Showing titles in Family

While the poetry you’ll listen to in Ron Wallace’s latest collection speaks of serious topics such as loss and the inescapable progression of time, you’ll also find plenty of humor in this book. His words bring to life his beloved Oklahoma prairies and skies, and his own family members. Wallace’s reflections on childhood, his parents, and, of course, baseball, are heartwarming.

Raise a glass, and sample what's been cooked up in this A Crock of Sundries, Volume One. A pinch of family traditions. A dash of the teenage years. Toss in a few alcohol-infused musings. Top it off with a bit of cheeky satire, and some pensive prose and poetry for a fun literary romp through genres. This single-author, multi-genre anthology by Timothy R. Baldwin is sure to have a bit of something for everyone. So kick back in your favorite reading spot, pour yourself a drink, and settle in for an evening of diverse entertainment.

The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings - a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family - finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: In “Island Diaries”, the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero.

No Sweet Without Brine is both a soulful and celebratory collection that summons sticky sweet memories with an acrid aftertaste of deep thought. Satisfying moments are captured in odes to Idris Elba’s dulcet tones on a meditation app and the satisfaction of half-priced Entenmann’s poundcake; in childlike observations of parental Black love, the coveted female form on Jet Magazine covers, and the desire for Zamunda to be a real place full of Black joy.

The Willies, Falkner’s first full-length poetry collection, offers a sharp and vulnerable portrait of the journey into queerhood in America. Departing from a more familiar coming out narrative he centers the stories of dueling selves. Masquerading white boy. Child of an addict. Closeted varsity athlete. At its core, The Willies asks us to consider who we will become if we do not grapple with what scares us most.

A radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic that together evokes the arc of an ordinary life. Nabaneeta Dev Sen's rhythmic lines explore the joys and agonies of first love, childbirth, and decay with a restless, tactile imagination, both picking apart and celebrating the rituals that make us human.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls.

This collection of words from Havva Ramadan has its origins during lockdown and her work continues to resonate to this day, finding an even wider audience through her rapidly growing online presence. Now, in her first book, A Voice: Turning Pain into Power, her words take a different form, collected to give us a very personal journey that we can all relate to, reflecting the pain of grief, the struggle of mental health and the journey we need to take to help us collect our pieces and find a way to rebuild ourselves once again.

Usman Hameedi’s debut collection, Staying Right Here, is a journey in finding home. Hameedi invites listeners to bear witness to vignettes of joy and hardship as he navigates finding his place in America. From an ode to Bodegas, an autobiography of his eyebrows, and elegies for lost friends, Hameedi’s thematic metaphors for family, wellness, and American biases weave a literary tapestry.

Whether we're tumbling with Katz in a field of yellow flowers with a group of long-haired young people what seems only a moment (but is really four decades) ago or doing yoga right now, looking out a sliver of window at moving clouds, this collection evokes the exact scenes and buzz of perception that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

An acclaimed poet deepens her exploration of the domestic in a new collection of playful and wise poems The poems in Carrie Fountain’s third collection, The Life, exist somewhere, as Rilke says, between “our daily life” and “the great work” - an interstitial space where sidelong glances live alongside shouts to heaven. In elegant yet colloquial language, Fountain observes her children dressing themselves in fledgling layers of personhood, creating their own private worlds and personalities, and makes room for genuine marvels amid routine.

A lively and imaginative debut, Neoteny explores blindness, family, and birdsong. In these poems, Emily K. Michael meditates on literary and personal heroes like Jo March, her beloved grandmother, and her guide dog. This collection is rich with treasures from childhood - the honey-colored piano Michael played, the fig tree in her front yard, and the trays of fresh mint drying on her grandmother's table.

Through entrancing narration of essay and poetry accompanied by soothing sound effects, Nora Nneka (Dr. Nora Ekeanya) details some of the traumatic events that led to her estrangement from her mother and decision to pursue a career in psychiatry.

Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails.

A cross between humorous poetry and memoir, Sonnets from Suburbia features Lady Penelope (aka actress Penny Peyser) serving up a funny take on modern day life in Shakespearean sonnet form.

Upon becoming a mother, Jessica Urlichs was reminded that the everyday ordinary is extraordinary. As sacred and tender as early motherhood is, it also comes with its struggles. Beautiful Chaos is a collection that chronicles it all - the highs, the lows, the confusion, the loss of identity, the becoming, and the brutal but beautiful ways our children hold mirrors up to us. This collection inspires vulnerability and will be a cathartic, healing read for anyone who needs it.

The Silver Lining of Tomorrow is a collaboration of poems and tidbits for all the Daddy’s girls out there. Traci Mahrt lost her father Melvin at the early age of 24. With a collection of poems found after his passing, Traci weaves in her own poems and shares her own life experiences with love, depression, and finding God.

In the collection of prose and poetry Letter to My Wife & Other Tales, his sequel to the successful The Time of Our Lives: Memories and Fantasies of a Blissful Nonagenarian, 96-year-old Elliot Schubert etches incisive portraits of the family members, friends and colleagues. These are the stories of those who helped shape his extraordinary journey through the 20th and 21st centuries as an athlete, Naval officer, scholar, scientist, writer, husband, and father.

Henry Normal uses poetry, storytelling and comedy to tackle big subjects with his trademark humour. This collection includes five of his funny and moving BBC Radio 4 shows: 'A Normal Family' is centred around Henry's son, Johnny, who was diagnosed with autism. 'A Normal Life' continues to draw on Henry's experiences of bringing up a child with autism. 'A Normal Love' sees Henry explore love, romance and other unreasonable expectations. 'A Normal Imagination' looks at why humans create. 'A Normal Nature' is an exploration of unsung nature, from the point of view of a busy urban human.

Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss. With searing vulnerability and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief.