Wesleyan Poetry Series
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Ars Poeticas

Format: Hardback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780819501523
Pub Date: 04 Feb 2025
Description:
Lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populismDuring the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht's question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times.
Library of Light Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780819500915
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2024
Description:
Incantation and elegy shine through one another in this extraordinary poetic memoirWhen poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book's center glows a more localized light: the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language's relationship to lineage, her mother's journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry.

Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton

Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton Cover
Format: 
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819500359
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2024
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819500366
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2024
Description:
The definitive guide to a major African American poet. This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton's unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry.

Septet for the Luminous Ones

Format: Hardback
Pages: 128
ISBN: 9780819500939
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2024
Description:
A Black poet performs a shamanic soul retrieval of the seven-hundred-year-old diasporic Black arts traditionContinuing her search for a neotropical mythos in this brilliant second collection, poet fahima ife articulates various scenes of subduction. Spoken in quiet recognition and grounded in desire, Septet for the Luminous Ones imagines a lush soundscape textured in oblique spiritual fusion of the Taíno and Yoruba. Or, what it sounded like coming together for the first time, and what it sounds like ever after, breathless, diaspora calling.

The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

Bilingual Edition
Format: Paperback
Pages: 994
ISBN: 9780819501233
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2024
Description:
The definitive edition of the complete work of a master Caribbean poet The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire gathers all of Cesaire's celebrated verse into one bilingual edition. The French portion is comprised of newly established first editions of Césaire's poetic ouvre made available in French in 2014 under the title Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J.
The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780819500663
Pub Date: 31 Mar 2024
Description:
The first bilingual edition of this radically original work Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956.
Notice Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 40
ISBN: 9780819501011
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2024
Description:
A chapbook from Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout on climate change.Notice is the product of a life-long interest in natural sciences by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout. The collection draws poems from her previous books calling our attention to how language frames and shapes our relationships to climate and kin.
Be Brave to Things Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
ISBN: 9780819500960
Pub Date: 02 Feb 2024
Description:
Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American masterBe Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Much of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems.
Fierce Elegy Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780819500670
Pub Date: 02 Feb 2024
Description:
Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reminds us that the elegy is lament but also - as it has been for centuries - a work of loveIn Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection, we find, in the poet's words, that "the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world." For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, "a holding open." In Gizzi's voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem.
mahogany Cover mahogany Cover
Format: 
Pages: 128
ISBN: 9780819500762
Pub Date: 01 Feb 2024
Pages: 128
ISBN: 9780819500779
Pub Date: 29 Feb 2024
Description:
mahogany is about the passing of time and unimaginable loss, strength, humor, and lovemahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross' solo career.
In Springtime Cover In Springtime Cover
Format: 
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780819500250
Pub Date: 07 Mar 2023
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780819500304
Pub Date: 07 Mar 2023
Description:
Lost in the woods with a horse, a mouse, and the ghost of a dead bird, you will discover if you're meant to live.In Sarah Blake's epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals.
suddenly we Cover suddenly we Cover
Format: 
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780819500236
Pub Date: 07 Mar 2023
Illustrations: 3 b&w photos
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780819500458
Pub Date: 07 Mar 2023
Illustrations: 3 b&w photos
Description:
Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream - and work - toward a more capacious "we" In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.
The Wild Hunt Divinations Cover The Wild Hunt Divinations Cover
Format: 
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780819500380
Pub Date: 07 Mar 2023
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780819500397
Pub Date: 07 Mar 2023
Description:
Shakespeare's 154 sonnets anagrammed into wildly new poems about queer desire and kink. The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire is a stunning second collection from National Poetry Series winner, Trevor Ketner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare's sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism.
Her Birth and Later Years Cover Her Birth and Later Years Cover
Format: 
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780819500168
Pub Date: 06 Dec 2022
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780819501080
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2024
Description:
A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life.

In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful

In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful

Format: 
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780819500120
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2022
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780819500137
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2022
Description:
In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the "current.
In a Few Minutes Before Later Cover In a Few Minutes Before Later Cover
Format: 
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780819500151
Pub Date: 04 Oct 2022
Illustrations: 18 color photos, 12 b&w line drawings
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780819501226
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2024
Illustrations: 34 color photos, 12 b&w line drawings
Description:
"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." - Harvard ReviewAn iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil.