Bøger udgivet af Alice James Books

How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society? The keenly observant and urgent poems of The Holy & Broken Bliss are grounded in daily existence, human tenderness, the rituals of a long marriage, and the poet's ongoing spiritual quest. In the middle of a world that seems to be breaking down into suffering and anger, the spare and direct lines of these poems, surrounded by silence, offer a kind of healing. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accepting). They call us to ask ourselves how we locate joy and even laughter when despair is ever-present. The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, satiation, rage, and acknowledgment of our collective sicknesses, along with the sacred possibilities of love, communication with nature, the power of art, and the "need to praise."

In Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, the climate has changed, and what mostly remains are zombies meandering through a world where we only have brief memories--where connection (human and zombie) is now only made possible thanks to bits of the salvaged wreckage that was left behind in the apocalypse. The poems pay homage to horror movies, riff on childhood mad libs, and scatter Vietnamese diacritics over text about iPhones, neurotransmitters, phobias, substance abuse, fleas, and vomit. The stakes are high: these pages are preoccupied with suicide from the start, especially with the deaths and legacies of poet Anne Sexton and Hong Kong actor/singer Leslie Cheung, but they also find ways to smile and serve from fixed narratives, which is where the zombies come to the forefront, wandering through a world where our only shared experiences are fading memories of the final times we encountered chance momentousness in our lifetimes. Macabre humor is combined with formal inventiveness. Drawing from broad swaths of history, literature, and pop culture, the forms in this book and the rewriting of conventional zombie narratives enable the poems to avoid the presumptuousness of wisdom. The poems instead expend their energy through playfulness, unassuming declarative statements, and sparse questions. Folks who love horror movies, especially the little theaters of love and friendship in these films, might appreciate the candor and arrangement of data in lieu of insight and wisdom.

"Autobiomythography of sifts through Nigerian stories and mythologies, both inherited and invented, to explore the self, family, and nations. Poem after poem, the speaker tries to define and find what the self is, and, in a tangential way, it is also about a son's relationship with his father alongside his country of birth, Nigeria. It is an exploration of what it means to be a subject-a person, yes, but also a literary subject-in the wake and afterlife of colonization, in an attempt at decolonization. There is a speaker in search of his self/voice and in the process, tries on multiple voices and personas-some which are closer to what he is, whatever that is, and others diametrically opposite. As the title suggests, the book spans and swirls together autobiography, myth, mythology, biography, history (shared and personal), and geography. The poems interrogate the perceptions of identity, reality, and ownership, and they erode the boundaries between fact and fiction to show us the fragility of the lines we draw in service to these abstractions, of the beliefs we hold about them, of the acts we perform in service to them"--

"Although grief is at the forefront of these poems, The Wild Delight of Wild Things is a simple love letter to Turner's late wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016). The poems are also a love letter to our planet during the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Intertwining this immense grief, Turner explores the hybrid borderlands of genre, and the meditations on love and loss blur the boundaries between poetry and lyric prose. In Italian, the word "stanza" is rooted in the word "room." And so, stanza by stanza, room by room, page by page, we draft ourselves forward into the imagination, our arms filled with all that we can carry from the days gone by. This is the art of survival. Profound grief teaches us how to dwell in the house of memory--that vibrant temporal landscape of the past--where we might live with the dead we love once more"--

"Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I Am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is a comment on writing itself. What have words done? When does writing become a form of disengagement, or worse, violence? The book is an exercise in paring the state down to its true logic of violence and imagining what can happen next. There are many contradictions-Although the protagonist teaches the same science that was used to justify enslavement and a racial caste system, she knows she will die at the hands of science and denies the state the last word by penning her own death certificate. As an educator and knowledge worker, she is an overseer of the same racist, misogynistic, and homophobic systems that terrorize her. Yet, she musters the courage to kill Kurtz, a primordial vision of white terror. She is Black and queer and fat and angry and chill and witty and joyful and depressed and lovely and flawed and an (im)perfect dagger to the heart of white supremacist capitalism"--

