Within my life's present unified theory of being, splendor divests itself of its own integrity, splitting to belong to everything that notices it, each part as effective as the whole splendid thing. It belongs to whatever wants it and is inexhaustible even as someone lays dying, even as someone else cries thinking there is none, their tears becoming prisms. . . With these words, the acclaimed poet Thylias Moss proclaims a hymn to the power of light over darkness, both in her own life, and in the wider world. In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honors--including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Writing Award--delivers a brilliant, passionate, and utterly moving memoir. It is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties. Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in sky-blue dress. Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from infliction pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendril further into her life. Yet ultimately, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness. It is about refusing to accept tyranny. It is about feasting on splendor. How can there not be pain in a world spinning madly, in the lovely calculable chaos. . .? asks Thylias. But, she says, I am saying that joy is too necessary to abandon.

An intimate self-portrait details the author's childhood when, at the age of five, her babysitter in a sky-blue dress delighted in torturing her and hurting her and explains how this incident affected her life, until she decided to defy the constraints of

Malin Pereira's collection of eight interviews with leading contemporary African American poets offers an in-depth look at the cultural and aesthetic perspectives of the post-Black Arts Movement generation. This volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as conversations with Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells previously in print. Largely published since 1980, each of these poets has at least four books. Their influence on new generations of poets has been wide-reaching. The work of this group, says Pereira, is a departure from the previous generation's proscriptive manifestos in favor of more inclusive voices, perspectives, and techniques. Although these poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific black aesthetic, their work just as effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics. Unlike Amiri Baraka's claim in "Home" that he becomes blacker and blacker, positioning race as a defining essence, these poets imagine a plurality of ideas about the relationship between blackness and black poetry. They question the idea of an established literary canon defining black literature. For these poets, Pereira says, the idea of "home" is found both in black poetry circles and in the wider transnational community of literature. A Sarah Mills Hodge Foundation Publication.

Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms. This new idea of adolescence became the driving force behind some of the modern era's most original poetry. Stephen Burt demonstrates how adolescence supplied the inspiration, and at times the formal principles, on which many twentieth-century poets founded their works. William Carlos Williams and his contemporaries fashioned their American verse in response to the idealization of new kinds of youth in the 1910s and 1920s. W. H. Auden's early work, Philip Larkin's verse, Thom Gunn's transatlantic poetry, and Basil Bunting's late-modernist masterpiece, Briggflatts, all track the development of adolescence in Britain as it moved from the private space of elite schools to the urban public space of sixties subcultures. The diversity of American poetry from the Second World War to the end of the sixties illuminates poets' reactions to the idea that teenagers, juvenile delinquents, hippies, and student radicals might, for better or worse, transform the nation. George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Lowell in particular built and rebuilt their sixties styles in reaction to changing concepts of youth. Contemporary poets continue to fashion new ideas of youth. Laura Kasischke and Jorie Graham focus on the discoveries of a specifically female adolescence. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon and the Australian poet John Tranter use teenage perspectives to represent a postmodernist uncertainty. Other poets have rejected traditional and modern ideas of adolescence, preferring instead to view this age as a reflection of the uncertainties and restricted tastes of the way we live now. The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity.

It's 1942: Tomi Itano, 12, is a second-generation Japanese American who lives in California with her family on their strawberry farm. Although her parents came from Japan and her grandparents still live there, Tomi considers herself an American. She doesn't speak Japanese and has never been to Japan. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, things change. No Japs Allowed signs hang in store windows and Tomi's family is ostracized. Things get much worse. Suspected as a spy, Tomi's father is taken away. The rest of the Itano family is sent to an internment camp in Colorado. Many other Japanese American families face a similar fate. Tomi becomes bitter, wondering how her country could treat her and her family like the enemy. What does she need to do to prove she is an honorable American? Sandra Dallas shines a light on a dark period of American history in this story of a young Japanese American girl caught up in the prejudices and World War II.

100 poems selected by Robert Pinsky that represent each volume in The best American poetry series.

This carefully edited Edgar Allan Poe collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: The Murders in the Rue Morgue The Mystery of Marie Rogêt The Purloined Letter The Gold-Bug The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade The Man of the Crowd The Tell-Tale Heart The Fall of the House of Usher The Cask of Amontillado The Black Cat The Masque of the Red Death The Pit and the Pendulum Ligeia The Oval Portrait A Tale of the Ragged Mountains Eleonora A Dream The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket The Journal of Julius Rodman Metzengerstein The Assignation Berenice Morella William Wilson The Imp of the Perverse Hop-Frog The Light-House Ms. Found in a Bottle A Descent into the Maelstrom The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar The Balloon-Hoax Mesmeric Revelation Some Words with a Mummy Mystification The Premature Burial The Oblong Box The Spectacles The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether The Sphinx The Island of the Fay The Landscape Garden Morning on the Wissahiccon The Domain of Arnheim Landor's Cottage The Duc de l'Omelette A Tale of Jerusalem Loss of Breath Bon-Bon Lionizing King Pest Four Beasts in One – The Homo-Cameleopard How to Write a Blackwood Article A Predicament The Devil in the Belfry The Man That Was Used Up The Business Man Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling Never Bet the Devil Your Head Three Sundays in a Week Diddling The Angel of the Odd The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. Mellonta Tauta Von Kempelen and His Discovery X-ing a Paragrab The Power of Words The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion The Colloquy of Monos and Una Shadow Silence… The Complete Poetical Works Biography: The Dreamer – Life and Work of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic, best known for his poetry and short stories.