Milk and Honey by rupi kaur (2015, Andrews McMeel Publishing; 208 pages) "milk and honey is a collection of poetry about love loss trauma abuse healing and femininity it is split into four chapters each chapter serves a different purpose deals with a different pain heals a different heartache milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look" - about the book, by the author (No capital letters) Recommended to all kind of survivors, To those searching for answers about pain and love To those searching for hope. Find this title in our catalog: Milk and Honey Recommended by: Maite
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Somos como las nubes (We Are Like the Clouds) by Jorge Argueta and Alfonso Ruano (2016, Groundwood Books; 36 pages) Somos como las nubes, We Are Like The Clouds is a collection of poems. The poems describe the odyssey that thousands of boys, girls and young people from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico undertake when they flee their countries. The reasons to leave their countries behind are many, but almost all share two: extreme poverty and fear of violence. The author, Jorge Argueta, wrote the poems based on his experiences of working with young people in El Salvador as well as with young refugees in the United States. Their testimonies -- and his own experience fleeing El Salvador during the war in the 1980s -- are the fabric that forms the book. "In 2014, when thousand of children began to arrive from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, I visited a shelter in San Diego, California, where young refugees were anxiously awaiting their fate. Some had the hope that a family member would take charge of them so they could remain in the United States. Others wanted to go back home. Others wanted to do both. Sad choices for young hearts. (…) Like the clouds, like dreams, our children come and go. Nothing and no one can stop them." The book, beautifully illustrated by artist Alfonso Ruano, is an eloquent and moving account of the tragic migrations of thousands upon thousands of children. The poems try to answer basic questions with incredibly complex answers: Why are they going and how does it feel to be one of them? What is this terrible trip like? What do their hopes and dreams for safety, a new life and a loving reception mean to them? Recommended to all ages. Find this title in our catalog: Somos Como las Nubes Recommended by: Maite Village Boy: Poems of Cultural Identity by Robert Davis Hoffmann (2014, Create Space; 43 pages) Robert Davis Hoffmann is a Tlingit poet and carver from the Tlingit Indian village of Kake, southeast Alaska. His sources behind his poetry and his carving are described as a desire to create to be able to connect his past to his present. This desire is stated in one of his incredibly powerful poems, titled Saginaw Bay. The core of Mr. Hoffmann is to create new forms out of the old, becoming a bridge between the past and the present, and he does so in the twelve poems that form this extraordinary book. Village Boy opens with the poem Raven Moves, a piece of writing that honors the Raven: "If I make words, they are Raven's echo." These are truly poems of cultural identity. Reading Village Boy one receives an extraordinary lesson in understanding the powerful identity of the Tlingit people. In the poem Reconstruction, the author shares the following: "I thought my life was in layers like a complex Chilkat blanket's warp and wefts; foreground, background; the Native, the not-Native.” The book ends with another powerful statement in the form of a poem, a piece named Black Buoy that closes with a question carried by every other question about cultural identity. A must read. Astonishing beautiful. Find this title in our catalog: Village Boy Recommended by: Maite One Last Word by Nikki Grimes (2017, Bloomsbury USA Children's; 128 pages) Nikki Grimes' One Last Word transports readers to the Harlem Renaissance through the “Golden Shovel” poetic form to create original poems based on the works of master poets like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, and others. The Golden Shovel poetic form borrows words from another poem and uses them at the end of each line in a new piece. Nikki Grimes explains how very challenging it is to create a new poem that way, especially in terms of coming up with something that makes sense. But it is precisely this form that transforms this book into a treasure in every sense. Here is an example of the fantastic work you will find in this book: using the sentence “Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads” from Jean Toomer's poem "Storm Ending." Grimes created her own poem called "Truth", which goes: “The truth is, every day we rise is like thunder- a clap of surprise. Could be echoes of trouble, or blossoms of blessing. You never know what garish or gorgeously disguised memories-to-be might rain down from above. So, look up! Claim that cloud with the silver lining. Our job , if you ask me, is to follow it. See where it heads.” The gorgeous original poems are also paired with one-of-a kind artwork from great contemporary African American illustrators including Cozbi A. Cabrera, Christopher Myers, Brian Pinkney, and Elizabeth Zunon. The book also includes a brief historical note on the period and brief biographies of each poet that facilitates an astonishing radical, emotional and thought-provoking dialogue between past and present. The voices you will hear in One Last Word belong to proud parents, and determined children and elders sharing themes of racial bias, beauty, and pride. This is a must read for poetry lovers of all ages, and for those searching for inspirational books based