Justins Rock: and other poetic reflections on growing up in Jordan, Montana

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Depending on the Light contains 64 short works of smart sophisticated sudden fiction that erupt from a core of sharp urban observations. Her language is at once insightful yet pointed, her voice clear and urgent. Gritty compassion and wry humor permeate these short short stories, and Hillman's insatiable lust for life is everywhere evident. Written chapters offer the history of stencil artwork from 30, BC to the present, tips for creating stencil artwork, and lots more! This exciting new comix collection examines LGBT life from new perspectives: Perfect for sexual outlaws, gender pirates, and their friends and admirers These side-splittingly funny short stories relive the twisted glory days of homegrown DIY punk rock, from "Road Trip," in which four benevolent urban skinheads venture forth to rural Montana for a friend's wedding, to the title novella, which follows the absurd trials and tribulations of a small-town Delaware punk band, Third Leg, as its dreams of superstardom get flushed away in a series of hilarious catastrophes.

A fictional chronicle of a year in the underground counter-cultural life of a San Francisco guy during the s: Dubious achievements including burping the alphabet backwards, keeping a dayjob at Last Laugh Book Distribution selling titles like Full Metal Genitalia , a blood-drenched wedding at Burning Man, and more will keep readers yowling with laughter at the absurdity, silliness, and occasional tragic meltdown that defines the outer edges of America's left coast.

Flashbacks and Premonitions is populated by the entire spectrum of contemporary alternative culture: Surreal yet strangely realistic, Jon Longhi's carnival is a portrait of modern America in decline, a wasted human landscape choking on its own polluted broken dreams. Twenty-six weird tales from the underground, ranging from one-page microbursts of energetic prose to longer, finely wrought chronicles of post-punk living.

Longhi's flair for creating memorable characters and his distinctive voice propel the reader forward toward the brink of insanity. In this charmingly disarming third volume of unique narrative poetry, spoken word Slam champ Matt Cook tackles political opinions "So Anti War" , courtship "Duck Decoys" , and family "The Mother of the Poet," "The Comet" , among other topics. The writing is clever, the artwork original, and the stories proving the old adage tht the truth is way stranger than fiction.

Inspired by shounen-ai manga - melodramatic Japanese comics by girls about gay boys - Tough Love is a teen romance and coming-out story about a shy boy named Brian. More realistic than Japanese manga, this story centers on the relationships Brian develops with Chris, the boy he likes, and Julie, the girl who befriends him. Serious issues like gay bashing, suicidal thoughts, and coming to terms with one's own sexual identity are depicted with an honest, gentle touch.

Socially relevant, fun, immediately accessible, and a bit of a soap opera, teenagers who are questioning their sexual identity will appreciate this book, as will friends, teachers, and parents of gay teens. A resource guide for those seeking support and further information is included.

What's all the fuss about The Killers? Featuring dozens of never-before-published photos of The Killers, from their earliest club gigs to recent shows at sold-out arenas. An epic true story of the meteoric rise of one American band from garage to arena stage Pop culture meets and mates with poetic formalism: Coyote pays homage to George Santayana The absolute lowdown on what and where in the neon desert's Sin City, whether you're here for a day, a week, or the rest of your life.

Avoid the Strip's cheesy pitfalls: For hangover recovery, discover some of the most relaxing spas and breathtaking outdoors the West has to offer. Future Tense series, edited by Kevin Sampsell. Like so many writers before him, Eric Spitznagel moves to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a highly paid and respected screenwriter. When Hollywood fails to notice, he settles for the next best thing: Determined to make the most of it, he sets out to write a movie that will be celebrated more for its witty dialogue and gripping plot than its depictions of hardcore sex.

As he soon discovers, making the Great American Porn is far from easy, especially when you've been hired to write a sequel to Butt Crazy. Makes a great stocking stuffer. In this collection of 25 short stories, one of the original masters of early 20th century science fiction and fantasy is introduced to a new generation of readers. Often cited as a major influence on J.

Lovecraft, Dunsany's work continues to delight and intrigue whether he is weaving fanciful tales of strange adventure in imaginary exotic locales, or depicting grim and creepy visions of otherworldliness. More than eighty books of his work were published, and his oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as successful plays, novels and essays. Each adventure - every action and choice - leads to unexpected situations Long after nightfall, America's best contemporary writers shine their flashlights into a world that begins around the time when most people fall asleep.

A superb exploration of inner city America told from the perspective of an African-American young man in short poetic prose pieces. Hypnotic and scary, just as you think you're reaching the end of a piece and that you understood it, Jackson twists the knife 90 degrees and exposes a point of view that catches you unawares, then he's through your defenses and into your heart. Author Bruce Jackson has lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and currently resides in Seattle where he works with troubled children in a public elementary school.

Drunk house painters, guys playing golf in a graveyard at midnight, Euripides made incomprehensible: Kassel writes up a storm in this collection of hysterical short stories. The Ghastly Ones and Other Fiendish Frolics follows in the grand and ghoulish tradition of Edward Gorey and Charles Addams in a delightfully gruesome and fanciful, tongue-in-cheek look at maniacs, monsters, and mayhem. Creeping through the pages are lurking beasties, axe-swinging psychos, and pouncing bloodsuckers - each one described in darkly witty verse and captured in Sala's fine, quirky drawing style.

Universe got elected governor of the most populous state in the U. Connect the dots to find Arnold groping a nearby female, draw a picture of yourself between Arnold and George W. Bush, color in the governor as Conan the Barbarian, drive a Hummer through a maze from Hollywood to Sacramento, and more. Great drawings, hilarious real quotes that we couldn't make up if we tried!

He creates beauty with an original hybrid of brutality and love that takes my brain to its favorite place. Whether he's writing about a chance sexual encounter at a Goth club called Lilith or revealing the inner thoughts of young hustlers in Hollywood, Catalyst unearths the trashy truth in his characters' unconventional lives. A humanist poet who sees the world from a very personal perspective.

After a poignant exploration of her family's curses and blessings, Po allows the healing process to begin. Without slogans or dogma, these seven authors have created an original literary manifesto of progressive ideas. Passionate stories about gentrification, discrimination, and identity politics unite with heartfelt poems exploring poverty, race and disability that positively shine with subversive solidarity.

Compiled by a veteran of the underground after spending 30 years in the alternative art trenches, these experiential, very real commentaries from today's underground luminaries offer honest and humorous advice on everything from "Door Etiquette for the Nightlife-Challenged" by Clint Catalyst to "How to be an Art Star" by downtown NYC scenester Reverend Jen. Without a hint of irony, Good Advice for Young Trendy People of All Ages shows would-be bohemians how things really are "How to Live in Debt" by Mykel Board , instead of selling far-fetched dreams of writing the great novel or producing a top gallery show.

Narrative poems with straightforward, feisty sensibilities confront the difficulties and rewards of love: Often funny, with a subtle sting, Coppola's heartfelt writing reveals an unrelenting, courageous struggle with a progressive disabling disease "Enlightenment and Muscular Dystrophy". A man tells his wife, "You know, I don't feel like going to the Robinsons' party. With so many remarkably unfunny things going on in the world today, everyone desperately needs to laugh just to relieve the tension of everyday life.

In fact, laughter, along with an active sense of humor, may help protect against a heart attack, according to a recent study by cardiologists. In the interest of restoring mental and physical health in the general population, Intelligent Jokes appeals to clever readers looking for more than a rudimentary punchline. Lovers of "shaggy dog stories", as well as those who appreciate witty insights into personal relationships, send-ups of human folly, and our preoccupation with sex, will find these amusing jokes enormously entertaining.

