Salmos from South Bethlehem - An Advent Memoir

Pamela Smit

Summary

This collection of 20 poems is spoken in the voice of a character named Rosa Celestina Morales, a 17 year old Puerto Rican girl living in South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the early 1970s.  Rosa's hopes and dreams, frustrations and torments are expressed in a mix of street talk, self-mumbling, and phrases from familiar prayers in Spanish, imported from the Spanish Mass and the first 20 psalms.  The content is drawn from the author's own experiences during the year she lived in Rosa's neighborhood as well as from stories she heard and people she met around the neighborhood.
Several of these poems have appeared previously in the New York Quarterly, Cimarron Review, and Woman Song III.  This is the first time the set of 20 have been collected in book form.  
The work is framed as a poetic memoir.  A prose introduction by the author and an afterword in Rosa's voice round out the series of poems and project what Rosa's life might have turned to some forty years later.

Available since: 08/07/2012.

Poetry & Theatre

Other books that might interest you

Renaissance Poets The: Volume 1

Various Authors, Edmund Spenser,...

For our Renaissance Poets we start with the coming to the throne of Henry 8th in 1519.  From then until its end, with the crumbling of the English Republic under Cromwell, in 1659 these poets capture a time when the World as they knew it then underwent tumultuous change.  Within their ranks were Spenser, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, Marvell, Drayton.  It is a list rich and sumptuous, long and gloried.  In these volumes we bring all these poets and others together to illustrate this poetical canon.

Show book

Burnt Out (NHB Modern Plays)

Gary Mitchell

On the surface, Michael and Cheryl have it all: a posh new home in suburban Belfast, good jobs, 2.4 pets.
But things take a sinister turn when, living opposite a bonfire site, they unwittingly become the targets of a hate campaign involving missing animals, graffiti and explosions…
Gary Mitchell's play Burnt Out is a blackly comic psychological thriller exposing the darker side of suburban life. It was first performed in 2023 at the Lyric Theatre Belfast, as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival.
Gary Mitchell is a British playwright based in Northern Ireland. His plays, many of them political thrillers about contemporary life in Belfast, have been widely performed, and he has been called 'Northern Ireland's greatest playwright' (Guardian).
'His writing has the blazing conviction of lived experience combined with an unfashionable relish for strong plots. His best work has a stomach-churning intensity' Daily Telegraph
'A domestic psychodrama laced with menace and sardonic humour, informed by Mitchell's own experiences… genuinely shocking, with an explosive, surreal climax' The Stage

Show book

Contested Will - Who Wrote...

James Shapiro

For nearly two centuries, the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays has been challenged by writers and artists as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Malcolm X, and Sir Derek Jacobi. How could a young man from rural Warwickshire, lacking a university education, write some of the greatest works in the English language? How do we explain the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Shakespeare's life and works? 
Contested Will unravels the mystery of Shakespeare's authorship, retracing why and when doubts first arose, what's at stake in the controversy for how we value Shakespeare's achievement, and why, in the end, there can be no doubt about who wrote the plays.

Show book

Intruder

Jerrold Yam

At home with loneliness and passing encounters, can we be familiar with another or even ourselves? Does love outweigh the uncertainty of its memory? In his third and latest collection, award-winning poet Jerrold Yam ushers us into a traveller's world through sensitive and enquiring eyes, navigating a landscape of flitting figures, thoughts and emotions.

Informed by expansive travel across Asia and Europe, Yam's poetry is as varied as his journey, exploring geysers, horse riding and Picasso, while building on his preoccupations with family, sensuality and displacement. His poems make fresh the contradictions of young adulthood, its heady mix of determined restlessness, bold insecurities, desire for intimacy and fear of commitment. In his unflinchingly honest treatment of these themes, Yam exhibits new range and complexity as he describes a shifting terrain, where moving on is as difficult as letting go.

Above all, Intruder is an attempt to make sense of the impermanent structures that hold up one's life. Home, like love, may be a fiction that we must resist claiming for our own. After all, can we--and should we--be more than intruders?

"Jerrold Yam writes with an old voice and the youthful abandon of a poet out of his safe shell; a strong conviction of his depthless solitude yet weak in the presence of love and desire. His poems are lamentable etudes of one-word titles so vocal of absence and longing they are heartrending to those in the thick throes of love's discovery, loss and reconciliation."
-Grace Chia, author of Cordelia and womango

Show book

A Christmas Carol - A Full-Cast...

Charles Dickens, Bleak December

A New Holiday Tradition... Starring Sylvester McCoy as Scrooge! 
 
Charles Dickens' classic ghost story for Christmas is brought to life in a full-cast audio adaptation starring Sylvester McCoy (Doctor Who, The Hobbit) as Scrooge! 
 
 When the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is delivered a grave warning by the ghost of his former business partner, he is forced to confront his past, present and future... but is it too late for him to change his ways? This beloved tale of redemption has been a tradition for many generations, and Bleak December's new production is destined to become a perennial favorite.

Show book

Enough (NHB Modern Plays)

Stef Smith

Jane and Toni are immaculate, iconic, accommodating flight attendants. They're here for your safety, your comfort and your pleasure. Or so you think. But 30,000 feet below them their seemingly perfect lives are rapidly unravelling.
In the sky, over the sea and in cheap hotel rooms around the world, they can feel the ground shake beneath them. Something is rising up, something which cannot be ignored. And it's calling out for them. If they're going to survive what's coming, something needs to change.
Poetic, unpredictable and explosive, Stef Smith's play Enough is a fragmentary and intense journey into female friendship, and unearths what happens when you can no longer be the woman people want.
Enough premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, as part of the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Show book