poems "direct . . . adventuresome" (Gwendolyn Brooks)

Big Towns, Big Talk: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Patricia

Poetry

Steerforth

poetry, "this woman is powerful" --VLS

Close to Death: Poems

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, Under the Red Flag features twelve stories which take place during China's Cultural Revolution--stories which display the earnestness and grandeur of human folly and, in a larger sense, form a moral history of a time and a place.

Under the Red Flag

JIN, Ha

United States

Encompassing America's African-American landscape and rich oral histories of the South, this poetry collection centers on the concept of "home" and explores conflicts between black and white, North and South, ancestral and modern.

Most Way Home: Poems

Young, Kevin

History & Criticism

ART-WORLD PHENOMENON Jean-Michel Basquiat was prolific in his short lifetime, creating an exhilarating new art inspired by music, language, and black American cultural icons. To Repel Ghosts synchronizes the harmony and discord of Basquiat’s canvases, adapting them as a bass line to improvise and play upon. Young renders ambitious, celebratory poetry of the everyday and the exalted — a double-album in verse, a jazz symphony, a hip-hop opera — taking Basquiat’s funkified history and making it sing. Structured on two “discs,” To Repel Ghosts shows five “sides” of the artist, exploring the rise and demise of a painter who helped break through the art world’s color line, first as SAMO© and then as a downtown art-scene wunderkind. Here are riffs on — and extended rhapsodies for — a pantheon of black genius: ballplayers, comic book and folk heroes, boxers, and especially musicians: Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson, and Grace Jones. This kaleidoscope of lives emerges in To Repel Ghosts to provide a unique foil to Basquiat’s own bout with fame. As an urban epic in the tradition of Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred and Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, To Repel Ghosts poignantly charts Basquiat’s era, its popular, social, and racial energies and excesses. An album of our times, it is a powerful statement on a now-gone genius, and our recently completed century.

To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor

William Corbett's memoir of Philip Guston focuses on their friendship over the last eight years of Guston's life and on the paintings and drawings Guston made during those years. Guston's figurative work, crude and bold images beautifully painted, turned the art world on its ear when they were first shown in 1970. Corbett explores themes of change, growth, doubt, freedom and risk as Guston's work and life exemplified them. This is not a book of art criticism; art jargon is avoided. It is a book that looks hard at Guston's late paintings and celebrates their humor, violence, mystery, and sustaining force.

Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir

Corbett, William

Arts & Photography

They knew us before we began to walk upright. Shamans called them guardians, mythmakers called them tricksters, pagans called them gods, churchmen called them demons, folklorists called them shape-shifters. They’ve obligingly taken any role we’ve assigned them, and, while needing nothing from us, have accepted whatever we thought was their due – love, hate, fear, worship, condemnation, neglect, oblivion. Even in modern times, when their existence is doubted or denied, they continue to extend invitations to those who would travel a different road, a road not found on any of our cultural maps. But now, perceiving us as a threat to life itself, they issue their invitations with a dark purpose of their own. In this dazzling metaphysical thriller, four who put themselves in the hands of these all-but-forgotten Others venture across a sinister American landscape hidden from normal view, finding their way to interlocking destinies of death, terror, transcendental rapture, and shattering enlightenment.

The Holy

Quinn, Daniel

Daniel Quinn, well known for Ishmael – a life-changing book for readers the world over – once again turns the tables and creates an otherworld that is very like our own, yet fascinating beyond words. Imagine that Nazi Germany was the first to develop an atomic bomb and the Allies surrendered. America was never bombed, occupied, or even invaded, but was nonetheless forced to recognize Nazi world dominance. The Nazis continued to press their campaign to rid the planet of “mongrel races” until eventually the world – from Capetown to Tokyo – was populated by only white faces. Two thousand years in the future people don’t remember, or much care, about this distant past. The reality is that to be human is to be Caucasian, and what came before was literally ancient history having nothing to do with those then living. Now imagine that reincarnation is real, that souls migrate over time from one living creature to another, and that a soul that once animated an American black woman living at the time of World War II now animates an Aryan in Quinn’s new world, and that due to a traumatic accident memories of this earlier incarnation assert themselves. Compared by readers and critics alike to 1984 and Brave New World, After Dachau is a new dystopian classic with much to say about our own time, and the dynamics of human history.

After Dachau

Living Things contains all the poems in Porter’s National Book Award Finalist collection, An Altogether Different Language, plus forty-four new works. David Shapiro writes in his foreword, “Anne Porter’s diction is as modest as that of William Carlos Williams or of a poet she nurtured as a houseguest for many years, James Schuyler. . . . She has the quality of paying attention to ultimate reality that Fairfield Porter, who painted her so often alone and with their five children, told me should be the conclusion of every sermon. . . . She is an American religious poet of stature who reminds us that the idea of the holy is still possible for us.” Living Things is a book for any lover of fine poetry, but will be particularly inspiring and meaningful to Christians whose faith is strong, and would make a beautiful gift.

Living Things: Collected Poems

Porter, Anne

Set in Kansas City, Missouri, during the Jazz Age of the 1920s and ’30s, Such Sweet Thunder is a majestic evocation of childhood and parental love told through the eyes of a remarkable boy, Amerigo Jones. This vivid portrait of an era marred by racial segregation and relentless, daily injustices is nonetheless rendered with love and longing for a time and place that was enriched by a vibrant, burgeoning, and widely influential African American culture and a fierce feeling for family and community.

Such Sweet Thunder: A Novel

Carter, Vincent O.

Dramas & Plays

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Books by Steerforth