Cover painting by Mark Ryden. Travel a picturesque and often harrowing road through these narrative poems to encounter the quiet survivors and overlooked places fallen through the cracks in the American Dream. Meet a battered wife wearing a celebratory dress to her husband's funeral "The Red Dress" and a fed-up woman who shoots a complaining nonsmoker at Denny's "Mother of Four". With empathy for the human condition, Juliette Torrez captures the absurdity, hypocrisy, and ultimately the beauty of the places and people she has known.

Hard-hitting stories, accessible poems, and hair-raising comix answer the question of millennial ennui in the wake of economic crashes, Zoloft for breakfats, and governmental insanity. This lively collection contains fresh work by more than 40 cutting-edge writers and artists: Outstanding writers from every region of the US are featured in this celebration of human spirit and good ol' American originality. B etween and , Manic D Press produced more than a dozen page photocopied and stapled books of fiction and poetry by some of the most talented young writers from the Bay Area and beyond.

Collected for the first time in a single trade paperback edition, this archival volume includes rare works by twelve authors including Jon Longhi, Wendy-o Matik, Jorge Argueta, Lisa Radon, Jerry D. In these never-before-seen live and backstage photos, Sid Vicious is alive and sneering, the Red Hot Chili Peppers barely have a tattoo between them, the crowds are moshing, and the hairdos are tremendous. North America's favorite crypto-zoological homonid recast as the modern day everyman bravely struggling with casual cannabalism, eating disorders, pop culture and philosophical quandaries.

Absolutely hilarious - a total laugh riot! Whether Jeffrey McDaniel's denouncing insomnia "4, A. In Jeffrey McDaniel's second book, it is hard to separate the humor from the pain. Both qualities are omnipresent whether he's tackling dysfunctional family memories in 'The Most Awful Lullaby', or broken-hearted romance in poems like 'Another Long Day in the Office of Dreams'.

Fresh, provocative, non-doctrinaire, his poems are the kind I want to grow up to write. Earnest and confessional in the best sense, Maybe's poems about self and vulnerability reveal her beliefs in family, love, identity, and anti-establishment idealism. Her uncanny ability to pivot at multiple places within a poem, using surprising observations and control of language, wraps beauty and purity around her day-to-day experiences.

In this wholly unpredictable collection of tongue-in-chic short stories, Beth Lisick casts a cool eye on the lost and living dead of offices, nightclubs, shopping malls, and rent-controlled apartments. Pretentious web designers, reality show wannabes, and hipster party girls are among the characters populating a seemingly ordinary world teetering on the brink of chaos.

Her first book was Monkey Girl , this is her second. I n her first collection of short stories, celebrated spoken-word artist Beth Lisick evokes the rollicking world of post-boom America. An impoverished but proud office drone "I am the reigning queen of the Toshiba BD copy machine" gets a makeover. A teenager is drugged by her fraudulent, sadistic orthodontist. On a five-hour flight to Cabo San Lucas, the author psychically bonds with a flight attendant. In this collection of 25 hilarious, anecdotal short stories, spoken-word performer Beth Lisick creates a panoramic tapestry of strip malls, junk-food habits, and yuppie pickup joints, unveiling a world that most of us simply drive past.

Blending the everyday and its sometimes grotesque underside, hallucinatory detail, and stripped-down dialogue, Lisick's descriptions are almost hypnotic with their complex rhythms and cadences. These stories - all of which Beth Lisick uses in performance - imbue the ordinary with unique and unexpected hilarity. Striking, witty, and vividly contemporary, these stories evoke what it's like to live now, in the suburban wasteland of the '90s. Cover by Frank Kozik. T wisted stories, bone-chilling poems, and harrowing yet humorous comix that deal with failed relationships, religious cults, loneliness, and drugs, penned with razor-sharp precision.

A voluptuous gift for highbrow art connoisseurs and lowbrow eccentrics: Why should kids have all the fun? Through shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces, these activist entrepreneurs offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models. But only a handful survive today. Some, such as Whole Foods Market, have abandoned their quest for collective political change in favor of maximizing profits. The book challenges the widespread but mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace.

Davis uncovers the historical roots of contemporary interest in ethical consumption, social enterprise, buying local, and mission-driven business. Joshua Clark Davis is assistant professor of history at the University of Baltimore. Marc Steiner, podcast host, radio host, and activist, introduces the event.

Clean Be Our Valentine: An Evening with Tayari Jones. A Oprah's Book Club Selection! An American Marriage is a stirring love story and an insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit.

Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. Presented in partnership with CityLit Project. Original Illustrations by Floyd Cooper". Written by Glenda Armand, the book is illustrated by the award-winning artist Floyd Cooper. Floyd Cooper talks about his artistic process. Arts at the Pratt is supported by the William G. The other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth in what may seem an unlikely place — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — from the s through the s.

It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues, and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mark Whitaker's Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung commuity and a vital addition to the story of black America.

It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. He is the author of the memoir, My Long Trip Home. What the Trump Administration is Doing to America. David Cay Johnston first met Donald Trump in and has tracked him ever since. He wrote about Trump in two books: He was also an uncredited source of documents and insight for major campaign reports by the Washington Post, New York Times, and network television.

When Trump announced his campaign in June , Johnston was the first national journalist to write about a potential Trump presidency. In It's Even Worse Than You Think, Johnston examines the first one hundred days of Donald Trump's presidency, including a close look at what the mainstream press stopped covering years ago: He also shows how our lives are affected by many actions that the new administration quietly approves without drawing the attention of the Washington press corps. Founder and editor of DCReport.

Clean Brown Lecture Series: Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: In his new book, former federal prosecutor Paul Butler shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread -- all with the support of judges and politicians.

He also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer without relying as much on police. John Merrow, Addicted to Reform: Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary.

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American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing. He founded and until was the president of Learning Matters, a nonprofit media company. LaMarr Darnell Shields has dedicated his life to inspiring adults and youth alike to pursue a higher purpose, achieve sustainable value for long-term success, and cope with adversity in order to create opportunities in their personal, professional and spiritual lives.

Shields has been studying, writing about, and implementing change in schools and non-profit organizations for years. Staying Mindful with Your Money. Are you interested in learning how to save money without ruining your lifestyle? What about putting extra money aside for the holidays? If so, then join us for the Budgeting Basics program, featuring InvestEd, a local organization dedicated to spreading financial literacy.

Clean The Business of Publishing. Are you interested in the publishing world? Do you want tips and tricks on how to become a published author or how to self-publish?

Have you considered marketing strategies and business plans? Lydia Kang, MD, is a practicing internal medicine physician and author of young adult fiction and adult fiction. Jacqmin's first book of poems, Missing Persons, was published by Waywiser Press in spring She lives in Baltimore, where she is an associate production editor at Johns Hopkins University Press. Greg Williamson is the author of four volumes of poetry: Read "Coupling" by Hilary S. Read "Drawing Hands" by Greg Williamson. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, Uncompromising Activist: Richard Theodore Greener was a renowned black activist and scholar.

He was the first black graduate of Harvard College, the first black faculty member at a southern white college, and the first black U. Yet he died in obscurity, his name barely remembered. Because he was light-skinned and at ease among whites, Grenner's black friends and colleagues sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying to "pass. They stayed in New York City, changed their names, and vanished into white society.

