Little Girl Blue Poems

Winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize Fall 2021, Little Girl Blue: Poems is a collection of elegiac poems that confront desire and loss with and unshakeable sense of joy. This work is a powerful and unique blending of history, memory, and music.

"A gripping web of poetry that takes the reader from one extreme to the next. Little. Girl. Blue. is a sensitive expression of a black woman's plight in the modern world. It is much more than poetry. It is the compilation of thoughts, emotions, and experiences that are common to the human condition. Kristen Danyelle is an emerging poet who echoes the brillance of great writers before her. This work is funny, sad, happy, ocassionally bittersweet, and above all, honest. Little. Girl. Blue. is the first in what is sure to be a brillant library of collections from this young poet."

Collection of poems about the sea, accompanied by watercolors by the artist Meilo So.

Inspired by the age-old nursery rhyme, RB redefines the meaning of the song in a way that makes it relatable to her in thisA 25 poem collection exploring various themes such such depression, the emotions and thoughts one experiences in recovery and other important life choices one has to make when they have no will to live. RB writes this from a teenager's point of view, finding a gateway to understanding oneself and beginning to understand the reasons why we feel the way we feel towards certain things. When all the world is frantically finding purpose and setting goals and change itself, this Little girl Blue is in the back of the barn fast asleep.

Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.

Starred Review from Booklist: "This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet's work... [a] landmark collection." From the Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams: "Jim Harrison...was among the great ones—an elevated soul in all his unruliness who favored his senses and courted the wild on the page and in the world. His was a storied life that loomed large, and we are the beneficiaries. 'Such a powerful wounded poet—wrote as if he had to sing with a cut throat . . . and he did have to sing,' said Jorie Graham." Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is the definitive collection from one of America’s iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career, as well as a section of previously unpublished "Last Poems." Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem “correspondence” with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser. Weaving throughout these 1000 pages are Harrison’s legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. Jim Harrison: Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details, or as Publishers Weeklycalled him, “an untrammeled renegade genius... a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.” NOTE:Jim Harrison: Complete Poems also appears as a three-volume box set. Print run limited to 750 copies. Each volume is introduced by a different writer: Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman. The box set retails for $85 and ISBN is 9781556596414.

Breathe is a timely offering and a catalogue of sharp inhales and deep exhales punctuated by the shifting air around us. Ancestral wounds and present-day pain unwind on these pages, but even in the darkest depths of their undercurrents, there is hope and joy to be found. These poems roar with the truths of the body and its breaks, and sigh with its jagged sutures. In this powerful debut collection, Angel Dye bears witness to the sacredness of scars and to the power of community, self-love, and faith in a grand design.

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Poetry! Interweaving elegy, indictment, and hope into a love letter to California, Look at This Blue examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril. Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives—human, plant, and animal—in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America’s continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke’s cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance.

Originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award presented in the United States. Ansel Elkins’s poetry collection, Blue Yodel, is the 109th volume to be so honored. Esteemed poet and competition judge Carl Phillips praises Elkins for her “arresting use of persona,” calling her poems “razor-edged in their intelligence, Southern Gothic in their sensibility.” In her imaginative and haunting debut collection, Elkins introduces readers to a multitude of characters whose “otherness” has condemned them to live on the margins of society. She weaves blues, ballads, folklore, and storytelling into an intricate tapestry that depicts the violence, poverty, and loneliness of the Deep South, as well as the compassion, generosity, and hope that brings light to people in their darkest times. The blue yodel heard throughout this diverse compilation is a raw, primal, deeply felt expression of the human experience, calling on us to reach out to the isolated and disenfranchised and to find the humanity in every person.