Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor (Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O'Connor Trust Series)

Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of Flannery O'Connor's attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O'Connor's thoughts on the subject. O'Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O'Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: "I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral." Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O'Connor's fiction.

Literature & Fiction

O'Donnell, Angela Alaimo

History & Criticism

Fordham University Press

Lovers' Almanac is a collection of poems that explores the varieties of love that human beings experience. Anchoring the volume is a 12-poem sonnet sequence featuring an intimate dialogue between a man and woman, each poem keyed to one of the months of the year. The book offers a range of poems engaging divine love, agapeic love, familial love, fraternal love, parental love, and homage, the love we bear towards artists, saints, and heroes. As the title implies, Lovers' Almanac also explores the concept of time and the ways in which love is grounded in the succession of seasons--both the seasons of the year and the seasons of life. These incarnational poems devote attention to embodied, incarnate love, evident in all times and places, and celebrate the power of love to open us up, save us from the prison house of self, and redeem us from the suffering human beings are heir to. Love accompanies us throughout the course of human life, from birth to death, defying loss, loneliness, aging, and our inevitable mortality. The premise of the book might be summed up by one of its epigraphs, echoing St. Paul: "Love never fails"

Lovers' Almanac

Resource Publications

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's WAKING MY MOTHER reaches through memory to truth, enlarging family history and stories of her mother's life into connections that twine us all: story, spirit, family. "If art is what we do to break bread with the dead (Auden), and rhyme and meter are the table manners (Heaney), then Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's hard-won, well-wrought, acoustically sumptuous poems set forth a proper feast: haunting, abundant, free of pieties. As with any good wake, here the living and the dead behold one another.The kinship is astonishing."-Thomas Lynch"

Waking My Mother

Poetry

Word Poetry

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O'Connor is a collection of 101 sonnets that channel the voice of celebrated fiction writer, Flannery O'Connor. In these poems, poet and scholar Angela Alaimo O'Donnell imagines the rich interior life Flannery lived during the last fourteen years of her life in rural Georgia on her family's farm named "Andalusia." Each poem begins with an epigraph taken from O'Connor's essays, stories, or letters; the poet then plumbs Flannery's thoughts and the poignant circumstances behind them, welcoming the reader into O'Connor's private world. Together the poems tell the story of a brilliant young woman who enjoyed a bright and promising childhood, was struck with lupus just as her writing career hit its stride, and was forced to return home and live out her days in exile, far from the literary world she loved. By turns tragic and comic, the poems in Andalusian Hours explore Flannery's loves and losses, her complex relationship with her mother, her battle with her illness and disability, and her passion for her writing. The poems mark time in keeping with the liturgical hours O'Connor herself honored in her prayer life and in her quasi-monastic devotion to her vocation and to the home she learned to love, Andalusia. &nbsp;

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O'Connor (Paraclete Poetry) (Volume 1)

Paraclete Press

These poems map a private pilgrimage to nowhere--from the chair to the couch, the couch to the chair. These poems also map a public pilgrimage through the landscape of pandemic, from dire disaster to the hope for healing. They chronicle a year spent in lockdown in a small village just outside New York City. &nbsp; Living amid the Coronavirus catastrophe has occasioned extraordinary outpourings of love over the past year. These poems recognize the public love of healthcare workers, front-line essential workers, people helping their sick and elderly neighbors and family members, school teachers ministering to students and their parents--all signs of our belief in the common good, as well as the many forms of private and personal love we practice--among them the uncountable emails, texts, social media posts, phone calls, and Zoom calls we share with our beloveds whom we are separated from, making ourselves present to them virtually when we cannot be present physically. These are but a few of the many forms love has taken--and continues to take--during these late days of pandemic. &nbsp; The title of the book,&nbsp;Love in the Time of Coronavirus, is borrowed from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's luminous novel,&nbsp;Love in the Time of Cholera, about the enduring power of love in the face of time and deadly circumstance. This book of poems goes beyond Marquez's primary focus on romantic attachment to consider love in its many forms. As with Marquez's novel, the poems remind us that love flourishes even, and perhaps especially, during times of extremity, when the reality of mortality becomes palpable to us and we begin to see life in the context of eternity. It is then that love becomes the most powerful antidote we have to human suffering.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage

Religion & Spirituality

About the Author\nAngela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., is a writer, poet, and professor. She teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. She is also co-editor of the Curran Center’s new book series, “Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series,” published by Fordham University Press.\n“Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." —Exodus 3:5 
“The Holy Land is everywhere.” —Black Elk 
The two epigraphs that preface Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Holy Land introduce the reader to the central theme that permeates her poems: that holy places deserve to be regarded with reverence and that all places are holy places. In her afterward, the poet traces these foundational concepts to her Catholic childhood wherein religious instruction consisted largely of memorizing the Baltimore Catechism. “One of questions the Catechism poses is ‘Where is God?’ The answer is ‘God is everywhere.’ We believed this to be true. God was in church, but God was also in our house (a crucifix in every room), in the backyard, in our Buick (rosary beads swinging from the rearview mirror), at our birthday parties in the basement, and in our own bodies. And though those places may not sound very holy, they were. Because God was there. Is there.” 
In addition to affirming this foundational belief, these poems extend the terrain, moving beyond the geographical and the physical to the temporal, the carnal, the intellectual, and the spiritual realms. They assert that our days are blessed, our bodies are blessed, our minds and souls are all blessed and sacred ground. The poet explores a broad spectrum of physical locations, beginning with poems set in the Holy Land and moving on to places closer to home, ranging from the west of Ireland to rural Minnesota, from New York City to the Texas border. She also probes the temporal spaces we occupy, experiences of death and birth, love and loss, desire and desolation that mark our human passage. 
The English word holy is related to the Germanic word heilig, a word that means blessed and also carries within it the idea of wholeness. Holy Land attempts to honor both the holiness and the wholeness of our world—from Gotham to Golgotha, the Bronx River to the Sea of Galilee—and to honor the holiness and wholeness of our blessed and broken humanity.

Holy Land: Poems

Dear Dante: Poems

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Books by O'Donnell, Angela Alaimo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O'Donnell, Angela Alaimo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor (Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O'Connor Trust Series)

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor (Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O'Connor Trust Series)

Lovers' Almanac

Waking My Mother

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O'Connor (Paraclete Poetry) (Volume 1)

Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage

Holy Land: Poems

Dear Dante: Poems