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Reading Life: On Books, Memory, and Travel
2015Michael Pearson
A unique blend of memoir, literary appreciation, and travel narrative, Reading Life is a series of interrelated essays tracking the relationship between books and experience, dramatizing and reflecting on how stories lead us into the world, and how we transform that engagement with the world back into personal narrative. A love story about books and travel, Reading Life is, by turns, comic and serious. Chapters shift in tone--from a lyrical quality akin to Adam Gopnik's to a tongue-in-cheek humor reminiscent of Ian Frazier's. The book transports the reader from the high desert landscape of Cather's New Mexico and the rocky coastline of E. B. White's Maine to the pilgrimage paths of Cervantes's Spain and the hallucinogenic heat of Bowles's Morocco. At the heart of Reading Life is the belief that stories are vital to our existence. [Amazon.com]
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Secessia
2015Kent Wascom
New Orleans, May 1862. The largest city in the ill-starred confederacy has fallen to Union troops under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin “the Beast” Butler. The city is rife with madness and rage. When twelve-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws into the unrest his mother, Elise, a mixed-race woman passing for white, and his father, Angel, whose long and wicked life is drawing to a close. What follows forces mother and son into a dark new world: Joseph must come to grips with his father’s legacy of violence and his growing sentiment for Cuban exile Marina Fandal, the only survivor of a shipwreck that claimed the lives of her parents. Elise must struggle to maintain a hold on her sanity, her son and her own precarious station, but is threatened by the resurgence of a troubling figure from her past, Dr. Emile Sabatier, a fanatical physician who adores disease and is deeply mired in the conspiracy and intrigue surrounding the occupation of the city. Their paths all intersect with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, a man who history will call a beast, but whose avarice and brutal acumen are ideally suited to the task of governing an “ungovernable city.”
Alternating between the perspectives of the five characters of Elise, Dr. Sabatier, Joseph, Marina, and Butler, Secessia weaves a tapestry of ravenous greed and malformed love, of slavery and desperation, set within the baroque melting-pot that is New Orleans. A Gothic tableaux vivant of epic scope and intimate horror, Secessia is the netherworld reflection of the conflict between north and south. [Amazon.com]
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Night Willow: Poems
2014Luisa A. Igloria
In this shining and unsparing new collection, celebrated poet Luisa A. Igloria draws from her own childhood memories, relationships, and keen sensory awareness to create a dreamlike series of pictures in which we, too, may see our growth through the experiences of joys, loss, and the poignant wisdom that comes with age. As poet Sean Thomas Dougherty puts it, Igloria's poems "get to the heart of why poetry is written: the pure lyric impulse of trying to live." [Amazon.com]
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Ode to the Heart Smaller Than a Pencil Eraser: Poems
2014Luisa A. Igloria
“When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus—‘as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place’—she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. ‘I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus,’ she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe." —Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award [Amazon.com]
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What We Ask Of Flesh Poems
2013Remica L. Bingham
Blending biblical characters into a deeply personal history, What We Ask of Flesh tells of women through time, their spirits borne through broken flesh, through wombs and memories. The body becomes instrument as words explore the mystical connection between what was and is. [Amazon.com]
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The Saints of Streets
2013Luisa A. Igloria
In Luisa A. Igloria's newest poetry book The Saints of Streets, hungry ghosts, mullahs, would-be assassins, carnival queens, Hell Girl, Dante riding Geryon's back, and a host of other figures guide us through the dioramas and exhibits of personal and collective memory: they'll be our chauffeurs, psychopomps, tourist guides, our sweet and difficult familiars. These poems are love letters, phone calls disrupting our day to remind us of the strange and beautiful mysteries of living in the postcolonial moment. [Amazon.com]
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Body Moves: Poems
2013Tim Seibles
Seibles may write of everyday events sleeping, teaching a class, talking on the phone in direct, simple language, but he invests each event with lyric significance: "you slept/ with your mouth open/ and the moon/ slipped inside"; "fluorescent light falls/ like a fine snow/ in the classroom"; "The phone rings. A low voice/ bleeds through the wire." Throughout, we sense despair and a concerted effort, barely accomplished, to resist it: the poet mourns "faces bruised/ with unspent desire," says of breakfasting alone in a MacDonald's, "There's nothing but eating to do." Other poems deal more directly with social concerns: "In Philadelphia/ I went back to the school/ we integrated." The cumulative result is an accessible yet thoughtful work that may well draw in readers new to poetry. [From Library Journal]
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The Blood of Heaven
2013Kent Wascom
The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.
