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A _ C O M M U N I O N _ O F _ S A I N T S
A Communion of Saints takes us on a harrowing trek through denial, descent, and resurrection in the Honolulu gay community of the 1980s. This book of prose poems, each glossed with a Biblical quotation, is an extended elegy for those who frequented the bar Meg Withers tended. She tends it - and them - still in this echo chamber of voices and stories. |
T H E _ E R O T I C S _ O F _ G E O G R A P H Y
Hazel Smith, author of the creative writing text, The Writing Experiment, shows us how it's done in this spirited book of performance poems, collages, elegies, meditations, explorations of gossip, uncertain identities, bodies and the city, to say nothing of “acts of omission.” An accompanying cd-rom includes new media and performance works by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean.
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P O E T A _ E N _ S A N _ F R A N C I S C O
Barbara Jane Reyes’s Poeta en San Francisco is a linguistic tour de force, incorporating English, Spanish, and Tagalog in a book-length poem at once lush and experimentally rigorous. From the vantage of San Francisco, Reyes looks outward to the Philippines, Vietnam, and other colonized places with violent histories. As she said in a recent interview, “It’s almost a cliché, the phrase, ‘the personal is political,’ but certainly, this is a strong consideration in my work.” And yet, it is not only violence that concerns Reyes: “I am interested in how we come to love in this world, despite the historical circumstances, the conquests, the wars, which have created us as a diasporic people, as exiles, and refugees.” This is an ambitious, sweeping and necessary work. Reyes has won the James Laughlin Award for a second book from the Academy of American Poets for this volume. Poeta En San Francisco is used as required reading at Stanford University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Muhlenburg College, Cal Arts and the University of Notre Dame. |
C R I B S
Cribs is a discrete sequence of poems probing into the manifolds of the book's title word: "crib" as a small child's bed, as literal translation, as plagiarism, as a summary or key to understanding a literary work, as a manger for feeding animals, as confinement, as home, as a memory aid for illegal immigrants, and so on. Speaking in a forked/chopsticked tongue, the author explores translingual and cross-cultural terrains where the inchoate, tangential, and back-translational emerge and diverge to unsettle an adopted diction. Cribs is used as required reading at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Utah, SUNY Binghamton and California State University, Los Angeles. |
A L L _ A R O U N D _ T H A T _ E M P T I E S _ O U T
All Around The Empties Out is used as required reading at Indiana University. |
A L C H E M I E S _ O F _ D I S T A N C E
Alchemies of Distance has been used as required reading at Cornell University and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. |