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Fraternal Light

| Filed under: Poetry, Recent Releases, Wick First Book
Cover for "Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black."

Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney’s resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves—but is finally receiving—Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemian writers and artists based in Greenwich Village from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and in Parisian avant-garde and expatriate enclaves from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

 


Sister Tongue زبان خواهر

| Filed under: Books, Poetry, Recent Releases, Wick First Book
Sister Tongue cover image

The poems in Sister Tongue explore negative spaces—the distance between twin sisters, between lovers, between Farsi and English, between the poet’s upbringing in California and her family in Iran. This space between vibrates with loss and longing, arcing with tension. Farnaz Fatemi’s poetry delves into the intricacies of the relational space between people, the depth of ancestral roots, and the visceral memories that shimmer beyond the reach of words.

 


Dear Vaccine

, and | Filed under: Health Humanities, Poetry, Recent Releases
Nye Cover

In March 2021, the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and the University of Arizona Poetry Center launched the website for the Global Vaccine Poem project, inviting anyone to share experiences of the pandemic and vaccination through poetry. Dear Vaccine features selections from over 2,000 poetry submissions to the project, which come from all 50 states and 118 different countries.

 


How Blood Works

| Filed under: Poetry, Recent Releases, Wick First Book
How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

In keeping with the central theme that the stories we tell ourselves—and, by extension, our understanding of who we are—are shaped by the spaces in which we tell them, the poems in How Blood Works vary drastically in form. From traditionally lineated lyrics to more architectural, segmented prose pieces, the poems themselves become a space for narratives of the self to play out.

 


On This Side of the Desert

| Filed under: Poetry, Recent Releases, Wick First Book
On This Side of the Desert by Alfredo Aguilar. Kent State University Press

This debut book of poetry describes the experience of being raised in southern California as a child of Mexican immigrants in the shadow of the borderlands. Just as the borderlands are defined by the desert, so, too, are its inhabitants defined by their families, their culture shaped from the clay of the Sonoran desert and given life by the nourishing water of their ancestors. In these poems, the desert is recognized for what it truly is—a living, breathing body filled with both joy and pain.

 


I Hear the World Sing

, and | Filed under: Poetry, Recent Releases
I Hear the World Sing by Hassler, Jewel & Siciarz

When schoolchildren from Kent, Ohio, and Florence, Italy, were invited to express their thoughts about “Where I’m From” in poetry, the connections that emerged between these students from different continents were remarkable. Their responses to this prompt—“lo vengo da” in Italian—demonstrate the underlying importance of home, families, the natural world, and the creative identities that children harbor within them.

 


The Many Names for Mother

| Filed under: Poetry, Wick First Book
The Many Names for Mother cover image

The Many Names for Mother is an exploration of intergenerational motherhood; its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past. This evocative collection hovers around history, trauma, and absence—from ancestral histories of anti-Semitic discrimination in the former Soviet Union to the poet’s travels, while pregnant with her son, to death camp sites in Poland. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dasbach ponders how the weight of her Jewish-refugee immigrant experience comes to influence her raising of a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child.

 


Speak a Powerful Magic

| Filed under: Art, Black Squirrel Books, Poetry, Recent Releases
Speak a Powerful Magic by Wick Poetry Center. Kent State University Press

Speak a Powerful Magic features poems by schoolchildren, immigrants and refugees, patients and caregivers, and veterans, alongside the work of well-known contemporary American poets, and it demonstrates that poetry is truly of the people. We turn to poetry to give voice to what is troubling us, to honor what we love, to make sense of our lives, to remember our past, and to commemorate what we’ve lost. Here, it becomes clear that poetry, especially when coupled with the visual arts, has the potential to broaden our understanding and bring people together in ways that more traditional communications simply cannot.

 


Learning to Heal

and | Filed under: Literature & Literary Criticism, Literature & Medicine, Medicine, Poetry, Recent Releases

What is it like to be a student nurse? What are the joys, the stresses, the transcendent moments, the fall-off-your-bed-laughing moments, and the terrors that have to be faced and stared down? And how might nurses, looking back, relate these experiences in ways that bring these memories to life again and provide historical context for how nursing education has changed and yet remained the same?

In brave, revealing, and often humorous poetry and prose, Learning to Heal explores these questions with contributions by nurses from a variety of social, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds. Readers meet a black nursing student who is surrounded by white teachers and patients in 1940, a mother who rises every morning at 5 a.m. to help her family ready for their day before she herself heads to anatomy class, and an itinerant Jewish teenager who is asked, “What will you become?” These individuals, and many other women and men, share personal stories of finding their way to nursing school, where they begin a long, often wonderful, and sometimes daunting, journey.

 


Fugue Figure

| Filed under: Poetry, Recent Releases, Wick First Book
Fugue Figure by Michael McKee Green. KSU Press

The book states plainly that both its speaker and the speaker’s mother have suffered near-deadly head injuries (“when I woke up in the hospital thirty years after you did,” “my head: / rotting pear”), resulting in loss of memory. However, rather than let a taxonomy like “family curse” sit unquestioned, Green writes toward the fugues (i.e., the condition of having one’s identity questioned) by making a kind of fugue (i.e., interweaving song). Johnathan Culler writes that “the fundamental characteristic of the lyric . . . is not the description and interpretation of a past event, but the iterative and utterable performance of an event in the lyric present, in the special ‘now’ of lyric articulation.” The lyric in Fugue Figure allows the unspeakable past to be uttered in the lyric present, and the form of diptychs and triptychs through the book place disparate lyric utterances together on the same page. While lyric addresses allow the reader to reach toward the speaker’s unknowns, the triptychs and diptychs allow the reader to reach toward the unnamable place between left and right signifiers, both adding to the vital enigma of the poems.

 


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