on history. Find this title in our catalog: One Last Word Recommended by: Maite Poems From the Women's Movement by Honor Moore (2009, Library of America; 200 pages) Poet and writer Honor Moore was a witness to the beginning of the modern women’s movement, a movement born in the 1970s. This book is a collection edited by her and, as she points out in her fantastic introduction, gives eloquent voice to lives that had been unspoken. In fact, poetry was vital to the movement, and as a friend of Moore’s claims in the introduction: “The women’s movement was poetry.” This incredible collection is part of the American Poets Project from the Library of America and spans works from 1965 to 1982. These two decades altered the face of American poetry forever, and savoring this book, you can dive in on the work of 58 woman poets and nearly a hundred poems. The selection of this poems offers a portrait of how the inner lives of women came into language during that crucial decade and a half. The reader can find this manifesto in poems that range from furious to contemplative, from outright funny to analytical, grief-stricken to visionary. The reader will also find a new language, at least one new to her or him - a language that places the core and power on speaking what was hidden, to show how women start identifying with one another and becoming a “we.” The poet opening the book of poems is Sylvia Plath, and the selected poem is The Applicant, a work that starts with a radical question: “First, are you our sort of a person?” From there the book navigates among incredible literature written by woman poets that answer many questions. In “Polemic #1,” a poem by Honor Moore we learn: “This is the poem to say “Write poems, women” because I want to read them, because for too long, we have had mostly men’s lives or men’s imaginations wandering through our lives, because even the women’s lives we have details of come through a male approval desire filter which diffuses imagination, that most free part of ourselves.” And that poem tells you what this fantastic collection is all about. Also, though it's too long to include here, be sure to check out “I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman” by Susan Griffin, one of the poems that touched me the most. Honor Moore, the editor of this wonderful book of women’s poetry, has authored three collections of her own poetry, Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir, and she has also written plays and a celebrated memoir, The Bishop's Daughter, which was a National Book Award finalist. If you like poetry, and you want to listen women’s voices, this is a book that will delight you. Find this title in our catalog: Poems From the Women's Movement Recommended by: Maite Loose Woman: Poems by Sandra Cisneros (1995, Vintage; 115 pages) Sandra Cisneros is well known as one of the voices emerged from the barrio, the lyrically inventive author of the novel The House on Mango Street. Always a fierce and unique feminist writer, with an audacious point of view of life in America, in this book she decides to unravel her most inner thoughts about the following topics: sex, love, womanhood and her dual culture. Reading her poems carries you to a Norteño music scene where you'll be surrounded by a very particular Mexican-American psyche. Loose Woman is a collection of love poems that push and face down desires, terrors, relationships. They have been described by Joy Harjo as "firecrackers and tequila, with a little candlelight and lace linen." If you are not afraid to be intoxicated by the eroticism of poetry, you will enjoy this book from beginning to the end. Highly recommended. You Called Me Corazón That was enough for me to forgive you. To spirit a tiger from its cell. Called me corazón in that instant before I let go the phone back to its cradle. Your voice small. Heat of your eyes, how I would've placed my mouth on each. Said corazón and the word blazed like a branch of jacaranda. Find this title in our catalog: Loose Woman Recommended by: Maite Peregrine by Caroline Goodwin (Finishing Line Press, 2015) iv. when I was a girl in alaska we walked to the ravine behind the quik stop and hurled glass bottles against the rock wall and laughed out loud for a long time when they shattered This is a book of poems by Alaskan poet Caroline Goodwin, currently serving as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA. Born and raised in Alaska, she moved to California in 1999 to attend Standford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her first book, Trapline, was published in May 2013 by JackLeg Press in Chicago. She teaches in the MFA and BA writing programs at California College of the Arts and in Standford Writer's Studio. About the book, poet Louise Mathias writes: "Caroline Goodwin's Peregrine is a delicate, barbed, incandescent meditation on grief and friendship and violence, infused with the difficult beauty of the natural world, elegantly paced, yet wild around the edges. Both a charm against, and a love song to the fleeting, Goodwin masterfully weaves together disparate sources-- Metallica and magic, ravines and wildflowers, this work is lovely and terrifying, singular and true." Peregrine is a collection of six poems. "Coleoptera," poem number five, was a very powerful reading. The poem sounds like the beats of a drum in the middle of the forest, like running out of breath until collapsing into a vision in the sun. The world that Goodwin delivers in Peregrine is a fragile, fractured one, where love and dead are twined together. Readers will enjoy the beauty that rests in the poems and will find an invitation to get immersed in a world where the voices of the dead can be heard, and