Melissa Kwasny – författare
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6 produkter
6 produkter
478 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven series—one of linked prose poems called “Another Letter to the Soul” and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history.Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in “Another Letter to the Soul” point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.
245 kr
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Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772-1801) a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions--indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and more--inform daily life. Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Reading Novalis in Montana stretches boundaries with a section of "reading poems"--poems in dialogue with romantic and modernist poets, including Ezra Pound, H.D., Novalis, Dickinson, as well as a sequence that is a twenty-first century take on "The Wasteland," included with stunning lyric poems. Using luxuriant syntax to string together conditional clauses, these poems throw the reader backward and forward within a line and a poem. Alternatively, repetition offers a commentary on meaning, chopping perception into fragments. Combined with a charming self-qualification that deliberately interrupts momentum, this work smartly ties the reader back down to earth.Throughout details of lived experience emerge--hiking through the Pacific Northwest, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship --and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life.
245 kr
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In this groundbreaking fourth collection comprised of exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers. The questions that have informed much of Kwasny's previous work--how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?--find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. "Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined it--as resolution of the real and the dream," Kwasny writes in the title poem. Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?
245 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
"If you would learn the earth as it really is," N. Scott Momaday writes, "learn it through its sacred places." With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home. The poems in this collection emerge from these visits and capture the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that, "we make a sign and we receive." Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating "a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here."
204 kr
Skickas inom 11-20 vardagar
In Putting on the Dog, Melissa Kwasny explores the age-old relationship between humans and the animals that have provided us with our clothing: leather, wool, silk, feathers, pearls, and fur. From silkworms grown on plantations in Japan and mink farms off Denmark’s western coast to pearl beds in the Sea of Cortés, Kwasny offers firsthand accounts of traditions and manufacturing methods—aboriginal to modern—and descriptions of the marvel and miracle of the clothing itself. What emerges is a fresh look at the cultural history of fashion.Kwasny travels the globe to visit both large-scale industrial manufacturers and community-based, often subsistence production by people who have spent their lives working with animals—farmers, ranchers, tanners, weavers, shepherds, and artisans. She examines historical rates of consumption and efforts to move toward sustainability, all while considering animal welfare, worker safety, environmental health, product accountability, and respect for indigenous knowledge and practice.At its heart, Putting on the Dog demonstrates how what we choose to wear represents one of our most profound engagements with the natural world.
168 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying.At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny’s seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. “I have come here for their peace and instructions,” she writes, listening to the willows, the “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.”What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature’s many lively colors—the “burnt orange” of foxes, “cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto,” white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world’s harsher elements—a dark bog’s purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life’s constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. “Why not,” she asks, “believe it matters?Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.