Greener never saw them again. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock's Uncompromising Activist is a long overdue biography about a man, fascinating in his own right, who also exemplified America's discomfiting perspectives on race. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock is distinguished professor emerita of education at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of The Multi-Talented Mr. Clean The Vietnam War: Realities That Got Lost. Did American troops fight in Vietnam with one hand tied behind their backs? Was the draft system fair? Did antiwar protests turn U. Isaacs , who covered the war's last three years for the Baltimore Sun and left Saigon in the final U.

Isaacs is the author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia and Vietnam Shadows: After the Civil War the Indian Wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America. Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the intertribal strife over whether to fight or make peace; explores the dreary, squalid lives of frontier soldiers and the imperatives of the Indian warrior culture; and describes the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies.

In dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we encounter a pageant of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers, and Indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led. The Earth Is Weeping is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today.

He recently retired after 30 years as a Foreign Service Officer with the U. He also served four years as an Army officer before joining the Foreign Service. In Cozzens received of the American Foreign Service Association's highest award, given annually to one Foreign Service Officer for exemplary moral courage, integrity, and creative dissent. The Power Clash Between the U. The immediate danger is that the five trillion dollars in international trade that passes through the area will grind to a standstill. He was among the only journalists allowed to board a Chinese war vessel and observe its operations.

In sobering detail, Crashback recounts the increasingly tense and sometimes fatal interactions between the superpowers—ones in which lifesaving decisions have to be made at every turn, and where the consequences of a wrong step can be devastating. But it also illuminates the brave and calculating characters behind the stealth cruisers, ultra-modern F fighters, and futuristic laser weapons who are contending for dominance, making this perhaps the most deeply accessed work of reporting on the conflict yet.

Michael Fabey has reported on military and naval affairs for most of his career, winning the prestigious Timothy White Award and earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination. He was the wittiest, the prettiest, the strongest, the bravest, and, of course, the greatest as he told us over and over again. Muhammad Ali was one of the twentieth century's greatest radicals and most compelling figures. At his funeral in , eulogists said Ali had transcended race and united the country, but they got it wrong.

Race was the theme of Ali's life. He insisted that America come to grips with a black man who wasn't afraid to speak out or break the rules. Ali went from being one of the most despised men in the country to one of the most beloved. Eig had access to all the key people in Ali's life, including his three surviving wives and his managers.

He also had access to thousands of pages of new FBI and Justice Department files, as well as dozens of hours of newly discovered audiotaped interviews from the s. Revealing Ali in the complexity he deserves, shedding important new light on his politics and his neurological condition, Ali is a story about race, about a brutal sport, and about a fascinating man who shook up the world.

Goodman, Whistleblower at the CIA. In , after twenty-four years of service, Goodman resigned when he could no longer tolerate the corruption he witnessed at the highest levels of the agency. In he went public, blowing the whistle on top-level officials and leading the opposition against the appointment of Robert Gates as CIA director.

In the widely covered Senate hearings, Goodman charged that Gates and others had subverted "the process and the ethics of intelligence" by deliberately misinforming the White House about major world events and covert operations. Retracing his career with the Central Intelligence Agency, he presents a rare insider's account of the inner workings of America's intelligence community, and the corruption, intimidation, and misinformation that lead to disastrous foreign interventions.

He served in the U. He lives in Bethesda, MD. Brewer, Sarah Merrow, Jadi Z. Brewer graduated from careers in palm-reading, bartending, and speech therapy. In addition to writing poetry, she rebuilds and repairs concert flutes for professional flutists. Omowale was born and bred in Baltimore, Maryland, where she began writing poetry in fifth grade and has never stopped. Her work has been published in Temba Tupu! Tokarczyk was born in the Bronx to a working-class white family; they moved to a suburban-like section of Queens when she was nine years old, but her heart remained in the Bronx.

For over two decades she has been a professor at Goucher College in Baltimore. Her poems have also appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the minnesota review, The Literary Review, Slant, Third Wednesday, Calling Home: The Poetry of Work. An avowed urbanite, she divides her time between Baltimore and New York City. Julie Lythcott-Haims, Real American: Real American by Julie Lythcott-Haims, bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult, is a deeply personal account of her life growing up as a biracial black woman in America.

The only child of an African American father and a white British mother, she shows how so-called "micro" aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person's inner life. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Wennersten and Denise Robbins, Rising Tide: Climate Refugees in the 21st Century. Over the next few decades, as sea levels rise, storms intensify, and drought and desertification run rampant, hundreds of millions of civilians will abandon their homes, cities, and even entire countries.

What will happen to these massive numbers of environmental refugees? Where will they go, what rights will they have, and who will take care of them? Detailing a number of solutions, John R. Wennersten and Denise Robbins argue that no nation can tackle this universal problem alone. The crisis of climate refugees requires global, concerted solutions beyond the strategic, fiscal, and legal capability of a single country or agency. Wennersten is an environmental affairs writer and author of Global Thirst: Water and Society in the 21st Century.

A graduate of Cornell University, she regularly publishes articles dealing with all aspects of global and national environmental change, with a focus on regional politics. In this definitive biography of Chester B. He is the author of The Indignant Generation and other works. She celebrates 40 years on-air and is a CPB silver medalist. They have four children, four grandchildren and one great grandchild. Harteis served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia, worked as a physician assistant in North Africa and Asia and spent a Fulbright year as writer-in-residence at the American University in Bulgaria.

For his work in the culture, he was accorded Bulgarian citizenship by decree of the President and Parliament in Harteis has taught literature and creative writing at a number of institutions over the years including The Catholic University of America, Creighton University, Mt. Vernon College, and Connecticut College. He has received honors and awards for his work including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the D.

Commission on the Arts, and the Ford Foundation. Reunion is his fifteenth book. Stoney is the true story of an African American groom of horse racing and his life as one of the sport's most respected of grooms. Walker "Stoney" Stone was one of the best-known grooms who ever put a rub-rag and comb and brush on a racehorse in America. He loved his craft and helped to prepare horses to run their best and arrive in the winners circle.

Stoney was a large part of Maryland horse-racing history for over 50 years, and he displayed his craft throughout the United States. Clean Mencken Day Hart, author of Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and has written several books on the history of Christianity, including Calvinism: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism.

iTunes is the world's easiest way to organize and add to your digital media collection.

Cathy Scott-Clark, The Exile: From September 11, to May 2, , Osama Bin Laden evaded intelligence services and special forces units, drones and hunter killer squads. While we think we know what happened in Abbottabad on May 2, , we know little about the wilderness years that led to that shocking event. Investigative journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy gained unique access to Osama bin Laden's inner circle, and they recount the flight of Al Qaeda's forces and bin Laden's innocent family members, the gradual formation of ISIS by bin Laden's lieutenants, and bin Laden's rising paranoia and eroding control over his organization.

They also reveal that the Bush White House knew the whereabouts of bin Laden's family and Al Qaeda's military and religious leaders, but rejected opportunities to capture them, pursuing war in the Persian Gulf instead, and offer insights into how Al Qaeda will attempt to regenerate itself in the coming years. Adrian Levy is an internationally renowned and award-winning investigative journalist who worked as a staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times for seven years before joining the Guardian as senior correspondent.

He has reported from South Asia for more than a decade, and now lives in London and in France. How We Transformed Our Careers. Join us for a game-changing conversation that might transform your life. The Pratt Library and the Maryland Educational Opportunity Center present a panel of career-changers who will share their experiences on how a career change had a profound impact on their lives.

