Other books that might interest you

• 

  Now I Lay Me Down to Fight - A...

  Katy Bowser Hutson

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In stirring verse and essays, Katy Bowser Hutson chronicles her battle with breast cancer and the complications of faith amid such a fight. Accentuated by the art of Jodi Hays, Katy's words lead us through the realization of cancer, the experience of chemotherapy and a mastectomy, relentless rounds of radiation, the uncertainty of ongoing treatment, and what comes after survival. She writes in resistance to sickness, of wrestling toward beauty:
  Cancer is an overgrowth, a kudzu: Tangling and strangling legitimate life.
  
  Chemo is a killing, a burning out:
  
  Burning down to ashy carbon, indiscriminately
  
  But cancer, did you know that I am a poet?
  Through it all, she shows what it means to struggle in a battered body and to pray to a God who is near to the broken. Join her in this consideration of mortality and witness her persisting trust in God's unseen ways.

  Show book

• 

  The Boys At Twilight - Poems...

  Glyn Maxwell

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The poems in this volume were selected by Glyn Maxwell from TALE OF THE MAYOR'S SON (published in 1990, when he was twenty-eight), OUT OF THE RAIN (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize), and REST FOR THE WICKED. Maxwell “is a formalist,” wrote Robert McIlwaine about his first book, “but . . . he is an outspoken anti-elitist social poet. His strenuous well-wrought poems . . . come from an English tradition of technical virtuosity with plain speech.” The Boys at Twilight shows, sometimes comically, men at war, boys at play, boys grown up, men overreaching and reverting. Other concerns are the dangers of authority and mob psychology, the absurdities of stardom and consumerism, the heroism of the decent, and the wisdom of doubt. His subjects range from biblical stories to the “Tale of the Chocolate Egg,” which is a long, “pitch-perfect description of a bored young man’s growing obsession with a new kind of candy” (Adam Kirsch, New Republic). Always in his work, “Maxwell knows that to see into is not necessarily to see through . . . His virtuosity has a ballast of sobriety” (Poetry Book Society).

  Show book

• 

  Applause - Poems

  Carol Muske-Dukes

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  National Book Award finalist Carol Muske-Dukes explores joy, dread, and the solitary communion of applauseApplause provides twenty vivid and evocative poems by Carol Muske-Dukes. In “Dream,” she seeks the past in reverie, along with bicoastal riffs on New York City and Los Angeles. “The Eulogy” paints the scene of a funeral in sunny California where a young man who has died of AIDS is laid to rest. In the title poem, a twelve-part journey through the ritual of applause, Muske-Dukes examines the power of a gesture—clapping—to transform oneself from individual to communal. “What a strange phenomenon,” she says, “to be single and plural at once, to feel joy and dread simultaneously, to wish to acknowledge publicly one’s anonymity.”

  Show book

• 

  Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Robert Bridges

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) was an English poet, educated at Oxford. Entering the Roman Catholic Church in 1866 and the Jesuit novitiate in 1868, he was ordained in 1877. Upon becoming a Jesuit he burned much of his early verse and abandoned the writing of poetry. However, the sinking in 1875 of a German ship carrying five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany, inspired him to write one of his most impressive poems “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Thereafter he produced his best poetry, including “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “The Leaden Echo,” and “The Golden Echo.”  (Summary by Bartleby)Editor: Robert S. Bridges (1844-1930)

  Show book

• 

  Poems on Various Subjects...

  Phillis Wheatley

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American to publish a book of poetry in 1773. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at age seven, and bought by a wealthy Massachusetts family who taught her to read and write. Her extraordinary literary gifts led to the publication of her "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," and to her eventual emancipation by her owners. Although some of the poems demonstrate an apparent acceptance of the racist values of the white slave-owning classes (which viewed Africans as savage), Wheatley's considerable talents simultaneously contradicted these stereotypes. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)

  Show book

• 

  Mermaid (NHB Modern Plays)

  Polly Teale

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A bold reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's tale of love, loss and desire, transported to a contemporary setting.
  Beneath the ocean's waves there is no death or pain or separation. Above, the modern world is beset with war, poverty and desire.
  On her sixteenth birthday, a mermaid rises up to the surface, leaving her childhood behind for ever when she falls in love with a mortal prince. She knows that she can no longer live at the bottom of the ocean - but must she destroy herself in order to be loved?
  Polly Teale's Mermaid was first performed by Shared Experience and Nottingham Playhouse on a UK tour in 2015.
  'wonderfully atmospheric' Whatsonstage.com
  'an enchanting fairy story brought splashing into present-day, superbly woven around a highly descriptive text' The Public Reviews

  Show book