The Victor Poems

"Anthony Caleshu's Victor is a wild ride, an arctic adventure, a spirited quest narrative, a mad love poem to the imagination in all its unstrung wild joys. The exuberance of address in this poem is contagious, at once zany and intimate, descriptive and lyric, it's pedal to the metal and won't let up. Caleshu is an extremely gifted and accomplished poet and a true romantic to boot." -Peter Gizzi

All the sections of ICON TACT were conceived as book-length single texts or serial poems; some of them were published as such in limited editions either by the author (as The Eternal Network) or by other micro presses. This book reflects a tradition Coleman has followed since Coach House released CORRECTIONS in 1985. ICON TACT represents the end of what Coleman considers to be his ?conventional? poetry cycle, during which only AMERICA reflects his current concerns with Oulipian constraints and poetry as a kind of word sculpture. LETTER DROP (2000) and MI SING (BookThug, 2005) represent one half of a four book set of which the third (based on Mallarms prose) is currently in progress. The fourth book will be concerned with the writing and the lives of the Troubadours.

Winner of the 2022 PEN Open Book Award! Winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award! Finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Awards in Poetry! Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States. Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks, undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark "other" by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.

Although best known as the author of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo was primarily a poet—one of the most important and prolific in French history. Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions. Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo's essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo's oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume's eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo's career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo's writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions. Illustrated with Hugo's own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo's bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.

kith [noun] one's friends, acquaintances, neighbours, or relations. In Kith, award-winning writer Divya Victor engages Indian-American diasporic culture in the twentieth century, via an autobiographical account that explores what 'kith' might mean outside of the national boundaries of those people belonging to the Indian and South East Asian diasporas. Through an engagement with the effects of globalization on identity formation, cultural and linguistic exchange, and demographic difference, Kith explores questions about race and ethnic difference: How do 'brownness' and 'blackness' emerge as traded commodities in the transactions of globalization? What are the symptoms of belonging? How and why does 'kith' diverge from 'kin,' and what are the affects and politics of this divergence? Historically-placed and well-researched, Kith is an unflinching and simultaneous account of both systemic and interpersonal forms of violence and wounding in the world today. Praise for Kith: "For Divya Victor, history is a wound. And the poet's language is bright like the white bandage on which blood shows more clearly. What we have on display in this book is an imagination that is as wide as the world. Part-anthem, part-instruction manual, part-memoir, part-dictionary, this text offers testimony to other ways of being and remembering, a reflection on forgotten lives. I read most of Kith in airplanes and airports, and found myself paying greater attention to everyone around me. I was grateful for Victor's long sentences that spilled into seemingly every corner of our contemporary reality--these sentences that describe so well our locked destinies and, at the same time, perhaps because of their wit, or vitality, or compassion, deliver us into liberated zones of heightened consciousness." -- Amitava Kumar, author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb Kith is a luminous work of "Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering," as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha might say, the dead flittering out of her thrifted coats with kith in their mouths. Kith, like neighbor, friend, enemy, or community, is a kind of conceptual limit, "not of blood and yet belonging"; not kin, which it is often confused with, but kindred, kinship, and also knowledge. Yet in Kith, it turns out that kith is also kin and kin is also kith and the neighbor is also friend, enemy, and the other neighbor's neighbor, and "we" are all stuck here at the limits of language grasping for new forms of community and belonging when those words suck too yet refuse to burn. Lodged within this "atlas of mangle" known as now-time is something at the helm of being named--Kith's offering, Kith's knowledge, Kith's open boat, Kith's astounding "shriek frightful." Where were you when it will happen? --Rachel Zolf

Traversing the world from the Garden of Eden to a grandmother asking what's a tweet, We Were Like Everyone Else explores the daily humanity of family, the folly of our politics, and a natural world that seems to offer the promise of consolation but never quite does. In poems both lyrical and narrative, the possibility of violence is never far off, but the same can be said of love, our capacity to endure, our hunger for healing and redemption. And yet these poems offer no prescription, no bulwark to keep menace from our children or despair from encroaching on our few vestiges of hope. Ken Victor's first collection of poems takes us back to children ducking under desks in the nuclear fear of the 50's, to the collapse of innocence in the face of the Vietnam War, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the depravity of the siege of Sarejevo. Always the question of whether or not we can survive our own missteps lingers in the background of our 21st century lives as we go about raising our children, dining in restaurants, walking in woods, working from a home office. As one poem puts it, you've got to live your life like you're in control of it, pray like you aren't.

Excerpt from Victor: And Other Poems I know not why I write, Yet must I sing Perchance I may indite That which will bring Joy to some aching heart, Balm to some wounded breast To play in Me my part, And find in Heaven my rest. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Towards the close of the First French Revolution, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, son of a joiner at Nancy, and an officer risen from the ranks in the Republican army, married Sophie Trébuchet, daughter of a Nantes fitter-out of privateers, a Vendean royalist and devotee. Victor Marie Hugo, their second son, was born on the 26th of February, 1802, at Besançon, France. Though a weakling, he was carried, with his boy-brothers, in the train of their father through the south of France, in pursuit of Fra Diavolo, the Italian brigand, and finally into Spain. Colonel Hugo had become General, and there, besides being governor over three provinces, was Lord High Steward at King Joseph's court, where his eldest son Abel was installed as page. The other two were educated for similar posts among hostile young Spaniards under stern priestly tutors in the Nobles' College at Madrid, a palace become a monastery. Upon the English advance to free Spain of the invaders, the general and Abel remained at bay, whilst the mother and children hastened to Paris.