The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut. [Amazon.com]
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The Homespun Wisdom of Myrtle T. Cribb
2012Sheri Reynolds
The #1 New York Times bestselling author Sheri Reynolds returns with a “nontraditional devotional”—at once a hilarious and inspirational novel packed with profound advice from the journey of the unforgettable Myrtle Cribb. [Amazon.com]
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Fast Animal
2012Tim Seibles
This collection by African American poet Tim Seibles explores a range of poetic form, including lyric, ode, narrative, and mystical. Like a "fast animal," the poet's voice can swiftly change direction and tone as he crisscrosses between present and past. [Amazon.com]
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A Few Spells: Poems
2010Rénee Olander
"Renée Olander's poems are distinctly female, which is to say fertile, passionate, powerful, sorrowful, sexy, stunning, and strong. Sit with them, spend time with them, hold them close, embrace them. You'll be glad you did. Reading A Few Spells is akin to being in the company of a wise and treasured friend," writes poet Lesléa Newman. [ODUscrivener.wordpress.com]
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Juan Luna's Revolver
2009Luisa A. Igloria
The poems in Juan Luna' s Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress. Igloria traces journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial power. Her poems allude to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna and the novelist and national hero José Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World’s Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout the collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility. [Amazon.com]
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Innocents Abroad Too: Journeys Around the World on Semester at Sea
2008Michael Pearson
Most people don't get the opportunity to circumnavigate the globe. Michael Pearson has had the good fortune to do it twice. As a two-term professor in the Semester at Sea Program, Pearson journeyed by ship in 2002 and 2006 to such countries as Japan, China, Vietnam, India, Myanmar, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, and Cuba. In Innocents Abroad Too he shares his experiences and candid impressions transporting the reader to bustling streets outside Shanghai's City God Temple to the Serengeti Plain. Along the way Pearson provides a literary journey, enriching his encounters with descriptions of the great books and great writers who have also brought the world closer to their readers. These touchstones are combined with journalistic sketches of the people and places he visits and Pearson's thoughtful meditations on the significance of travel and the importance of encountering the new. In the rich tradition of travel literature Innocents Abroad Too offers a blend of experience and imagination, worlds familiar and strange, seen through the eyes of a true traveler. [Amazon.com]
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The Sweet In-Between: A Novel
2008Sheri Reynolds
Kenny Lugo has grown up in a family that’s not really hers. Her mother died of cancer when Kenny was very young, and Aunt Glo–who is, in fact, her daddy’s girlfriend–took her in when her father was sent to jail for drug trafficking. Now, as Kenny approaches her eighteenth birthday and the end of the government checks Glo has been receiving looms, she is desperate to prove that this house and these people really do belong to her. But when a senseless murder occurs next door in their small coastal town, Kenny can’t get it out of her mind. She has always been consumed by the ways in which she is different–and inherently unworthy–so the unjust death of a young woman with everything to live for becomes an obsession. In the end, hers is a story of an unforgettable young woman whose redemption comes from a source she never would have imagined. {Amazon.com]
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Conversion: Poems
2007Remica Bingham-Risher
The first of three sections in this book concern real or imagined relatives and acquaintances and events such as a fish fry and a visit to a grandmother in a nursing home. The second part deals with such topics as the Civil Rights Movement, abused prisoners of war, and the black artist who painted Bill Clinton's portrait. Many of the poems in the final part are based on events in the Bible. This is the first book by this author and winner of the 2007 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.
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What the Thunder Said
2007Janet Peery
In the Dust Bowl of 1930s Oklahoma, a family comes apart, as sisters Mackie and Etta Spoon keep secrets from their father, and from each other. Etta, the dangerously impulsive favorite of her father, longs for adventure someplace far away from the bleak and near-barren plains, and she doesn’t care how she gets there; watchful Mackie keeps house and obeys the letter of her father’s law, while harboring her own dreams. After the massive 1935 Black Sunday dust storm brings ruin to the family, the sisters’ conflict threatens further damage. Seeking escape, and wagering their futures on an Indian boarding school runaway named Audie Kipp, the two leave home to forge their own separate paths, each setting off in search of a new life, each finding a fate different than she expected. Slow-gathering, powerful, with passages of haunting beauty, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed storytellers. [Amazon.com]
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Firefly Cloak: A Novel
2006Sheri Reynolds
Firefly Cloak is the powerfully vivid coming-of-age story of Tessa Lee, who, after being abandoned by her mother, sets off on a risky journey to discover what she has lost. When eight-year-old Tessa Lee and her brother, Travis, are abandoned in a campground by their desperate mother and her boyfriend of the moment, they are left with only two things: a phone number written in Magic Marker on Travis’s back and their mother’s favorite housecoat, which she leaves wrapped around her sleeping children. This housecoat, painted with tiny fireflies, becomes totemic for Tessa Lee, providing a connection to her past and to the beautiful mother she lost. Seven years later, when word arrives that her mother has been spotted working at a tourist trap on a seaside boardwalk not far from where Tessa Lee lives, she sets off on a dangerous journey to try to recover what has been taken from her. [Amazon.com]
