Poetry And Community

Inspired by contemporary English language haiku, accomplished poet, Jude Neale, explores ordinary objects through both poetry and photography in her new collection, Inside the Pearl. These photos and haiku-like poems capture moments and memories - recording and archiving, the history and treasures of Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, Canada. The images range from colourful household items to grainy, black and white snapshots of times past, reminders of a most difficult period in Japanese Canadian history that still resonate today.

This powerful poetry collection seeks to map the emotional and spiritual territory of diaspora, violence, abuse, and exile. Kai Cheng incorporates autobiographical details from her own childhood and adult life with the rhythms of the oral storytelling tradition and fairytale motifs, poignantly depicting the plight of trans women of color.

There are trans people here in the past, the present, and the future. H. Melt’s writing centers the deep care, love, and joy within trans communities. This poetry collection describes moments of resistance in queer and trans history as catalysts for movements today. It honors trans ancestors and contemporary activists, artists, and writers fighting for trans liberation. There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture.

Marty McConnell offers start-to-finish instructions along with a grounding in the Gathering Voices approach for both aspiring and seasoned facilitators who want to establish or invigorate a poetry learning environment for workshops in the community and the class room. Gathering Voices includes: Poetry from some of the most exciting poets writing today including Ada Limón, Patricia Smith, Jamaal May, Keetje Kuipers, Ocean Vuong, Rachel McKibbins, and so many more! Tailored discussion questions for each poem. Innovative and interactive writing prompts for twenty-four complete three-hour workshops. Guidelines for leading discussions of participants' work. Strategies for marketing your workshop, creating a schedule, maintaining boundaries and more.

"A book of vispo (visual poetry) glosas designed to begin to dismantle the maculinist legacy of avant-garde visual poetics."--

The process of poetry has importantly intuitive aspects and poetry embodies an ambivalence towards consciousness and towards those activities of thought in which it is constituted. It was ability to favour doubt over the productions of the rational mind that led Keats to associate poetry with his 'negative capability'. Consciousness is - like poetry - a floating signifier, a term of wide reference, and with a range of implications in the various disciplinary contexts in which it finds currency. Poetry, consciousness and community is about poetry, consciousness and community, about their reflexive relationships in process, and about how these relationships matter to the world today and to worlds to come. This book is interested in the nature of poetic, as opposed to other, thought; it is interested in the critical application of these forms of thought to each others' productions, and in how poetic thought might or might not be subject to its own regime. Poetry - as practice of testing the limits of language - entails a reflexive goal: that of understanding the journey in words made possible for, and by, the poem. Poetic meaning and truth are revealed between languages (likewise between genres, between texts, between subjects); it is in this inter-subjective and inter-cultural space that the limits of language (and so of conceivable worlds) are found.

Poetry. African American Studies. The follow up to 2013's BLOOD (Coldfront's book of the year), FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS is a visceral poetry collection that troubles the intersections of race, abuse, memory and history. Concerned with how the visibility of blackness can become an individual burden, FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS traces the lingering fallout of an identity informed by traumatic artifacts and events how the story of a story can be revised. FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS complicates the idea of family as nurturer and destroyer. A physical and haunting work of cathartic healing. "Shane McCrae's FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS is song that writes wrongs until they ring with generosity. When the poet turns to trauma and difficulty for subject matter, he returns to us with an unflinching devotion to hope, to possibility bearing wisdom, sustenance. McCrae has again transmuted a legacy of violence into one of love because 'the promise / is / New life.'" Heidi Lynn Staples"

Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky’s poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music, the first anthology of Zwicky’s poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and fugal structures, from polyphonic textures to the sprawling reach of narrative gestures. Throughout, one feels the deft hand of an adept using powerful metaphors to explore themes of colonial violence, environmental devastation, spiritual catastrophe, and transformation. Resisting Western philosophy’s exclusion of imagination from civic life, Zwicky’s poetry is noteworthy for the tension it achieves between the abstract and the personal, the general and the particular. Meditating repeatedly on themes of love and grief, this poetry is at once passionately committed to the lucidity of its utterances and the fidelity of its images.