Bøger udgivet af Tupelo Press

Part creation myth, part prophesy, Kristin Bock's Glass Bikini stitches together the fabrics of our dystopian present, reminding us of our culpability and power in this grand, human experiment. These often darkly humorous poems guide readers into dreamscapes and under-worlds that are ominously contemporary. From a looking-glass planet, we peer back at our own homes and see the news as a horror movie. There is the sickening feeling that something has gone terribly wrong. Monsters prowl here inspired as much by Sarah Kane as Mary Shelley. We hold a tiny prehistoric horse in our paws. We are masochistic voodoo dolls traipsing hand in hand through grisliness and the sublime. If there is any hope in this nightmarish proliferation of cyborgs and militia, it lies within the liberating powers of the feminine. Glass Bikini is both mirror and warning, asking us to see our own strange and terrifying shapes, the monsters we have helped create, and the ones we have become.

Godfrey describes how looking at art from the past makes us hunger for a civilization that might no longer be thriving amidst a greater desensitization and insular mass behavior. Furthermore, we are left to meditate on how we may just be on our own in the universe to even a higher degree than before because our attention and enthusiasm seems directed to the unmentioned gadgetry of modern human beings.

Flight gives testament to the struggle of skin color in contemporary America. Utilizing both innovation and tradition, Chaun Ballard's poems give voice to the silenced, proof to the disenfranchised, and life to the gone. "The poems in Flight unspool a rich and charmed history of survival into songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race; many of the poems in this collection explore (or allude to) the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson with a brilliance that is underscored by the poet's extraordinary sense of sound to etch a new reality in our ears." --Major Jackson

In Sharon Wang's thrilling and corporeal geometry, touch dominates, if often in its 'aftermarks' singes, whiffs, folds of fabric, echoing gestures between bodies. With generous language and quicksilver intelligence, Wang expresses 'a hunger so large it stops the mouth.' Her poems describe what is 'hard and brilliant, ' the spaces between objects, and what's left in the wake of losses. "Despite its attunement both to elegy and to witness, the mode is praise: 'He loved the world. He loved it suddenly / and without reason.' . . . As the poet works to understand, 'If in fact it wasn't possible to build / the world anew, ' she does build--extravagantly, judiciously, lovingly. The result is a book of radiant integrity." -- from the judges' citation for the Kundiman Poetry Prize.

In his most autobiographically transparent (and most comical) collection to date, Waldrep explores the intersections between body and spirit, faith and action. These are lyrics of incarnation, of method and meat-hood, of illness and the vicissitudes of love, earthly as well as heavenly, occupying the space between desire and gratification, between pain and praise.

"A lush, fierce, primal work in which the broken world still rotates and orbits--not for us as we could project, not as a metaphor for redemption--but we get to ride on it anyway. Eliza Rotterman has a voice unlike any other and familiar too: she writes, in finely faceted jewels of language set in strong lines that cut as they connect, of a woman in her body / a woman on this planet ever-aware, observing everything, suffering, believing, tracking, clocking, ticking, as she must. The poet explodes her being for her poetry--nothing escapes--and she gives that explosion to the reader, in the form of exquisite, precise, deep beauty. I could not be more grateful that this gift was made and held faithfully to its purpose: to show us the chaos at the heart of desire, the raw stillness at the center of hope."--Brenda Shaughnessy, author of Our Andromeda and judge for the Snowbound Chapbook Award

When the manuscript that became Lise Goett's new book Leprosarium was chosen for the Winner Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, judge Toi Derricotte's citation said, "This is dangerous art, as serious as a heart attack, unsparing mostly of the poet herself, and as intensely rewarding as it is unsettling." Goett's poetry, infused with a bountiful vocabulary, is rife with extravagantly dramatic forms that take in the sweep of western art and religion via relationships between those with power and those who've suffered their commands.

Farris warns us, "These are not stories one can hand to another and afterward ask: did your soul move like the peristalsis inside your gut?" Instead of capitalizing on the satisfying and familiar conventions of narrative, she uses the unclassifiable text, the monstrous text, and unruly prose to explore the ways language, as we know it, limits what is possible in our thinking about sexuality. For Farris, genre - with its established conventions, its repertoire of restrictions - and gender are inexorably linked. Indeed, she shows us that our most familiar categories of identity are embedded within the very texture of language itself. She reveals form, genre, and even grammar as the foundation of the social order, that alterity which speaks through us, and at the same time, defines us.