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Trill & Mordent
2005Luisa A. Igloria
The lush and humid poems of Luisa Igloria’s Trill & Mordent are a feast for the ear and the eye. Bursts of color and music punctuate Igloria’s dense, crafted lines, inviting the reader into Filipina life, a world at once strange and yet familiar to an American reader, opening wider perspectives into the commonalities and differences between America and the country it has so deeply influenced over the past century, the Philippines. [wordtech.com]
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Bitter Milk
2005John McManus
From Whiting Award-winning writer John McManus comes a debut novel of startling originality and mystery. The son of an unknown father and an ostracized mother, and the next of kin in a long line of bastard relatives, nine-year-old Loren Garland lives a life of subtle mystery beneath the shadow of an East Tennessee mountain. It is on his family's broken-down estate that Loren's imagination grows, and with it, the extraordinary voice of Bitter Milk, a young boy named Luther who may be Loren's imaginary friend, his conscience, or his evil twin. And yet outside the puzzle of Loren's brain, there are the darker goings-on of his family―his mother who wishes she were a man, his new uncle who plans to develop the Garland land into real estate, and his withered grandfather who holds the clan together through truculence and fear. When Loren's mother disappears, he must set out on a quest of his own devising, tossing aside the trappings of youth in order to discover the truth of the world. [Amazon.com]
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Buffalo Head Solos: Poems
2004Tim Seibles
"Reading Tim Seibles reminds me of the Buddhist parable of the burning house: everyone ignores the flames, pretends there is no smoke, no pain, no prospect of death. Or, if there is, it will only happen to someone else, someone in another world. According to these teachings, aversion and attachment are not the greatest barriers to fulfillment; it is indifference that endangers a soul. Not to embrace or confront what is undeniably there but to detach ourselves and retreat. It is precisely this indifference that these poems challenge with lyric insistence - begging, assailing, teasing, affirming. In this mystical, romantic and political collection, Seibles is willing to take a chance, any chance to engage the general malaise of our times. He is a musician of the spirit and of the body, and it is that quality which carries us forward breath by breath, line by line. The journey is oddly enchanting, even transformative"--Nin Andrews. [Amazon.com]
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Not home, but Here: Writing from the Filipino Diaspora
2003Luisa A. Igloria (Editor)
An exceptional collection of essays-- these are meditations that explore the enigma and the complexity of the Filipino diaspora as well as the hopes and triumphs of writing, living, and being in between cultures. This collection edited with a powerful introduction by Luisa Igloria, inspries the reader as well as those interested in diasporic studies to comprehend the sorrows as well as joys of living in the spaces between worlds." -- Marjorie Agosin -- Chilean American author "A lovely and powerful book -- a meditation on what it means to be other. It's about journeys; its's about memory. It's about recovery and discovery. Ultimately healing and transformative, this is a book to savor." -- Marianne VIlanueva, [Amazon.com]
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Born on a Train: 13 Stories
2003John McManus
Two years ago--at twenty-two--John McManus captivated writers and critics with his first story collection and became the youngest recipient of the Whiting Writers Award. Now McManus returns with a collection of stories equally piercing and visionary: stories about the young and old, compromised by circumstance and curiosity, and undergoing startling transformations. In "Eastbound," a car driven by two elderly sisters breaks down on an elevated highway: Beneath them lies the lost country of the South, overrun with concrete and shopping centers but still possessing the spectres and secrets of the past. In "Brood," a plucky young heroine moves with her mother into the home of the mother's online boyfriend: She will use the Audubon Guide to Birds, and her own wits to survive the advances of the boyfriend's teenaged son. In "Cowry," two backpackers in New Zealand race to witness the first sunrise of the twenty-first century. [Amazon.com]
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Shohola Falls: A Novel
2003Michael Pearson
A coming-of-age novel with a twist - along with two interracial love stories, a depiction of the explosive 1960s in America and a cross-country search for Mark Twain. [Amazon.com]
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Stop Breakin Down
2000John McManus
In a voice somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Cobain, John McManus explores young people living in extreme situations. Some are in the Tennessee Smoky Mountains, some in the Pacific Northwest, a few are in the Western deserts of Utah and Nevada, one is in England, and many are scattered throughout the Southern US. All are desperate for something beyond the ordinary lives that are given to them, and everyone is absolutely unforgettable. [Amazon.com]
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Wild Flights Poems
2000Renée Olander
First chapbook of poems written by Professor Renée Olander, ODU Vice President for Regional Higher Education Centers.
A gallery of books by faculty in the MFA Creative Writing Program, English Department, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University.
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