Ode To The Heart Smaller Than A Pencil Eraser

When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus—‘as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place'—she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. ‘I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus,’ she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe." —:Mark Doty,Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.

If I were a country and you my journalist I would have shot you down a street and left you to bleed. Fierce and unflinching, Rochelle Potkar's poetry springs from the deeply personal and ripples out to the world, capturing lovers' whispers and reverberations of explosions with equal ease. Vividly depicting love, grief, anger, and defiance, these poems glimmer like coins beneath the water surface, tethered with the weight of wishes clinging to them. As sensuous as it is articulate, Coins in Rivers is a deep meditation on womanhood, motherhood, and citizenship.

A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.

A sad thing happens to most people somewhere between preschool and college: we unlearn our natural love of poetry, a love rooted in sound and surprise, pattern and play, discovery and delight. That loss is a tragedy that this book aims to reverse. Based on fifteen years of teaching, and dedicated to the belief that rigor and accessibility are compatible, Listening to Poetry takes nothing for granted, and builds students’ confidence and skills from the ground up. It uses innovative, student-centered, and process-based approaches, including practical how-tos and skill-focused exercises for every subject covered. Poems don’t have to be approached like riddles to be solved, codes to be cracked, or prisoners to be interrogated. There is a better way, and it starts right here. Don’t take our word for it, though. Listen to students who’ve read this book: “I need to give full appreciation to this book for my new-found love of poetry... I have found myself a new hobby.” “Before this book I was overwhelmed by poetry and felt I would never be artistic enough to create or analyze it. Now I feel very comfortable... and am excited to continue my appreciation for the art.” “I have found my love for poetry from reading this book. I have learned how to read poetry and how to understand it.”

"In this shining and unsparing new collection of poems, Igloria draws from her own childhood memories, relationships, and keen sensory awareness to create a dreamlike series of pictures in which we, too, may see our growth through the experiences of joys, loss, and the poignant wisdom that comes with age. As poet Sean Thomas Dougherty puts it, Igloria's poems 'get to the heart of why poetry is written: the pure lyric impulse of trying to live.'" -- Publisher's description.

The prelude to The Hidden Stream conveys Stephanie Sugioka's intent with forceful grace: "I mean the prose that surrounds these poems to tell of the earth from which the flowers grow. For without this humble stuff of everyday life, there would be no poems." She then invites us "to see how these flowers have come to grow from the raw earth of my being." The interplay of light and shadow, poem and story, of Sugioka's exquisite memoir give access to the inner currents of a life enriched by cultural, spiritual, and intellectual influences, but even more, of a soul attuned to "streams and trees for nurturance and modeling." As she writes in her poem "After Reading The Tale of Genji," - " a woman's soul is like wind." -Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, author of Flying Yellow In her new memoir, Stephanie Sugioka says that hers has been a life that's mostly been "unremarkable." Readers, however, should not let that modest appraisal deter them from following The Hidden Stream: A Life in Prose and Verse from its source to where it meets us in the present moment. As graceful as it is honest and heartfelt, her narrative takes readers from her childhood, growing up in "the only Japanese-American (or any sort of Asian) family in the small southern town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina...in the fifties before the civil rights movement;" and then through various relocations and life changes while she reflects on being a daughter, wife, mother, teacher, poet, and writer. The writer asks, "what about the dirt from which these flowers grow . . . roots, worms, and decaying leaves?" The poems included in this memoir fold and uncover, uncover and fold, with origami-like precision, various moments that reward with their insight, ache, and quiet beauty. -Luisa A. Igloria, author of The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser In this lovely, thoughtful memoir of poems and prose-a hybrid form whose ancestry is the Japanese haibun-the inner world flowers through the poems, while the prose gives them a chronological and autobiographical frame. The work has an eloquent clarity, purity and a genuine modesty; the reader is respected, invited in, drawn into a world where life and art are one, and union becomes communion as we recognize ourselves in the clear and moving mirror of The Hidden Stream. -Eleanor Wilner, 2019 Frost Medalist and author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2017

Linus and his eraser, Ernie, don't always see eye to eye. But with the family art show drawing near, these two will have to sharpen their collaboration to make something neither one could do on their own! This ode to art by the illustrator of Spoon and Chopsticks points out the power of sharing the creative process and sticking with it.