My Hollywood and Other Poems

Author: Boris Dralyuk
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
ISBN: 1589881672
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 63

Book Description
"The wit and daring of his rhymes and phrasing remind me of that old master, Donald Justice, who dazzled us with the elegance of his forms. Dralyuk carries this high style into the 21st century, and I, for one, am thrilled to be in the presence of his marvelous verbal art. Pay attention, readers: a new maestro is in our midst."—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa "These [poems] are the souvenirs of an almost-vanished glamour, an ethnic, gritty, free-wheeling city, little fantasias encased in rhyme and meter."—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's My Hollywood and Other Poems is a collection of lyric meditations on the experience of émigrés in Los Angeles. In forms ranging from ballades to villanelles to Onegin sonnets, the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. My Hollywood draws on the poet’s own life as a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, honors the vanishing traces of the city’s past, and, in crisp and poignant translations, summons the voices of five Russian poets who spent their final years in LA, including the composer Vernon Duke. “Dralyuk embraces rhyme with a rare and admirable enthusiasm for sound and syllable, for musical variety and plays on words . . . [An] air of upbeat sorrow permeates My Hollywood. It’s an émigré mood, defined by the conviction that things could always be worse.”—New York Review of Books "Sophisticated, musical, and often humorous."—Booklist "Byronic rhymes are poetry’s answer to special effects, and Dralyuk’s skill at slipping them in—so that the art seems artless—is worthy of Industrial Light & Magic . . . What’s true of my favorite films is true of this book: the lines are first-rate, but it’s the images that linger.”— Austin Allen, The Hopkins Review "My Hollywood is a first-rate collection of precise, delightfully graceful poems, the poet as Fred Astaire tap-dancing up and down the lines."—Russian Life

My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems

Author: Amber Dawn
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551527944
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Book Description
In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life. In this, her second poetry collection, Amber Dawn takes stock of the costs of coming out on the page in a heartrendingly honest and intimate investigation of the toll that artmaking takes on artists. These long poems offer difficult truths within their intricate narratives that are alternately incendiary, tender, and rapturous. In a cultural era when intersectional and marginalized writers are topping bestseller lists, Amber Dawn invites her readers to take an unflinching look at we expect from writers, and from each other. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard: Poems

Author: Dana Goodyear
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393082466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 79

Book Description
Poems about sex, marriage, and the desire for a child from a “scary-cool and edgy-smart” poet (J. D. McClatchy). The frank, raw lyrics of Dana Goodyear’s second collection draw on the scenery of Los Angeles—the teenagers, vagrants, pornographers—and the beautiful decay that serves as an insistent reminder to them all. The poems are unsparing but tender, candid but sly, and open to the force of nature on an individual human life. from “Wildfire” We want this. The end to sleeping, the bittersweet arousal, the peeling back, the soft bath in resin, the release. It can’t come quick enough, the hot touch that breaks the crust and lets us go. Hear it now: a crackling, as the woods begin to sing alongside the birds.

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Author: Robert Chandler
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141972262
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet. Robert Chandler is an acclaimed poet and translator. His many translations from Russian include works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, while his anthologies of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales are both published in Penguin Classics. Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and co-founder of the StoSvet literary project. Her most recent collection is 2013's Ophelia i masterok [Ophelia and the Trowel]. Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews and translator of many books from Russian, including, most recently, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (2014).

The Hypnotiser

Author: Michael Rosen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Book Description

Dancing in Odessa

Author: Ilya Kaminsky
Publisher: Tupelo Press
ISBN: 1936797313
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 77

Book Description
Winner of the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, selected by poet and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Eleanor Wilner who says, "I'm so happy to have a manuscript that I believe in so powerfully, poetry with such a deep music. I love it." One might spend a lifetime reading books by emerging poets without finding the real thing, the writer who (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) can take the top of your head off. Kaminsky is the real thing. Impossibly young, this Russian immigrant makes the English language sing with the sheer force of his music, a wondrous irony, as Ilya Kaminsky has been deaf since the age of four. In Odessa itself, "A city famous for its drunk tailors, huge gravestones of rabbis, horse owners and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish," Kaminksy dances with the strangest — and the most recognizable — of our bedfellows in a distinctive and utterly brilliant language, a language so particular and deft that it transcends all of our expectations, and is by turns luminous and universal.

Hollywood & God

Author: Robert Polito
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226673413
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 87

Book Description
Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today’s Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems

Author: VERNON. DUKE
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781589882041
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"[Duke] is an autobiographer of considerable perception and honesty . . . With innumerable deft touches he illustrates the similarities and dissimilarities of the two musical worlds in which he has lived." --The New York Times Passport to Paris is a witty, pleasantly chatty, richly detailed memoir of a life in emigration and of a dual career in the "serious" and "popular" music worlds. It provides one of the most vivid and refreshingly buoyant accounts of the perilous exodus from the collapsed Russian Empire undertaken by some two million people during the late 1910s and early 1920s, and also offers rare intimate portraits of major figures in 20th-century music, from Sergei Prokofiev to the Gershwin brothers. This edition includes a new Introduction by Boris Dralyuk as well as poems that Duke wrote in California in the 1960s, here translated from the Russian by Dralyuk, that offer a glimpse of the last happy decade of Duke's life.

Directing Herbert White

Author: James Franco
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1770894586
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Book Description
The debut poetry collection by the actor, director, and writer James Franco I’m a nocturnal creature, And I’m here to cheat time. You can see time and exhaustion Taking pay from my face— In fifty years My sleep will be death, I’ll go like the rest, But I’ll have played All the games and all the roles. —from “Nocturnal” “There’s never been a book quite like this. Hollywood — fame, celebrity, the promise of becoming an artist — is the beast at its center. Franco knows it like Melville knows whaling. Hollywood in this book devours its young. Obsessed with myths about its own past, it can be survived only by finding a vantage point that is not Hollywood. Bold yet subtle, fearless yet disarming, Franco has made a book you will never forget.” — Frank Bidart, winner of the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry “A star-studded cast moves like ghosts across the screen of James Franco’s poetic consciousness, imbuing the writing with scenes of icons who are also humans replete with sorrow and presence in our own psyches. James Dean, Monica Vitti, Catherine Deneuve, Sal Mineo, Heath Ledger, pass and fade. The author has a wonderful self-reflexive insouciance about his own fame and roles inhabited, from Hart Crane to Allen Ginsberg to Harvey Milk’s lover. Franco is a gifted contemporary Renaissance kind of guy, surveying the waterfront of illusion, suffering, and impermanance. We leave the movie theater a little wiser.” — Anne Waldman, poet, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist

The Zoo in Winter

Author: Polina Barskova
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN: 1935554263
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
Opulent, playful and sensual, Polina Barskova's poems have earned her a reputation as the finest Russian poet under the age of 40. While steeped in Russian and classical culture, Barskova's work remains unmistakably contemporary, at once classic and edgy - always fresh, new and startling. This is the first English translation of this remarkable poet, collecting poems from seven earlier books as well as from her recent work. Dralyuk and Stromberg's superb translation perfectly renders the strange and intoxicating beauty of Barskova's poetry.