You Know How a Cat

will bring a mouse it has

caught and lay it at your

feet so each morning I

bring you a poem that

I've written when I woke

up in the night as my tribute

to your beauty &

a promise of my love.

-James Laughlin

Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship, affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors. Cats raise a mirror up to their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotise, frustrate and delight. To poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses, as they purr, prowl, hunt, play, meow, and nap, often oblivious to their so-called masters. Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by some of the greatest poets of all time.

This book proposes a fundamental relationship between exile and mapping. It seeks to understand the cartographic imperative inherent in the exilic condition, the exilic impulses fundamental to mapping, and the varied forms of description proper to both. The vital intimacy of the relationship between exile and mapping compels a new spatial literacy that requires the cultivation of localized, dynamic reading practices attuned to the complexities of understanding space as text and texts as spatial artifacts. The collection asks: what kinds of maps do exiles make? How are they conceived, drawn, read? Are they private maps or can they be shaped collectively? What is their relationship to memory and history? How do maps provide for new ways of imagining the fractured experience of exile and offer up both new strategies for reading displacement and new displaced reading strategies? Where does exilic mapping fit into a history of cartography, particularly within the twentieth-century spatial turn? The original work that makes up this interdisciplinary collection presents a varied look at cartographic strategies employed in writing, art, and film from the pre-Contact Americas to the Renaissance to late postmodernism; the effects of exile, in its many manifestations, on cartographic textual systems, ways of seeing, and forms of reading; the challenges of traversing and mapping unstable landscapes and restrictive social and political networks; and the felicities and difficulties of both giving into the map and attempting to escape the map that provides for exile in the first place. Cartographies of Exile will be of interest to students and scholars working in literary and cultural studies; gender, sexuality, and race studies; anthropology; art history and architecture; film, performance, visual studies; and the fine arts.

This book proposes a fundamental relationship between exile and mapping. It seeks to understand the cartographic imperative inherent in the exilic condition, the exilic impulses fundamental to mapping, and the varied forms of description proper to both. The vital intimacy of the relationship between exile and mapping compels a new spatial literacy that requires the cultivation of localized, dynamic reading practices attuned to the complexities of understanding space as text and texts as spatial artifacts. The collection asks: what kinds of maps do exiles make? How are they conceived, drawn, read? Are they private maps or can they be shaped collectively? What is their relationship to memory and history? How do maps provide for new ways of imagining the fractured experience of exile and offer up both new strategies for reading displacement and new displaced reading strategies? Where does exilic mapping fit into a history of cartography, particularly within the twentieth-century spatial turn? The original work that makes up this interdisciplinary collection presents a varied look at cartographic strategies employed in writing, art, and film from the pre-Contact Americas to the Renaissance to late postmodernism; the effects of exile, in its many manifestations, on cartographic textual systems, ways of seeing, and forms of reading; the challenges of traversing and mapping unstable landscapes and restrictive social and political networks; and the felicities and difficulties of both giving into the map and attempting to escape the map that provides for exile in the first place. Cartographies of Exile will be of interest to students and scholars working in literary and cultural studies; gender, sexuality, and race studies; anthropology; art history and architecture; film, performance, visual studies; and the fine arts.

Becoming Activist is a revolutionary study of youth human rights activism and literacy learning. The book follows five urban youth organizers from the Drop Knowledge Project in New York City. Intentionally polyvocal, the voices of the five youth are featured prominently to highlight the shifting articulation of their activist identities in relation to social and economic justice. Becoming Activist explores critical literacy pedagogy beyond the confines of formal education. While it has been historically theorized within English classrooms, much existing research points to the limitations of conducting critical literacy in schools. In search of a space where critical literacy can be more fully realized, this book positions urban youth organizing as an alternative context for powerful community-based learning. A valuable read for educators, researchers, and young organizers, Becoming Activist offers insight into conducting literacy work to promote positive youth and community development. Ultimately, the idea of "becoming" is key to understanding and supporting youth activists as they grow to exercise their political power for positive social change.

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters--they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. The substantial, revealing--and often very funny--interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz is incontestably Latin America's foremost living poet. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol) here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger made its appearance. This is followed by the complete texts of Days and Occasions (Dias Habiles), Homage and Desecrations (Homenaje y Profanaciones), Salamander (Salamandra), Solo for Two Voices (Solo a Dos Voces), East Slope (Ladera Este), Toward the Beginning (Hacza el Comienzo), Blanco, Topoems (Topoemas), Return (Vuelta), A Draft of Shadows (Pasado en Claro), Airborn (Hijos del Aire), and Paz's most recent collection, A Tree Within (Arbol Adentro). With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, John Frederick Nims, and Charles Tomlinson."

Becoming Activist is a revolutionary study of youth human rights activism and literacy learning. The book follows five urban youth organizers from the Drop Knowledge Project in New York City. Intentionally polyvocal, the voices of the five youth are featured prominently to highlight the shifting articulation of their activist identities in relation to social and economic justice. Becoming Activist explores critical literacy pedagogy beyond the confines of formal education. While it has been historically theorized within English classrooms, much existing research points to the limitations of conducting critical literacy in schools. In search of a space where critical literacy can be more fully realized, this book positions urban youth organizing as an alternative context for powerful community-based learning. A valuable read for educators, researchers, and young organizers, Becoming Activist offers insight into conducting literacy work to promote positive youth and community development. Ultimately, the idea of "becoming" is key to understanding and supporting youth activists as they grow to exercise their political power for positive social change.

