343 results for "Literature"

Kinship

Maxim Shrayer
Kinship, the new collection of poetry by the bilingual author, Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer, weaves together some of the principal themes in modern Jewish history: ancestry in Eastern Europe, the Shoah, antisemitism, exile, displacement and immigration, Zionism and Israel. Shrayer's richly orchestrated and formally elegant verse captures with poignancy and passion what it feels like to be a Jewish poet with Soviet roots, living in America during Russia's brutal war in Ukraine. Kinship is, ultimately, a pained and inspiring meditation on writing between languages and cultures.
Finishing Line Press 2024-04-05 50 pages

I saw it: Ilya Selvinsky and the legacy of bearing witness to the Shoah

Shrayer, Maxim
A native of Crimea, the Soviet Jewish poet Ilya Selvinskii (1899-1968), in 1942-43, bore witness to Nazi atrocities in and near the city of Kerch (in eastern Crimea) and in the south of Russia. This included the massacre at the "Bagerovo ditch", an anti-tank ditch west of the city, where the Nazis murdered ca. 7,000 Jews of Kerch in November 1941. What he saw impressed Selvinskii for the rest of his life. He was the first Soviet poet to publish extensively on the Holocaust, most notably his two poems "I Saw It" (1942) and "Kerch" (1945). In general, he somewhat downplayed the fact that the victims were Jews, as did Ehrenburg and other contemporary poets who wrote on the Nazi mass murders. Selvinskii's shock of viewing the Bagerovo ditch was also reflected in his postwar poems, in particular in "Kandava", the first version of which was published in 1946. Selvinskii influenced many other poets who wrote on the Nazi genocide, among them Iosif Utkin and Lev Ozerov. After the war Selvinskii was accused of "cosmopolitanism" and holding an "anti-party line"; he was partially blacklisted. Pp. 263-277 contain the Russian originals and English translations of "I Saw It" and "Kerch".
Academic Studies Press 2013 326 pages

Saint Ghetto of the Loans: grimoire

Pomerand, Gabriel
Poetry. Art. Translated from the French by Michael Kasper and Bhamati Viswanathan. SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS reissues a legendary but little seen masterpiece of French book art from 1950, by the Lettrist Gabriel Pomerand. The prose poem text appears in segments on left-hand pages (bilingually, in this edition), and its French words and syllables are represented visually by dazzling pictographs--rebuses--on pages facing. "Every 20th century art movement has its mythic works, fetishized objects of cult workshop. Gabriel Pomerand's Saint Ghetto des Prets sits alongside Isidore Isou's Les Journaux des Dieux as one of the few sustained works of metagraphics produced by the Lettrists. A remarkable novel-in-pictographs-and-verse"--Johanna Drucker.
Ugly Duckling Presse 2006-01-01 120 pages

Cultural Slag

Felicia Lamport
"Cultural Slag is a collection of light verse, prose pieces and black-humor drawings by the creators of Scrap Irony, a collaboration hailed by the New York Times as an "uncommonplace book of bright verse and lively prose." Laughing over the absurdities of our times, Miss Lamport takes us from New York statues to foreign ruins, from Broadway abysses to transportation traps, from musical soup to political nuts. Flagrant indulgence in exotic words (did you know that larks flew not in common flocks but in exhaltations?) is balanced by solid satire of our art forms, our critics and any cultural clinkers that have rolled her way. Mr. Gorey's style has been variously described as macabre, Edwardian, ghoulish, appropriately antic, superb, charming. To embellish this volume he has again created the perfectly right drawings that are treasures in themselves. Felicia Lamport is the author of Mink on Weekdays as well as Scrap Irony. Her work has been published in Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Show, Life, The New Yorker and other magazines. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Edward Gorey is well known for his slender and elegant series of illustrated fables, of which The Hapless Child, The Vinegar Works, The Remembered Visit are only a few."
Wildside Press, LLC 2024-10-11 146 pages

Algorithmic Shapeshifting Poems

Bogi Takács
Algorithmic Shapeshifting is the first poetry collection of Bogi Takács, winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. The collection includes poems from the past decade and previously unpublished work. The scope of pieces extends from the present and past of Jewish life in Hungary and the United States to the far-future, outer-space reaches of the speculative—always with a sense of curiosity and wonder. “Bogi Takács is a poet of visceral exuberance and Talmudic invention. Moving as dazzlingly between genres as languages, e makes the reader eir kaleidoscope where ancient traditions, unenvisioned technologies, and children's toys tumble with ordinary, transcendent precision, imagining new ways of being and observing others signally extant. These poems draw blood and spark synapses, make dauntingly familiar and tenderly strange. You should let them change you.” Sonya Taaffe, author of Forget the Sleepless Shores “Bogi Takács's poetry is gleefully and unabashedly itself, pulling the reader through surreal worlds of visceral magic, body modification, political wit, and interpersonal devotion. Whether looking back into Talmudic history, forward into a science fictional psychic war, or sinking into the earth and growing flowers from its own eye sockets, "Algorithmic Shapeshifting" presents a voice that is consistently fresh, startling, and sincere.” Ada Hoffmann, author of The Outside
Aqueduct Press 2019 114 pages

In case of fire in a foreign land: new and collected poems from two languages / Ariel Dorfman ; with translations by Edith Grossman with the author

Dorfman, Ariel
In the world of Chilean poet Ariel Dorfman, men and women can be forced to choose between leaving their country or dying for it. The living risk losing everything, but what they hold onto—love, faith, hope, truth—might change the world. It is this subversive possibility that speaks through these poems. A succession of voices—exiles, activists, separated lovers, the families of those victimized by political violence—gives an account of ruptured safety. They bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal and social damage in the aftermath of terror. The first bilingual edition of Dorfman’s work, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land includes ten new poems and a new preface, and brings back into print the classic poems of the celebrated Last Waltz in Santiago. Always an eloquent voice against the ravages of inhumanity, Dorfman’s poems, like his acclaimed novels, continue to be a searing testimony of hope in the midst of despair.
Duke University Press 2002-09-03 159 pages

Freedom from Violence and Lies Essays on Russian Poetry and Music by Simon Karlinsky

Robert P. Hughes,Richard Taruskin,Thomas A. Koster
Freedom from Violence and Lies is a collection of forty-one essays by Simon Karlinsky (1924-2009), a prolific and controversial scholar of modern Russian literature, sexual politics, and music who taught in the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1964 to 1991. Among Karlinsky's full-length works are major studies of Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gogol, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin; editions of Anton Chekhov's letters; writings by Russian émigrés; and correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Karlinsky also wrote frequently for professional journals and mainstream publications like the New York Times Book Review and the Nation. The present volume is the first collection of such shorter writings, spanning more than three decades. It includes twenty-seven essays on literary topics and fourteen on music, seven of which have been newly translated from the Russian originals.
Academic Studies Press 2018-05-30 502 pages

Treyf Pesach

Obenzinger, Hilton
Poetry. Jewish Studies. Blasphemy is holy--and exciting, outrageous literature in TREYF PESACH (Unkosher Passover). Novelist Paul Auster declares that this book "strikes with all the force of an exploding bomb--because it speaks the truth." This collection of poems presents radical departures from traditional rituals, formats and conventions: alternative Passover Seders, Yom Kippur liturgy, Thanksgiving prayers, psalms and other poems in the form of proclamations, resolutions, jazz improvisations, incantations, rants, orations, comic monologues, oil spills, life spills, songs, visions, undocumented documents, borders, suns, farewells, minutes of meetings, talk-stories, and all accompanied by provocative drawings of Treyf Passover Seder plates by artist Charles Steckler. In this book the symbolic plate is arrayed with treyf (un-kosher food) and the story of the Exodus with untypical meanings, whiskey instead of wine, recounting the continual slavery of wars and military occupations. The poems in TREYF PESACH have taken place over the course of years and various occasions, from vicious aggressions, to absurd walls, to smallpox blankets, to oil spouting across the Gulf, and more, all framed by the first months of the Trump regime. Some have been read out loud at Seders, Yom Kippur services, Thanksgiving Day benedictions, Sunday fellowships, and other ceremonies. But those are the exceptions. For the most part TREYF PESACH has been placed under arrest and shoved across the borders of respectability. Hilton Obenzinger writes poetry, fiction, history, and criticism, and is the recipient of the American Book Award. According to poet Diane di Prima, "he is the American Jonathan Swift."
Ithuriel's Spear 2017 98 pages

The Raven and the Sun

Boria Sax
Boria Sax, steeped in animal studies in myth and literature, is not only a teacher and scholar, but also one of our finest lyric poets. This collection of poems and tales, centered around the mysterious world of crows and ravens that exists around us almost unnoticed, demonstrates the universality of the narratives in which animal wisdom plays, as he retells Eastern European and Native American crow/raven tales. The book is also interspersed with Sax's sensitive lyrics on other topics. Includes two "crow wheel" illustrations by Tom Fitzpatrick.
Poet's Press 2010-07 84 pages

Notes from the Hero's Journey Poetic Fragments of an Internal Odyssey

Al Davis
This book of poems has intent, design, and purpose. They are written to touch something hidden deep within you, something latent, undiscovered, and mysterious. I hope that you may wish to discover more about that of which I speak.For there are answers to your questions if you but seek. That hidden something is true of everyone, almost without exception, but most of us have fallen asleep to the yearning and the searching that it can give rise to. If you are not in the category of the walking dead--and you are truly searching-- perhaps this book will be for you. If you loved fairy tales as a child, would rather travel to ancient sites than take cruises or hang out on a beach, appreciate the mythology from other cultures, enjoy classical art, perhaps read philosophy and great literature, are enthralled by the wonder of the natural world--and the list goes on and on--this book may be of interest to you. Even if your yearning takes other forms, you may love what I've written as well. But the book is not an answer to your yearnings. It can, though, be a window into a world where those same yearnings are addressed, satisfied, and shown a further and meaningful path to take. I wrote it in the language of today (including a small amount of crude language), with some references to literary or artistic works of the past. Despite the simplicity of many of the poems, there is great depth of meaning, if you are open to it. My suggestion would be to read only a few poems at a time, trying to ponder what I am talking about, letting them sink in emotionally, rather than dissecting them intellectually. And certainly don't continue to read until your eyes glaze over, as that will not profit you in the least. Enjoy!
Al Davis Poetry 2025-11-21 185 pages

Rare Flower - Life, Love and Peace Poems

Ada Aharoni
"The love and peace poems by international poet Ada Aharoni, are among the best in modern literature." (Saul Bellow, Nobel Laureate in Literature) "Rare Flower" by Ada Aharoni is a collection of moving, powerful and well-crafted poems, which has been compared to Jubran Khalil's "The Prophet." In brilliant poem after poem, Ada unfolds before our eyes new depths of human relations, the complexities and intricacies of love, and the joys and pains of life. Several of her poems have been put to music in a delightful manner. Influenced by the British Peace Poet, Wilfred Owen, whom she greatly admires, she powerfully denounces the whole concept and practice of War. As a woman and a mother, she condemns the killing of soldier-sons by involving them in war situations, and she clearly demonstrates that in our nuclear age, the continuation of the practice of war can dangerously lead to the end of humanity. Her beautiful, hopeful poems shed light and a deep comprehension of the possibilities of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the creation of "A Global Village Beyond War."
Dignity Press 2012-10 326 pages