Written In Exile

After a failed push for political reform, the T’ang era’s greatest prose-writer, Liu Tsung-yuan, was exiled to the southern reaches of China. Thousands of miles from home and freed from the strictures of court bureaucracy, he turned his gaze inward and chronicled his estrangement in poems. Liu’s fame as a prose writer, however, overshadowed his accomplishment as a poet. Three hundred years after Liu died, the poet Su Tung-p’o ranked him as one of the greatest poets of the T’ang, along with Tu Fu, Li Pai, and Wei Ying-wu. And yet Liu is unknown in the West, with fewer than a dozen poems published in English translation. The renowned translator Red Pine discovered Liu’s poetry during his travels throughout China and was compelled to translate 140 of the 146 poems attributed to Liu. As Red Pine writes, “I was captivated by the man and by how he came to write what he did.” Appended with thoroughly researched notes, an in-depth introduction, and the Chinese originals, Written in Exile presents the long-overdue introduction of a legendary T’ang poet.

Julian Leclerc, a handsome and talented young barrister, has been found dead of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. The verdict is accidental death, but his fiancee, Ann Hewitt, suspects there's something more to the story. As the grieving woman recounts the details of Julian's tragic end to psychiatrist Dr. Tony Page, he listens with acute interest - but not for the reason she thinks. Years earlier, he and Julian had been lovers, and now, disturbed by the circumstances of his friend's demise, Tony sets out to uncover the truth. His quest will take him from the parties and pubs of the gay underworld of 1950s London to Scotland Yard and the House of Commons as he uses his shrewd and penetrating insight to find who or what was responsible for Julian's death. But he may discover more than he bargained for - about Julian, and himself.

The swooning Victorian ladies and the 1950s housewives genuinely needed to be liberated. That much is indisputable. So, First-Wave feminists held rallies for women's suffrage. Second-Wave feminists marched for Prohibition, jobs, and abortion. Today, Third-Wave feminists stand firmly for nobody's quite sure what. But modern women--who use psychotherapeutic antidepressants at a rate never before seen in history--need liberating now more than ever. The truth is, feminists don't know what liberation is. They have led us into a very boring dead end. Eve in Exile sets aside all stereotypes of mid-century housewives, of China-doll femininity, of Victorians fainting, of women not allowed to think for themselves or talk to the men about anything interesting or important. It dismisses the pencil-skirted and stiletto-heeled executives of TV, the outspoken feminists freed from all that hinders them, the brave career women in charge of their own destinies. Once those fictionalized stereotypes are out of the way--whether they're things that make you gag or things you think look pretty fun--Christians can focus on real women. What did God make real women for?

Contains poems about migration by more than seventy women.

Exile on a Grid Road is a celebration and exploration of the human experience, from youth to adulthood and illness to joy. Sadness, healing, humour, forgiveness, and joyfulness mingle as Shelley Banks creates detailed narratives of office life, failing health, and complex relationships and confronts the rootlessness and disconnection common to a contemporary experience marked by globalization and increasing mobility. In many of her poems, Banks presents the conundrum of belonging, identity, and culture. She displays an intimate knowledge of the many environments in which she has lived but also possesses an underlying disconnect due to the temporary nature of her stay in each place. Though poems such as "Moon Offering" and "Grasshopper Summer" are rich with natural imagery of the Canadian prairies, Banks' writes, "I have no farm./I am three generations past my mother's flight/from saddles, curry combs and dill./I am afraid of horses./I'm city-deep." She expresses a similar separation from her youth in the Caribbean, recalling the vivid details of storms, beaches, and "curry, chutney, tangerines" yet reasserting her alienation and feelings of loss. Encounters with mortality are brought into sharp relief in later sections when Banks introduces an elderly grandmother, aging family pets, and the sudden death of a parent on his way to McDonald's for a morning coffee. In "Kiss of Knives", a sequence of nine poems which follows a woman battling breast cancer, Banks reveals her insight into the complexity of emotion present while dealing with illness. This complexity is especially evident in the poem "2: Wings Spread Under Glass" when a woman "so tired she can't walk/across a grocery store" agonizes that she has become a neglectful parent even as she fights to stay alive. Banks' quiet wit keeps her serious subject matter from overwhelming by presenting mundane details of working life with fresh observational humour, including describing tea that "is cold and tastes like chewing gum" and expressing envy towards an irresponsible coworker who "wears Black Cashmere,/come-fuck-me shoes." She uses rich imagery to evoke nostalgia and to remind readers of the details we often miss during the process of daily life. By combining sharp observation, humour, and accessible verse, Exile on a Grid Road reveals the wonders to be found among the seemingly mundane details of the day to day.

Outlandish addresses geographical displacement as a lived experience in the twentieth century, as a predicament of writing, and as a problem for theory. It focuses on the work of three transnational writers from diverse backgrounds working in different genres: Joseph Conrad, the Ukrainian-born Polish novelist and storywriter living in Britain at the turn of the century; Theodor W. Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher and sociologist transplanted to Los Angeles during the Second World War; and Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British novelist and journalist, recently released from the peculiar conditions of his notorious houseless arrest. The author argues that Conrad, Adorno, and Rushdie emblematize significant shifts over the course of the century, from a modernist expression of almost universal deracination, to a post-Auschwitz disarticulation of home and subjectivity, to an emergent conceptualization of displacement in terms of migrancy, hybridity, and flow. He theorizes a mode of reading between exile and diaspora--two fundamentally different descriptions of displacement--and allows the "outlandish" writing of these three figures to complicate this seemingly continuous trajectory. Drawing on texts from literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and geography, the author explores what he calls the "rhetoric of displacement"--the struggle to assert identity out of place. He reads this writing predicament against the backdrop of the century's salient economic and technological changes, political upheavals, and mass migrations. In doing so, he draws attention to those aspects of exile and diaspora that have remained insufficiently considered: their relation to nationalism and colonialism, to authority and institutionality, and, above all, to broader questions of subjectivity, "race," location, and language, as these concepts themselves subtly change over the course of the century.

One of the most intriguing and engaging voices in contemporary Christianity is that of the Irish poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama and this is his first, long-awaited poetry collection. Hailing from the Ikon community in Belfast and working closely with its founder, the bestselling writer Pete Rollins, Pádraig’s poetry interweaves parable, poetry, art, activism and philosophy into an original and striking expression of faith. Pádraig’s poems are accessible, memorable profound and challenging. They emerge powerfully from a context of struggle and conflict and yet are filled with hope.

How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written? In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writers—essayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoirists—respond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. Their contributions—poignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely political—make for an offering that is remarkable for the candor and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Susan Abulhawa, Suad Amiry, Rana Barakat, Mourid Barghouti, Beshara Doumani, Sharif S. Elmusa, Rema Hammami, Mischa Hiller, Emily Jacir, Penny Johnson, Fady Joudah, Jean Said Makdisi, Karma Nabulsi, Raeda Sa’adeh, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli.