Every Riven Thing

Every Riven Thing PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466878223
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
A vibrant new collection from one of America's most talented young poets Every Riven Thing is Christian Wiman's first collection in seven years, and rarely has a book of poetry so borne the stamp of necessity. Whether in stark, haiku-like descriptions of a cancer ward, surrealistic depictions of a social order coming apart, or fluent, defiant outpourings of praise, Wiman pushes his language and forms until they break open, revealing startling new truths within. The poems are joyful and sorrowful at the same time, abrasive and beautiful, densely physical and credibly mystical. They attest to the human hunger to feel existence, even at its most harrowing, and the power of art to make our most intense experiences not only apprehensible but transfiguring.

Every Riven Thing

Every Riven Thing PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466878223
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
A vibrant new collection from one of America's most talented young poets Every Riven Thing is Christian Wiman's first collection in seven years, and rarely has a book of poetry so borne the stamp of necessity. Whether in stark, haiku-like descriptions of a cancer ward, surrealistic depictions of a social order coming apart, or fluent, defiant outpourings of praise, Wiman pushes his language and forms until they break open, revealing startling new truths within. The poems are joyful and sorrowful at the same time, abrasive and beautiful, densely physical and credibly mystical. They attest to the human hunger to feel existence, even at its most harrowing, and the power of art to make our most intense experiences not only apprehensible but transfiguring.

My Bright Abyss

My Bright Abyss PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374216789
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry

Hammer Is the Prayer

Hammer Is the Prayer PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374167745
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
"The selected poems of American poet Christian Wiman"--

One With Others

One With Others PDF Author: C.D. Wright
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320169
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Honored in "Best Books of the Year" listings from The New Yorker, National Public Radio, Library Journal, and The Huffington Post. "One With Others represents Wright's most audacious experiment yet."—The New Yorker "[A] book . . . that defies description and discovers a powerful mode of its own."— National Public Radio "[A] searing dissection of hate crimes and their malignant legacy."—Booklist Today, Gentle Reader, the sermon once again: "Segregation After Death." Showers in the a.m. The threat they say is moving from the east. The sheriff's club says Not now. Not nokindofhow. Not never. The children's minds say Never waver. Air fanned by a flock of hands in the old funeral home where the meetings were called [because Mrs. Oliver owned it free and clear], and that selfsame air, sanctified and doomed, rent with racism, and it percolates up from the soil itself . . . In this National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines explosive incidents grounded in the Civil Rights Movement. In her signature style, Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, interviews, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vittitow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, and activists. This history leaps howling off the page. C.D. Wright has published over a dozen works of poetry and prose. Among her honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.

Ambition and Survival

Ambition and Survival PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"That calling, at once religious, ethical, and aesthetic, is one that only a genuine poet can hear—and very few poets can explain it as compellingly as Mr. Wiman does. That gift is what makes Ambition and Survival, not just one of the best books of poetry criticism in a generation, but a spiritual memoir of the first order." —New York Sun "This weighty first prose collection should inspire wide attention, partly because of Wiman's current job, partly because of his astute insights and partly because he mixes poetry criticism with sometimes shocking memoir ... The collection's greatest strength comes in general ruminations on the writing, reading and judging poetry." —Publishers Weekly "[Wiman is] a terrific personal essayist, as this new collection illustrates, with the command and instincts of the popular memoirist ... This is a brave and bracing book." —Booklist “Blazing high style” is how The New York Times describes the prose of Christian Wiman, the young editor transforming Poetry, the country’s oldest literary magazine. Ambition and Survival is a collection of stirring personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Milton in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes of his youth, and traveling in Africa with his eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on writers as diverse as Thomas Hardy and Janet Lewis. The book concludes with a portrait of Wiman’s diagnosis of a rare form of incurable and lethal cancer, and how mortality reignited his religious passions. When I was twenty years old I set out to be a poet. That sounds like I was a sort of frigate raising anchor, and in a way I guess I was, though susceptible to the lightest of winds. . . . When I read Samuel Johnson’s comment that any young man could compensate for his poor education by reading five hours a day for five years, that’s exactly what I tried to do, practically setting a timer every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was boiled. It’s a small miracle that I didn’t take to wearing a cape. Christian Wiman is the editor of Poetry magazine. His poems and essays appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New York Times Book Review.

He Held Radical Light

He Held Radical Light PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717818
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 101

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Book Description
A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poets What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known. Seamus Heaney opens a suddenly intimate conversation about faith; Mary Oliver puts half of a dead pigeon in her pocket; A. R. Ammons stands up in front of an audience and refuses to read. He Held Radical Light is as urgent and intense as it is lively and entertaining—a sharp sequel to Wiman’s earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss.

Once in the West

Once in the West PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374713545
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A searing new collection from one of our country's most important poets Memories mercies mostly aren't but there were I swear days veined with grace —from "Memory's Mercies" Once in the West, Christian Wiman's fourth collection, is as intense and intimate as poetry gets—from the "suffering of primal silence" that it plumbs to the "rockshriek of joy" that it achieves and enables. Readers of Wiman's earlier books will recognize the sharp characterizations and humor—"From her I learned the earthworm's exemplary open-mindedness, / its engine of discriminate shit"—as well as his particular brand of reverent rage: "Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone / is that a prayer that's every instant answered?" But there is something new here, too: moving love poems to his wife, tender glimpses of his children, and, amid the onslaughts of illness and fear and failures, "a trace / of peace."

Survival Is a Style

Survival Is a Style PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721416
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Named as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement Survival Is a Style, Christian Wiman’s first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

Hard Night

Hard Night PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Make no mistake: Christian Wiman's poetic endeavors are ambitious. From the personal lyrics of solitude and loss to "Being Serious," the long poem that concludes Hard Night, his poems examine emotions clearly, without sentimentality. A profound reverence for form and passion for poetry are evident in these artfully shaped poems that contain and find meaning in the unwieldy and inexplicable. Just as he is doing as the new editor of Poetry, Wiman makes intellectually and emotionally engaged writing accessible to an expanding audience of readers. Christian Wiman is the author of two books and a widely published essayist and critic. He lives in Chicago, where he is editor of Poetry magazine.

Bewilderment

Bewilderment PDF Author: David Ferry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226244881
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against—and with—his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From Bewilderment: October The day was hot, and entirely breathless, so The remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fall Seemed as if it had no cause at all. The ticking sound of falling leaves was like The ticking sound of gentle rainfall as They gently fell on leaves already fallen, Or as, when as they passed them in their falling, Now and again it happened that one of them touched One or another leaf as yet not falling, Still clinging to the idea of being summer: As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day, Had read, and understood, the calendar.