Other books that might interest you

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  Duino Elegies

  Rainer Maria Rilke

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  We have a marvelous, almost legendary image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. 
  One morning, he walked out onto the battlements and climbed down to where the cliffs dropped sharply to the sea. From out of the fierce wind, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). 
  He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus—completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort—and one of the literary masterpieces of the century.  
  Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.”

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  The Big Smoke

  Adrian Matejka

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  Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the National Book Award in Poetry—a collection that examines the myth and history of the prizefighter Jack Johnson 
   
   
   
  The legendary Jack Johnson (1878–1946) was a true American creation. The child of emancipated slaves, he overcame the violent segregationism of Jim Crow, challenging white boxers—and white America—to become the first African-American heavyweight world champion. The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka's third work of poetry, follows the fighter's journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejka's book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnson's complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.

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  Robin Hood and the Christmas Heist

  Chris Bush, Matt Winkworth

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  As winter's first snow falls, there's not much Christmas cheer in Sherwood Forest. Cupboards are bare, the nights are cold, and the cruel Sheriff of Nottingham squeezes his citizens for every penny they're worth.
  But deep in the forest, in the heart of the Major Oak, Robin and Marian are plotting an audacious scheme to bring some festive joy to all…
  This charming retelling of the Robin Hood legend by Chris Bush, with music by Matt Winkworth, was first performed at Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, in 2024, directed by Elin Schofield.
  Robin Hood and the Christmas Heist was commissioned by the Rose to be performed by members of the Rose Youth Theatre alongside four professional adult actors – and offers a wealth of opportunities for other theatre companies who want a merry Christmas classic that hits the target.

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  Milton's Paradise Lost -...

  Leland Ryken

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  Get everything you can out of your time reading the classics with the Christian Guides to the Classics Series!  Leland Ryken provides a clear pathway to understanding the "Great Works" through this engaging series of short guidebooks. Beginning with "why the classics matter" and "the nature and function of literature," readers will find a helpful path to reading and analyzing influential works in the Western canon.  Each book:  Includes an introduction to the author and work  Explains the cultural context  Incorporates published criticism  Defines key literary terms  Contains discussion questions at the end of each unit of the text  Lists resources for further study  Evaluates the classic text from a Christian worldview.  This guide opens up the paramount epic in the English language, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and showcases Milton’s understanding of crime and punishment in the events of creation, paradisal perfection, the fall, and redemption.

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  Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere

  Anastacia-Renee

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  In this bold hybrid collection of poetry, flash fiction, and Afrofuturism sci-fi, the award-winning interdisciplinary writer and author of Side Notes from the Archivist explores what happens when god is a Black woman in a town. What happens when there are multiple universes in the middle of nowhere? 
  And what if in each universe there reigned other Black woman gods? One million versions of god, and one million saints to watch over us? And what if this Black woman god were placed here on earth? 
  These are just a few of the questions Anastacia-Reneé asks in this daring and mind-bending hybrid collection. Hers is a universe of striking variety—monsters, nontraditional saints, witches, zombies, the couple in the apartment next door, the wise elders from down the block, and gods watching over us all—as well as community and connectedness. 
  With a prose storyline and characters that connect through family, time, and place, Anastacia-Reneé paints world(s) rich with wonder and the paranormal as she peers into the lives of everyday people and spectacular creatures inhabiting not just our neighborhoods, but other dimensions. Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere is about interstellar ancestry, community and spirituality. It is about the things we invoke, conjure, and rely on to maintain joy as we keep it moving through difficult eras. Anastacia-Reneé’s power imbues her spellbinding storytelling with lovingly rendered characters brought to life in lyrical poetry. She builds worlds within worlds and dares us to fully see and love ourselves in all our complexity.

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  The King of Terrors

  Jim Johnstone

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  CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves?
     
  
    Written after a brain tumour diagnosis, The King of Terrors is a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Johnstone's poems oscillate between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we're never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar."There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‘each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.’ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as certain ‘as the body // it inhabits’ – offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." – Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems 
  "The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being unwell, or, as the poet says, living 'between / age and agency.' Haunting, stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with the shock of the mortal." – Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar

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