A Study Guide for Nazim Hikmet's "Letter to My Wife," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Nazim Hikmet's "Letter to My Wife," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), the greatest modern Turkish poet was a political prisoner in Turkey for eighteen years and spent the last thirteen years of his life in exile. Banned in his own country for thirty years, his poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages, and today he is recognized world-wide as one of the twentieth century's great international poets. This revised and enlarged selection of his finest work enables us at last to hear, in a single volume, the full range of his distinctive voice in the highly acclaimed versions that have made him an influential presence in contemporary poetry.

Garrett Hongo's long-awaited third collection of poems is a beautiful, elegiac gathering of his Japanese-American ancestors in their Hawaiian landscape and a testament to the power of poetry, as it brings their marginalized yet heroic narratives into the realm of art. In Coral Road Hongo explores the history of the impermanent homeland his ancestors found on the island of O'ahu after their immigration from southern Japan, and meditates on the dramatic tales of the islands. In sumptuous narrative poems he takes up strands of family stories and what he calls "a long legacy of silence" about their experience as contract laborers along the North Shore of the island. In the opening sequence, he brings to life the story of his great-grandparents fleeing from one plantation to another, finding their way by moonlight along coral roads and railroad tracks. As his grandmother, a girl of ten with an infant on her back, traverses "twelve-score stands of cane / chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind," Hongo asks, "Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?" In fact, it is Hongo who guides himself--and us--as, in these devoted acts of recollection, he seeks to dispel the dislocation at the center of his legacy. The love of art--making beauty in however provisional a culture--has clearly been a guiding principle in Hongo's poetry. In this content-rich verse, Hongo hearkens to and delivers "the luminous and the anecdotal," bringing forth a complete aesthetic experience from the shards that make up a life.

"A dangerous thunder, living is."

Dazzlingly queer, inclusive, celestial, with indigenous ancestral heart, Greyhound Americans, by award winning poet Moncho Alvarado, confronts a family history of borderland politics by discovering a legacy of violence, grief, trauma, and survival through poems that have an unmistakable spirit, tenderness, intimacy, and humility. These poems' persistent resilience creates a constellation of songs, food, flowers, family, community, and trans joy, that, by the end, wants you to feel loved, nourished, and wants you to remember to say, "I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive."