Poets On Place

Tells of an extended tour across the U.S. taken by the author and his wife, during which they visited with more than sixty poets, asking them about the importance of place in their work. This volume presents the text of those interviews, often accompanied by a poem from the author, and interwoven with segments of Pfefferle's travel narrative and illustrated with black and white photographs.

Thirty-nine United States poets share their poems, inspirations, thoughts, anecdotes, and memories.

Reflections on how landscape, the imagination, and the "real world" color the creative process

A collection of poems centered around life in Appalachia addresses topics ranging from the marginalization of the region's people to the environmental degradation it has endured throughout history.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essay. In thirty innovative essays, THE POEM'S COUNTRY: PLACE & POETIC PRACTICE considers how the question of place shapes contemporary poetry. Responding from cities and rural communities across the United States, the contributors of THE POEM'S COUNTRY thoughtfully and passionately explore issues of politics, personal identity, ecology, the Internet, war, sexuality, faith, and the imagination. Essential reading for students of poetry at every level, THE POEM'S COUNTRY examines the connection between lyric and geographical constraint, as well as how place challenges, enchants, and helps clarify the intersections between language and the world. "This remarkable and exciting gathering of prose on contemporary poetry is international and generational at once -- this is important because it represents the imaginations and insights of emerging poets writing across a spectrum of taste, 'place and poetic practice.' Yet the critical nature of the writing is more testimony than theory, more personal than panoramic, which means that the individual essays are that much more alive, more in touch, and more unique. Overall, THE POEM'S COUNTRY resists tradition even more than it replaces it." --Stanley Plumly "THE POEM'S COUNTRY demonstrates that poetry isn't limited to the landscapes we inhabit but by the scope of the imagination itself. In these ravishing essays, the next generation of poets explores the influence of place on contemporary poetry, and a diverse reimagining of place emerges that both grounds and lifts us up." --Quan Barry

This astonishing, self-assured debut leads us on an exploration to the stars and back, begging us to reconsider our boundaries of self, time, space, and knowledge. The speaker writes, “...the universe/is an arrow/without end/and it asks only one question;/How dare you?” Zig-zagging through the realms of nature, science, and religion, one finds St. Francis sighing in the corner of a studio apartment, tides that are caused by millions of oysters “gasping in unison,” an ark filled with women in its stables, and prayers that reach God fastest by balloon. There’s pathos: “When my new lover tells me I’m correct to love him, I/realize the sound isn’t metal at all. It’s not the coins rattling/ on concrete, but the fingers scraping to pick them up.” And humor, too: “...even the sun’s been sighing Not you again/when it sees me.” After reading this far-reaching, inventive collection, we too are startled, space struck, our pockets gloriously “filled with space dust.”

Caldecott Honor Book Today Show Best Book for the Holidays ALA Notable Book for All Ages ALSC Notable Children's Book NCTE Notable Poetry Book Evanston Public Library's Top 100 Great Book for Kids Nerdy Award Winner for Single Poem Picture Book Bank Street Best Books of the Year In this powerful, affirming poem by award-winning author Zetta Elliott, a Black child explores his shifting emotions throughout the year. There is a place inside of me a space deep down inside of me where all my feelings hide. Summertime is filled with joy—skateboarding and playing basketball—until his community is deeply wounded by a police shooting. As fall turns to winter and then spring, fear grows into anger, then pride and peace. In her stunning debut, illustrator Noa Denmon articulates the depth and nuances of a child’s experiences following a police shooting—through grief and protests, healing and community—with washes of color as vibrant as his words. Here is a groundbreaking narrative that can help all readers—children and adults alike—talk about the feelings hiding deep inside each of us.

A “harrowing and hallucinogenic” collection of poems from author of the New York Times–bestselling National Book Award-finalist Citizen: An American Lyric (Library Journal). Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem about rising racial tensions in America, Citizen: An American Lyric, won numerous prizes, including the The National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Her new collection of poems—intrepid, obsessive, and erotic—tell the story of a woman’s attempt to reconcile herself to her own despair. Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, what remains long after is her singular voice—its beguiling cadence and vivid physicality. There is an unprotected quality to this writing, as if each word has been pushed out along the precipice, daring us to go with it. Rankine’s power lies in the intoxicating pull of that dare. From one of contemporary poetry’s most powerful and provocative authors, The End of the Alphabet is a work where “wits at once keen and tenacious match themselves against grief’s genius” (Boston Review).

A 117-page single-sentence novel about language and war. Vanessa Place withholds the period for 130 pages and one long night as its legless narrator recounts the war journey that has lead him to his final point of final truth, next to an armless man making stew. Place's single sentence unmoors time and space, subject and object, victim and perpetrator, in a voice sanctifying everything and elegizing nothing"--Publisher's statement http://lesfigues.com/book/dies/.

“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.