Over the past quarter century, four consecutive American presidents—two Democrat, two Republican—have spent more time, diplomatic capital, and military resources on Iraq than any other country in the world. Much as the Vietnam syndrome cast a long shadow over American security policy in the decades after the end of the Vietnam War, Iraq provides the commanding narrative for this generation of American leaders. Department of State under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appears frequently on national and global television networks.

He served as a spokesperson for the U. Department of State between and and was the primary U. His opinion pieces have been published in a wide range of print and on-line outlets, including The Washington Post, the Guardian, and the BBC. Atlantic Magazine named him as one of 21 Brave Thinkers in He resides in Washington, DC. Dinah Miller and Annette Hanson, Committed: The Battle over Involuntary Psychiatric Care, psychiatrists Dinah Miller and Annette Hanson offer a thought-provoking and engaging account of the controversy surrounding involuntary psychiatric care in the United States.

They bring the issue to life with first-hand accounts from patients, clinicians, advocates, and opponents. Looking at practices such as seclusion and restraint, involuntary medication, and involuntary electroconvulsive therapy—all within the context of civil rights—Miller and Hanson illuminate the personal consequences of these controversial practices through voices of people who have been helped by the treatment they had as well as those who have been traumatized by it.

The authors explore the question of whether involuntary treatment has a role in preventing violence, suicide, and mass murder. They delve into the controversial use of court-ordered outpatient treatment at its best and at its worst. Finally, they examine innovative solutions—mental health court, crisis intervention training, and pretrial diversion—that are intended to expand access to care while diverting people who have serious mental illness out of the cycle of repeated hospitalization and incarceration.

They also assess what psychiatry knows about the prediction of violence and the limitations of laws designed to protect the public. Three Psychiatrists Discuss Their Work. Clean Meet the Authors of In the Margins: A Conversation in Poetry. The book features poems that individually speak to social, family, and political issues while collectively chronicling the interrelationship of the poets.

Listeners will enjoy a helpful overview of the Central Library's most prominent departments and collections as well as additional background about the building's architecture and history. Thanks to a capital grant from the State of Maryland as well as matching funds from the City of Baltimore and the Library's Board of Trustees and Directors, the Central Library is currently undergoing a full-scale historic restoration and renovation.

This audio tour provides both information on the current state of the building and a preview of what changes are to come. The tour will be updated throughout the restoration process, which is scheduled to be complete in Geoffrey Cowan, Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary. After sweeping nine out of thirteen primaries, he felt entitled to the nomination. But the party bosses proved too powerful, leading Roosevelt to walk out of the convention and create a new political party of his own. Chaos Theories is her first book. Read four poems by Elizabeth Hazen.

Read three poems by Rose Solari. D Watkins The Cook Up: Liza Jessie Peterson is an actress, poet, playwright, educator and activist. She has performed her play, The Peculiar Patriot, in more than 35 jails and penitentiaries across the country and has opened for keynote speakers at conferences on mass incarceration. She is featured in Ava Duvernay's upcoming Netflix documentary about mass incarceration, 13th. Mason Jar Press, a new, local independent press, brings together their authors in a celebration of literature and art.

Michelle Junot has kept notes on her phone for years—what to pick up at the store, work-out logs, prayers, hopes, thoughts on life and death—all the while creating a snapshot of her life with an honesty that only occurs when not paying attention. It explores topics of family, work, love and sexuality. The women of BLBC believe, like Hughes, that even in these currently tense racial times, laughter and the celebration of life is crucial.

Historically, it is what African Americans have done and will continue to do, no matter what challenges face them. Edited by celeste doaks. Iyer asks whether hate crimes should be considered domestic terrorism and explores the role of the state in perpetuating racism through detentions, national registration programs, police profiling, and constant surveillance. She teaches in the Asian American studies program at the University of Maryland. Stacey Patton, Spare the Kids: Seventy per cent of all Americans say they favor spanking, but African American culture seems to have a special attachment to it.

The overwhelming majority of black parents see corporal punishment as a reasonable, effective way to protect their children from street violence, incarceration, or worse. Stacey Patton's extensive research suggests corporal punishment is a crucial factor in explaining why black folks are subject to disproportionately high rates of child abuse, foster-care placements, school suspensions and expulsions, and criminal prosecutions -- all of which funnel traumatized children into our prison systems and away from their communities.

By examining all the layers of corporal punishment -- race, religion, history, popular culture, science, policing, the psychology of individual and cultural trauma, and personal testimonies with parents and children -- Dr. Patton encourages parents, teachers, clergy, and child-welfare providers to consider a wider range of tools for raising and disciplining black children. Spare the Kids is part of a growing national movement to provide positive, nonviolent discipline practices to those rearing, teaching, and caring for children of color.

She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday. The Making of an Ubuntu Teacher. LaMarr Darnell Shields responded to the chaos in his life, first as a young man and student growing up on the South Side of Chicago, then as a college student and community leader, and finally as a man who became an Ubuntu teacher. The stories juxtapose his years as a high-risk male, growing up in gang territory, expelled from school, with his years as a Teach for America corps member and classroom teacher.

The book, co-authored by Dr. Shields and his team have been using to motivate, uplift, and empower boys of color for decades. These include how to tap in to their natural competitiveness and peer-sensitivity, how to structure rituals that mimic their instinctual need for hierarchy and brotherhood, and how to empower educators to find points of connection and relevancy. LaMarr Darnell Shields is a social entrepreneur, inspirational speaker, and educator who loves to create and build with purpose. Shields has dedicated his life to inspiring adults and youth alike to pursue a higher purpose.

Brian Gilmore, Washington, D. He currently teaches social justice law at Michigan State University. His blog on Medium is called bumpy's blues. Joseph Ross is the author of three books of poetry: Read "philadelphia" by Brian Gilmore. Requiem" by Joseph Ross. A Novel in Utero. Eric Goodman's new novel, Womb, reveals how easily life can be lost and, just as easily, how life can be celebrated.

Penny is reluctant to tell her husband, Jack, that she's pregnant.

With dead-end jobs and unfulfilled lives, she believes that they're not ready to support a child. When Jack finds out the truth about their child's conception, Penny must reevaluate the priorities in her life. With unpredictable twists and thought-provoking fetus commentary, the narrator shares his bumpy journey to birth from the all-knowing perspective of the womb.

Goodman is the author of Tracks: A Novel in Stories and the children's book, Flightless Goose. His short fiction, travel stories, and nonfiction have been widely published. A California native, Goodman has lived in Baltimore for nearly 20 years. Helene Cooper, Madame President. When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won the Liberian presidential election, she demolished a barrier few thought possible, obliterating centuries of patriarchal rule to become the first female elected head of state in Africa's history.

Madame President is the inspiring, often heartbreaking, story of Sirleaf's evolution from an ordinary Liberian mother of four boys to international banking executive, from a victim of domestic violence to a political icon, from a post-war president to a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Helene Cooper deftly weaves Sirleaf's personal story into the larger narrative of the coming of age of Liberian women.

Helene Cooper is the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, having previously served as White House correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, and the assistant editorial page editor. Before joining the Times, she spent 12 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the bestselling memoir, The House at Sugar Beach.

From the moment he was arrested for trespassing at a McDonald's in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 13, , Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery found himself in a unique position from which to cover police brutality in America and the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. After hundreds of interviews with victims' families, local activists, and officials conducted over a year of on-the-ground reporting, Wesley Lowery has brought a new understanding of life inside America's most heavily policed cities.

