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Poetry-Making As Healing, Callan Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Many of us are taught to believe that poetry is restricted to a narrower existence than it truly is. Many people don’t enjoy poetry, or say they don’t understand it—but luckily, poetry, for a while now, is becoming more accessible as an art form. In this work, I seek to further this accessibility by connecting writing poetry with building a house.

Women's Hall Of Fame, Brianna Kean

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

No matter how you identify we can all take actions in support of gender equality. Women have come a long way in society since Sacagawea’s time, but that doesn’t mean we live in an equal world. I was inspired by these ten women, and I hope you are too. Take that inspiration and turn it into action, so that maybe one day people might honor you for supporting women’s rights. This project honors ten women throughout history that have made an impact on women's rights and societal values. I created a portrait, a bio, and a poem that aims at …

An Exploration Of My Undergraduate Poetry Works, Clover O'Mordha

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Throughout my years at the University of Akron, I have explored my creative writing, focusing on poetry, and developed a distinct style. There have been many influences on my poetry and I utilize several poetry aesthetics, conventions, and styles. My honor project will explore my poetry by referencing a 30-page portfolio of my collected undergraduate works.

Joshua Harmon's The Soft Path (University Of Akron Press, 2019) Reviewed In The New Issue Of Mid-American Review, University Of Akron Press

News of The University of Akron Press

Joshua Harmon’s first collection of poetry, The Soft Path, was reviewed by Turner Wilson in the latest issue of Mid-American Review (vol. XL, no. 1).

Wilson praises the book as “a vision of the future of American pastoral poetry,” reading the “spare and fragmented style” as a comment on our broken “understanding and exploitation of wilderness” (169).

Akron Poetry Catalog And Reader September 2019, University Of Akron Press

University of Akron Press Publications

In our mobile-sized poetry catalog and reader, you can read poems from new books by Oliver de la Paz, Joshua Harmon, Brittany Cavallaro, Krystal Languell, Tyler Mills, Caryl Pagel, Emily Rosko, Emilia Phillips, Aimée Baker, Anne Barngrover, Matthew Guenette, Leslie Harrison, Sandra Simonds, Philip Metres, and Jennifer Moore.

Soft Tornado, Zoe Orcutt

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Soft Tornado is the creative senior honors project of Zoe Orcutt. It is the culmination of her creative undergraduate work, including 30 pages of poetry, a critical essay, and a self-reflection.

"Before The Rain Came" (Poems), Alizabeth Christian

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Poetry is often perceived as an unfamiliar form of expression. With misconceptions of poetry being as something driven by pure epiphany, poetry is lost amongst many individuals. This misconception is challenged throughout this collection and encourages readers to embrace vulnerability through the speaker’s passage to self acceptance. In my piece, “For the Big Horns,” vulnerability is encompassed when the speaker says that “The mountain told me that we are all animals without blueprints. That people are no longer people without fear, and that fear is a root.” These lines encapsulate the speaker’s persistence to show readers an experience of humanness, …

Evidence, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Subjects found,

Documents lost.

Telos Haunts Billboards, Colin Post

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This piece is an excerpt from an ongoing hypertext poem, akhilleus, which chronicles the activities of a network of characters interacting with the built world via text. This particular piece follows Telos, a seer of ends, as they appear before a billboard. Telos contemplates billboards as a kind of document, a succession of information planes along the roadway, echoing into and past each other, and also shares a premonition of the end of billboards.

Curiosity, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

No.

Girl-King, Brittany Cavallaro

University of Akron Press Publications

The poems in Brittany Cavallaro's Girl-King are whispered from behind a series of masks, those of victim and aggressor, nineteenth-century madame and reluctant magician's girl, of truck-stop Persephone and frustrated Tudor scholar. This "expanse of girls, expanding still" chase each other through history, disappearing in an Illinois cornfield only to re-emerge on the dissection table of a Scottish artist-anatomist. But these poems are not just interested in historical narrative: they peer, too, at the past's marginalia, at its "blank pages" as well as its "scrawls and dashes." Always, they return to "the dark, indelicate question" of power and sexuality, of …

The Veronica Maneuver, Jennifer Moore

University of Akron Press Publications

Jennifer Moore's debut collection takes its title from a bullfighting technique in which the matador draws the bull with his cape; in these poems, however, traditional moves are reconfigured and roles are subverted. In a broader sense, the word "veronica" (from the Latin vera, or "true" and the Greek eikon, or "image") functions as a frame for exploring the nature of visual experience, and underscores a central question: how do we articulate events or emotions that evade clear understanding? In order to do so, the figures here perform all manner of transformations: from vaudeville star to cartoonist's daughter, from patron …

