Black Glasses Like Clark Kent

Black Glasses Like Clark Kent PDF

Author: Terese Svoboda

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2012-02-14

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1555970451

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After her Uncle's suicide, Terese Svoboda investigates his stunning claim that MPs may have executed their own men during the occupation of Japan after World War II [Our captain] commended us for being good soldiers and doing our job well and having a minimum of problems. Then he dropped a bomb. He said the prison was getting overcrowded, terribly overcrowded. As a child Terese Svoboda thought of her uncle as Superman, with "Black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps." At eighty, he could still boast a washboard stomach, but in March 2004, he became seriously depressed. Svoboda investigates his terrifying story of what happened during his time as an MP, interviewing dozens of elderly ex-GIs and visiting Japan to try to discover the truth. In Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Svoboda offers a striking and carefully wrought personal account of an often painful search for information. She intersperses excerpts of her uncle's recordings and letters to his wife with her own research, and shows how the vagaries of military justice can allow the worst to happen and then be buried by time and protocol

Mere Mortals

Mere Mortals PDF

Author: Terese Svoboda

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 0820334243

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All of the medical, technological, and psychological advances of the twentieth century challenge “mere mortals” in Terese Svoboda's third book of poetry. In “Faust,” a mini-epic in five acts, the eponymous character of literary legend appears in the form of a woman, who redefines what being mortal means in light of the politics of the Third World, and gender. In contrast “Ptolemy's Rules for High School Reunions” explores what happens when you do without a pact with the devil. The gods—Greek and otherwise—also make appearances as a TV announcer in “Philomela,” in the basement with the plumber in “The Smell of Burning Pennies,” and in the dyslexic confusion between “Dog/God.” But it is not only the divine that charges the poems in Mere Mortals—sex also suffuses and reinvents key relationships. Readers of such wittily probing poems as “The Root of Father is Fat” and “Brassiere: Prison or Showcase?” will know why Philip Levine has described Svoboda as “one light-year from being the polite, loverly, workshop poet. ”Mere Mortals' poems first appeared in such magazines as the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and the American Poetry Review.

Bohemian Girl

Bohemian Girl PDF

Author: Terese Svoboda

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0803226829

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After being sold by her father to an eccentric Indian to settle a gambling debt, Harriet escapes her Pawnee captor and begins a trek to find her father, meeting a variety of strange characters and encoutering odd situations along the way.

Anything That Burns You

Anything That Burns You PDF

Author: Terese Svoboda

Publisher: IPG

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 684

ISBN-13: 193618298X

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The first full-length biography of Lola Ridge, a trailblazer for women, poetry, and human rights far ahead of her time This rich and detailed account of the life and world of Lola Ridge, poet, artist, editor, and activist for the cause of women's rights, workers' rights, racial equality and social reform. From her childhood as a newly arrived Irish immigrant in the grim mining towns of New Zealand to her years as a budding poet and artist in Sydney, Australia, to her migration to America and the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. At one time considered one of the most popular poets of her day, she later fell out of critical favor due to her realistic and impassioned verse that looked head on at the major social woes of society. Moreover, her work and appearances alongside the likes of Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Will Durant, and other socialists and radicals put her in the line of fire not only of the police and government, but also the literary pundits who criticized her activism as being excessive and melodramatic. This lively portrait gives a veritable who's who of all the key players in the arts, literature, and radical politics of the time, in which Lola Ridge stood front and center.

Names for Light

Names for Light PDF

Author: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1644451549

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Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story—that of a writer seeking to understand who she is—moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book. Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.

The Good Occupation

The Good Occupation PDF

Author: Susan L. Carruthers

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-11-14

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0674972929

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Waged for a just cause and culminating in total victory, World War II was America’s “good war.” Yet for millions of GIs overseas, the war did not end with Germany and Japan’s surrender. The Good Occupation chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to postwar occupier, by exploring the intimate thoughts and feelings of the ordinary servicemen and women who participated—often reluctantly—in the difficult project of rebuilding nations they had so recently worked to destroy. When the war ended, most of the seven million Americans in uniform longed to return to civilian life. Yet many remained on active duty, becoming the “after-army” tasked with bringing order and justice to societies ravaged by war. Susan Carruthers shows how American soldiers struggled to deal with unprecedented catastrophe among millions of displaced refugees and concentration camp survivors while negotiating the inevitable tensions that arose between victors and the defeated enemy. Drawing on thousands of unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs, she reveals the stories service personnel told themselves and their loved ones back home in order to make sense of their disorienting and challenging postwar mission. The picture Carruthers paints is not the one most Americans recognize today. A venture undertaken by soldiers with little appetite for the task has crystallized, in the retelling, into the “good occupation” of national mythology: emblematic of the United States’ role as a bearer of democracy, progress, and prosperity. In real time, however, “winning the peace” proved a perilous business, fraught with temptation and hazard.

The Collected Schizophrenias

The Collected Schizophrenias PDF

Author: Esmé Weijun Wang

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2019-02-05

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1555978274

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Powerful, affecting essays on mental illness, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a Whiting Award An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.

All Aberration

All Aberration PDF

Author: Terese Svoboda

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 82

ISBN-13: 082033460X

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These are poems of family, of romantic hope and disappointment, of parenthood, and of grief that move from a childhood in Nebraska in which a father strides into a ripe wheat field; to the parks and parking lots of New York City, the interchangeable landscapes of suburban America, and the more sensual environment of secluded water; to little traveled parts of Africa and the Pacific where our customs and passions are refracted into shapes that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque. Terese Svoboda writes of a world in which the reassuring simplicity remembered from childhood is difficult to recover. Outside of this vision of the past, all present life seems an aberration--an existence where violence can supplant love, families break apart, a child dies. All Aberration received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, a lead in Contemporary Poetry 1986 and a Notable Book nomination by the American Library Association. It was written during stays at Yaddo, MacDowell and Ossabaw, and received the benefit of a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1982. Its poems first appeared in such magazines as Harper's, The Nation, Paris Review, and Ploughshares.

Voice of the Fish

Voice of the Fish PDF

Author: Lars Horn

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1644451778

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Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn’s adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn’s upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art installations—memorably in a photography session in an ice bath with dead squid—to Horn’s travels before they were out as trans, these essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of “the body” as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all.

Riverine

Riverine PDF

Author: Angela Palm

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-08-16

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1555977464

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"Versions of small portions of these essays have appeared in Sundog lit, Tampa review, Hippocampus, and Essay daily"--Acknowledgmentes.