Real Toads Imaginary Gardens On Reading And Writing Poetry Forensically

An illuminating exploration of how to read and understand poetry, and how reading critically can teach us to write. What makes reading a poem unlike reading anything else? While there are as many ways to read a poem as there are types of poetry, every poem demands a conscious attention to language. Reading poems forensically helps us bring that attention to our own writing. In Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens, acclaimed poet and teacher Paisley Rekdal demonstrates how to observe the building blocks of a poem—including its diction, form, imagery, and rhythm—and construct an interpretation of its meaning. Through close analyses of contemporary and classic poems as well as creative exercises and specific, skill-based questions, this book shows how a poem takes shape and accrues meaning through the intersection of all its lyric elements. Lucid and generous, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens reveals how to read and write critically, and how to appreciate—and achieve—the exhilarating craft of poetry.

A Tupelo Press Lineage Series publication Intimate is a hybrid memoir and "photo album" that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, Intimatecreates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal's Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race. Praise for Paisley Rekdal's previous books: "Rekdal ... cleverly dissects what it means to be biracial in America and overseas in this artful collection.... The narrative structure is inventive and draws from her sharply honed skills as a poet.... Rekdal has a lot to say."--Booklist "Dazzling. Just as a kaleidoscope refracts and changes the object viewed, Rekdal's subjects and protagonists are often unable to tell themselves from the stories they've been told."--Publishers Weekly

Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

In Paisley Rekdal's second book of poems, all the flavors of one's expectations, every conceivable misconception and desire, each relationship, loss and spectacle are brought forth naturally, as though they had simply stepped from behind some trees. The poems frequently find themselves standing in Japanese block prints, or in Delos, or before a painting by Caravaggio, or inside the tale of Atalanta and Meleager. Rekdal's is a poetry of subtlety and grace, but shocking in its directness, its refusal to obscure or deny the difficult life to which self-knowledge must bring us. It is a poetry born not of mere technique, but of the unrelenting necessity to know and then to speak.

In Speculum, Hannah Copley considers the difficult history of the female body. Mirroring the title object used for centuries by gynaecologists, the poems uncover the hidden lives behind scientific progress. From the enslaved women exploited in the name of invention to the anonymous residents of mother and baby homes, Copley navigates personal, historical and forgotten legacies with equal exactitude and tenderness. Speculum is not only important as a feminist text, but its poetry is immaculate; a virtuosic first collection.

In this study of Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, renowned Melville scholar Hershel Parker provides the fullest introduction to and analysis of this work to date. It is the first complete reading of Billy Budd to draw on the definitive but neglected Hayford-Sealts Genetic Text. For the first time, it places Billy Budd in the context of Melville's writings and projects of the last decade of his life; and it is the first to present the work as a product of the post-Gilded Age and fin-de-siecle period rather than of the mid-century high romanticism of Moby-Dick.

This comprehensive guide will prepare candidates for the test in all 50 states. It includes four complete practice exams, a real estate refresher course and complete math review, as well as a real estate terms glossary with over 900 terms, and expert test-prep tips.

We normally think of reading and writing as skills that are a part of linguistic intelligence. In The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive, Thomas Armstrong shows how involving the other seven intelligences--logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic--will help students acquire reading and writing skills, especially those students who are not particularly strong in linguistic intelligence. The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing appeals to all educators who work with reading and writing skills, from the preschool teacher leading the class in phonemic awareness activities to the post-graduate professor helping students examine kinesthetic imagery in Shakespeare's plays. The book combines Howard Gardner's MI theory and recent brain research on reading and writing with historical, anthropological, biographical, and psychological perspectives on literacy. Armstrong pulls the research together to show you how to engage students by infusing the study of words with imagery, logic, oral language, physical activity, emotion, music, social involvement, and nature experiences. Armstrong provides hundreds of ideas, strategies, tips, and resources for teaching everything from grammar and spelling to word decoding and reading comprehension. His strategic approach synthesizes the best reading and writing methods for application in preK-12 classrooms, literacy programs, speech and language pathology groups, one-to-one tutoring sessions, and all other settings where words are the focus of learning. Armstrong shows you how to empower your students with literacy skills for life. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.