Sanctificum

Sanctificum PDF

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."

We Have Crossed Many Rivers

We Have Crossed Many Rivers PDF

Author: Dike Okoro

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2012-07-31

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9788422888

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We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa is a fascinating anthology of some of the finest contemporary poetic voices from twenty-nine African countries. Inspired by the examples of first generation African poets like Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Dennis Brutus, and Mazisi Kunene, the poets in this anthology display rootedness in, and preoccupation with, the discourses of identity and political freedom. At the same time, they engage the more contemporary themes of human and economic rights, governance, the natural environment, love, family and generational relations representative of the African continent. Poems from Tanure Ojaide, Yewande Omotoso, Reesom Haile and Frank Chipasula are inlcluded and in all there are contributions from 68 poets.

Smoking the Bible

Smoking the Bible PDF

Author: Chris Abani

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 1619322544

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An award-winning author of numerous books, Chris Abani moves between his Igbo ancestry and migration to the United States in poems that evoke the holiness of grief through the startling, central practice of inhaling an immolated Bible. Smoking the Bible is an arresting collection of poems thick with feeling, shaped by Chris Abani’s astounding command of form and metaphor. These poems reveal the personal story of two brothers—one elegizing the other—and the larger story of a man in exile: exile of geography, culture, and memory. What we experience in this emotionally generous collection is a deep spiritual reckoning that draws on ancient African traditions of belief, and an intellectual vivacity drawing on various wisdom literatures and traditions. Abani illustrates the connective geography between harm, regret, and release, as poems move through landscapes of Nigeria, the Midwestern United States, adulthood, and childhood. One has the sense of entering a whole and complex world of the imagination in reading this collection. There is no artifice here, no affectation; and these poems are a study in the very grace of image.

Hands Washing Water

Hands Washing Water PDF

Author: Chris Abani

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2012-12-18

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1619320703

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“Chris Abani’s poetry resonates with a devastating beauty which cuts through to the heart of human strength.”—Pride Hands Washing Water is Chris Abani's fourth poetry collection—a mischievous book of displacement, exile, ancestry, and subversive humor. The central section, “Buffalo Women,” is a Civil War correspondence between lovers that plays on our assumptions about war, gender, morality, and politics. Sweetest Henri, I know we promised to be honest, one to the other, but your recent missive, though welcome as any epistle from you, filled me with a dread that clung like dampness to wet wood. I am terrified for your immortal soul, dear sweet Henri. This mad war of Lincoln is infecting you with a sickness too depraved to even address. . . Abani’s writing is ruthless, at times traumatic, and consistently filled with surprising twists and turns.

Song for Night

Song for Night PDF

Author: Chris Abani

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1933354313

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My Luck, a West African boy solider who has not spoken for three years, fights in a senseless war and embarks on a terrifying yet beautiful journey to find his lost platoon.

Kalakuta Republic

Kalakuta Republic PDF

Author: Chris Abani

Publisher: Saqi

Published: 2015-05-05

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 0863568785

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This powerful collection of poems details the harrowing experiences endured by Abani and other political prisoners at the hands of Nigeria's military regime in the late 1980s. Abani vividly describes the characters that peopled this dark world, from prison inmates such as John James, tortured to death at the age of fourteen, to the general overseers. First published after his release from jail in 1991, Kalakuta Republic remains a paean to those who suffered and to the indomitable human spirit. 'Reading Abani's poems is like being singed by a red hot iron.' Harold Pinter 'Abani's poetry resonates with a devastating beauty which cuts to the heart of human strength, survival and tyranny.' Pride Magazine 'Stunning poems ... Abani conveys the experience in words shaped into art and made unforgettable by their quietness.' New Humanist 'A beautiful work of art ... elevates art and humanity above meanness and inhumanity.' World Literature Today 'A brave and challenging book ... I was moved as much by what the poems have achieved as by what they have rescued from that nightmare world. Reading, I found myself in tears.' Sunday Tribune 'An unheralded chunk of authentic literature' New Statesman 'Abani's ...poems contain moments of grace, humanity and humor.' Susannah Tarbush, Diwaniya 'Chris has emerged with poems that are graceful pieces of art, almost ready to be hung in a gallery for others to come and enter them and rest in them and weep in them and admire them.' Kwame Dawes, professor of English literature, University of Columbia, South Carolina, USA

Abstraktion und Einfühlung

Abstraktion und Einfühlung PDF

Author: Percival Everett

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 64

ISBN-13: 1933354704

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"If you said "cubism" fifteen times, you would be getting close to some of what Percival Everett is playing with in this new book of poems. With words that mimic process, the poems here attempt to reverse the canvas, skewing perspective to reflect the world around it, spiraling into the work as a way to get out of it. Often what stands in the way of art is art itself, a lingering delusion that there is such a thing as beauty, especially universal beauty. The same is true of a belief in transcendence. To buy into it is to merely substitute one word for another, to fall prey to a correspondence theory of truth."--BOOK JACKET.

The Face

The Face PDF

Author: Chris Abani

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-03

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 1632060434

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Nigerian-born author and poet Chris Abani gives a profound and gorgeously wrought short memoir that navigates the stories written upon his own face. Beginning with his early childhood immersed in the lgbo culture of West Africa, Abani unfurls a lushly poetic, insightful, and funny narrative that investigates the roles that race, culture, and language play in fashioning our sense of self

Giovanni's Room

Giovanni's Room PDF

Author: James Baldwin

Publisher: Everyman Publishers

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781841593722

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"The groundbreaking novel by one of the most important twentieth-century American writers--now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart. Introduction by Colm Toibin"--

Becoming Abigail

Becoming Abigail PDF

Author: Chris Abani

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2006-03-01

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1936070200

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A breathtaking novella from the award-winning author of Song for Night and GraceLand. —A New York Times Editors’ Choice “Moody, lyrical prose reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved . . . Though the fictional Abigail exists only on the pages of Abani’s novella, her character will seize the imagination of everyone who reads her story.” —Essence Magazine “Becoming Abigail, a spare yet voluptuous tale about a young Nigerian girl’s escape from prostitution is so hypnotic that it begs to be read in one sitting . . . Abigail is sensitive, courageous, and teetering on the brink of madness. Effortlessly gliding between past and present, Chris Abani spins a timeless story of misfortune and triumph.” —Entertainment Weekly Tough, spirited, and fiercely independent Abigail is brought as a teenager to London from Nigeria by relatives who attempt to force her into prostitution. She flees, struggling to find herself in the shadow of a strong but dead mother. In spare yet haunting and lyrical prose reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, Abani brings to life a young woman who lives with a strength and inner light that will enlighten and uplift the reader.