Drawing on his own experience growing up biracial in suburban Cleveland, Lowery probes killings that have shaken America to the core: Grappling with decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, too few jobs, and threadbare community services, Lowery examines how these factors have all contributed to our national crisis. Wesley Lowery is a national reporter for the Washington Post who covers law enforcement and justice. He was a member of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coversage of police shootings.

Viva House, the temporary home and soup kitchen for those living in Sowebo, provides love and community to many. April Ryan, At Mama's Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White. In At Mama's Knee, April Ryan looks at race and race relations through the lessons that mothers transmit to their children. As a single African American mother in Baltimore, Ryan has struggled with each gut-wrenching, race-related news story to find the words to convey the right lessons to her daughters.

At a time when Americans still struggle to address racial division and prejudice, their stories remind us that attitudes change from one generation to the next and one child at a time. She is the author of The Presidency in Black and White. Clean Celebrating the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Julianne Malveaux, founder and president of Economic Education. Malveaux is a labor economist, author and commentator on issues such as race, culture, gender and their economic impacts. Magazine, Essence and many other publications. Her weekly columns, syndicated through King Features, appeared in newspapers across the country from to She has hosted television and radio programs and appeared as a commentator on all the major networks.

Since receiving her Ph. Malveaux has been a contributor to academic life. Reviled by some, proclaimed a hero by others, McCreary first drew public attention in the late s for a career that peaked a few years after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of Living and working as he did at the midpoint between Philadelphia, an important center for assisting fugitive slaves, and Baltimore, a major port in the slave trade, his story illustrates in raw detail the tensions that arose along the border between slavery and freedom just prior to the Civil War.

McCreary and his community provide a framework to examine slave catching and kidnapping in the Baltimore-Wilmington-Philadelphia region and how those activities contributed to the nation's political and visceral divide. Milt Diggins is an independent scholar, public historian, and lecturer. He is a former editor of the Cecil Historical Journal and a frequent contributor to local publications.

What He Accomplished as President. By objective measures, evidence indicates that President Barack Obama has been tremendously successful and effective. On economic indicators alone, he is credited with the longest streak of job growth in U. His victories have come against a backdrop of criticism and sometimes open defiance from conservatives, lack of cooperation in Congress, and racially tinged commentary in traditional and social media. Through it all, the President, who campaigned on a slogan of "Yes, We Can! Days is editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, which has won numerous national, state, and local awards under his leadership including a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Walter Arthur Harris Gill, Ph.

He graduated from Morgan State College University and later received a masters and doctorate from Syracuse University. Gill has worked as a teacher, professor, artist, actor and author. Gill is sometimes known as The Urban Professor. Gill has touched over 17, students in public, detention and residential center schools and undergraduate and graduates in higher education.

He has produced a variety of art works; performed in community theatre, written three books on urban education and designed, copyrighted and promoted the "I Love Balitmore - The Harbor City" tee shirts. His philosophy is "he who teaches, learns. Davis, In the Shadow of Liberty: From Billy Lee, valet to George Washingotn, to Alfred Jackson, faithful servant of Andrew Jackson, these dramatic narrative explore our country's great tragedy -- that a nation "conceived in liberty" was also born in shackles.

These stories help us know the real people who were essential to the birth of this nation but who have traditionally been left out of the history books. When Regina discloses the truth about her abusive mother to her social worker, she is separated from her younger siblings Norman and Rosie. Beaten physically, abused emotionally, and forced to labor at the farm where Cookie settles in Idaho, Rosie refuses to give in.

Regina Calcaterra is the bestselling author of Etched in Sand, the memoir of her childhood growing up in numerous foster homes, homeless shelters, and on the streets, all the while trying to protect and keep her siblings together. She has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the perils that foster children face if they age out of the system parentless. Visit her on the web at www. Valerie Graves, Pressure Makes Diamonds: Becoming the Woman I Pretended to Be.

It follows her journey from the projects of Motown-era Michigan to the skyscrapers of Madison Avenue and beyond. Once upon an April, I forced myself to sit down and write the too late love poems for a few boys who came into my life brief, but grand seasons.

Manic D Press: Great Books Since

I was thinking about the many loves that were never lovers—how intimacy and romance can occupy a room without taking hold of the body. This poem is a contrapuntal, which means it can be read three different ways. Musically speaking, a contrapuntal imposes two or more distinct melodies upon each other simultaneously, and in doing so, creates a brand new harmonic relationship. Give them a little head start, maybe a month to write a poem that approaches their song in some way, and when everyone meets in the basement they read their poems in the same order as the track listing. The first line of this poem, "Snow would have been breaking the drifts that day, on a mild mood," persisted in my mind long before I set down this poem to paper.

It makes sense to me now that a poem that thinks about the tensions between the world outside us and the strange ones inside us would begin in an image of gesture and atmosphere. The way words are companions to each other. The way the word is companion to the mind. The way context infuses. Language as simultaneously remedy and refusal. I thought love had failed me. Probably I had failed love.

I was, as they say, going through a hard time. In attempt to restore myself, recreate myself, I looked to the poetry of the Elizabethans. Because isn't art supposed to assuage the crushing pain of existence? It did not help.

Being in an aftermath is difficult. One wants to argue with it. One wants to make it into an order. Being inside it is also difficult. One might be able to organize it but is there another way? One wants to bring something up. One wants to change it. One wants to exist. One wants to do one thing. To "rise above it. My poems can't seem to be rid of either one, even though I'm neither. I imposed all that came after onto this. The narrative accompaniment originally written to appear here bore no actual relationship to the poem's inception.

The futility, the wherelessness, the overarching visuospatial dysgnosia of the poem, in conjunction with the task of tethering its construction to a particular temporal episode, convinced me that it had been written in the aftermath or in the midst of a series of traumas from which it took me nearly four years to emerge. One of the interesting things about the poem--to me, anyway--is that it was semi-planned.

I love the mysterious causality that such statements can imply. A book a friend gave me for Christmas. The poems are largely about love, and destroying the past experiences of love in order to arrive at a clean slate and a new hope to embrace love. Dorner, unable to find justice for what he saw as his unfair dismissal from the force for filing an allegedly false report accusing another officer of brutality, had taken up arms against his erstwhile comrades and their kin.

Walter Benjamin's unfinished work — an assemblage of aphoristic observations and quotations — would irrevocably shape my writing and thought. How do we approach the seemingly unspeakable through language? As a writer, there are things that are easier for me to write about, and feelings or experiences that are so difficult to articulate that they become long stretches of silence.

I didn't think prank at first. I didn't really think anything beyond the image—a baby grand piano resting on a sandbar in Biscayne Bay. Sixteen-year-old Nicholas Harrington said it wasn't a prank. He said it was "more of a movement. I thought of being fearless and reckless and so full of ideas. Translating these poems is an act of archaeology.

I work with co-translators, unearthing with raw strikes of the shovel until I can see the lines of the poem and switch to gentle brushes. When I first saw the shape of this poem, the shape of its idea, my mind began to echo with its nothingness. Troy, Michig an is a collection of sonnets inspired by the city map of my hometown—I wanted to represent the rectangle shapes repeated throughout of the city plan. I chose the sonnet form because younger writers often use it when they attempt to become a poet.

Even though I no longer qualify as a younger poet, this book was also about bringing to life a version of myself from the past to try to make sense of the landscape that had shaped my understanding of both safety and danger. All of the poems posit and argue the main questions in the piece, i. The main "drama" is the dialogue—between what we call the humanities and what we call science, and the inconclusive answers provided from both disciplines. I started writing this poem on a Columbus Day. At the time, I was working for the federal government as a contractor.