Words Matter: Documents Of The Departed, Thomas Atwood

Proceedings from the Document Academy

As families begin to experience the passing of loved ones from a ‘silent generation’, they will be forced to make decisions about the physical belongings of those who lived in a Depression Era mentality. Some of these choices will be easy, as one may possess little sentiment over a clock or a set of dishes. Other decisions will be trying, as these items will surely invoke conversations that make us reconsider the meaning of the words keep, want, need, and discard. This paper discusses the documents of Dr. Lloyd Mills (1927-2013), Professor Emeritus of English, at Kent State University. For …

Post Subject: A Fable, Oliver De La Paz

University of Akron Press Publications

Ecstatic and obsessive, the prose poems that make up Oliver de la Paz's Post Subject: A Fable reveal the monuments of a lost country. Through a series of epistles addressed to "Empire" a catalog emerges, where what can be tallied is noted in a ledger, what can be claimed is demarcated, and what has been reaped is elided. The task of deposing the late century is taken up. What's salvaged from the remains is humanity.

Fat Jersey Blues, John Repp

University of Akron Press Publications

"I know I'm holding a good book in my hand when I use the other to call my friends and read poems to them. How generous John Repp is! He zooms in on the moment, but he's always glancing at everything that surrounds it. His funny poems have dark hearts, just as the sad ones are clearly written by someone capable of belly-shaking laughter. They tell wonderful stories, yet they contain chewy little nuggets that are often indifferent and even hostile to story. I've said elsewhere that a poem either writes you a check or sends you a bill, and …

Time Is A Toy: The Selected Poems Of Michael Benedikt, John Gallaher, Laura Boss

University of Akron Press Publications

Time is a Toy fills in the mystery of what happened to the work of Michael Benedikt, one of America's acknowledged major contemporary poets of the 1960s and 1970s, who disappeared from the stage of American poetry. The editors John Gallaher and Laura Boss solve that mystery while discovering new unpublished poems, as well as Benedikt's classic published work.

A Poet Drives A Truck: Poems By And About Lowell A. Levant, Lowell A. Levant

University of Akron Press Publications

Lowell A. Levant had the twin vocations of poet and truck driver. He rose to prominence in Berkeley in the sixties as a member of the Artists, Musicians, Poets, and Sympathizers Local of the I.W.W., whose work was collected in Poems Read in the Spirit of Peace and Gladness. Readers will notice four main qualities of his poems. First, as observed by his mentor, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, there is “… the complex depth of his writing about work, machinery, trucks, equipment, repair, maintenance -- all in a deceptively slightly befuddled voice that masks the surprising competence of …

Signaletics, Emilia Phillips

University of Akron Press Publications

Signaletics pits the measured against the immeasurable, the body against identity, and the political against the personal. With a defunct 19th-century body measurement system of criminal identification as a foundation, the poems move in and out of history, only to arrive at the immediate voice of a speaker, distraught about the death of a child brother, the remove of a father, and the estrangement of the personal with the politics of her country.

Thievery, Seth Abramson

University of Akron Press Publications

A few rare holdouts to the contrary, American culture is loud, unsubtle, insensitive, needy, exhausting, cheaply convenient, unreflective, and above all, distracted. What has been happening behind the scenes during all the years we haven't been paying attention? What world have we given ourselves and what have we given up in that shallow exchange? Such observations are deeply implied by the poems in Seth Abramson's Thievery. At the bottom of this book is the sense that we've been ripped off and don't even know it yet. That we have allowed it has left us stunted, morally and spiritually, with …

The Poet Resigns: Poetry In A Difficult World, Robert Archambeau

University of Akron Press Publications

What are we really wishing for when we want poetry to have the prominence it had in the past? Why do American poets overwhelmingly identify with the political left? How do poems communicate? Is there an essential link between formal experimentation and political radicalism? What happens when poetic outsiders become academic insiders? Just what makes a poem a poem? If a poet gives up on her art, what reasons could she find for coming back to poetry? These are the large questions animating the essays of The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World, a book that sets out to …

Carnival, Jason Bredle

University of Akron Press Publications

Jason Bredle's poems approach the world like a haunted cat approaches a glacier, curious and itchy with strangeness. In Carnival, he skates paratactically between states of being: levity, heart-holes, licks of darkness, lovesickness and werewolfishness. Bredle's gift as a poet is to traverse and re-traverse one looking glass in ten different moods. When he goes through it, we are taken. -Melissa Broder

