Tell Me Again Poetry And Prose From The Healing Art Of Writing 2012

For more than a decade The Healing Art of Writing conference has sought to strengthen compassionate understanding between healthcare providers and those who seek a state of well-being beyond the reach of surgery or pharmacology. Together, the participants share the belief that being cured of disease is not the same thing as being healed, and that a practice of expressive writing promotes both spiritual and physical healing. The writings presented at the 2013 conference, collected here in Tell Me Again, are a powerful testament to that belief. Within these pages you will hear, again and again, words of truth, words that uplift, words that heal.

A “raw and honest” (Los Angeles Review of Books) memoir from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a haunting, visionary memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice.

A Pathway to Healing: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose is a collection of expressive writing and art by participants in the workshop entitled Writing Through the Cancer Journey, at MemorialCare Todd Cancer Institute (TCI), Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. The eight-week session, held three times a year, offers ways for participants to explore and share their thoughts and emotions concerning diagnosis, treatment, and healing. Literary forms and prompts are introduced, along with mindfulness meditation and articles about wellbeing and creative expression, for attendees to respond to their grave and unpredictable illnesses. As a group, they explore their deepest joys and worries about their personal journeys as they practice expressive writing in a safe and supportive environment. Writing Through the Cancer Journey has been offered by Margaret Towner since 2015. Facilitating workshops in wellbeing and education for years, she has a wealth of experience along with her own insights as a cancer survivor and published writer. Recent research has shown that expressive writing is helpful in reducing stress and anxiety, ameliorating physical symptoms, and strengthening the possibility of recovery and well-being. Backed by these findings, Margaret is a firm believer that creative expression, and in particular writing, can help patients turn toward resilience, tranquility, and potential healing.Expressive writing is supported by Mariusz Wirga M.D., Medical Director of Psychosocial Oncology at TCI. His programs, Beat the Odds and Boost the Odds, offer patients pathways toward physical and emotional well-being. Writing Through the Cancer Journey uses expressive writing as an additional pathway of support for patients. During the workshop, the idea evolved to publish a book to share writing with a broader audience. The courageous contributors to this book have been participants in all these programs, and in the writing workshop they have found ways to express their rich insights about themselves in literary forms such as haiku, free verse, journaling, and storytelling. The selections in this book include writings about diagnosis, treatment, living with uncertainty, finding simple pleasures, resilience, life's vital activities, and love, along with the participants' own visual art.

Poems and commentary by both unknown and famous poets reveal how people from all walks of life have used poem-making to explore matters of concern to us all.

The remarkable story of seven contemporary Russian-language poets whose experimental work anchors a thriving dissident artistic movement opposed to both Putin’s regime and Western liberalism. What does leftist art look like in the wake of state socialism? In recent years, Russian-language avant-garde poetry has been seeking the answers to this question. Marijeta Bozovic follows a constellation of poets at the center of a contemporary literary movement that is bringing radical art out of the Soviet shadow: Kirill Medvedev, Pavel Arseniev, Aleksandr Skidan, Dmitry Golynko, Roman Osminkin, Keti Chukhrov, and Galina Rymbu. While their formal experiments range widely, all share a commitment to explicitly political poetry. Each one, in turn, has become a hub in a growing new-left network across the former Second World. Joined together by their work with the Saint Petersburg–based journal [Translit], this circle has staunchly resisted the Putin regime and its mobilization of Soviet nostalgia. At the same time, the poets of Avant-Garde Post– reject Western discourse about the false promises of leftist utopianism and the superiority of the liberal world. In opposing both narratives, they draw on the legacies of historical Russian and Soviet avant-gardes as well as on an international canon of Marxist art and theory. They are also intimately connected with other artists, intellectuals, and activists around the world, collectively restoring leftist political poetry to global prominence. The avant-garde, Bozovic shows, is not a relic of the Soviet past. It is a recurrent pulse in Russophone—as well as global—literature and art. Charged by that pulse, today’s new left is reimagining class-based critique. Theirs is an ongoing, defiant effort to imagine a socialist future that is at once global and egalitarian.

'Raw, poetic and compulsively readable ... I can't wait to buy a copy for everyone I know.' Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help The summer she turned thirteen, Molly Brodak's father was arrested for robbing eleven banks. In time, the image she held of him would unravel further, as more and more unexpected facets of his personality came to light. Bandit is her attempt to discover what, exactly, is left, when the most fundamental relationship of your life turns out to have been built on falsehoods. It is also a scrupulously honest account of learning how to trust again, and to rebuild the very idea of family from scratch. Refusing to fence off the trickier sides of her father's character, Brodak tries to find, through crystalline, spellbinding prose, a version of him that does not rely on the easy answers but allows him to be: an unknowable and incomprehensible whole – who is also her father. Unforgettable, moving, and utterly relatable, Bandit is a story of the unpredictable complexity of family.

Celebrates a young girl's transitions through birth, childhood, and young adulthood, with advice on remaining connected to loved ones and nature.