Please Note: Some of these ebooks have user limits, which are noted. When you are finished reading, please close your browser window and quit your web browser so other people can access the ebook.
Funeral Diva by
A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art. "Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has the feeling of live performance. . . . Its strength is in its abundance, its desire for language to stir body as well as mind."--Parul Sehgal,The New York Times Book Review "She is a writer for the future, in that she defies genre."--Hilton Als "This notable achievement, traveling from youth to adulthood, is a harrowing account of how Sneed transforms violence and pain into an artist's life."--Claudia Rankine, author ofCitizen: An American Lyric "There's an eerie sense of timeliness to this book, which features prose and poetry by the writer and teacher Pamela Sneed and is largely -- though not entirely -- about mourning Black gay men killed too soon by a deadly virus."--Tomi Obaro,Buzzfeed "OH MY GOODNESS, it was amazing. I was in tears by the end. What starts off as beautiful memoir evolves into incredibly moving poetry, painful and sweet and lovely."--Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY "Balancing and mixing, with rhyme and reason, love and anger, good and bad, memory and the created present, all to tell the story of a life, a memoir unrestrained, devoid of artificial forms. Honest. Free."--Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of Books In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s.Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed's poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears--like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde--whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights,Funeral Diva confronts today's most pressing issues with acerbic wit and audacity. The collection closes with Sneed's reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities. "Riveting, personal, open-hearted, risky and wise."--Sarah Schulman, author ofConflict Is Not Abuse " . . . a tour de force about the collision between a coalescing 1980s 'Black lesbian and gay literary and poetic movement' in New York and the onslaught of AIDS."--Donna Seaman, Booklist "Pamela Sneed'sFuneral Diva is deft, defiant, and devastating."--Tommy Pico, author ofFeed "Funeral Diva is urgent and necessary reading to live by. This is writing at its finest. Keep this book close to your heart and soul."--Karen Finley, author ofShock Treatment "Reminiscent of Audre Lorde'sZami, Pamela Sneed's memoir is, in itself, a healing balm, affirming in its truths and honesty. I cannot remember ever reading a book that illustrates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on our community more poignantly than Funeral Diva."--Nicole Dennis-Benn, author ofPatsy "Pamela Sneed takes enormous risks in this book. She tells the truth with fierce concentration and an abiding sense of purpose."--Dorothy Allison, author ofBastard Out of Carolina
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Crushing It by
The poems in Jennifer L. Knox's darkly imaginative collection,Crushing It, unearth epiphanies in an unbounded landscape of forms, voices and subjects--from history to true crime to epidemiology--while exploring our tenuous connections and disconnections. From Merle Haggard lifting his head from a pile of cocaine to absurdist romps through an apocalypse where mushrooms learn to sing, this versatile collection is brimming with dark humor and bright surprise. Alongside Knox's distinctive surrealism,Crushing It also reveals autobiography in poems about love, family, and adult ADHD, and Knox's empathetic depictions of the ego's need to assert its precious, singular "I" suggest that a self distinct from the hive, the herd, the flock, is an illusion. With clear-eyed spirit,Crushing It swallows all the world, and then some.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Cardinal by
Tyree Daye'sCardinal is a generous atlas that serves as a poetic "Green Book"-- the travel-cum-survival guide for black motorists negotiating racist America in the mid-twentieth century. Interspersed with images of Daye's family and upbringing, which have been deliberately blurred, it also serves as an imperfect family album.Cardinal traces the South's burdened interiors and the interiors of a black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home --a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him. With the language of elegy and praise, intoning regional dialect and a deliberately disruptive cadence, Daye carries the voices of ancestors and blues poets, while stretching the established zones of the black American vernacular. In tones at once laden and magically transforming, he self-consciously plots his own Great Migration: "if you see me dancing a twos step/I'm sending a starless code/we're escaping everywhere." These are poems to be read aloud.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Thrown in the Throat by User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
The Tradition by
Finalist for the 2019 National Book AwardHonored as a "100 Notable Books of the Year" fromThe New York Times"By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."--Craig Morgan Teicher, "'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview" for NPR"A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem."--Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown's "Dark" (featured in theNew York Times Magazine in January 2019)"Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men."--O, The Oprah Magazine"The poems ofThe Tradition, Brown's third collection, are at turns tender and vulnerable, severe and riveting." âe*Los Angeles Review of BooksFeatured in NPR's "'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview" Named a Lit Hub "Most Anticipated Book of 2019"One of Buzzfeed's "66 Books Coming in 2019 You'll Want to Keep Your Eyes On"The Rumpus poetry pick for "What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner" One of BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019"Jericho Brown's daring new bookThe 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--is 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.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Lima :: Limón by
BuzzFeed's Books Coming in 2019 That You'll Want To Keep On Your Radar NPR's 2019 Poetry Preview NBC's 8 Excellent Latino Poetry Books for National Poetry Month The Rumpus's Books To Read in 2019 Remezcla's 8 Books to Read this Year Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books To Read For Spring 2019 "Through a range of forms--tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more--the poems in Scenters-Zapico's second collection . . . incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference." âe*Publishers Weekly, starred reviewIn her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Unflinching, Scenters-Zapico highlights the hardships and stigma immigrants face on both sides of the border, her desire to create change shining through in every line. Lima :: Limón is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
King Me by
