Poetry. THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES by Daniel Y. Harris is a post-digital and post-human literary oeuvre whose vortices are replete with the language of kabbalah, alchemy, holy writ, and the nuances of digital technology and social media. In illuminating a wide array of literary styles and varied poesis, THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES balances an amalgam between nihilism and transcendentalism by burrowing through the minutiae of self and identity to conjure the image of a post-human self as an inventor, engraving tropes of originality from the littered density of the literary canon. The book scrapes the periphery of form and style, but not to extol a certain impossible obscurity, futility, abstraction, disdain, flippancy, or the realpolitik of viral media. Technology and hyperreality meet Judaic midrash and biblical exegesis in stanzas which seek to create a human being from the refuse of bandwidth. THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES for a new spiritus, geist and religious ethos for the 21st century.

The Underworld of Lesser Degrees

Literature & Fiction

Harris, Daniel Y.

Poetry

NYQ Books

Dramatic and intimate, the poems in Does She Have a Name? trace the journeys of two women-- one middle aged, the other her infant granddaughter--through near-mortal encounters with medical crises. Both survive their trials, passing from life to death and back again; both face wrenching, unpredictable challenges; both emerge from years of therapy, made whole but alone, changed by experience in apparent and invisible ways. Moving from a NICU unit's urgent ministrations to the patient work of neurologists and speech pathologists, told from the perspectives of parent, child, husband, and witness, and exploring questions of disability, difference, and the calculated value of human life, Does She Have a Name? is an affecting, provocative book of poems.

Does She Have a Name?

Witte, George

This collection of poems charts the course of a speaker coming-of-age in rural South Mississippi, a world that is sublime and terrifying, but these poems are not limited to one landscape, region or approach. If this collection has a hero, it is Gigolo who confesses his hand-bitten tale of survival, navigating the difficulties of his inevitable frail natures, holding his fist up to what he dreams and lives for. He speaks of the wounds that must be spoken of. He speaks of the correspondence of nature, the marvels of nature. He perseveres adversity, he celebrates adversity, he portrays a speaker's evolution—whole yet broken, dying yet loving—alive at its end.

Thus Spake Gigolo

Bailey, Scott

TO THE DARK ANGELS is a compassionate, transcendent journey through the mysteries, myths, and struggles of our time. It is dark at times, yet richly luminous, woven from the fiery brightness of love and a gentle humor, as Jared Smith employs the depth of a half-century of poetic craft and hard-earned experience in exploring the profound value of human dignity placed against the cosmic dance we share with all life, the earth, and the unknowable itself. This is a deeply resonant song of maturity, which ultimately fills the reader with a sense of peace and joy that will last a lifetime.

To the Dark Angels

Smith, Jared

Marked: Poems of the Holocaust

Herz, Stephen

In his first full-length collection, GRUEL, Bunkong Tuon documents the lives of Cambodian refugees and explores the poetic landscape of a Cambodian America. Written tenderly, with honesty, intelligence, and occasional humor, GRUEL is populated by survivors such as a boy who loses his mother to the Khmer Rouge regime, a grandmother who risks her life to steal a few grains of rice for her grandson, an uncle who is beaten by Thai military police for night fishing outside a refugee camp, an aunt who leaves the East Coast to buy a donut shop in California, a father who re-experiences the traumas of the Cambodian Genocide, a young man who discovers Charles Bukowski in a Long Beach public library, a professor who teaches about the horrors of war to college students at a private college in Upstate New York, to name a few. It's a book about memories, ghosts and haunting, personal loss and historical traumas, losing and finding home, discovery and self-invention; above all, it's a book about love, sacrifice, and hope.

Gruel

Tuon, Bunkong

United States

Driven by the rhythms of everyday language and filled with details only a lifelong outsider registers, Gloeggler sheds light on a world habitually ignored. Covering the 35 or so years the poet has worked in group homes for the developmentally disabled and his relationship with his ex-girlfriend's autistic son, this book goes beneath the labels. No one's special or exceptional, cursed or looking for pity. It's just individuals with different talents and shortcomings trying to make it from one day to the next with maybe a little extra help. It's the frustrations, the tedium, the care and love, the well-earned dignity, the sense of helplessness that sometimes overwhelms and the rare epiphanies. It's all about connections, commitments and bonds and realizing that we are more like each other than we're ever comfortable to admit.

Until the Last Light Leaves

Gloeggler, Tony

John Amen's STRANGE THEATER takes the reader on a multifaceted journey, each poem a puzzle piece in a mysterious drama, a view onto a stage where dialogues and narratives shuffle and rotate, where characters improvise insights that blur the boundary between horror and the absurd. Offering a unique vision of contemporary life, Amen is a Virgil of sorts, navigating the unknown, plumbing the conscious and unconscious alike. Replete with compelling imagery and frequently shocking proclamations, STRANGE THEATER imprints itself on the psyche, Amen's voice continuing to resound long after the final poem is read.

strange theater

Amen, John

In Okla Elliott's first full-length poetry collection, he seamlessly integrates history, philosophy, science, and personal narrative to form a literary geography that is at once erudite and accessible. Ranging from rural Kentucky to post-Soviet Russia to ancient Egypt, these poems invite the reader on a unique aesthetic and intellectual journey.

The Cartographer's Ink

Elliott, Okla

In WHAT BLOOMS IN WINTER, Maria Mazziotti Gillan finds cause to celebrate the clarity and comfort of people and times past. This book is a praise song for all that is human and that survives despite grief and loss. It is one woman's story of an immigrant girl growing up in the 1950s in Paterson, NJ, and seeing over a distance of so many years all that she was given to carry into her life as a woman--wife, mother, daughter, grandmother, widow, and arts and eco-activist. All these experiences and people have formed her into the indomitable woman she is. Laced with humor and optimism, this book leads us to believe that flowers that bloom in winter out of hard ground have their own audacious beauty.

What Blooms in Winter

Gillan, Maria Mazziotti

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