Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 22 of 22
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Akron Poetry Catalog And Reader September 2019, University Of Akron Press
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.
Girl-King, Brittany Cavallaro
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
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 …
Post Subject: A Fable, Oliver De La Paz
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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," …
Orphan, Indiana, David Dodd Lee
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
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 …
Requiem For The Orchard, Oliver De La Paz
Requiem For The Orchard, Oliver De La Paz
University of Akron Press Publications
These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place “where the Ferris Wheel/ was the tallest thing in the valley,” where a boy would learn “to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck/ with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.” Looking back, the poet wrestles with the meaning of labor in the apple orchards and “the filthy dollars we’d wad into our pockets,” or the rites of passage that included sinking a knife into the flank of a dead chestnut horse. In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties—or …
A Letter To Serafin, John Minczeski
A Letter To Serafin, John Minczeski
University of Akron Press Publications
A Letter to Serafin is a multi-paneled study of juxtapositions and duplicities, where history becomes a living entity, not just a shadowy artifact. Minczeski colors his lines with dark hues of wry comedy and sharp tones of pathos, transcending geography and time by providing testimony on behalf of those who no longer can. This is a vital book for anyone who has ever been transported by a piece of artwork, or haunted by a photograph that projects meaning beyond its borders.
"If the aim of poetry is to speak the unspeakable, then John Minczeski gives voice to all that goes …
Map Of The Folded World, John Gallaher
Map Of The Folded World, John Gallaher
University of Akron Press Publications
Map of the Folded World, John Gallaher's third full-length collection, examines the eros and desperation of suburban America with the precision of a cartographer's eye. But as its title suggests, it does so according to the polar opposite of convention. More concerned with subtext than narrative, often childlike in tone and propelled by the logic of innocence, Gallaher's poems don't shy away from a bottom-line sensibility: “If you can just run fast enough,” one poem offers, “no one will ever die. // Do you remember that? / And are you better now?” This is a book filled with swimming …