Daily Sonnets

Poetry. In DAILY SONNETS Laynie Browne charts new territory as she subtly investigates the daily influxes of the poetic moment. From longing for the family in the very midst of the family, to the play of the mind which mimics and shepherds the visible games of children, Browne offers here the mimesis of the possible, a moving reflection of action and intimacy, a letting go and a grasping of the poetic and the political, all in the firm hold of song.

DAILY SONNETS FOR 12-STEPPERS is an exploration of the principles embodied in the 12-Step program of recovery. The calendar sets the pace for this adventure. Each month concentrates on one of the steps, and each day of the month contemplates an aspect of that step. Wellness is our natural state, and the Twelve Steps provide a perfect means to restore wellness that has been pushed aside by learned habits. Daily Sonnets for 12-Steppers has no parallel. Dean Lovejoy has combined his knowledge of the 12 steps with his unique assortment of talents to produce a remarkable volume of daily reminders of specific 12-step work and of the principles that underlie each step. __Storm A King, PhD. Redding, CA What a wonderful meditation on the 12 Steps! What a wonderful undertaking. It definitely should be published. __Gretchen Goff, Psychologist, Tesuque, NM Whether you’re just starting on your road to recovery, have been on the path for years or supporting a person in recovery, Dean Lovejoy’s sonnets offer insight into the mind, internal dialogue and habits that are a part of recovering wellness. A gift given from his heart, his essence in apparent in each verse . __Roy Woolfstead, Retired Attorney, Mt. Shasta, CA Dean has written a powerful book to touch the hearts and minds of those in recovery. It’s simplicity makes the 12-step process available to all who seek to mature in their life. I’ve taken to reading this book daily and it assists me, in a safe way, to look at and gently confront unexamined areas of my life. As a licensed therapist, I find this book can be a useful tool. I highly recommend it. __Brad Seiser, Palo Cedro, CA Dean Lovejoy has found a way to add poetry as a tool for those of us seeking to improve our lives. In this thought provoking and fun read, I have found it possible to explore delightful additions to my daily self-care routines. __Thom Spring, MS, LCLS, Mesa, AZ

The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in Pop Sonnets, a collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets. All your favorite songs are here, including hits by Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, and many others. With stirring sentiments on everything from love and despair to wanton women, Pop Sonnets offers inspirational verse for every occasion.

The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time offers original readings of poems composed in this century—poems that are challenging to follow, challenging to understand, challenging to discuss, and challenging to enjoy. Difficult poetry of the past relied on allusion, syntactic complexity, free association, and strange juxtapositions. The new poetry breaks with the old in its stunning variety; its questioning of inherited values, labels, and narratives; its multilingualism; its origin in and production of unnamed affects; and its coherence around critical and social theorists as much as other poets. The essays in this volume include poets writing on the works of a younger generation (Lyn Hejinian on Paolo Javier, Bob Perelman on Rachel Zolf, Roberto Tejada on Rosa Alcalá), influential writers addressing the work of peers (Ben Lerner on Maggie Nelson, Michael W. Clune on Aaron Kunin), critics making imaginative leaps to encompass challenging work (Brian M. Reed on Sherwin Bitsui, Siobhan Philips on Juliana Spahr), and younger scholars coming to terms with poets who continue to govern new poetic experimentation (Joseph Jeon on Myung Mi Kim, Lytle Shaw on Lisa Robertson). In pairings that are both intuitive (Marjorie Perloff on Craig Dworkin) and unexpected (Langdon Hammer on Srikanth Reddy), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time illuminates the myriad pathways and strategies for exploring difficult poetry of the present.

Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon. In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.

Your Sonnet For The Day was inspired by Pratibha’s own musings across her childhood, which were spent in Scotland, Iraq and other countries before she returned to her homeland, India. The well known sonnet is a short poem of fourteen lines that revolves around love and emotions, but it can also be the perfect style for expressing a single idea or thought. Pratibha’s sonnets go beyond the conventional romantic pentameter and explores strong emotions of life through her quatrains. Her sonnet’s power comes from her ability to capture the essence of our emotional entanglement with life clearly and succinctly. These compositions are well received for its setting in a modern tableau, which serves as a wonderful context to introduce poetry for children within the Common Wealth. Adults will also find the prose familiar, as each sonnet exfoliates the whispers that we all have, but rarely find the words to express them. Surely, this book will awaken the poet in each of us.

An anthology of more than three hundred sonnets, arranged by the birth date of the poets, features the work of Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, the Brownings, Christina Rossetti, Frost, Millay, Walcott, Heaney, and others.