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Judith Filc. Splintering like light in a prism, the poems of Jorge Aulicino combine images of the Dirty War in Argentina, of historic Latin American independence struggles, and of the battles against fascism in Europe. Translated into English for the first time by poet Judith Filc working closely with Aulicino, this influential book (published in Spanish in 2008) is filled with the experiences of a grandson of European immigrants now chronicling a world where multitudinous cities are cracking under their own weight in an ongoing present whose common denominator is war. Testifying for the migrating masses he has called "pariahs of empire," who traverse a globe with no stable borders, Aulicino's lyrical "I" shifts between roles, exile or spy or reporter taking detailed notes. "'I am the scribe of the Party and of declassified files, ' writes Argentine poet, translator, and journalist Aulicino in this 50-part poem, his first to be translated into English--an account of Old and New World battles against the totalitarian spirit. Aulicino composes with a journalist's sense of scene and a poet's eye for imagery, leading readers through cities that do 'not stop making noises' and the 'repetitive world' of 'barbarians and jungles.' The poem, presented in en face translation, traverses ports and eras like a container ship full of the industrial world's 'overproduction, ' moving between 'foreign coves. / Hong Kong or whatever. Sumatra.' An ever-present undertow of violence marks the work, evidenced in the mutating refrain 'and yet, armies.' Aulicino also references an array of artists, writers, and historical figures. With an almost sardonic deadpan, he jumps seven centuries in two lines, weaving the prescient words of a 12th-century sultan into the fate of Nazi general Friedrich Paulus: 'You cannot, / said Saladin, start a siege with forces at your rear. / The circle closed on Von Paulus.' He later collapses time again, describing Attila behind the wheel of a Porsche. 'The state of eternal destruction is his certainty, ' Aulicino writes of his Attila--a sentiment that the poet undoubtedly shares."--Publishers Weekly

The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet's mother's, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: "If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?" A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all its griefs and opportunities for growth. The reader is then transported with the poet to Italy. In 2000, Williamson began visiting Tuscany regularly, and eventually became a property owner there. The poems set in Italy dwell on an encounter with old culture, and its potential to encourage both resignation and mysticism, with moods that persist from the tutelary geniuses of two great Italian poets: the nihilistic Leopardi and the tentatively mystical Montale. Gathering around those experiences multiple lore from music, philosophy and science, it becomes an extended meditation on mental suffering, glimpses of the ecstatic, and the double nature of our life, "skull / and beatific face," with "the immortal recombinants of fire and water."

In this timely anthology, established and emerging poets bear powerful witness to the COVID-19 pandemic in writing that reels from collective grief and uncertainty. This volume consists of sixteen separate chapbooks, and a collection of pandemic-era photography, which are unified by a shared narrative: public and private experiences of quarantine, and the impulse toward creation during a time of enormous upheaval, injustice, and protest. Each voice brings with it a deeply personal account of this globally historic moment, and in doing so, conveys the urgency of introspection, of isolation, and of revolution. These pieces feature B. A. Van Sise, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Yusef Komunyakaa, Laren McClung, Stephanie Strickland, Mary Jo Bang, Shane McCrae, Ken Chen, J. Mae Barizo, Dora Malech, Jon Davis, Lee Young-Ju, Jae Kim, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, A. Van Jordan, Maggie Queeney, Traci Brimhall, Brynn Saito, Denise Duhamel, and Rick Barot. This is a transcendent and ultimately transformative book of poetry written through the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the post-civil war era, General Francisco Franco's fascist government forbade the people of Spain's Catalonia region from speaking, reading, and writing in Catalan, a crime punishable by imprisonment or execution. Throughout these years, the work of Catalan poets could only be found via the underground. Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve traveled to meet each of the poets featured in this anthology, embarking on the long road of joy, pain, and friendship that is the work of translation. These fourteen poets, like fourteen blackbirds, provide keen angles of perception in beautiful and lyrical poetry, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes nostalgic, and always engaging, until now almost entirely unknown to U.S readers.