On the "Best Poetry Books of the Year" list fromLibrary Journal "A sophisticated and breathtaking writer, Reeves takes the reader on a harrowing journey: each poem comes packed with arresting imagery, relentless in its examination of how tragedy and trauma become internalized -- cleaning out the wounds to understand the pain."--Los Angeles Review of Books "Roger Reeves'King Me stitches together many worlds into one startling and visceral book. His ranging, encyclopedic knowledge crosses history, medicine, biology, metapoetics and more, but he tackles it all with a bold and sonorous surrealist flow."--American Microreviews From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s,King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writingKing Me, I became very interested in the mythology of king, the one who is sacrificed at the end of the harvest season. . . . For me, the myth manifests in the killing of young black men, Emmett Till, and in the ways America deems young, black male bodies as expendable--Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. These are the young kings whom we love to kill--over and over again." From "Some Young Kings": The hummingbirds inside my chest,with their needle-nosed pliers for tonguesand hammer-heavy wings, have left a messof ticks in my lungs and a punctured lullabyin my throat. Little boy blue come blowyour horn. The cow's in the meadow. And Dorothy's alone in the corn with Jack, his black fingers, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clickingalong her legs until she howls--Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker . . . Roger Reeves earned his MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing and his PhD from the University of Texas. His poems have appeared inPoetry,American Poetry Review, andBoston Review. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Late Empire by
"This timely yet elemental collection unfolds where the exigencies and distractions of daily life brush up against the political, the ethical, and the existential." --Publishers Weekly "Olstein here meditates on a world gone awry, limning in precise, beautifully modulated language both personal dislocation and the slings and arrows visited upon the community at large." --Library Journal> "Brilliant and provocative." --The Literary Review "InLate Empire,the poet throws herself into a disturbing discussion about 21st-century realities, pinpointing, questioning, and exhorting. It's a riveting picture of the micro, day-to-day busy-ness against the macro, overshadowing struggle of existential survival." --Rain Taxi> In her fourth bookâe*a gorgeous call-to-arms in the face of our current social and political conditionsâe*Lisa Olstein employs her signature wit, wordplay, candor, and absurdity in poems that are her most personalâe*and politicalâe*to date. Like a brilliant dinner conversation that ranges from animated discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion to intimate considerations of motherhood, friendship, and eros, Olstein's voice is immediately approachable yet uncomfortably at home in theAmerican empire. Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections and a book-length lyric essay. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches in the Michener Center for Writers and New Writers Project MFA programs.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Patient Zero by
"I will call the voice of this poet a 'common' voice... a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing." --Philip Levine,Ploughshares This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine.Patient Zero is filled with voices--of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing. From Patient Zero Love is a worried, old heart disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff blues are made of, real blues that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk like the "Okra blues" or "Pay Day blues," though I think House would agree two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues, if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog bitten in two by the neighbor's dog, all of which makes me wonder about the source of our disease and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam and Eve left the garden'... Tomás Q. Morín's debut poetry collectionA Larger Country was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthologyComing Close, and translator ofThe Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Burn Lake by
Selected for the 2009 National Poetry Series by Natasha Trethewey Set in southern New Mexico, where her family's multicultural history is deeply rooted, the poems in Carrie Fountain's first collection explore issues of progress, history, violence, sexuality, and the self. Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with the peculiar journey of Don Juan de Oñate, who was dispatched from Mexico City in the late sixteenth- century by Spanish royalty to settle the so-called New Mexico Province, of which little was known. A letter that was sent to Oñate by the Viceroy of New Spain, asking that should he come upon the North Sea in New Mexico, he should give a detailed report of "the configuration of the coast and the capacity of each harbor" becomes the inspiration for many of the poems in this artfully composed debut.
User limits: 1 UT Austin user at a time
Barbie Chang by
"With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous."--Linda Gregerson "Chang's voice is equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified."--American Poets Barbie Chang, Victoria Chang explores racial prejudice, sexual privilege, and the disillusionment of love through a reimagining of Barbie--perfect in the cultural imagination yet repeatedly falling short as she pursues the American dream. This energetic string of linked poems is full of wordplay, humor, and biting social commentary involving the quote-unquote speaker, Barbie Chang, a disillusioned Asian-American suburbanite. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that "even silence is not silent." From "Barbie Chang Lives": Barbie Chang lives on Facebook has a house on Facebook street so she can erase herself Facebook is a country with no trees it allows her to believe people love her don't want to cover her Barbie Chang . . . Victoria Chang is the author of three previous poetry books. In 2013, she won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Chang teaches poetry at Chapman University and lives in Southern California.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
When My Brother Was an Aztec by
"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams. I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow! With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars. The lion didn't want to do it-- He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowd this: I only wanted some goddamn sleep . . . Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Devotions by
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.
User limits: 1 UT Austin user at a time
Directed by Desire by
"Jordan . . . is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."--Alice Walker "Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan's work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress."--BOMB Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan's 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs. As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power--of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value. . . . She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality." From These Poems These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? June Jordan taught at the University of California Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her 28 books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children's books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. Her numerous awards include a PEN West Freedom to Write Award and a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers Conference. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.
User limits: Unlimited UT Austin users
Stairway to Heaven by
A new collection from a poet who "writes with scrupulous and merciful passion about every kind of relatedness--family, place, politics, and wildlife" (W. S. Piero) In her fifth book of poems, Stairway to Heaven, Alison Hawthorne Deming explores dimensions of grief and renewal after losing her brother and mother. Grounded in her communion with nature and place, she finds even in Death Valley, that most stark of landscapes, a spirit of inventiveness that animates the ground we walk on. From the cave art of Chauvet to the futuristic habitat of Biosphere 2, that inventiveness becomes consolation for losses in family and nature, a means to build again a sense of self and world in the face of devastating loss.
User limits: 1 UT Austin user at a time
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.