This is the definitive centenary edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, recognised today as a master of her art and acclaimed by poets and readers alike. Her poems display honesty and humour, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy. They often start outwardly, with geography and landscape - from New England and Nova Scotia, where Bishop grew up, to Florida and Brazil, where she later lived - and move inexorably toward the interior, exploring questions of knowledge and perception, love and solitude, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. This new edition, edited by Saskia Hamilton, includes Bishop's four published volumes (North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel and Geography III), as well as uncollected poems, translations and an illuminating selection of unpublished manuscript poems, reproduced in facsimile, revealing exactly how finished, or unfinished, Bishop left them. It offers readers the opportunity to enjoy the complete poems of one of the most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century.

The Poems of Octavio Paz is the first retrospective collection of Paz's poetry to span his entire writing career from his first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem. This landmark bilingual edition contains many poems that have never been translated into English before, plus new translations based on Paz's final revisions. Assiduously edited by Eliot Weinberger-who has been translating Paz for over forty years-The Poems of Octavio Paz also includes translations by the poet-luminaries Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson. Readers will also find Weinberger's capsule biography of Paz, as well as notes on many poems in Paz's own words, taken from various interviews he gave throughout his long and singular life.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) grew up to become a famous poet, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956. Before that she was a little girl who lived with her Gammie and Pa in Great Village, Nova Scotia. It was there that Bishop learned to walk, to read, to write, to sing hymns, and to catch bumblebees in foxglove flowers. It was there she first went to school and, when she was five, where her mother left and never returned. Lovingly rendered, this visual and lyrical feast tells the story of Bishop's childhood days, inspired by Bishop's own poetry and prose, paired with Quentin Blake-style artwork from illustrator Emma FitzGerald. A love letter to words, 'A Pocket of Time' is a lesson for young readers in finding the poetry in everything.

Embodying Theory: Epistemology, Aesthetics and Resistance takes a deep dive into representational spaces of social science theory and research, positioning post-structuralist frameworks as potent tools in ongoing fights against injustice and inequity. In this interactive text, the reader takes a discursive tour through theoretical and imagistic landscapes that offer options for liberated existence and expression from repression and moralism. By foregrounding the "double articulation" of what is articulated through language and what is shown through visual material, Embodying Theory furthers an argument that there are numerous ways to embody, interpret and interact with meaning across cultural, materialist and populist platforms, to strategically create counter-narratives in the service of building peaceable, inclusive, sustainable and joyful futures. Embodying Theory offers a series of writings and images to make theory walk, recasting major post-structural and deconstructive thought in order to explore spheres of action in the educational, the sociopolitical, the ethical, the aesthetic and the academic. This is an explicitly politicized approach to text creation, understood as both building theory and practice, to collaboratively design a textual experiment. This book reconceptualizes the text as an anti-moralistic response, as a non-violent battleground visually and textually. Embodying Theory uses the form of the book to demonstrate the always possible, to break open words and images. Through an interplay of light and language, the text foregrounds an affirmative stance against the nihilistic and the cynical. Embodying Theory interacts with core notions of "becoming" as key to understanding processes of subjects constructing their present and future.

A 25th anniversary edition of a book cited by Modern Language Journal as "notable for the original and interesting choice of poems and for the accuracy and poetic quality of the translations." Work by 14 Brazilian poets, including the late Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, is presented en face with translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Ashley Brown, Jane Cooper, Richard Eberhart, Barbara Howes, June Jordan, Galway Kinnell, Jean Longland, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Louis Simpson, Mark Strand, Jean Valentine, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright.
Selected by Books for College Libraries (1988).

Although Elizabeth Bishop is perhaps better known as a masterful poet, she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as this centenary edition of her prose demonstrates. From her witty, unforgettable portraits of Marianne Moore and the Sitwells to her engaging childhood recollections of Canada and Massachusetts, her writing reflects a lifelong fascination with memory and travel, and her unique eye and ear for people and places. This new volume - edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Lloyd Schwartz - includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Included here are her stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and - for the first time - the original draft of Brazil, the Life World Library volume she repudiated in its published version, as well as extensive selections from the correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson. Here is a rich and revealing selection, and the indispensible companion to the poems.

Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written," ""The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds 'grand, ' but is as quietly convincing as everyday speech."

A "Boston Globe" Best Poetry Book of 2011 This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and poets alike. Bishop's poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape--from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later lived--human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos.
This new edition offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentiethcentury poetry.

This is a new release of the original 1927 edition.

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From Elizabeth Bishop's introduction: 'When I first came to Brazil, in 1952, I asked my Brazilian friends which Brazilian books I should begin reading ...They frequently recommended this little book, "Minha Vida de Menina" ...In English the title means "My Life as a Little Girl" or "Young Girl", and that is exactly what the book is about, but it is not reminiscences; it is a diary, the diary actually kept by a little girl between the ages of 12 and 15, in the far-off town of Diamantina, in 1893-1895 ...The more I read the book the better I liked it. The scenes and events it described were odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny and eternally true. The longer I stayed on in Brazil the more Brazilian the book seemed, yet much of it could have happened in any small provincial town or village, and at almost any period of history - at least before the arrival of the automobile and the moving-picture theatre

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some ninety poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. "Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box" presents, alongside facsimiles of many notebook pages from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that heretofore have been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies. This revelatory and moving selection brings us into the poet's laboratory, showing us the initial provocative images that moved Bishop to begin a poem, illustrating terrain unexplored in the work published during her lifetime. Editor Alice Quinn has also mined the Bishop archives for rich tangential material that illuminates the poet's sources and intentions.