Occasioned by the birth of a first child and originally spoken aloud into a digital audio recorder on the poet's long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a neighborhood burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007, each of the poems in Patrick Coleman's first book resists the confusions of twenty-first-century parenthood, marriage, art, and commerce. By turns conversational and anxious, metaphysical and self-mocking, celebratory yet permeated by an awareness of life's flickering ephemerality, Fire Season is a search for gratitude among reasons to be afraid--and proof that a person can pass through the fires and come out the other side alive.

The great tradition of Irish poetry courses through Seán Mac Falls' blood and into his lines, as if he has spent a lifetime inhaling the sea breezes, cliffs, and peat bogs, ennobled from William Butler Yeats to Seamus Heaney to Eavan Boland. Here in a generous volume is a stunning treasury of pleasures, direct and appealing in voice, earthbound and empyrean in spirit, epistemological and rare.

"Part miracle, part oracle, in these poems lava speaks "with the focus of a burning glass," lighting lyric core samples through geo-historical and cultural texts about Iceland. Shifting the ground so "nouns are never still," the lava reveals how language itself is a record of collisions: poem as matter, sound as forge, form as friction. And what does it mean to be human in the face of such ancient forces, especially as climate change unsettles the earth that anchors us? By the light of the "sphere's credo," can we, too, be remade?"--

Contemplative and disquieted, the poems of Epistle, Osprey trace the mysteries of encounter, wanderlust, rootedness, the human relationship with nature, and our uncertain place in a startling world-here where "an eagle ascends with its broken feast."

In 2016, Leapfolio published the Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement. The Guide provides an overview of the major problems that retirees face and the simple strategies they can implement to make their retirement financially successful. The Guide fulfilled Cardinal's expectations and proved to be a success, as they sold or distributed more than 6,000 copies in the past year. But they also learned that the Guide isn't quite sufficient by itself. So they've created this Workbook to offer additional examples of real-life situations, products, and strategies, and guidance to help people prepare to discuss retirement planning with a professional advisor.

"American Massif follows the first stages of one American Mastodon in his attempts to evolve. His life begins to resemble a human life. His mother appears human. His wife and children, human. His own birthplace and childhood. His appetites, sins, faith, cynicism, big plans. All apparently human. At the same time, all of these things are relinquished or increasingly subject to the story of his own extinction. The massif's landscapes are as varied as pinewoods, clay hills and prairie, but grow more abstract. In his naive way, A.M. moves through or ponders the Higgs Field, art, national and family states of emergency. From his own house to an airport, from volcano to museum, he goes foraging for images good enough to eat, for friends, for antidotes to apocalypse"--

Goblets of gin, fans of feathers, war-bombed bricks, loaves of bread, soot, smoke, and paper money-such are the tangible things that touched the lives of women who worked as wage laborers during an era of Europe of cabaret and hyperinflation. The crises of modernity and capital, as well as the human experiences of women and who loved, lost, and fought against the structures of privilege that all the while aided them during a fraught stretch of time between wars, come alive in City Scattered, a chapbook of poems that invite us to experience and examine the conditions of labor that echo those of our current day.'City Scattered invokes the bleak not-so-cabaret-life of an imagined Berlin in four voices. Along with a German woman, there's an ethnographer who plays a Victrola and takes notes ("but you can already/ find all that in novels," answers an informant), an interlocutor critiquing, and a chorus (counted as one voice). The Berlin woman "being self-serving, promiscuous, and unmotherly, was nevertheless the darling of a new consumer culture" negotiates the realm. "The real power of light is presence" writes author Tyler Mills, but the light shed in the series "I / Self / Woman in Berlin" is a power itself "with coal staining the sheets/like ink." Congratulations!'Terese Svoboda'In City Scattered, through gorgeous strands of speech, Tyler Mills perceptively reintegrates our sacred, forgotten past into a portrait of a woman whose self-possession and complexity are palpably rendered. Only a poet with such sensitivities of language can so clearly hear and interpret the immortal silence of history; only a poet attuned to her own incandescent spirit can test the oneiric nature of poetry with such vigor of mind.'Major Jackson'Tyler Mills' The City Scattered is a rich document of the "inner architecture" and social displacements that occur under the "skies / of capital." Its choral structure deftly links the late days of the Weimar Republic to labor in the age of Amazon. Through swift images and attention to the complexity of pleasure, Mills' poems show the independence and alienation of workers, particularly women, for whom the "purse thickens" while unemployment rises and money is "losing value." Her crisp, suggestive case study illuminates the confluence of precarity and prosperity at the heart of our era. "Do not lean out," warns a sign on a window in one poem; but we're already leaning closer to read.'Zach Savich

