This book presents the life and writings of Armenian poet Hmayeak Shems (1896-1952). The Armenian Genocide of 1915 devastated Shems, who lost his family and home and wandered for years in exile. Yet from debilitating isolation, Shems found a lyrical mastery of Armenian identity and modern spirit. Illuminated by his poetry, this biography chronicles his travels, encounters, and thought to reveal a more compelling and complete portrait of Shems than previously known.

Hmayeak Shems: A Poet of Pure Spirit

Biographies & Memoirs

Gery, John

Baladouni, Vahé

Arts & Literature

University Press of America

5-part narrative poem set in civil war Louisiana.

Davenport's Version: A Narrative Poem

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Portals Pr

Charlemagne: A song of gestures

Plumbers Ink Books

The burning of New Orleans: A narrative poem

Action & Adventure

Amelia

His subjects range from close self-analysis to abstract considerations of time and place, but essentially he is interested in adapting traditional poetics to fit contemporary situations.

Gallery Of Ghosts

History & Criticism

University of New Orleans Press

A Gallery of Ghosts

Story Line Press

The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing, wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle’s comment, “Happiness appears to depend on leisure,” the book divides into four sections, gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances, idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from a train trip cross country. 
There are “no things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the book’s opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to “above the abundant sand of the Sudan,” these poems express the importance of being “grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,” while cultivating “the grace to know what to ignore.”

The Enemies of Leisure

Travelled in the mind, and travelled in the world, John Gery’s Have at You Now! is a collection of wide range, deep sympathy, and elegant craft.

Have at You Now!

CW Books

Enemies Of Leisure

A collection of poetry explores timelessness, idleness, and the struggle between leisure and work

Enemies of Leisure

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Books by Gery, John