stay. Find this title in our catalog: Peregrine Recommended by: Maite The Roads of the Roma: a PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers edited by Ian Hancock, Siobhan Dowd & Rajko Duric (1998, University of Hertfordshire Press; 160 pages) One of the services we offer at the Sitka Public Library is the Interlibrary Loan , a service whereby a user of one library can borrow books or receive photocopies of documents that are owned by another library. I ordered this book through Interlibrary Loan because I am fascinated with the Romani people and language. In this volume, the writings of 30 authors have been brought together in a PEN anthology of the literature of the Roma. Over half was originally written in Romani, with versions by their authors in different European languages, including Polish, Italian, French and German. The ones in the book are English translations, but their spirit has been maintained by Burton Bollag, Siobhan Dowd, Tom Fugalli, Ian MacAndless, Minna Proctor, Anika Weiss and others. What is fantastic about this volume is that while hundreds of poems, plays, operas and novels have been written with Roma characters or themes in mind, virtually none of them have been written by Roma themselves. This has resulted in the emergence, over the years, of a literary, fictitious “Gypsy” image, and an equally unreal history. The book’s introduction by Ian Hancock is a mesmerizing piece that explains this dilemma: “While we suffer physically on the streets of Europe, we are targeted in a different but just as significant way in literature. Both situations are equally oppressive, and both are provoking differing responses from the Romani people.“ And adds: “This book brings to the English-speaking world for the very first time writings not just about Roma but by Roma, and will, one foresees, play an important role in laying to rest the stereotypes which stand between the Romani peoples and their acceptance as real and feeling members of the human community.” This book is a jewel for readers who love poetry and history, and who are also aware of the dangers of not learning from the past. “We were silent for thousands of years But our hearts are full Of unuttered sentences, Like a sea receiving Blue river waters All its life long.” -- From The People With The Face of the Sun By Dezider Banga (Translated from Italian by Minna Proctor) Order this title through Interlibrary Loan: The Roads of the Roma Recommended by: Maite Acorn by Yoko Ono (2013, Algonquin Books; 216 pages) I had the fortune to receive an unexpected present from a faraway friend: a book by legendary avant-garde icon Yoko Ono, a book with a great title, Acorn, with 100 incantations, a hundred haiku-like instructions, poems with 100 black and white line drawings by the artist. The book starts with a letter by Ono that says: Dear Friends, My book of conceptual instructions GRAPEFRUIT was first published in 1964. In the summer of 1996 I picked up from where I left off, and wrote 100 ACORNS for a website event. I’m now repeating 100 ACORNS for you to enjoy and participate in, one Acorn per day through November, December, January and February, on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest & Facebook. After each day of sharing the instructions, please feel free to like, share, comment, message, question, discuss, and/or report what your mind tells you. I’m just planting the seeds. Have fun. love, Yoko There is nothing not to like in this book. You can find an instruction like Grapefruit that says: "Get a telephone that only echoes back your voice. Call every day and talk about many things." Or another one, Connection Piece II: "Imagine your friends without the baggage / you know them by / See how you feel about them then." Or my favorite, Watch Piece I: "Watch a hundred-year-old tree breathe./Thank the tree in your mind for showing us/how to grow and stay." And then, there is the art. Just fantastic. Get the book and be inspired. There is nothing not to like in this book. You can find an instruction like Grapefuit that says: “Get a telephone that only echoes back your voice. Call every day and talk about many things.” Or another one, like Connection Piece II: “Imagine your friends without the baggage / you know them by / See how you feel about them then”. Or my favorite, the Watch Piece I that says: "Watch a hundred-year-old tree breathe./Thank the tree in your mind for showing us/how to grow and stay." And then, there is the art. Just fantastic. Get the book and be inspired. Read The New Yorker's review about Acorns, here: Order this title through Interlibrary Loan: Acorn Recommended by: Maite Poems, New and Collected by Wislawa Szymborska (2000, Mariner Books; 296 pages) This definitive collection of Wislawa Szymborska’s wonderful poetry in English is a joy and includes the 100 poems in View with a Grain of Sand as well as 64 more translated poems and the full text of her 1996 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The book has been beautifully translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work. Among the poems in this collection is this one: The Three Oddest Words When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being can hold. If you want to read more about the poet called “The Mozart of poetry” by the Nobel commission, described by Robert Hass as "unquestionably one of the great living European poets" and by Charles Simic as "one of the finest poets living today," you can go to The Poetry Foundation website Click here to listen to Amanda Palmer reading Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Life While-You-Wait” Find this title in our catalog: Poems, New and Collected Recommended by: Maite |