6 minute read
POETRY
Poems By Aurielle Marie Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
"Some writers write poetry to flex what they can do. Aurielle Marie writes reckoning poems themselves come to work. Gumbo Ya Ya kicks with this lit lit magic, this insistent electricity, pages what sweat ink, bleed it, weep it, drip it. Aurielle Marie will cuss, but an Aurielle Marie poem can curse; that what she has seen, felt, or known, is trans-amplified in the room she gives the poem to do what it’s gonna do. Gumbo Ya Ya is Aurielle Marie’s Dirty-Dirty grimoire drawn from a vernacular trickbag at once up to something and down for whatever. These poems are spell weaving. They are bound to work you."
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—Douglas Kearney - Final Judge Citation
Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Gumbo Ya Ya is a cauldron of multifaceted poems confronting race, binaries, and violence, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. Armed with a poetic dexterity that employs urgent subject matter and sultry lyricism, Aurielle Marie’s debut is as stunning as it is timely. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black girl dies “by the barrel of the law” or “for loving another Black gxrl.” Part ancestral and familial archival, part ethnography of Black femme resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogues the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with cultural commentary and personal narrative. It asks us to chew upon both the rich meat and tough gristle, and in doing so we walk away, washed anew and more than satisfied.
Aurielle Marie is a Black and queer essayist, poet, and cultural strategist hailing from the Deep South. A 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer award recipient, she’s received invitations to fellowships from many literary institutions, including Lambda Literary, VONA Voices, and Tin House. Her work is featured in TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Black Warrior, and other journals. Aurielle Marie writes and speaks about Blackness, bodies, sex, and pop culture from a Black feminist lens.
PITT POETRY SERIES | UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS Paperback • 9780822966661 • September 2021 • £14.00 72 pages
By Crystal Wilkinson, Nikky Finney and Ronald W. Davis
A collection of lyrics and prose about Blackness, racism, and political awareness. Crystal Wilkinson combines her deep love for her country roots with her passion for language and storytelling to craft compelling lyrics and prose in this collection about Black girlhood, racism, and political awareness. The fiction writer turned poet muses on such topics as the politics of her Black body, lost fathers, motherhood, mental illness, rape, and religion.
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Hardback • 9780813151151 • August 2021 • £23.00 106 pages • 36 illus.
Other Worlds
By Albert Goldbarth
A collection of poems examining life from a quasi-science-fiction perspective. This book looks at our everyday joys and griefs as interpreted by Mars and quantum physics. It studies the many conflicting realities that America uneasily accommodates in time of pandemic and protests. It provides elegiac poems informed by the realms of memory, ghosts, and imagined afterlives. This is a bravura performance by the only poet to have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award and who, at 73, is writing at the height of his power.
PITT POETRY SERIES | UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS Paperback • 9780822966692 • November 2021 • £13.50 96 pages
Little Pharma
Poems By Laura Kolbe
Winner of the 2020 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. The title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet’s dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. The poems trace the arc of a young woman’s life, from being a hesitant and anxious, newly-minted medical trainee to becoming an adept of the otherworldly logic of the hospital wards.
PITT POETRY SERIES | UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS Paperback • 9780822966722 • October 2021 • £13.50 96 pages
By Kamau Brathwaite
Deeply felt requiems from an internationally celebrated poet. Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Elegguas – a play on "elegy" and "Eleggua," the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad – is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead.
THE DRIFTLESS SERIES & WESLEYAN POETRY SERIES | WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Paperback • 9780819580184 • March 2021 • £13.50 136 pages
Be Brave to Things
The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer By Jack Spicer and Edited by Daniel Katz
Indispensable collection of previously unavailable poetry by an American master. This book shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his game – his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Alongside unseen, out of print, and otherwise unavailable poems are Spicer’s three main plays, major unfinished projects, early and alternative versions of his famous work, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended ‘books’ and serial poems. Invaluable to any student of 20th century American poetry.
WESLEYAN POETRY SERIES | WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Hardback • 9780819578150 • November 2021 • £25.95 400 pages
The Past
By Wendy Xu
Elegiac and searching, poems written in the long shadow of immigration. This collection fantasises about becoming a lyrical record of the past, while working to disrupt this Westernised desire. Having immigrated to the US three days before Tian’anmen Square, Xu probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an eternal psychic experience. Subverting traditional Chinese forms, the book culminates in a series of ‘Tian’anmen Square Sonnets’ to conjure up the irrepressible past, and conjure up a new kind of poem: at once code and confession.
WESLEYAN POETRY SERIES | WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Hardback • 9780819580450 • October 2021 • £18.50 104 pages
By Andrea Brady
An innovative suite of poems encompassing the drone age. A powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war’ through a sophisticated and complex interplay of linguistic devices.
WESLEYAN POETRY SERIES | WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Paperback • 9780819580429 • September 2021 • £11.95 96 pages
Born to Slow Horses
By Kamau Brathwaite
Winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2006). Brathwaite is one of the foremost voices in postcolonial inquiry and expression, and his poetry is densely rooted and expansive. His newest poems are haunted, figuratively and literally, by spirits of the African diaspora and drenched in the colours, sounds, and rhythms of the islands. But they also encompass the world of the exile and return, and the events of 9/11 in New York City.
WESLEYAN POETRY SERIES | WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Paperback • 9780819567468 • March 2021 • £13.50 160 pages
The Lazarus Poems
By Kamau Brathwaite
A mystical masterwork about the afterlife by the great Barbadian poet at the end of his career. This book is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange, exhibiting ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the 'sycorax video style' he's been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: the afterlife. Brathwaite speaks of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies the racial politics and ageism underlying the events described.
