The Blood Poets

This thought-provoking and insightful study of 40 years of American violent cinema ties together the multiple disciplines of psychology, criminology, censorship, and anthropology. The study is divided into two volumes: Volume 1: American Chaos, From Touch of Evil to The Terminator, and Volume 2: Millennial Blues, From Apocalypse Now to The Matrix. Horsley raises a new dialogue between scholars and movie buffs as readers struggle to find their own answers to the connection between the need to portray and the need to watch violent films.

"A rhapsodic follow-up to Tongo Eisen-Martin's Heaven is All Goodbyes, this collection further explores themes of love and loss, family and faith, refracted through the lens of Black experience. These poems honor intellectual tradition and ancestral knowledge while blazing an entirely new path, recording and replaying the poet's sensory travels through America, from its packed metropolises to desolate anytowns. Packed with politically astute and clear-eyed takes on race and class, filled with wisdom and great humanity, these poems perform mind-bending leaps and wander down back alleys to arrive at their moment of ultimate truth"--

The definitive guidebook and rebel yell for poets seeking radical growth. You want to write great poems: poems that challenge, inspire and awe; poems that forever alter your audience and yourself. Those poems take imagination, skill and some serious guts. This is not an easy step-by-step up a how-to staircase. This collection of essays, prompts and exercises is the safecracker�s toolbox you need to tap in to your creative source, find what�s sparkling in the dark, and get its life-blood and electricity flowing into your writing.

Winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Winner of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award For prize-winning poet Tiana Clark, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, her own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because Tiana cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past—she will always see blood on the leaves.

"Katie Ford's is a finely-wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc." —Poetry I lie still, play dead, am delivered decree: our daughter weighs seven hundred dimes, paperclips, teaspoons of sugar, this child of grams for which the good nurse laid out her studies as a coin purse into which our tiny wealth clinked, our daughter spilling almost to the floor. —from "Of a Child Early Born" In Katie Ford's third collection, she sets her music into lyrics wrung from the world's dangers. Blood Lyrics is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."

"Nate Marshall was paying close attention when Chuck D said, 'Rap is CNN for Black people.' In his hard-hitting chapbook, BLOOD PERCUSSION, Marshall takes the Hard Rhymer's words and masterfully applies them to poetry, turning his eye toward gun play, free lunches, skull caps, prayers, and praise songs. With wit and fierce music, these poems take on the subjects that can't find a space on the evening news, reminding the reader again and again that there is power and grace in truth- telling even when those truths are difficult to hear."—Adrian Matejka