I had the day off because Columbus Day is a federal holiday and our building was closed, but I didn't get paid because the contractor did not recognize that holiday. It's a screwed up situation. In "The Trees at Lystra," the opening story in his collection, Eclogues , Davenport recasts from a Greek adolescent's perspective the New Testament story in the Book of Acts in which Paul and his companion come portentously to the lively village to inveigh against polytheism and are mistaken ironically for Zeus and Hermes.

The poem is what I call a "transliteration" —a meaningful sound-alike—of William Blake's classic poem, "The Tyger. Many of them are also transliterations, or are other kinds of odd translations. Aside from this poem having the most boring title ever, I've grown increasingly fond of this quiet, formally simple poem after sharing it aloud at recent poetry readings.

As it took shape, I was seeking some kind of employment; teaching jobs were impossible to come by and I eventually took a position as an administrator for a financial services company on Water Street, very close to the bottommost point on the island of Manhattan.

I had a small portrait of T. Eliot smoking a cigarette on my desk, framed in mauve, taken when he was with Lloyds Bank and doing the most important writing of his life. A lot of the brokers thought this 80 year old photograph was actually me, or my father. I don't think that I will ever get over the feeling of looking out the window of a flying airplane.

It isn't so much that it's shocking—which of course it is, if you think about it. Part ant colony, part lit-up window of a stranger's house, the earth, arrayed and displayed 30, feet below, scintillates. It also examines the absurdity of our daily lives, the excitement that we can reap from the weirdest cultural prizes Three strikes! After my previous books, featuring poems that included everything even one kitchen sink , I'd been trying to write shorter, slightly more focused if still meditative, poems. However, what I'd come up with—poems I thought of as "single-gestured," most of which were under fifteen lines long—seemed too tidy, at best, and in any case unsatisfying.

She worked as an editor and then a civil servant for the Beijing tax bureau until she quit the job in Liu Xia started writing poetry in and has continued to this day. She met Liu Xiaobo in the s at a literary gathering and married him when he was imprisoned in so that she could visit him in prison legally as she explained. He was detained without trial from May to February , then sentenced to three-year imprisonment from October to October , and finally given an eleven-year term in December Liu Xia herself has been under house arrest since Probably "Single page drawing" began in , when an acquaintance introduced me to Cy Twombly's paintings and prints.

Not that I began writing the poem then. But every time since then when I have stood in a room with Cy Twombly's work, I have felt two impulses: I began to draft this poem when I lived in New York, after one of many times someone stopped me and asked for directions. The draft began as a conversation between me and an "offstage" character. Almost a monologue, but not quite.

What drove me to the page is that I felt helplessly pleasant when asked for assistance. The sensation was awful on some level. I look like a nice, unthreatening person. Yet something about that is slightly intolerable. I kept writing to try to understand why. It has to do with power—power is at play in this poem.

I am far from being a power-hungry person, but where is the line between helpfulness and manipulation? That question seemed the burning center of the writing. At the same time I learned gray foxes sleep in trees, in dens as much as 30 feet from the ground. Motherhood created an urgent narrative situation in me: I had to write about my life. I wrote fast—it felt fast—and under the ardent sign of motherhood I chased subjects I'd glossed or abstracted or left out of previous poems.

My sentence was the sizzling rope connected to the stick of dynamite under the door in a cartoon—out of time, out of time. My dad is not a poetry reader. He reads nonfiction mostly.

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He's a Timothy Egan and Malcolm Gladwell fan, to name two. When I was an adolescent, I wanted to become a ballerina. I practiced with more dedication than I knew I possessed. Some nights I dream I can still dance the way I could at my best. I did "come upon the body of a whale" on a trip to Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island in the middle of winter.

There is nothing I love more than an island in winter. It is the only time you can have a whole beach to yourself. To me it is heaven. I grew up on an island, so perhaps that is why I feel so strongly about this. I got obsessed with China. I used to live in Beijing, population 21 million. When I arrived I didn't speak Chinese, didn't understand it, and the city was alarmingly, indigestibly verbal. If not for a small group of expats who welcomed me into their world and gave me some sense of regularity I wouldn't have lasted long.

I work at a big state university: Near campus there's a bubble tea place run by a friendly Asian couple. One day someone taped a piece of college-ruled paper to the wall with the question, "How Do You Feel? When I think of this poem, I think of Math. I wrote this poem after reading it. I wrote "[taking away taking everything away]" in response to an assignment I gave my graduate students at NYU. I was teaching a course I called "Terms of Engagement. The first mode we considered was ekphrastic.

It is used in Japan to refer to the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I began this series of poems later into my writing of this collection, which centers around J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb. A translation, whatever else it might be, is an attempt to recreate an experience. The tricky question is, whose experience? Do you try to make Rilke sound slightly archaic to reproduce the experience that a modern German might have of the original, or do you try to find an equivalent for the experience that a German-speaking contemporary of Rilke might have had?

I wrote "The Descent of Man" after a long layoff from writing—or, to be more accurate, from trying to write, which is largely what I do. Poems written after a long layoff in my case usually turn out baroque, or more baroque than ones that are the result of working habitually. Not writing can be writing, too, but if it isn't the internal pressure that builds up in a real layoff, the fancy ideas that come from reading too much, and the overreaching resulting from all the built-up energies spilling over can create artifacts that are supersaturated, conceptually overdetermined.

Our primary aim was to create translations that sound like his poems—that bring his music into harmony with the 21st century. My childhood was built atop an apple orchard. Or rather, my childhood home was constructed on what used to be a former orchard. A single crab apple tree in our backyard remains. My friend Katie and I both of us six years old were digging in the backyard when we discovered a buried trash heap that must have been quite old.

I wrote the first draft of this poem in a third floor studio apartment in Mexico City. An aging architect owned the building, and his office stood adjacent to the three-story home, an office comprised of glass. His own Philip Johnson's glass house. This poem contains one of my favorite ways to think and talk about poetry: In the summer of , when I wrote this poem, I had moved across the country to Western Massachusetts for poetry school. My friend was at work when a visitor to the building began to cough up blood. Usually it goes like this: We recognize these poems and we feel bad.

We have been reading these poems since the Bible. It has gotten a little ridiculous, lately, with poems that use amputation as metaphor for Fragmentation or the Dead Father or Pick-Your-Sadness. At readings, I usually introduce this poem as 'my love letter to New York City. I think both represent the broad catalogue of emotions one can tangle with during a simple stroll in New York City on any given afternoon.

My mother died on Easter morning of when I was years-old. I spent the summer in Omaha, Nebraska cleaning out our family's house, which felt like closing a wound that kept reopening. Many nights I'd end up sitting on a closet floor reading her books, trying on her jewelry, or just living in the smell her clothes. Ultimately, I ended up donating almost everything. Born in Mexico City in , Santiago came of age during a period of acute political repression, artistic censorship, and violations of academic autonomy that culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre, in which hundreds of student protesters and bystanders were killed and injured, and over a thousand were arrested.

The literary society Santiago encountered when he began writing poems in was stultifying and conservative. They appear this way because they are all a part of a quasi-linear thought process, or thought movement, with a focused concern on physical and emotional orientation, the way the body and mind moves through the world and how it relates or doesn't to its surrounding.

