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Dear Yusef

Author: John Murillo

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2024-11-05

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0819501352

This carefully and generously curated mosaic of essays, letters, and poems reveals the profound impact that poet Yusef Komunyakaa has had on poets, educators, and readers worldwide. The anthology brings together creative and critical offerings from fellow poets, former students, literary entities, and other admirers. There are emerging and established voices—from previously unpublished writers to Pulitzer Prize winning poets. Together these pieces honor one of the most influential writers of the last half century, one, it turns out, who is as beloved for his teaching as he is celebrated for his creative work. Contributors include Terrance Hayes, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forché, Toi Derricotte, and Martín Espada, among others. Dear Yusef affirms Komunyakaa's transformative influence, showcasing how his mentoring has ignited creativity, nurtured passion, and fostered a sense of belonging among countless individuals. Through the artistry of these testimonials, we witness the transformative power of poetry and the enduring legacy of a true literary icon.

Neon Vernacular

Author: Yusef Komunyakaa

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 1993-04-30

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0819574538

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This Pulitzer Prize–winning collection pairs twelve new poems with work from seven previous volumes by “one of the most extraordinary poets writing today” (Kenyon Review). The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa traverses psychological and physical landscapes, mining personal memory to understand the historical and social contexts that shape experience. Neon Vernacular charts the development of his characteristic themes and concerns by gathering work from seven of his previous collections, along with a dozen new poems that continue the autobiographical trajectory of his previous collection, Magic City. Here, Komunyakaa shares an intimate and evocative life journey, from his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana—once a center of Klan activity and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts—to his stormy relationship with his father, his high school football days, and his experience of the Vietnam War and his difficult return home. Many of the poems collected here are drawn from limited editions and are no longer available.

Watch Your Language

Author: Terrance Hayes

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0143137735

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From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.

The Heart of Fire

Author: Joseph A Todaro

Publisher: Trafford Publishing

Published: 2011-03-17

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1426958560

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The Heart of Fire is a story about two brothers, Ferran and Yusef, who set out from their home in the city of Jhanal to find their mysterious mentor, Tala al-Sahara-Sitt. What they find is adventure, tragedy, and enough intrigue to bring down a kingdom. Enter the djinn, a race created by the ancient gods to oversee humankind, although betrayal, it seems, is not strictly a human trait and the magical lords of the realm of Ashur are menaced by their own problems and a prophecy a thousand and one years in the making.

The Man from Baghdad

Author: Patricia Roush

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2009-10

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1440168717

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As the C-130 transport aircraft circled Baghdad in preparation for landing, Jack Armstrong, the forty-three year old seasoned intelligence operative, fastened his seatbelt for a mission he never bargained for. Armstrong soon discovers that his many years of working undercover in the Middle East haven't prepared him for the transformative journey he begins to make once he steps foot on the ground in Baghdad. Throughout the mission, Armstrong finds himself engaged in an upside-down interior labyrinth: struggles with his deeply held moral and religious convictions; conflicts within his work for the C.I.A. in Iraq; his love for Iraqi medical doctor Haifa al-Hashimi; commitments he cannot keep to his wife and children in the States; and the ideals and policies that he has always defended working for the U.S. government that don't seem to 'fit' any longer. Armstrong is partnered up with middle-aged Iraqi informant, Daoud al-Hassan, a pensive former victim of torture from the old regime, full of old-world wisdom and common sense survival tactics who gets Armstrong out of many a tight circumstance. Colin MacPhearson, an old friend from British Intelligence, joins Armstrong and Daoud in their pursuit of 'Jabbar' - the symbol of all this is evil and the ultimate target of the mission. The characters, conflicts, carnage and circumstances that Jack Armstrong becomes enmeshed in make for not only an action-packed drama but a study in the common denominators that make us all human. It offers a front-row center seat to the real-life story of today's Iraq through the eyes of Jack Armstrong and the circle of humanity around him. It presents a human face to the Iraqi people and 'their story'. But the real 'man from Baghdad' is not revealed until the very end of the story - or is it the beginning?

Act V Scene I

Author: Stanley Moss

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1644210312

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“Open Act V, Scene I or any of Stanley Moss’s books anywhere, and you will come shockingly upon wisdom and beauty, a diversity of styles—a unity of voice, a voice that was there since the beginning. I love Stanley Moss’s work. The pace, the strategy, the wit, the knowledge are astonishing. Of the generation that is gradually leaving us, those born in the mid- and late-1920s, he has a prominent place. He loves donkeys. He owns Ted Roethke’s raccoon coat. He is an original.”—Gerald Stern “Magisterial. . . this book is magnificent. I’ve read it several times with greater and greater pleasure. Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanity, the quality and quantity of information which it generates into poetry of the highest order make it a continuing delight.”—Marilyn Hacker “. . . In our epoch of turmoil, crisis, and grief, I find that Moss’s poetry still, always, brings me a little closer to happiness.” —Forrest Gander “I’ve loved Stanley’s poems since I first encountered a poem of his in Poetry magazine in John Berryman’s office when I was nineteen.” —W.S. Merwin “. . . This is a book to hold onto for dear life.” —Rosanna Warren I Choose to Write a Poem I choose to write a poem when my left ankle’s broken, purple, and my right ankle’s swollen blue, both knees banged, twice their usual size, both my long legs “killing me,” while a famous angel is really killing me. I separate physical pain from the real thing— the real thing, the soul usually dies before the body. My soul is dancing, welcoming spring in the garden on a beautiful June morning, ready to live forever.

Sanctificum

Author: Chris Abani

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2013-06-07

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1619320711

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Chris Abani finds the sacred in a charged and broken world, to "build meaning from detritus."

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

Author: Yusef Komunyakaa

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780374600136

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New and selected poems from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet These songs run along dirt roads & highways, crisscross lonely seas & scale mountains, traverse skies & underworlds of neon honkytonk, Wherever blues dare to travel. Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth brings together selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa’s work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner. Komunyakaa’s masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality. The new poems in this collection add a new refrain to the jazz-inflected rhythms of one of our “most significant and individual voices” (David Wojahn, Poetry). Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a slingshot, workers who “honor the Earth by opening shine / inside the soil,” and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey. As April Bernard wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.”

Will My Name Be Shouted Out

Author: Stephen O'Connor

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1997-09-02

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0684832100

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Describes efforts to educate urban youngsters through writing.

The Story of My Life

Author: Giacomo Casanova

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2001-05-01

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 9780140439151

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Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbuckler, poet, self-made gentleman, bon vivant, Giacomo Casanova was not only the most notorious lover of the Western world, but a supreme story teller. He lived a life stranger than most fictions, and the tale of his own adventures is his most compelling story, and one that remained unfinished at the time of his death. This new selection contains all the highlights of Casanova's life: his youth in Venice as a precocious ecclesiastic; his dabbling in the occult; his imprisonment and thrilling escape; and his amorous conquests, ranging from noblewomen to nuns.