Pole Dancing To Gospel Hymns

Four-time Denver Grand Champion, Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the 2008 Women of the World Poetry Slam, Andrea Gibson’s dynamic and energetic first book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, challenges us to not only read, but to react. Hauntingly vivid, the poems march through a soldier's lingering psychological wounds, tackle the curious questions of school children on the meaning of "hate", and tangle with a lover's witty and vibrant description of longing. Gibson's poems deconstruct the current political climate through stunning imagery and careful crafting. With the same velocity, the poignant and vacillating love poems sweep the air out of the room. It’s word-induced hypoxia. Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns whispers with a bold and unforgettable internal voice rich with the kind of questioning that inspires action.

Gibson's dynamic and timely new work is a energetic collection of stirring and introspective poetry. Hauntingly vivid, her poems deconstruct the current political climate through stunning imagery and careful crafting.

Sarah Coakley is one of the most exciting and creative figures in contemporary theology. Her far-reaching systematic vision of the Christian faith has integrated insights from systematic theology, gender studies, sociology, patristics, analytic philosophy of religion, and evolutionary biology. This integrated vision coheres around the mystical and contemplative core of Christian experience. In her challenging revisionary work on themes such as gender, sacrifice, desire, and the doctrine of the Trinity, Coakley reconnects theological reflection with its contemplative roots and pushes toward a new approach to systematic theological reflection. In Sarah Coakley and the Future of Systematic Theology, scholars explore Coakley’s multifaceted contribution to contemporary theology and consider the ways through which her work sets a new standard for systematic reflection on the Christian faith. This volume brings together, around Coakley’s work, a gathering of established and emerging scholars and asks critical questions of Coakley’s work as we await three further volumes of her systematic theology.

MultiVerse does for superheroes what Rob Sturma's first anthology Aim For The Head did for zombies: It tackles what could be dismissed as a genre novelty and through the words of page and stage poets, finds the heart, pathos, and humor involved in the otherworld of those with superhuman abilities. Welcome to an examination of the many facets of what it means to be a hero.

This is an account of an ethnically and racially diverse classroom of funny, endearing, and often poignant six-year-olds in a Seattle inner-city elementary school. The author, their volunteer literary coach, describes the classroom, their heroic teacher, a number of clever teaching modules, and the evolution of this school toward excellence. The children’s confidences, essays, and poetry sparkle with humor, and the unexpected viewpoints of childhood. Eight captivating students are profiled and featured for us in line drawing illustrations. In the final chapters some startling school district data is introduced as well as three common-sense recommendations to give all kids a fair chance in school. Having learned so much about the realities of public elementary education in her five years in the classroom, the author wanted to share the good news of what is possible with others who might otherwise view this as a grim subject.

A Constellation of Half-Lives is a collection of poems that attempt to reconcile the crisis of living on a collapsing planet with the unreasonable joy of loving and the pleasure of being alive. With careful precision and an exquisite eye for detail, poet Seema Reza examines what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and an American in a time of war. Through second-person poems she questions whether the beauty of this world outweighs its fragility and risk.

More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.

In her electrifying debut, Franny Choi leads readers through the complex landscapes of absence, memory, and identity. Beginning in loss and ending in reflective elation, Floating, Brilliant, Gone explores life as a brief impossibility, “infinite / until it isn’t.” Punctuated with haunting illustrations by Jess X. Chen, Choi’s poems read like lucid dreams that jolt awake at the most unexpected moments.