetry and prose with illustrations and Chinese translations.

Poetry. Women's Studies. Art. Music. SISYPHUSINA is a cross-genre collection of prose, poetry, visual art, and improvisatory music, centered on female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack rich vocabularies to describe female aging, Shira Dentz uses the hybrid form as an attempt to suture new language that reflects internal and physical processes that constitute a shifting identity. By deviating from formal classical construction, and using the recurring image of a rose, SISYPHUSINA circles around conventions of beauty, questioning traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. Some of the book's images are drawn from separate multimedia collaborations between the author and composer Pauline Oliveros, artist Kathy High, and artist Kathline Carr. A musical composition improvised by Pauline Oliveros, based on one of her text scores, titled "Aging Music," is the book's coda, and readers can listen to it online by scanning a QR code inside the book. The interweaving of these collaborations with the author's voice and voices from other sources imbue this book with a porous texture, and reimagines the boundary of the book as a membrane.

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING “A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author, “one of the leading lights of the modern American essay.” —Financial Times “My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges—in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences—she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”

Originally published: New York: Grove Press, 1957.

Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of her natal Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home. In this new edition, Trethewey looks back on the ten years that have passed since Katrina in a new epilogue, outlining progress that has been made and the challenges that still exist.

Susan Schultz has written a masterful set of meditations on life and thought upended and made strange by the events of 2020. Poet, university professor, baseball fan, wife, mother, dog lover and Buddhist, Schultz is attuned to "bird song clarity in cold air" and the cataclysm of George Floyd's murder and Donald Trump's presidency. The resulting pieces are meditations in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius as well as something like closed captions for actual meditations in the Buddhist sense. "I like the dailiness of this work," Schultz writes. "The struggle to get inside the moment that hangs like water droplets on a brown railing after hard rain, to hear the petal's hinge as it opens, or the cat that scratches to get in, this is a poetics." Schultz provokes us with observations on love, death, family, neighborliness, social violence, racial reckoning. Ultimately, we are guided to read these poems of memory and presence, of vision and wakefulness, through the practices of surrendering and witnessing, and in doing so, discover that being present is a powerful form of compassion.

A collection of poems.