"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Posts tagged ‘Carolyn Forché’

Monday Must Read! Lauren K. Alleyne: Difficult Fruit

What a beautiful read this week!

Lauren-Alleyne-2Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014). She holds an MFA in Poetry and a graduate certificate in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University, and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Iowa State University. Alleyne’s fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and poetry have been widely published in journals and anthologies such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Guernica, The Caribbean Writer, Black Arts Quarterly, The Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gathering Ground, and Growing Up Girl, among others. Her work has earned several honors and awards, most recently the Picador Guest Professorship in Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany, a 2014 Iowa Arts Council Fellowship, and first place in the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Contest. Alleyne is a Cave Canem graduate, and is originally from Trinidad and Tobago. She currently works at James Madison University as Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and an Associate Professor of English.

Buy Lauren’s Beautiful Book Here!

Praise for Difficult Fruit

Lauren Alleyne’s voice is a revelatory and formidable fusion of irrepressible music and uncompromising craft. Like snippets of cinema, these poems arrest the senses and challenge what’s known. Every door this exceptional work opens opens onto a larger light.—Patricia Smith

To go back “is a verb conjugated in dreams,” Lauren Alleyne writes in her debut volume Difficult Fruit, inscribing the governing mystery of this work, the secret knowledge of the dead. In anaphoric bursts of incantatory disclosure, in ghazals of love and survival, eros and the infinite, she does, indeed, go back, past all griefs and illuminations, “to the song beneath the song.” There is uncommon spiritual knowledge here as well as political discernment. There is much to learn while accompanying Alleyne on her “raft of language,” through a troubled world and an imagined heaven, to the place “from which comes all singing.” I have gone with her and would do so again and again.—Carolyn Forché

Difficult Fruit is a book I wish there were no need for. But need there is; and Alleyne delivers poems of loss and grief and, thankfully, hope. “Meaning is the closest we get to salvation,/which is to say the word changes nothing/–it does not unmake the rivers,” she writes. But addressing the ages in ghazal and crown and free verse forms, she reminds us, in the “flaming sentence” that in one’s life, “it is in the raft of language we begin our escape.”—Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Visit Lauren’s Website

More From Lauren Online

http://www.laurenkalleyne.com/work.html

http://www.gwarlingo.com/2014/the-sunday-poem-lauren-k-alleynes-difficult-fruit/

https://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/689-lauren-k-alleyne-poetry

http://www.2river.org/2RView/10_4/poems/alleyne.html

http://www.thegriefdiaries.org/poetry-by-lauren-k-alleyne/

http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/24-november-2010/two-poems/

http://www.thethepoetry.com/2013/02/poem-of-the-week-lauren-k-alleyne/

http://www.thefeministwire.com/2015/09/poetry-madame-x-by-lauren-k-alleyne/

Hear Lauren Read!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8VfxSkn3dc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax3nmQXD0YQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E5PvO_Lkcs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70DVGoDzRlI

 

Wonderful work!

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

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Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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Must Read–and Must See–Monday: Poetry of Witness

 

poetry-of-witness-posterSomething a little different this week: recommending a documentary, Poetry of Witness. Poetry of Witness is a 2015 documentary film directed by Billy Tooma and Anthony Cirilo about the lives of six contemporary poets who have lived through, and survived, extremities such as war, torture, exile, and repression, using poetry to preserve their memories.It debuted October 16, 2015 at the Buffalo International Film Festival.

The film documents the struggle of six contemporary poets who have faced the duress of war, exile, and human rights violations to give voice to their experiences while wrestling with the complex moral quandaries of artistic production, memory, and trauma. The poets: Carolyn Forché (Salvadoran Civil War), Saghi Ghahraman (Iranian Revolution), Fady Joudah (Doctors Without Borders), Claudia Serea (Socialist Republic of Romania), Mario Susko (Bosnian War), and Bruce Weigl (Vietnam War) offer first-person accounts of how their experiences as soldier, activist, doctor, and survivor imprint their poetry as evidence of those conflicts, rather than as representations of them.

Buy Poetry of Witness: The Documentary

A Couple of Suggested Anthologies (there are so many more…)

Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness

Award winning poet Carolyn Forché spent 13 years compiling Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness. It is an exhaustive and illuminating work of breadth, beauty, wisdom and tragedy.

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500 – 2001

More about the Poetry of Witness

Anthony Cirilo Talks about Poetry of Witness

Carolyn Forché talks about the poetry of witness

Poet Carolyn Forché gathers 500 years of suffering in new anthology

Sandra Beasley: “Flint and Tinder – Understanding the Difference Between ‘Poetry of Witness’ and ‘Documentary Poetics’”

More About Against Forgetting at3Generations

Love y’all. 

Mary

 

 

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Family, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing

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