Even The Hollow My Body Made Is Gone

"Memory and its embodiment in a colloquial, yet highly wrought musical language are what originally drew me to Harrington's manuscript and what continues to pull me back. We learn the story of Lillian and Webster and their children and grandchildren, a black family living a hardscrabble life in the rural South more than sixty years ago. Set on the cusp of the Civil Rights era, the poems chronicle a way of life that has long since vanished."--Elizabeth Spires, from the foreword Janice N. Harrington is an award-winning children's book author and a nationally recognized storyteller. She works as a librarian in Champaign, Illinois.

The best contemporary American poets are represented in this essential anthology.

This book serves as both a textbook and reference for faculty and students in LIS courses on storytelling and a professional guide for practicing librarians, particularly youth services librarians in public and school libraries. Storytelling: Art and Technique serves professors, students, and practitioners alike as a textbook, reference, and professional guide. It provides practical instruction and concrete examples of how to use the power of story to build literacy and presentation skills, as well as to create community in those same educational spaces. This text illustrates the value of storytelling, covers the history of storytelling in libraries, and offers valuable guidance for bringing stories to contemporary listeners, with detailed instructions on the selection, preparation, and presentation of stories. It also provides guidance around the planning and administration of a storytelling program. Topics include digital storytelling, open mics and slams, and the neuroscience of storytelling. An extensive and helpful section of resources for the storyteller is included in an expanded Part V of this edition.

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

"The poems in Copia are about what is and what is almost-gone, what is in limbo and what won't give way, what is almost at rock bottom but still and always brimming with the possibility of miracle."—Rachel Zucker Erika Meitner's fourth book takes cues from the Land Artists of the 1960s who created work based on landscapes of urban peripheries and structures in various states of disintegration. The collection also includes a section of documentary poems about Detroit that were commissioned for Virginia Quarterly Review. Because it is an uninhabited place, because it makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub- oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block. Vines knock and enter through shattered drop-ceilings, glassless windows. Ragwort cracks the street's asphalt to unsolvable puzzles. Meitner also probes the hulking ruins of office buildings, tract housing, superstores, construction sites, and freeways, and doesn't shy from the interactions that occur in Walmart and supermarket parking lots. It is nearly Halloween, which means wrong sizes on Wal-Mart racks, variety bags of pumpkins extinguishing themselves on the stoop children from the trailer park trawling our identical lawns soon so we can give away nickels, light, sandpaper, raisins, cement. Erika Meitner was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Best American Poetry 2011, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech.

A biographical reflection on the art and life of Horace H. Pippin—the best-known African-American artist of his time—Primitive is a critique on current perceptions surrounding African-American folk art, as well as the absence of key African-American history in present-day curricula. Award-winning poet Janice Harrington connects readers with a fascinating, odds-defying artist, all while underscoring the human need for artistic expression.

As people live longer, we face the challenges that come with caring for, and living as, an aging population. This collection focuses on the sad, funny, mundane reality of life in a nursing home. In her own words, Janice N. Harrington worked her way through college as a nurses' aide and wrote The Hands of Strangers because she "cannot forget the 'girls' I worked with or the 'residents' under my care. I haven't forgotten what I saw, heard, felt, or learned." Janic N. Harrington's debut Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone earned teh 2007 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and an NEA fellowship for poetry.

The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works. "Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing." As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud. He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart. This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.