These fourteen-line poems give voice to the individual and collective experiences of women. They are windows into a stark otherworld, one filled with the raw materials of experience: sex, birth, cloth, pain. Spare and strange beauty marks the lives and worlds of these women, defined by their struggle for survival in the physical and psychological captivity of the domestic realm. The speaker moves between the singular and plural, sounding out the overlapping experiences of women as both subject and object of the domination inherent in settler colonialism.

"...begins by considering philosophical questions arising from the experience of desire and intimacy: What does love reveal about-and make possible within-the individual? Can we ever truyly understand another person's experience of the world around them? To what extent is the other ultimately inaccessible, a world unto herself?"--

In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother's role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello's trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.

Waldrep's seventh collection begins where his prior collection, feast gently, left off: "This / is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again," according to the opening poem in The Earliest Witnesses. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: eye-proofs of an epiphenomenal world. "Can you see this," the ophthalmologist in "A Mystic's Guide to Arches" asks over and over again. Sight becomes both the facilitator and impediment of desire, in collusion with language itself. "She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my mind's eye, a pear," Waldrep carefully records in "[West Stow Orchard Poem (II)]." The desire-poems in The Earliest Witnesses want the thing itself, its image of the mind, and the language that transmutes both thing and image into song.

The bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething-they want nothing more than to survive... but illness is one of the masters of this book.... The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; power to control and to correct the suffering they both witness and withstand.

Alan Michael Parker's latest collection, The Age of Discovery, is a work of enduring beauty, filled with his signature tenderness and surprise. Parker's interests range from the Psalms to the Internet, from a woman stepping out her window to die to two men trying to learn how to live as they argue in a row-boat. With an eye on some of the greatest love poets (Amichai, Mistral, Neruda), Parker delivers a collection deep in empathy, rigorously attentive, and formally inventive.

An actress. A thinker. A filmmaker. Built of archives and the imagination, the three fictive women narrating Blood Feather articulate a feminist philosophy of art-making and life-making for our fractured world.

The essays in What Came Before say without saying. Combining and blurring the genres of myth, essay, and poetry, these small works explore subjects as diverse as the death of Moses, the special relationship between gay men and cats, the movie "Titanic," rock collections, and the afterlife.

What happens when a central part of life as we know it does not exist? Noah Falck's latest collection answers this question in a playfully gloomy way that reveals the strange edges of our reality. Anyone who has experienced that rug-pulling sensation of change, of strangeness, will relate to Noah Falk's Exclusions. Each lyric poem "excludes" a common subject, including topics such as fiction, modern technology, answers, government, and romance. By setting these subjects against a backdrop of obscurity and strangeness, Falck skillfully keeps readers invested and off-balance. Exclusions brings readers into a world where "the wind is nothing more than a brilliant collection of sighs" and "the sun flattens into a sort of messy bruise over the lake." Even excluding many of the things we take for granted, Falck's lyric poetry includes so much: death, smoke, shadows, sadness, history. This collection will leave readers with a changed perspective on what is necessary, and how to deal with immense change. A 2020 Believer Book Awards Finalist, Exclusions has been praised for its ability to "[keep readers] off balance, stumbling forward, and absolutely alive with both the inventive possibilities of lyric poetry and that rare experience of watching the genre redefine itself in a pair of this art's most capable hands." This is a genre-defining book of poetry that allows us to look into the past, present, and future to understand "the foundations of sadness beginning with the needs of children."