Lyrical narratives that chronicle a long marriage, rich with wit, dark irony, and poignancy. In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond’s poems, they “brim with what the whole world knows.” Entering History opens on a middle-aged couple, modern-day travelers in an ancient setting. The collection follows their relationship through time and place, combining the personal and the historical in stories of the family—siblings, a daughter, and the very different marriage of the poet’s parents. The marriage poems share the intimacy, erotic playfulness, irritations, worries, and angers that are part of an enduring love and a long marriage. In “Portrait of My Husband Reading Henry James,” the poet paints her husband using syntax and language that evoke James’s. In “Venasque,” the wintry village, perched on the edge of a cliff, serves as a metaphor for the existential crisis facing the couple. “Lines composed at Beaufort, South Carolina, a few miles above Parris Island,” about the poet’s brother, moves back and forth between the Civil War and the preparations of troops for today’s wars. In “Jacob and Esau with Sister,” two brothers, in a transaction as old as oral history, highlight its consequences in the twenty-first century. “Anniversary” is a heartbreaking elegy for a third brother who kills himself. Hammond reaches into the past and present of the American family, closing Entering History where it began, with the couple in bed, now older, harkening back to the bed they shared when they were newlyweds. These powerful, beautifully crafted, lyrical narratives give depth to an examination of life—its joys, sorrows, laughter, and tragedies.

This book offers a thorough examination of the novels of Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990), one of the most talented, compelling and overlooked writers within East German feminist and avant-garde circles. Using a combination of theoretical approaches - including Adorno's aesthetic theories and Bakhtinian analyses of dialogism and the carnivalesque - the author traces Morgner's engagement with postmodernist aesthetic strategies back to her efforts, beginning in the early 1970s, to pose questions about effective political practices. Morgner's work sheds new light on the fraught relationship between GDR intellectuals and the state, a hotly debated topic that marks most recent attempts to understand literary culture in the German Democratic Republic. Situating Morgner's fiction at the intersection of postmodern and feminist theory, this study also offers new evidence for viewing literature from the GDR as significantly more complex and aesthetically interesting than has been previously assumed.

Poetry. In her debut poetry collection, Rachel Kaufman enters the archive's unconscious to reveal the melodies hidden within the language of the past. MANY TO REMEMBER unravels the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews and the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet's own family histories. Kaufman's poems follow "fleshed like fables" and "the past's near ending" to arrive at an "alphabet, gardened, growing," creased and longing to translate the past for the present.

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books of 2020 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

A play and selected poetry by Russian author Vladimir Mayakovsky.

This book argues that twentieth-century American poetry has "contained" and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways. This book shows that even as history evolves into a professional discipline in the late nineteenth century, twentieth-century American poets continue to take history as the subject of their poems.

Negative history is a legal term referring to decisions that have been overruled or questioned in some way by an appellate court. Cathryn Hankla’s Negative History alludes to such ambiguity in the domain of a more personal justice—as the title poem suggests: “Petals of morning/open in lucid order/opposed to the law.//Here is a question without an answer.” Through these enthralling poems, the reader enters spheres of history and emotion in which there are more often ironies to be observed than answers to be found or justice served. And yet what can be discovered through vivid visual detail, through the poet’s eye, can lift us from our reliance on the world’s determinations and into an appreciation of life’s mysteries. With the issues tackled in Negative History—individual and familial identity, cultural and emotional heritage—Hankla skillfully balances keenest loss with the gains some losses paradoxically make available (“Submerging yourself, you learned/to search the darkness”). This remarkable collection plumbs the depths of sexual and transcendent love (“Let me die trying to tell you/one word that might matter”) and summons from those murky realms the feral nature of strong emotions and of our own fears (“I have unearthed/enough emptiness to survive”). In Negative History, Hankla professes the power of love to carry us from “where the press of heat healed the split.”