Prop Rockery, Emily Rosko

University of Akron Press Publications

Art is about something the way a cat is about the house," says Allen Grossman. This is abundantly true of Emily Rosko's poems in Prop Rockery, a condition she defines with a quote from King Lear: "a looped and windowed raggedness." And while this condition is "pretend," and these poems are indeed virtuoso performances, the despair, loneliness, lies, and miscommunication they examine are as real as anything in art. Parataxis and fragments meet rhyme and chewy-on-the-tongue Anglo Saxon diction at the axis of postmodern irony. Prop Rockery explodes in your mouth-no sugar, plenty of bite. -Natasha Sajé, author of …

A Face To Meet The Faces: An Anthology Of Contemporary Persona Poetry, Stacey Lynn Brown, Oliver De La Paz

University of Akron Press Publications

The literary tradition of persona, of writing poems in voices or from perspectives other than the poet’s own, is ancient in origin and contemporary in practice. The embodiment of different voices is not only a dramatic and creative moment, but also a moment of true empathy, as the author moves beyond his or her own margins to fully inhabit the character, personality, and mindset of another human being. While there are a great number of poems written in persona, both historically as well as in the modern poetic landscape, there are no anthologies currently in existence that collect and celebrate …

Hurricane Party, Alison Pelegrin

University of Akron Press Publications

"Hurricane Party is an original and rewarding work, a masterful follow-up to Big Muddy River of Stars, and a livewire, compelling contribution to American poetry. No other poet sounds like Pelegrin, and that's the sure sign of a writer at the top of her game." —Elton Glaser

American Busboy, Matthew Guenette

University of Akron Press Publications

"In American Busboy, a wry anti-mythology, the anti-hero busboy in an anonymous Clam Shack! tangles with the monotonous delirium of work, the indignities and poor pay of unskilled labor, the capricious deus ex machina of mean-spirited middle management, the zombified consumption of summer tourists, while jostling for the goddess-like attentions of waitresses and hostesses—all battered up in sizzlingly crisp wit and language, and deep-fried in a shiny glaze of surrealism." —Lee Ann Roripaugh

The Monkey And The Wrench: Essays Into Contemporary Poetics, Mary Biddinger, John Gallaher

University of Akron Press Publications

The first volume in the "Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics," The Monkey & the Wrench, explores the debate over hybrid aesthetics, confronts the topic of contemporary rhyme, and ventures into the realm of persona and the mystical poem. This volume is ideal for both the classroom and the nightstand, for the poet's desk and the critic's bookshelf. Series editors Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher have assembled an eclectic collection that welcomes the reader into the conversation, while documenting the seismic activity of today's poetry world.

Le Spleen De Poughkeepsie, Joshua Harmon

University of Akron Press Publications

Winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is "a tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America's benighted post-industrial heartland." Harmon's Poughkeepsie shimmers just beyond the borders of banal recognition. "If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy," Harmon writes in an introductory pastoral, seeking out "the stray / detours and workarounds of the secret / city inside the more obvious one...on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life." Poughkeepsie is that city of the heart where no one can look at anyone else "alone," …

The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems Of The Magdalen Laundries Of Ireland, Rachel Dilworth

University of Akron Press Publications

The poems of The Wild Rose Asylum offer a multi-faceted consideration of the historical phenomenon of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums, the largest and most controversial of which were run for 150 years, until 1996, by the Catholic Church. In poems that embrace both traditional and experimental forms, Rachel Dilworth’s work explores complex factors involved in the loss by thousands of Irish women of years of their lives, numerous aspects of their identities, and countless future possibilities to confinement and arduous unpaid laundry labor as “penitents” in these facilities for so-called “fallen” women. Pervaded by a cutting awareness of an incarceration of …

Orphan, Indiana, David Dodd Lee

University of Akron Press Publications

Orphan, Indiana is a collection of spontaneous outbursts framed by reticence and the guiding mania of the subconscious. Profane and poignant, accidental-seeming but soaring with satirical intent, David Dodd Lee's poems capture a verisimilitude that's phenomenological, and yet of the moment.

Nothing Fatal, Sarah Perrier

University of Akron Press Publications

What happens when love is replaced by romance? In Nothing Fatal, Sarah Perrier explores this and other questions about our contemporary understanding of dating, relationships, sex, and marriage. In the opening lines of “Too Darn Hot,” a poem fueled by the same weary ardor as Cole Porter’s song, the speaker asks, “Why sort the doubletalk from the innuendo? / They’re both lyrical.” Rather than sorting the one from the other, the poems of Nothing Fatal delight in the ways that the imperfect and seductive power of language has, for centuries, helped us find new and inventive ways to woo …