Poet Anderson

"Includes a previously-unreleased soundtrack CD by Tom DeLonge and Angels & Airwaves"--Page 4 of cover.

The poem from which BLACK UNDER derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: "I am black and black underneath." These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson's debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems' linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma's still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson's dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty. BLACK UNDER layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies--and incongruences--of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.

This poetry collection celebrates the impossible truths of the natural world and the magic that hides in plain sight. Poet and podcaster Jarod K. Anderson (creator of The CryptoNaturalist Podcast) has built a large audience of social media followers and podcast listeners with his strange, vibrant appreciations of nature. Ranging from contemplations of mortality to appreciations of single-celled organisms, the poems in this collection highlight our connection to a living universe and affirm our place in a wilderness worthy of our love.

Jonas Anderson and his older brother Alan are Lucid Dreamers. But after a car accident lands Alan in a coma, Jonas sets out into the Dream World in an attempt to find his brother and wake him up. What he discovers instead is an entire shared consciousness where fear comes to life as a snarling beast called a Night Terror, and a creature named REM is bent on destruction and misery, devouring the souls of the strongest dreamers. With the help of a Dream Walker—a guardian of the dreamscape, Jonas must face his fears, save his brother, and become who he was always meant to be: Poet Anderson.

“The best novel I know of on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer.” —Richard Yates Widely recognized as R. V. Cassill’s masterpiece, Clem Anderson is the story of an author whose astonishing talents are outmatched only by his capacity for self-destruction. Arrogant, untrustworthy, moody, and narcissistic, Clem is also a brilliant artist capable of astonishing feats of alchemy: His pen magically transforms real life into the stuff of great literature. But the rising tide of literary success is dangerous ground for a personality as unstable as Clem’s, and when he dies at the age of forty, alone and disgraced, it is up to his few remaining friends to pick up the pieces. The most steadfast and empathetic of these survivors is Dick Hartsell, a former classmate and fellow writer who has long walked in Clem’s shadow. Commissioned by a movie studio to publish a memorial article about his doomed friend, Hartsell struggles to capture the man’s unruly existence in this tidy format. So he sets out to write a novel called Clem Anderson, detailing his eponymous hero’s epic rise and fall. From a rural midwestern childhood to early fame as an undergraduate poet to the intoxicating expatriate literary scene in post–World War II Paris and an unhappy romance with a Hollywood starlet, Hartsell tells the story of Anderson’s life. The result is a work of art as singular and unforgettable as its ill-fated subject.

Laurie Halse Anderson's path to writing for young adult readers was indirect, unintentional, and difficult. Although Anderson may never have set out to write for teens, her commitment to creating stories that enrich, disquiet, and guide the teens she admires led to her selection as the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award. The author of several highly acclaimed novels_including Speak, Fever 1793, Prom, Chains and Wintergirls_Anderson channels the lives of real readers through her imagination and onto the page, enrapturing those who ultimately see themselves reflected in her tales. In Laurie Halse Anderson: Speaking in Tongues, Wendy J. Glenn examines the life and works of one of the most popular authors for teens. Drawing from both primary sources (Anderson's writings, published interviews, speeches, the author's blog, and other online sources, as well as a live interview with the author) and secondary sources (reviews of and scholarly articles on her work), Glenn explores the themes and impact of Anderson novels. This richly researched work includes in-depth analyses of each of Anderson's young adult titles, chapters on Anderson's lesser-known writings for children, short stories, and poems, and a synthesis of reviews for each title Anderson has published. Readers of this book will come away with a greater understanding of an author who has demonstrated the marked capacity for writing diverse texts for multiple audiences in varying genres, breaking barriers with each title she creates.

The study develops a new theoretical approach to the relationship between two media (jazz music and writing) and demonstrates its explanatory power with the help of a rich sampling of jazz poems. Currently, the mimetic approach to intermediality (e.g., the notion that jazz poetry imitates jazz music) still dominates the field of criticism. This book challenges that interpretive approach. It demonstrates that a mimetic view of jazz poetry hinders readers from perceiving the metaphoric ways poets rendered music in writing. Drawing on and extending recent cognitive metaphor theories (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier), it promotes a conceptual metaphor model that allows readers to discover the innovative ways poets translate “melody,” “dynamics,” “tempo,” “mood,” and other musical elements into literal and figurative expressions that invite readers to imagine the music in their mind’s eye (i.e., their mind’s ear).