Other books that might interest you

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  This Is the Honey - An Anthology...

  Kwame Alexander

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  A breathtaking poetry collection on hope, heart, and heritage from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time, edited by Why Fathers Cry at Night author and #1 New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander.  In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, and Nikki Giovanni, This Is the Honey is a rich and abundant offering of language from the poets giving voice to generations of resilient joy, “each incantation,” as Mahogany L. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is “a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly.”   This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller’s In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy” to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of “home” through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion. From a “jewel in the hand” (Patricia Spears Jones) to “butter melting in small pools” (Elizabeth Alexander), This Is the Honey drips with poignant and delightful imagery, music, and raised fists.   Fresh, memorable, and deeply moving, this definitive collection a must-have for any lover of language and a gift for our time.    

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  And I Will Make of You a Vowel...

  Morag Anderson

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  Winner of the 2023 Aryamati Pamphlet Competition. In her second chapbook, And I Will Make of You a Vowel Sound, Morag Anderson places centre stage an unlikely cast of neglected, exploited, and unsung characters. These poems uncover many of the contradictions of life lived in the female body and bear witness to largely forgotten yet highly-personal stories, woman by woman, girl by girl. Confident and assured of voice, she navigates womanhood and its attendant desires and abuses, permitting the reader to embrace the power and vulnerability encased in the female form. Anderson's delicate choice of words \'unlace restraint' and take us to the limits of the female body's potential.

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  A Good House

  Amy Jephta

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  'Once they've been here long enough, they're no longer squatters. Then they're simply…
  Neighbours.'
  In the quaint suburban community of Stillwater, a mysterious shack springs up from the dust with the inhabitants nowhere to be seen. As speculation abounds, new residents Sihle and Bonolo are recruited by their neighbourhood to be the face of a campaign to demolish the shack.
  Funny, thrilling and provocative, Amy Jephta's play A Good House is an explosive exploration of race, resentment and community politics, about a couple who discover the limits of good neighbourliness and what is required to fit in.
  It was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2025, directed by Nancy Medina, in a co‑production with Bristol Old Vic in association with The Market Theatre, Johannesburg.

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  Antony and Cleopatra

  William Shakespeare

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  Antony and Cleopatra (First Folio title: The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The play was first performed, by the King's Men, at either the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe Theatre in around 1607; its first appearance in print was in the Folio of 1623.
  The plot is based on Thomas North's 1579 English translation of Plutarch's Lives (in Ancient Greek) and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony from the time of the Sicilian revolt to Cleopatra's suicide during the Final War of the Roman Republic. The major antagonist is Octavius Caesar, one of Antony's fellow triumvirs of the Second Triumvirate and the first emperor of the Roman Empire. The tragedy is mainly set in the Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Egypt and is characterized by swift shifts in geographical location and linguistic register as it alternates between sensual, imaginative Alexandria and a more pragmatic, austere Rome.
  Many consider Shakespeare's Cleopatra, whom Enobarbus describes as having "infinite variety", as one of the most complex and fully developed female characters in the playwright's body of work. She is frequently vain and histrionic enough to provoke an audience almost to scorn; at the same time, Shakespeare invests her and Antony with tragic grandeur. These contradictory features have led to famously divided critical responses. It is difficult to classify Antony and Cleopatra as belonging to a single genre. It can be described as a history play (though it does not completely adhere to historical accounts), as a tragedy (though not completely in Aristotelian terms), as a comedy, as a romance, and according to some critics, such as McCarter, a problem play. All that can be said with certainty is that it is a Roman play, and perhaps even a sequel to another of Shakespeare's tragedies, Julius Caesar.
  Among the most significant works William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Orpheus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest, Venus and Adonis, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and many more.

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  The Tenderness of Silent Minds -...

  Martha C. Nussbaum

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  The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions. 
   
   
   
  Offering a reading of Britten's views about the value and beauty of the body that situates these in the context of his thirty-nine year partnership with his lover, the singer Peter Pears, and also surveying pacifist themes in works written both before and after War Requiem, Nussbaum presents a compelling framework for critically assessing Britten's oeuvre. Nussbaum engages with a remarkably wide range of Britten's works, examining his treatment of aggression and its roots in his collaborations with the poet W. H. Auden, offering readings of the value placed on the body in early partnerships with Britten's beloved and singer Peter Pears, and surveying pacifist themes in Britten's earlier works. The analysis throughout is enriched with perspectives from Britten's personal letters and thoughtful study of the social and political backdrop of fear and homophobic disgust in mid-twentieth century Britain.

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  Tormentil

  Ian Humphreys

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  'I can't face the big stuff so I comb the moors for a tiny yellow flower' – so begins Tormentil, the second poetry collection by Ian Humphreys. Set largely in the starkly beautiful West Yorkshire moorlands, these poems creep and bloom across geographies and time. Isolated by grief in the first months of the pandemic, Humphreys goes in search of hope and blessings among the burnt heather, tumbledown mills and canal locks near his home in the Calder Valley. He unearths a landscape of wildflowers and wildlife, a soundscape of rain and birdsong, at once healing, threatening and under threat.
  These are richly textured poems of living and resisting, anchored by connections to family, food, community – and an acknowledgement of the precarious root-holds of hard-won freedoms. A soaring, defiant hymn to recovery, this vital book contemplates migration, otherness, and all the internal and external elements that bind us, make us unique.

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