Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018

Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 PDF

Author: Gerald Stern

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2020-01-21

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1324002344

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Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection An illuminating and irascible compilation of selected and new poems from National Book Award winner Gerald Stern. For five decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this “sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary” (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit. Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in Last Blue (2000); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life—even when they are far in the past—in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses. With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long “been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry” (New York Times Book Review).

Blessed as We Were

Blessed as We Were PDF

Author: Gerald Stern

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2020-01-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1324002336

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Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection An illuminating and irascible compilation of selected and new poems from National Book Award winner Gerald Stern. For five decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this “sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary” (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit. Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in Last Blue (2000); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life—even when they are far in the past—in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses. With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long “been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry” (New York Times Book Review).

This Time

This Time PDF

Author: Gerald Stern

Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780393319095

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"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only?' " -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Gerald Stern's achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." -- Grace Schulman, The Nation "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." -- C. K. Williams

Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992

Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 PDF

Author: Gerald Stern

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2010-06-22

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0393076660

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"Stern's unadorned craftsmanship has few rivals in American letters."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Galaxy Love: Poems

Galaxy Love: Poems PDF

Author: Gerald Stern

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2017-04-04

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0393254925

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Galaxy Love showcases the voice of a beloved and acclaimed poet, celebrating the passions and rhythms of life. The poems in this new volume by the winner of the National Book Award span countries and centuries, reflecting on memory, aging, history, and mortality. “Hamlet Naked” traverses Manhattan in the 1960s from a Shakespeare play on 47th Street to the cellar of a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village; “Thieves and Murderers” encompasses musings of the medieval French poet François Villon and Dwight Eisenhower; “Orson” recounts a meeting of the poet and Orson Welles, exiled in Paris. Gerald Stern recalls old cars he used to drive—“the 1950 Buick / with the small steering wheel / and the cigar lighter in the back seat”—as well as intimate portraits of his daily life “and the mussel-pooled and the heron-priested shore” of Florida. These are wistful, generous, lively love poems and elegies that capture the passage of time, the joys of a sensual life, and remembrances of the past.

I.

I. PDF

Author: Gerald Stern

Publisher: Ayin Press

Published: 2023-01-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781532362019

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A masterful long poem from one of our great American poets. Gerald Stern's long poem I. is an extraordinary and wild compilation of poetic modes, moods, and registers--meandering and focused, hallucinatory and concrete, deranged and deeply ecstatic. Inspired by the sight of a derelict synagogue on the Lower East Side, I. is an intrinsically New York poem, concerned with shifting structures of place and identity in the face of time and rapid change. Though first written in the late aughts, Stern's brazen, mischievous politicality and blasphemous spirituality, refracted through the biblical book and prophetic character of Isaiah, feel particularly relevant to the present moment. Intertextual, critical, at times jubilant and derisive, I. brims with Stern's idiosyncratic mix of high intellect and chthonic populism. The book features Stern's original introduction, as well as a foreword and afterword written by poet-luminaries Ross Gay and Alicia Ostriker. "I. is vintage Gerald Stern, and it epitomizes his glorious career. 'A continuation . . . a crazy footnote . . . a weird midrash'--that's the Jewish poetry that has always mattered and what this truly (look it up) berserk and tender prophecy brings us so movingly now. All hail Stern's I, period!"--Peter Cole, author of Draw Me After: Poems "I. is a book-length vortex. From various locales on New York's Lower East Side, the poet, I mean I., reflects on the likes of Abraham, Dickinson, Cervantes, Fats Waller. He considers words such as 'pelican,' he conjures crimes such as oil spills, he mentions a 'room for affection,' he brings up the 'pellucid distinctness of objects' and cites passages, so to speak, in Exodus. I. investigates and observes. And, as with much of Stern's poetry, observation is both profane and sacred. Within a tumult of images from God-knows-where and language that upsets both the cart and carter, I. beckons. Stern delivers." --Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies Poetry. Jewish Studies.

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for PDF

Author: Alice Walker

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2007-11-06

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1595585893

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A New York Times bestseller in hardcover, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For was called “stunningly insightful” and “a book that will inspire hope” by Publishers Weekly. Drawing equally on Walker’s spiritual grounding and her progressive political convictions, each chapter concludes with a recommended meditation to teach us patience, compassion, and forgiveness. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For takes on some of the greatest challenges of our times and in it Walker encourages readers to take faith in the fact that, despite the daunting predicaments we find ourselves in, we are uniquely prepared to create positive change. The hardcover edition of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For included a national tour that saw standing-room–only crowds and standing ovations. Walker’s clear vision and calm meditative voice—truly “a light in darkness”—has struck a deep chord among a large and devoted readership.

This Great Unknowing

This Great Unknowing PDF

Author: Denise Levertov

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 82

ISBN-13: 9780811214582

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When Denise Levertov died on December 20, 1997, she left behind forty finished poems, which now form her last collection, This Great Unknowing.

New Collected Poems

New Collected Poems PDF

Author: Eavan Boland

Publisher: Carcanet Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13:

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"Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001) and reproducing all her earlier collections in their entirety, together with two key poems from 23 Poems (1962) and an excerpt from her unpublished 1971 play 'Femininity and Freedom'. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the development of a poet writing in a space she has cleared by critical engagement and experiment with form, theme, and language."--BOOK JACKET.

The Poet X

The Poet X PDF

Author: Elizabeth Acevedo

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0062662821

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Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award! Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent. “Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice.” —Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation “An incredibly potent debut.” —Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost “Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street This young adult novel, a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List, is an excellent choice for accelerated tween readers in grades 6 to 8. Plus don't miss Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land!