Walt Mcdonald First-book Series in Poetry – Serie

'This is probably the best book to come out this year. Not only is this the most beautifully bound book of poetry I think I've ever seen, but Thom Satterlee is obviously a master at his craft' - Suite101.com. 'Thom Satterlee has fashioned a new genre, a contemporary hagiography in verse, primarily narrative but seasoned with lyric occasion. ""Burning Wyclif"" offers a deeply personal, word-savoring vision of a word-afflicted man, with the paradox and mystery one would expect of the life of a heretic and saint' - Scott Cairns, author of ""Compass of Affection: New & Selected Poems"". 'For its lyrical but authoritative evocations of a passionate scholars works and days, and for its formful penetrations into the Word itself the sound and sense/we made in that language/before languages. Thom Satterlees ""Burning Wyclif"" is a remarkable book, first or otherwise, inspired and earned' - William Heyen. 'These poems shine with the desire of a medieval priest. How strange. Yet the book illuminates his conundrums so fiercely that they become ours. Thom Satterlee speaks through the character of Wyclif with such concentrated intelligence, passion, and humor that while I was reading, the historical man seemed to be standing in the room beside me' - Jeanne Murray Walker. 'Most of us recognize the name John Wyclif and associate it with the translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English. Admirers will add that Wyclif was one of the most prominent philosophers and theologians of the second half of the fourteenth century. Others will call him heretic for his condemnation of what he saw as corruption in the Catholic Church and especially for his attack on the Churchs doctrine of transubstantiation. If we want to know the facts of Wyclifs life, we can consult an encyclopedia or biography. If we want to know John Wyclif, and maybe ourselves, we should read Thom Satterlees poetry collection ""Burning Wyclif""' - Robert A. Fink, from the Introduction ""Burning Wyclif"". Sometimes you have to raise the body up to burn it down. So it was with Wyclif, who rested forty-two years under chancel stone condemned by the Papacy, protected by the Crown. Finally, a bishop came with a few men, spades, shovels, a horse and cart. By then, not much was left of Wyclifhair and skin gone, his bones slipped out of place inside the simple alb they'd buried him in. The bishop gathered what he could. Beside the River Swift, he lit a pile of wood and tossed the bones on one at a time, cursing the heretic from limb to limb. Afterwards, they shoveled ash into the water and no one even thought the word martyr. Thom Satterlee is assistant professor of English at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, and advisor for the universitys student literary magazine, Parnassus. His poetry has appeared in ""Alaska Quarterly Review"", ""Image"", ""Southwest Review"", and ""The Southern Review"" and has been selected for ""Poetry Daily"".

Soaring across extensive terrain, from the working world of Detroit to American suburbia and pop culture; from the European landscape of World War II to the current war in Iraq, Christine Rhein opens her personal world to the world at large. In poems that explore the historical, social, and scientific, as well as the poignant and humorous, Rhein relishes life's juxtapositions. '""Wild Flight"" introduces us to an important new voice...This is a poetry of the highest imagination, and the most energetic intelligence, written by a poet with a keen eye and a large spirit. Her hard look at this life is made beautiful by her art' - Laura Kasischke. 'One of the mysteries of human life is that it is never an individual journey, a truth that Christine Rhein discovers over and over in this remarkable first book. In ""Wild Flight"", she walks us artfully through the histories she comes from and those she is witness to in our time...The personal is political in these large-minded poems, and the political personal' - Roger Mitchell. From ""Tuning"": I try to tune out the boom! boom! boom! from the shooting range two miles from my house, and think of the people who live next door to the targets, or in the din of London and Berlin where nightingales now sing fourteen decibels louder to be heard by mates, quintupling the pressure in their lungs . ..Imagine if we could hear bread rising, dew forming, the budding of raspberries, the tear of a cocoon, a minnows pulse, our own cells growing, dying. When my husband kisses my ear, I love the swoosh, the quiver, his breath sand driven by wind, my whispered name.

Haven’t we all been told how beauty is thin as truth? And don’t we believe and disbelieve this “lie we’d carve and starve for. / We’d suck it till the juice ran down our arms”? Skin compels us, repels us. Beauty may be only skin deep, a fine covering—sensuous, at times Translatorlucent, almost Translatorparent, and yet so obdurate. Skin insulates, guarding its vital organs just beneath this surface that teases us to peek, to try to penetrate. We call this desire by many names, the best of which is love. April Lindner’s sensuously orchestrated collection of poems conveys the beauty and truth of love, how we know it to be paradoxical, obsessive, fearful, rapacious, holy. —Robert Fink, from the Introduction byduction

In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman’s relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to “our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies,” a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker’s Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced through a teenage girl’s coming of age, showing the reader what it means to become - and remain - a Jewish woman in America.

Your Blue and the Quiet Lament records the textures of grief after a cousin's murder at the hands of the Syrian state reaches the poet through a long-distance phone call. The poems trace a narrative of arrest, imprisonment, and torture in Syria and interweave the difficulties a family experiences in the diaspora.Shifting between the death of poet Federico García Lorca and that of her cousin, Lubna's poetry contends with personal loss by distancing the meaning of one death through the proxy of another. Yet the distortion of distance is already there—in the language, in the geographic space, in time, in the grief itself—tinged with blue.As she recalls childhood memories and imagines conversations with her dead cousin, Lubna's poetry whispers, calls out, sings, laments, pens letters, photographs, sketches, paints, and prays in an attempt to exhaust grief.

Cassie Pruyn's Lena asks new questions: why we love, why we grieve. We've read elegies before, but not like this. A lush and unsparing first book, Lena asks readers to understand love--crucially, a first love, an erotic love-in the context not of a love lost but instead of an identity gained: we must consider not only "was she worth it?," but also "who has she made me?" Pruyn lets us feel what lovers feel--the magnetism, the physicality, the tenderness, the rage, the wondering--with language both musical and visceral. In these poems, the landscape is a character in itself; the past is as tangible as the present. Pruyn takes us to the "Lost Love Lounge," we ride in a "car / red as a dragon," and we observe the beloved "stick herself in the belly with a needle" in the way "she used to attach her cufflinks." This is love and grief raised to the highest power; it is a debut not to be missed.

In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young woman's relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love, and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to "our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies," a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation, and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker's Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced through a teenage girl's coming of age, showing the reader what it means to become—and remain—a Jewish woman in America.

A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees is a collection of poems made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. In the aftermath of a fictional bee extinction, these poems are presented to the post-bee reader as "artifacts." These are poems in hindsight.Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry's "natural" inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way if bees—and the relations they make possible—suddenly disappeared. Like any natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile. Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name feelings. What changes about our imaginations after a peg in the environment is removed? What could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if nature is no longer a mirror?Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are the residue of a dead species—but they are also the offshoots of a playful, abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playingwith Bees covets what's left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.

The Lyme Letters is epistolary verse that spells out a memoir. R, a non-binary femme character, narrates their experience of disease and recovery through recurrent letters to doctors, pets, family members, lovers, and a "Master." R, in letter form and repurposed religious texts, also explores the paradoxical experiences of queer non-reproductivity, chronic illness and disability, and the healing that can be found in the liminal spaces between.