Tumbling for Amateurs

Matthew Gwathmey

Sinossi

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 FIDDLEHEAD POETRY BOOK PRIZEA reimagining of an instructional text on tumbling supports poems about the amateurishness of being human.
Tumbling for Amateurs is a reimagining of James Tayloe Gwathmey’s 1910 book of the same name, published as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library. Bookended with “Propositions” on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,” each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text. In the spirit of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, word and image work for each other, creating something more than just an instructional manual.
Tumbling is, well, a metaphor for everything. And we all are, well, amateurs. Experimentation abounds in these poems and manipulated pictures. There are anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling’s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics. In this experimentation of form and text is a search for the lyric, for an emotional connection when one isn’t always possible, in bodies, in movement, in desire. “We measure our lives by what our bodies can do.”
“We have no other way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other." Like the tumbling acts from which they spring, Gwathmey's poems are delightfully performative. They leap, loop, and reconfigure familiar forms into fresh and acrobatic new intimacies. Slyly queering his source text — an early 20th century tumbling manual for young men salvaged from the dusty closet of family history — Gwathmey transforms instruction into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire." – Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book
"Matthew Gwathmey’s poems, springboarding from a genre of fitness manual popular in the early twentieth century, tumble us into the present through tests gamily set for body and mind. As ripped as his gymnast protagonists—evoked so fetchingly in the book’s illustrations—Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to 'what must remain / nameless.' There’re so many ways to read ourselves into Tumbling for Amateurs. Go toe to toe with these poems and they’ll tone up your grip on what poetry is."
– John Barton, author of Lost Family
"Gwathmey's poems go together like a troupe, somersaulting through the vocabulary of the way a body moves. They turn the still past into this moving present." – Paul Legault, author of The Tower

Disponibile da: 19/09/2023.

Lunghezza di stampa: 250 pagine.

Poesia e teatro

Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

Quiet Night Think - Poems & Essays

Gillian Sze

“One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,” writes Wallace Stevens. In Quiet Night Think, award-winning poet Gillian Sze expresses her own definition.
		 
During the remarkable period of early parenthood, Sze’s new maternal role urges her to contemplate her own origins, both familial and artistic. Comprised of six personal essays, poems, and a concluding long poem, Quiet Night Think takes its title from a direct translation of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Li Bai, the subject of the opening essay. Sze’s memory of reading Li Bai’s poem as a child marks the beginning of an unshakable encounter with poetry. What follows is an intimate anatomization of her particular entanglement with languages and cultures.
		 
In her most generically diverse book yet, Sze moves between poetry and prose, mother and writer, the lyrical and the autobiographical, all the while inviting readers to meditate with her on questions of emergence and transformation: What are you trying to be? Where does a word break off? What calls to us throughout the night?

Mostra libro

The Apothecary of Flight

Jane Burn

The Apothecary of Flight by Jane Burn is a heady flight into the art of poetry itself: its vital importance as a tool for expression; for understanding and translating the self; for articulating the sheer force and joy of poetry and the way, for a person with autism, it can hold, identify and celebrate both the smallest and weightiest of life's experiences and concepts.
These unfettered and exquisite poems pulse with the details of both the wild and tame, the sacred and the humane – observing nature and animals with an artist's eye, capturing the ways in which place and time can hold the experiences of the body, memory and identity. This ongoing dialogue with poetry itself sets a visionary path towards discovery – the page as a place to root oneself, a place of deep creative freedom, self-permission, belonging and defiance. Ultimately, the form, presence and physicality of Burn's extraordinary poems move us with compassion towards the happiest solitude of words, and of love.

Mostra libro

Road Dogs - A Novel

Anonimo

“Road Dogs is terrific, and Elmore Leonard is in a class of one.”—Dennis Lehane, author of Shutter Island and Mystic River 
  
“You know from the first sentence that you’re in the hands of the original Daddy Cool....This one’ll kill you.”—Stephen King 
 Elmore Leonard is eternal. In Road Dogs, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award winner and “America’s greatest crime master” (Newsweek) brings back three of his favorite characters—Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Cundo Rey from La Brava, and Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap—for a twisting, explosive, always surprising masterwork of crime fiction the San Francisco Chronicle calls, “a sly, violent, funny and superbly written story of friendship, greed, and betrayal.”

Mostra libro

Modern Poetry - Poems

Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor. 
 
 
 
In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time's deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? "It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem," Seuss writes. "You can't hide / from what you made / inside what you made." What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

Mostra libro

This Far - Poems

Anonimo

This collection offers a rich harvest taken from one season in the poet's creative life. Like movements in a musical composition, these poems share leitmotifs  ̶  grief and the desire to honor those "saints" who have passed on; the sacramental power of nature; and, how works of art illuminate and console as they do. They point to the tension between the practice of monastic silence and the urge to bear witness, interrogating faith in the light of crises facing the earth and our human community. At the same time, the poet celebrates encounters that offer blessings of hope, inviting us to join her in a pilgrimage that leads us, with her, "this far," and gestures to what lies beyond.

Mostra libro

Lovin Safari II

Dean Hamid

Lovin Safari II: Gunzz and roses 
Safari Kennedy and Zues Beloit finally get a Opportunity to share life and love together. The beautiful shores of Belize, Mexico is the backdrop for their well deserved bliss. 
Gunzz Black has been put away for good. Or has he? 
Gunzz has escaped from his maximum security prison and is hell bent on revenge, causing havoc and murder along the way. Extending as far away as their own front door. 
Zues and Safari realize that until Gunzz is stopped permanently, they will never be free of him. Zues takes it on himself to put a end to his devious tirades, and makes a move on his own, not telling Safari. Along with Thomi, his brother in law, he prepares for the insinuating standoff between them. 
Safari enlist the help of friends, Missouri District Attorney, Tabitha Wallace, and another friend, Private Detective Aniah Myers to not only seek out the whereabouts of Zues, but to finally end St. Louis of Gunzz's scourge. 
Will Zues finally come face to face with his mortal enemy Gunzz? Will Safari struggles put a end to Gunzz's never ending efforts to rid her of obtaining happiness? Or will something or someone stand in her way. 
Dean Hamid weaves a genuine classic tale of action-thriller, romance and drama in the telling of Lovin Safari ll / Gunzz and roses...

Mostra libro