"Against the backdrop of iconic, ancient Hindu texts, Burning Like Her Own Planet reimagines the lives of Hindu goddesses through a contemporary, feminist lens. Told in a series of persona poems and dramatic monologues, the book reinvents these myths into essential stories of love, betrayal, and faith. In these poems, the goddesses question their predetermined fates and examine what it means to be human and divine. They speak in the voices of girls, wives, and mothers, all trying to carve a space for themselves in a world ruled by jealous gods and capricious luck. Overcoming a string of challenges, these goddesses discover their own agency, and the power that comes from telling their own stories. At the heart of the book are the goddesses Sita and Parvati-women who are cast in the role of the "perfect" wife, the "perfect" mother. Here, the goddesses describe their own transformations from naèive, untried women into powerful forces claiming their autonomy. Each in her own way challenges the traditional notions of what it means to be a woman, illuminating the connections between the personal and the universal, the devout and the earthly. The poems highlight the tension between obligation and freedom, examining the consequences for those who try and change the narrative. Whether blessed or cursed, these women, these girl-goddesses, forge their own place within the pages of ancient texts, writing the bitter and the sweet of own lives as they undergo the trials of becoming holy"--

"Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn't hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life-even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question 'What isn't hell?' and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a 'redvioletcerulean handkerchief'"--

"Feast offers abundance and nourishment through language, and reaches toward a place an immigrant might call home. The poems in this collection-many of which revolve around food and its cultural significances-examine the brown body's relationship with nourishment. Poems delve into what it means to be brown in a white world, and how that encourages (or restricts) growth. Feeds its readers by employing lush sonics and imagery unafraid of being Filipino and of being Asian American"--

From the perspective of a teacher in a youth detention center, these hard-hitting poems have a unique blend of dark humor and realism.In a composition of both compassion for Americas unheard voices and contempt for the systems unjustness, American Treasure chronicles McDonoughs personal place within the nation. She considers her work with incarcerated students, her privilege, her womanhood, and the connection she shares with others. Through this exploration, McDonough writes with care about the possibility of a people in a country built on cruelty.Poems prod, ache, question, and laugh, as they tap into the complexity of a modern nation full of contempt for the vile systems woven into the American fabric, while also celebrating those who live in spite of them.

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destructionthrough natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history.The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope.By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in menin the structures that they design and maintain.

Brother Sleep is a collection of grievances through which a speaker mourns the loss of a brother, grandfather, and a sense of self as they navigate a landscape of desire marred by violence against queer and Mexican people.Set in the border cities of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, these poems navigate the liminal space between language and silence. As the poems grieve the loss of family, the violence perpetrated against queerness, the bodies lost border-side, and the cruelty against tenderness, Amparan's words bloom in evocation. Reflecting on lovers, friends, family, classmates, and others of impact, they navigate personal reconciliation in response to imposed definitions of their personhood.These poems evoke an equal sense of sorrow and tenderness amidst a complex landscape of the self.

"By turns poignant and hopeful, raging and joyful, Small hours interweaves the personal and the political, connecting family history to moments within a larger historical arc of injustice and oppression. The poems in this collection bear witness to those whose stories have fallen into the fractures of history and been lost. The poems ask us to recall the tyrants of the past as similar abuses of power repeat themselves in the present. Forgiveness and understanding vie with the memory of events that can never be redressed, only remembered, and sometimes redeemed"--

Sadoff's eighth poetry collection seeks to understand why cultural norms have kept people from their fullest, most engaged selves.

Translated from Hebrew, these poems are a genuine depiction of personal familial grief from an Israeli perspective.

Insightful poems full of rich, historical detail, and musings on the world's random elegance. Roots of memory and nostalgia become the architecture of the mind as Thomson explores the past to better grasp the future.

In the deeply personal Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized American citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major auto accident.The collection is an odyssey of what it means to recoverphysically and mentallyin the aftermath of trauma and traumatic brain injury, charting when before crosses into after. Through connected poems, buckling and expansive syntax, ekphrasis, and conjoined poetic forms, Decade of the Brain remembers and misremembers hospital visits, violence and bodily injury, intimate memories, immigration status, family members, and the self.After the accident I turned outall of the lights in the room while I watched,concussed, from the mirror. I edged like a feverwith nothing on the tip of my tongue.