Other books that might interest you

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  Worldly Things

  Michael Kleber-Diggs

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  “Sometimes,” writes Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.”In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.”Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

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  Tambo & Bones

  Dave Harris

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  'In today's world, errybody got a story.
  It's overwhelming. How! The humanity! O! Everywhere, someone appealing to yo sense of… empathy.'
  Tambo and Bones are stuck in a minstrel show. It's hard to know what's real when you're stuck in a minstrel show. Their escape plan: get out, get rich, get even.
  A daring theatrical exploration of the intersection of race, capitalism and performance, Dave Harris's play Tambo & Bones laughs through our past, blows the roof off our present, and imagines an explosive future for our world and for theatre.
  Tambo & Bones was commended in the 2019 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, and was first performed in a co-production between Playwrights Horizons, New York City, and Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles, in 2022. It was first produced in the UK in 2023 by Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, and Actors Touring Company, directed by Matthew Xia.

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  Elegies & Laments - Poetic...

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas...

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  In these more modern time perhaps our first thoughts of an Elegy or a Lament is for someone’s passing.  Wreathed in grief and death we think of a headstone on a silent grave and the memories that shelter within our hearts, slowly receding from one generation to the next, as an often lonely voice extols the virtues and traits of the one who has passed. 
   
  But these two very early forms of poetry, dating back to at least Ovid and probably further, are also surprising in their lyrical touch.  These are not just mournful and sad but also whimsical or rich with celebration and tribute as they journey through joy, laughter, love, tears and comfort. 
   
  Our Classic Poets, who have specifically chosen to include the form in the title of their work, include the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, Aphra Behn, Rainer Maria Rilke, Radclyffe Hall and many others of equal measure are always surprising in their views, their analysis and their sharing of words and thoughts, offering feelings that mirror our own and provide a balm of many hues for our wounded and tender souls. 
   
  1 - Elegies and Laments - An Introduction 
  2 - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray 
  3 - The Lament of Swordy Well by John Clare 
  4 - An Elegy on a Pile of Ruins by John Cunningham 
  5 - Lament by Rainer Maria Rilke 
  6 - Elegy - Supposed to Be Written in Barnet Churchyard by George Townsend 
  7 - Elegy by Thomas Chatterton 
  8 - A Lament by Radclyffe Hall 
  9 - An Elegy by Ben Jonson 
  10 - Laeta - A Lament by HP Lovecraft 
  11 - Angellica's Lament by Aphra Behn 
  12 - Amores - Book I Elegy V - Corinna in an Afternoon by Ovid 
  13 - Morning Lament by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 
  14 - The Wind's Lament by John Morris-Jones 
  15 - Noon Day Elegiacs by T W Rolleston 
  16 - Midnight Lamentation by Harold Munro 
  17 - February. An Elegy by Thomas Chatterton 
  18 - Elegy in April and September by Wilfred Owen 
  19 - Elegy by Anna Seward 
  20 - Autumn Elegy by Leslie Norris 
  21 - Elegy on the Year 1788 by Robert Burns 
  22 - Elegy for an Enemy by Stephen Vincent Benet 
  23 - An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog by Oliver Goldsmith 
  24 - Pointless It Is To Lament by Narsinh Mehta 
  25 - To the Beloved Dead - A Lament by Alice Meynell 
  26 - The Slave's Lament by Benjamin Cutler Clark 
  27 - The Slaves Lament by Robert Burns 
  28 - A Lament by Katharine Tynan 
  29 - The Going of the Battery (Wives Lament November the 2nd 1899) by Thomas Hardy 
  30 - Lament in 1915 by Harold Munro 
  31 - An Elegy on the Death of Llywelyn ab Gruyffyd by Gruffydd ap Yr Ynad Coch 
  32 - Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady by Alexander Pope 
  33 - Elegy on a Lady Whom Grief for the Death of Her Bethrothed Killed by Robert Seymour Bridges 
  34 - Lament by Edna St Vincent Millay 
  35 - The Mother's Lament For Her Infant by Lucretia Maria Davidson 
  36 - Elegy on the Death of Mr Phillips by Thomas Chatterton 
  37 - Lament for the Poets, 1916 by Francis Ledwidge 
  38 - Lament for Thomas McDonagh by Francis Ledwidge 
  39 - Elegy on the Earl of Rochester by Anne Wharton 
  40 - Elegy on William Shakespeare by William Basse 
  41 - Adonais - An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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  The Tattoo Collector

  Tim Tim Cheng

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  "I moved to a country called writing" declares Tim Tim Cheng in this striking debut collection. The Tattoo Collector explores family history, displacement, politics, protest, and, as it moves between East and West, the uses of language to illustrate and interrogate what lies in between. As these poems range from Hong Kong, Scotland, and London, they unravel the relationship between the body, ecology and class with precise and haunting tenderness.
  Here, in Cheng's illuminating and needle-sharp poems, the tattoo is a narrative, the body a radical means of expression. In states of flux, between resisting and belonging, we enter museums, hospitals, graveyards, and gigs. These intimate and polyphonic poems invite us to be troubled and enthralled by exhibits and the stories they have to tell, to look inside the glass box and study what is on display. Close-up, the poems bring into the daylight details that can be seen skin-deep on the surface, as well as those which point to another meaning, inked indelibly, beneath.

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  The Red Shoes

  Nancy Harris

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  'What's wrong with wanting to dance?'
  When an orphaned young woman is taken in by some local do-gooders, she is expected to be seen and not heard.
  Dazzled by a pair of beautiful shoes, she sees in them an opportunity to shine – but soon her feet betray her, taking her to places she does not wish to go.
  Nancy Harris's version of The Red Shoes is a contemporary retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's extraordinary fairytale of dance, desire and destruction. It was first performed at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 2017 and revived in the version published here in 2024 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Kimberley Rampersad.

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  A Family Memory - Philosophical...

  Amr Mounir

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  On a train that travels far, she finds herself immersed in a whirlpool of memories… faces from the past, forgotten voices, and unhealed pain. Every stop brings back fragments of her painful past with her family. But are these just memories, or is the train itself carrying her to a confrontation she did not expect?

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