Universal Poems

Universal Poems are collection of some of the finest poems which cut across diverse cultures, social background, religion and race. It include categories like love, lost love, romance, friendship, nature, dedication, seasons, depression, life, death, haiku, etc. Some of the poems in this book express the feelings of the author at a particular time while others are based on inspiration and unique imagination and they are well written for your maximum relaxation and enjoyment.

In 1978, Lydia Tomkiw - precocious, inventive poet and beguiling new wave chanteuse - blazed out from Chicago's intertwined worlds of poetry and punk rock. Her trajectory stands as a thrilling testament to the independent do-it-yourself ethos - that the journey from the Chicago's Ukrainian Village to the inaugural volume of Best American Poetry can be made via nightclubs, armed with little more than office xerox machines, glue, restless imagination, words and moxie.Tomkiw's poetry is both innovative and immensely enjoyable - formally playful, rigorously perceptive, delightfully surreal, and fueled by her singular, sexy charm. Tomkiw's story leads us back to a circle of immensely talented poets, mostly women, including Elaine Equi, Sharon Mesmer, and Connie Deanovich. Collectively they invigorated American urban poetry and cleared a path for a more vital, raucous, and fiercely female verse. In their scene lay the roots of now celebrated forms like slam and spoken word. With her acclaimed band Algebra Suicide - designed explicitly as a vehicle for her poetry - she pushed the boundaries of poetic performance, while also leaving behind a series of unassailably ace records. This new collection presents all her publications in facsimile editions, preserving the raw sizzle of her early self-published chapbooks as well as comprehensively reissuing the works that secured her reputation. In addition, it brings together over 180 uncollected poems, joined by critical and biographical essays by poets Paul Hoover and Sharon Mesmer and music critic Ira Robbins.LYDIA TOMKIW POEMS restores to print and posterity an exhilarating and important voice in American poetry.

Universal Poems is a collection of poems that are heart-spoken to inspire and help readers through any situation they may encounter.

Poetry. Sufism. Middle Eastern Literature. Arab American Studies. Translated from the Persian by Reza Ordoubadian. Shamsed-din Hafez was born some six hundred years ago in southern Iran, but his poems have universal and contemporary appeal. Wherever Persian is known, he is easily recited by both king and common man. Those uncertain about matters of love, fortune, or any other situation open a page of his collection of poems at random and in it see their dilemmas untangled. His turns of phrase have enriched the Persian lexicon and entered everyday language; this has made him Persian culture's most read, quoted, and revered figure. Reza Ordoubadian's translations make the poems of Hafez accessible to the English language reader, while remaining faithful to the nuances of Hafez's language and thought in the original Persian.

With something of a poetry renaissance currently under way worldwide, there is now, more than ever, a need for a solidly-based methodology for interpreting poems: something more empirical than traditional ‘lit-crit’ approaches, and something more linguistically-informed than the version of ‘postmodernism’ rampant in certain Anglophone universities. The latter approach, which tends to allow the individual reader to do what he/she likes with a poetic text, is inadequate to interpret modernist poetry, whose English-language precursors may be found in the late Romantics; its pioneers were already writing (in France) as early as 1840. What is so different about the modernists? Most importantly, their works are monumental, in that they are strongly resistant to deconstruction. Contributing to this resistance is the fact that they are built around two deep-level propositions, each of which generates a set of indirectly-signifying images, sharing the same internal structure, but having a different vocabulary. Thus, they do not signify according to linear narrative, but according to these propositions—and the relation between them—which may be reconstructed by a careful comparison of images on the textual surface. Every text—as subject-sign—refers to an intertextual object-sign, which is usually another poem, but may also be a film or other form of art. Mediating between these two signs is their reader-constructed interpretant, which completes the semiotic triad. As this book shows, the novelty of this sign is thrown into relief by the contrast it makes with a lexical counterpart from the reader’s experience, which differs from the interpretant in structure. The book’s inclusion of French and Japanese, as well as English poems, shows that deep-level signifying mechanisms may well be universal, with considerable research and pedagogical implications.

Poems Of Universal Love is highly inspired by spoken word and black culture in the African Diaspora. The poems depict a current image of our times and they have a highly political emphasis commenting on such social issues as unreliable politics and the reign of Trump, racism and terrorism, feminism and women's rights, hunger and poverty, diseases and mental health, joblessness and education. Even global warming isn't forgotten. The writer suggests failure of democracy and she suggests that the idea of welfare state must be re-evaluated. In the face of hard times the poems celebrate diversity and find joy in love, romance and cultural phenomena. The poems Brown Desire and Misfit Manifesto of the book have been also released as spoken word tracks on Youtube and Soundcloud.

Alicia Mountain’s urgent and astonishing debut collection maps a new queer landscape through terrain alive and sensual, defiant and inviting. With a voice that beckons while it howls, Mountain nimbly traverses lyric, confessional, and narrative modes, leaving groundbreaking tracks for us to follow. High Ground Coward offers fists full of soil, leftovers for breakfast, road trip as ritual, twins of lovers and twins of ourselves. This world blooms with hunger-inducing detail, its speakers asking us to consider what it will take to satisfy our own appetites while simultaneously trying to nourish one another. “Ferocious, even the softest part,” Mountain shows us “a way to fall in love with wanting,” leaving us “ravenous, but gradually.” Bearing witness to identity formation in solitude and communion, High Ground Coward is an almanac of emotional and relational seasons. Mountain’s speakers question the meaning of inheritance, illness, violence, mythology, and family architecture. Whether Mountain is at work revealing the divinity of doubt, the entanglement of devotion, or the dominion that place holds over us, High Ground Coward heralds a thrilling poetic debut. From “Scavenger” We three eat food and are in love. This is the easy way to say there are stores beneath the floor. Potatoes and shallots, hard-necked garlic streaked purple, jars beside jars, themselves each staving globes of suction. Preservation, a guardian hunger. In the evening I whisper to the boiled beet, like a naked organ in my flushed hand: You are ground blood, you are new born, you have never been nothing— thawfruit seedflower greenstart rootbulb handpull shedscrub mouthsweet and again.