Racing Hummingbirds

Author: Jeanann Verlee
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1935904906
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 74

Book Description
Racing Hummingbirds examines, critiques, and at times delights in one woman's navigation through the many worlds of manic depression and her struggle to maintain humanity in the process. Jeanann Verlee's award-winning debut collection is a series of narratives, prayers, and conjurings which address gender, sex, race, poverty, heartbreak, and survival with such stark intimacy, you will find yourself living inside. These poems cannot possibly be about you, yet they are. They cross boundaries and reclaim hope. They are as the opening poem suggests, nothing short of communion. Fierce and formidable, Jeanann Verlee is poised to make an indelible mark – much like a razor slashing silk – on what's become a comfortably placid poetic landscape. Her unflinching and uncompromising stanzas will change the way you move through the world. -Patricia Smith, “Blood Dazzler” Any storyteller can recount powerful experience [she] makes you feel something powerful is happening in the telling. It is when safety dissolves that we discover possibility...It’s a special person that will make you wish they were your villain. -Brian S. Ellis, “Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom" ...a roller coaster of imagistic magic. Form, language, allusion, and voice interact, collide, shape-shift, and duel...throughout an utterly arresting mosaic. -Danse Macabre Magazine

Dear Future Boyfriend

Author: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 193590471X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
In her celebrated debut volume, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz tackles, among other idiosyncratic topics, love ("Science"), heartbreak ("Lit"), and thieving suburban punks ("Ode to the Person Who Stole My Family's Lawn Gnome"). Quirky and funny with a subtext of social commentary, Aptowicz's writing lets the reader ride shotgun in a hilarious sprawling road trip through America’s youth culture. Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is a dizzying dervish of a poet, an astounding talent, a deft lyricist whose patented take on this dopey world is dazzling in its originality. Everything she encounters is fair game, and she jolts us into unexpected, delightful recognition. -Patricia Smith, "Blood Dazzler" Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is a flash flood of uppercut quotes. Reading her work tempts me to lean over to the people next to me, and say, “Hey, you gotta see this.” Do not miss the opportunity to absorb this woman's work, page or stage." - Buddy Wakefield, "Live for a Living"

The New Clean

Author: Jon Sands
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1935904272
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 67

Book Description
Jon Sands has traveled into a ridiculous world, where nothing is too hilarious to not be honest, and nothing is too honest to not get you pregnant. Best of all, he’s packed us in his suitcase. He represents an ever-changing population of those raised elsewhere who find themselves beckoned by the history, mystique, and magic-makers of New York City. These poems inhabit their own contradictions, and exquisitely navigate the many complicated sides of what it means to be alive. Jon Sands is a high-stakes, honest poet of wild range. Sands possesses the remarkable ability to celebrate just as deeply as he mourns & whichever city he moves through in his poems ... one can be certain that there will be some singing. That's just what these poems do. - Aracelis Girmay, author Sands scours buses in Queens, faceless bullets, and a city full of “back talk” to find a place where we can all “fall madly in Jon,” and we do. Always fresh, The New Clean is a poetics of triumph - Michael Cirelli, Executive Director of Urban Word-NYC

Floating, Brilliant, Gone

Author: Franny Choi
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1938912942
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 77

Book Description
In her electrifying debut, Franny Choi leads readers through the complex landscapes of absence, memory, and identity. Beginning in loss and ending in reflective elation, Floating, Brilliant, Gone explores life as a brief impossibility, “infinite / until it isn’t.” Punctuated with haunting illustrations by Jess X. Chen, Choi’s poems read like lucid dreams that jolt awake at the most unexpected moments.

Yarmulkes & Fitted Caps

Author: Aaron Levy Samuels
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 193891239X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
Aaron Samuels, raised in Providence, Rhode Island by a Jewish mother and a Black father, is a Cave Canem Fellow and a nationally acclaimed performer. In this ground-breaking collection of poems, Samuels examines the beauty and contradictions of his own mixed identity with gut-wrenching narratives, humor, and passionate verve.

The Incredible Sestina Anthology

Author: Daniel Nester
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1938912373
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.

Pecking Order

Author: Nicole Homer
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1949342107
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91

Book Description
Nicole Homer's first full-length poetry collection, Pecking Order, is an unflinching look at how race and gender politics play out in the domestic sphere. Homer challenges the notion of family by forcing the reader to examine how race, race performance, and colorism impact motherhood immediately and from generation to generation. In a world where race and color often determine treatment, the home should be sanctuary, but often is not. Homer's poems question the construction of racial identity and how familial love can both challenge and bolster that construction. Her poems range from the intimate details of motherhood to the universal experiences of parenting; the dynamics of multiracial families to parenting black children; and the ingrained social hierarchy which places the black mother at the bottom. Homer forces us to reckon with the truth that no one–not even the mother–is unbiased.

Bring Down the Chandeliers

Author: Tara Hardy
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1935904310
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 78

Book Description
Tara Hardy�s first book of poems explores the glory, garden and grit of wound while aiming at the bulls-eye of redemption. Translating what the body knows into text, she writes about love, betrayal, sex, war, addiction, regret, and forgiveness. From flat out advice to a trauma survivor, to what roils inside Adam�s rib, to sex from the perspective of her hair, these poems strive to come to terms with human flaw and its aftermath. Through personal narrative, her work deepens our understanding of larger cultural splits, among them victim/perpetrator, gay/straight, urban/rural, coastal/middle, poor/privileged, self/other. These poems press us to work shame into joy, rage into art, and regret into possibility.

Junkyard Ghost Revival

Author: Anis Mojgani
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 193590454X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Book Description
This book contains poetry from a small team of wildly unique, talented and award-winning authors who have been touring the world for years. They have united for a once in a lifetime tour to perform their work and to charge the hearts of America with gut-splitting, lust wrangling, socially active verse. This is the Junkyard Ghost Revival.

No Matter the Wreckage

Author: Sarah Kay
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1938912578
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
Top selling poet Sarah Kay releases her debut collection of work from the first decade of her career. Following the success of her breakout poem, "B," No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's skill for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"). Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. - 2011 TED speaker (recording has been viewed 3 million times online) - First book, "B" was ranked #1 Bestselling Poetry Book on Amazon - Featured on HBO, American Public Radio, Huffington Post, CNN.com, etc. - Founder and Co-Director of Project VOICE