We're in my parents' living room, the day after my poetry reading at the University of Cincinnati. The same poem can serve several purposes. At my most single-minded, I began to understand this, against my will, in the years after my mother left the earth on May 22 nd , For a time and I'm not sure whether this time has actually ended, or will ever end everything that felt like poetry also naturally resembled mourning.

Written long hand in a Xanax-and-alcohol stupor on a plane that seemed to be slowly crashing toward Memphis. This poem began with its title, which emerged for me in the last few moments of a dream. The whole sentence surfaced at once, like a seashell revealed at low tide. My dream, as I remember, was an anxious one. I had to assemble an object composed of tiny, elaborate parts—screws and gaskets, a loose pile of flat washers that, maliciously, began to disappear when I grasped them. Had you driven over the bridge that night, you would not have seen the body in the bed.

You would have seen the lighthouse. You may have seen the beacon flash. You may have, because it was late, seen the lighthouse as more of a shadow than a white, peaked structure. It would have been surrounded by snow. Like Auden, I believe a poem should be more interesting than anything that might be said about it.

His skill in the ring and personality out of it were so outsized that almost anything he claimed seemed possible. When he said he hoboed from Galveston to New York City alone at age 12, everyone believed him. When he said he fought a foot shark with nothing but his fists, no one questioned it. The nuts that make up this poem were what I wrote on postcards to my friend the poet Genine Lentine. For a few years, I've been writing poems in which I use the natural environment as a force field and I try to receive frequencies, intuitions, from natural beauty to fuel and form a poem, in the same way radio waves and microwaves and light waves in the atmosphere carry content and meaning.

He lives in Los Angeles and invited me to join him and a group of his friends, most of whom I didn't know, to celebrate his birthday. Comedians do more than make us laugh; they woo crowds into the world of a joke. With facial tics and anaphora and alligator shoes, they often sit us down in neighborhoods we distrust or are not privy to. They make us feel safe, activate the car alarm then crowbar the window for the knock off satchel sunning in the passenger seat.

Without any money, lonely and out of my depth, whatever that could have been, I spent most of my time digging around for books of poetry to read in the dark innards of Columbia University's Butler Library. I'd studied Spanish in high school, and was on the prowl. He composed this poem and recited it to Kharms in January This poem is one of the oldest in the collection I wrote it seven years ago. I included it because I thought it set up some of the book's concerns, and as such, it feels like the grandparent to others.

I found myself writing "The Contagious Knives" in a fury of contagion; a corrosive tide of rage and frustration at the state of the world, its steady state of exploitation, coercion, misery, metals, charisma. This is why the language of this play as in life! As a poet I've become increasingly interested in sound: I've become more and more involved in music, blues in particular, over the past several years, so I think that informs my poetry.

When I was in high school men started hitting on me and I wasn't sure what to do. Most of my life I'd been trying to be a less assertive presence in the world the general opinion of my elders and peers was that I needed to exercise humility, be less bossy, be less of a know-it-all, start fewer fights. It has no epigraph, but if it did, it would have one of the following:. Some research recently revealed that it is not too much information that is stressful or overwhelming, it's too much information that seems to be meaningful.

For example a walk in the woods is full of enormous input: It is the only poem that uses the sentence as unit of composition, hence its title—so, in that way it certainly works within a different cadence, a different logic from the other poems. The poem also marks a shift in the book—away from the dreamy renderings of place in the sequence that it concludes and into the more concrete spatiality of the Kansas plains.

The truth is I had gotten obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Why are these considered girls' books? People are building log cabins! They're getting chased by panthers and dying of starvation and eating the curliest part of the pig, the tail! They're sucking horehound, the most lawless candy!

Territories are declaring statehood. People are waking up in the Dakotas at last. I don't remember exactly how I wrote this poem. I remember that it occurred quickly and required only a little revision. It is my personal favorite poem in a collection I wrote called Hider Roser , but I'm not sure why. I like reading it aloud and always include it in my set list when reading to an audience. Belgium, Flanders, Benelux, Low Country—so many words associated with this tiny and stunningly gifted land. It speaks Dutch, French, German, and its own dialects. Dutch is not my mother tongue, but it is my mother's tongue.

Though my brother and I were not raised bilingually, we've heard it all our lives. The sound of the language first and always precedes its meanings to me Frost's "the sound of sense". In the past two years, I have been studying a small group of Dutch poets and writers, mostly reading them aloud. It's not a proper study, and the list is eclectic, guided by other people's bookshelves.

I'm disappointed when writers, in discussing their work, interpret it for their readership. This seems a violation of the literary contract between author and reader. That in mind, here I'll lay bare the ideas that undergird "Violet for Your Furs" without doing you the disservice of deciphering individual images.

Cataloguing these ideas will require some name-dropping. Bear with and forgive me. This line poem is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. When I was finishing up my book, my editor suggested I write a few new poems for the final section, poems that would perhaps move closer toward the idea of hope that sits in the book's title.

This is one of three poems I wrote in that frenzied couple of weeks I've never written so quickly in my life! When I was young, the penis crop was plentiful. Every year, a bountiful harvest. Then came hot flashes, mood swings, sleeplessness, and a long—very long—penis famine. Thus the first two sentences, which floated into my head one day. I remember being immediately pleased with my simile. Sebald for Vertigo , so that intellectual inquiry and creative inquiry inform one another, so that I find myself in the magnetic field of someone else's range and diction, so that I am moved out beyond mere self-reflection.

I should say, first, that this "The landscape" poem is one of a series of eight all titled "The landscape. I began work on "The Maud Poems" several years before my mother died. She was an older mother for the time, she'd grown up in Topeka, Kansas, after the first world war; her father had left, her mother Olive ran a boarding house, and her uncle Meldrum owned a funeral parlor. This earlier version of the poem had the same basic stanzaic shape, action, and deployment of images as "Mappa Mundi" does now but its tempo and temperament were much different: This poem originally stood on its own under the title "Collapse.

I was intent on writing seriously about death. The Iraq war was just beginning and was very much on my mind. I was thinking about my own lack of power and courage in that context. It's funny how poems tend to get generated in my mind. They never begin with what, in my teaching days, students called "ideas. This can be the sound, say, of a certain woodpecker on a very still spring morning; a snatch from an old Monk tune; or, as in this case, a small chunk of conversation that has lodged itself in mind, whether or not I knew it had.

The map is channeled by other people's voices. Once you have the map you get to keep it, but only if you share it with others. When I was younger I was really into horror movies. I found it at this local hole in the wall video store Video Village , long since closed where tapes were fifty cents to rent for five days.

Mostly, for me, writing is a feral act. Xi Chuan pronounced Sshee Chwahn, not to be confused with Sichuan, the province , one of contemporary China's most celebrated poets, was born in Jiangsu in with the name Liu Jun, which means "army," reflecting the ethos of the era.

I also actually did have a vase of flowers before me when I wrote the first draft, and I couldn't tell if the flowers were dead or alive—but there they were, nonetheless, upright. Now approaching ninety, Yves Bonnefoy is often acclaimed as France's greatest contemporary author. For a number of years—and I suppose still—I've felt somewhat helplessly concerned with the figure of the Greek Chorus. I'd written a number of poems revolving around the Chorus before this one: I almost never write a poem with a sense of what it will be about.

