Faculty - Literature
The Galleons by
For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American parents in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.
Sometimes I Never Suffered by
In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains 'a shrewd composer of American stories' (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America's racial history, as well as his own. Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time's manifold potential to mend.
Time Being by
As time beings, what we have is the time being, the present moment, however compromised, however shattered. Buchanan’s characteristic combination of wry humor, nerve, empathy, wisdom, and outrage exposes the laughably absurd and the evisceratingly tragic all at once.
Director of Undergraduate Writing Initiatives
Rage Hezekiah's poems are gutting, bold, tender, and loving. (And, she's a wonderful person in our community.)
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton by
A series of poems drawn from various collections published throughout the 40-year career of American poet Lucille Clifton
The marvelous poet Aracelis Girmay has edited an gorgeous collection of Clifton's poems.
First-Year and International Student Counselor - Academic Services
The Carrying by
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance.
Limón's tender observations and sharp turns keep me coming back to this book months after reading it. Her lines are beautifully rendered and often devastating, I'm so grateful for her generosity in bringing this power to the page.
Visiting Faculty - Drama
The Tradition by
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown;s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