I don't use preexisting forms traditional or otherwise , writing exercises, or poetic formal devices to generate material. At this point in my writing life, I do tend to think about a whole manuscript while I'm composing individual poems, so I might begin a poem in relation to a manuscript with the thought that it should be a longer poem, or a shorter one, or perhaps lighter in tone, or maybe more fierce. But overall, I prefer to keep the parameters loose. The world of this poem grew from a simple wish to play on the word "felt. Also, at the time I wrote the poem, I was very interested in Joseph Beuys's work and was learning about his symbolic interest in materials like felt and wax.

My husband was teaching law, and I was tending to our two young sons. My first-grader was in the American school, which abuts the university campus; I was able to see a fragment of it from my balcony. The idea was we'd each write a poem every day for a month, and we'd take turns giving writing prompts. To say that I wrote it is less an offense than to say I translated it.

Though it has everything to do with its correspondent text, the purpose of writing through "Zone" was not to reproduce it but to create an original work—the only real impediments put on the piece being its influences, which are many. As a child, I remember painting in the art room, my favorite room at my elementary school. When my son went to kindergarten and we were given a tour of the art room all those memories of art class came forth. I was both compelled and terrified. What would I produce? This poem was written over the course of several months, during which fear vied with hope and the idea of "trying" anything at all became almost laughably fraught.

The poem became, in a sense, a meditation on effort, in which the suspension of effort was the aim of my efforts. This is the first poem in Mean Free Path. I wanted the dedication to be integral to the book, not something set apart on a prefatory page. Because the poems are largely concerned with the possibility of writing and being for , with finding a mode of address capable of something other than ironic detachment or expressing prefabricated structures of feeling, it seemed like cheating to have a prose dedication external to the poems and their pressures resolving all of these issues as if by fiat.

In the summer of the year , the Author, then in ill health, had retired to Berlin, where, in consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language: It comes out of a trip I took in the summer of when I went to Lebanon and Syria to do some journalism about Palestinian refugee camps, and the aftermath of the Lebanese Israeli War. I arrived just at the moment that the worst internal violence since the Lebanese War broke out.

This poem was one of 32 "recipes" commissioned from various writers by the visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra the project was published in the June issue of Esopus magazine. There was a small neighborhood park in Carroll Gardens where I would sit almost every day after the weather turned warm. Most of the people who stopped in the park were there to simply be: I came to love this place.

This poem is a direct response to the introduction of Coleridge's "Xanadu-Kubla Khan" in which he explains thata most unwelcome visitor from Porlock disturbed his "anodyne" vision and ruined his inspiration for his poem. I was always fascinated with this poem: What business was Coleridge called to? How did I come to write this poem? Well the oddest thing started me off. A friend told me that when she was in Chennai in the summer she had trouble with her computer. I had never heard of such a thing before but later, asking around I did hear similar stories from others.

In any case what my friend told me stayed in my head. At first the poem "The Cup" came in response to an assignment I gave myself: Obviously I didn't make it! But focusing on the cup let me channel the narrative drive of the poem. Originally it was only about how the cup smashed, the pieces of the event all squashed into 14 lines. I wrote "Lunaria" almost by accident, while working on another poem, which was about Judas and was not going well. Everyone knew Jesus had to die, including Jesus himself. My Judas was like a character in a novel, who appears to be free, although in reality the writer controls him completely, only the Judas of my poem had the consciousness of a real person, and was completely bewildered to find himself standing on the street with that bag of money in his hand.

Actually, I have alternatives! My poem grew out of my thinking about a new dishwashing soap that I had discovered in a supermarket, a nicely colored liquid in a curvy bottle with an unusually abstract name—Method—which I associated with Descartes' Discourse on Method. The book, as well as this poem particularly, tracks a continuum along what traditionally you might style transcendence and what we've today come to call celebrity culture. This poem arose from a coincidence: I wrote this poem as part of a collaboration I did in spring of with the painter Chris Uphues. Chris and I met at a bar after a reading I had given, and he told me he was a painter.

I had a feeling he would be good. He sent me photos of ten paintings via email and I was blown away by his work, so I took his titles and wrote ten corresponding poems. It is something to be believed only by those who wish to believe. Yet the conventional wisdom must be tackled on its own terrain.

Intemporal comparisons of an individual's state of mind do rest on technically vulnerable ground. Who can say for sure that the deprivation which afflicts him with hunger is more painful than the deprivation which afflicts him with envy of his neighbor's new car? In the time that has passed since he was poor, his soul may have become subject to a new and deeper searing. In Their Own Words. Black Poets Speak Out. Pulitzer Centennial Poetry Celebration.

Yet Do I Marvel.

Poem of the Masses

Features In Their Own Words. Tishani Doshi on "A Fable for the 21st Century" I'd been thinking about the idea of knowledge versus information for some years. I sat alone in the kitchen while my wife was at work Read Article. Jeffrey Yang on "Circle" Although camels originated in the New World millions of years ago, they eventually evolved, diverged, disappeared, and moved on to the Old World where they multiplied. Hey, Marfa Graywolf, Monica Ferrell on "Oh You Absolute Darling" Ten years ago, I dated a man who said to me many curious and indeed bizarre things over the course of the nine months we spent together.

Aaron Coleman on "On Disembodiment" A few years ago, this question popped into my mind: Adam Giannelli on "Stutter" I've stuttered since childhood, but "Stutter" is the first time I ever wrote about it. Jennifer Hayashida on "Chronology" There is a story from when I was a small child and lived in Oakland, California, the city where I was born. Drew Gardner on "Raised by Wolves" This is poem on a mythological theme: Romulus and Remus are abandoned and left to float down a river Read Article.

Kerri Webster on "Vanitas" A vanitas isn't a vanitas if it's just the skull; it's the juxtaposition of bone and beauty, often ruinous beauty, that creates the discourse. John Myers on an untitled poem from Smudgy and Lossy Or be reminded. Jordan Davis on "Shell Game" A guy I knew in college began a story with the line, "It begins 'in medias res,' which is Latin for 'not very good. Nicole Cooley on "Marriage, the Franklin Mineral Museum" This poem was first sparked by a lunch in Atlanta with a beloved poet friend years ago, when my first book came out.

John Deming on "Headline News" I'm interested in the relationship that anxiety and depression and have with addiction, media consumption, and substance abuse. Aditi Machado on "Archaic" According to my notes, the first draft was composed on the third of August Jones on "What It Means To Say Sally Hemings" It's interesting to talk about the genesis of this poem, because its current place in my life is what I think about more than how it began.

Catherine Blauvelt on "Leg Me. Pimone Triplett on "Spieden Island, San Juans Boat Tour, Washington" "Spieden Island…" was more of a collective gathering on my part inspired by overhearing many different speech acts—the naturalist guide who asks questions, provides information, voices aspirations, the father prompts thinking towards the end, and then the approximations, or half translations, of the imagined inner thoughts of the sheep.

Diana Khoi Nguyen on "I Keep Getting Things Wrong" In the messy aftermath of a death in the family all life is an aftermath , it took me two years to access and gain entrance into my grief. Aimee Nezhukumatathil on "In Praise of My Manicure" I probably need tell no one that growing up in predominantly white towns, the first day of classes was always a source of strife for me when I anticipated my last name called out. Alicia Mountain on "Drive Thru" "Drive Thru" snuck up on me the way lust and hunger often sneak up on me.

Justin Phillip Reed on "Consent" Many times I've arrived at the moment of a man entering me and found there two truths: Luljeta Lleshanaku and Ani Gjika on "Negative Space" One of the most resistant images from my childhood, which comes to me from time to time, is the damp school corridor and the cleaning ladies who warn in a threatening tone:

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