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31 products
David Williams
Far Sides of the Only World
Regular price $10.95 Save $-10.95
Fourth book published in the Carolina Wren Press Chapbook Poetry series.
Enid Shomer
All We Know of Pleasure
Regular price $17.95 Save $-17.95Here is the good stuff: poetry written by women that actually excites the thinking reader. This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers’ notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing?
This groundbreaking anthology includes some of our most powerful women writers—among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Glück. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes.
At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry—its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.
Jaki Shelton Green
Dead On Arrival
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95
Reissue of Jaki Shelton Green's acclaimed premier collection of poetry. Green's earlier works pulse with the intoxicating rhythms and fierce clarity of image that made her one of North Carolina's most popular poets. Here is an artist at turns angry and wickedly funny, demanding justice yet possessed of a refined grace.
Jaki Shelton Green
Conjure Blues
Regular price $12.95 Save $-12.95
I have not known your face as woman my first born/my first one/my new self I am learning to speak in whole sentences learning not to speak always in the mother tongue we are learning that we can be sisters that we can open the curtains together that we can each call morning something else
George Elliot Clarke
Gold Indigoes
Regular price $12.95 Save $-12.95
Number one in the series is Clarke’s Gold Indigoes. This lyric collection by the acclaimed Nova Scotian poet, playwright, and librettist traces the contours of relationship in lush yet startling francophilic tones.
Jaki Shelton Green
singing a tree into dance
Regular price $10.95 Save $-10.95
A special edition poetry chapbook in celebration of Jaki Shelton Green's receipt of the 2003 North Carolina Award for Literature. Contains 8 new poems, including "Lifting Veils" dated 9/11/2001, and the long poem entitled "bring me your breasts."
Joseph Donahue
In This Paradise
Regular price $10.95 Save $-10.95
Part of a chapbook sequence, In This Paradise: Terra Lucida XXI-XL is the fifth chapbook to be published by Carolina Wren Press.
Jaki Shelton Green
Breath of the Song
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95
A long-awaited compendium of selections from Green's previous books as well as many new poems, including her response to 9-11-01.
Ken Rumble
Key Bridge
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95
Key Bridge is a poem about race, sex, birth, and death set against the backdrop of Washington, D.C. Traveling through the city's present and past, its geography, its dream-world double, and its flora and fauna, Key Bridge examines the gap between Washington s day-to-day street-life and its status as a tourist spot and seat of the federal government. The city is presented as constantly shifting and evolving, a place that is impossible, finally, to pin down.
William Pitt Root
White Boots
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95
William Pitt Root's White Boots: New and Selected Poems of West [are] poems of tender awe and Rilkean praise erasing completely the divisions between man and beast, poems that invite the reader upon their back and carry him across buttes and vistas, arroyos and sheer cliff shimmy holes, poems whose music is wound so tight that the stitches and sinews disappear and all that remains is the pure imagination made manifest and majestic, the reader alone on the plain riding their shine. --Keith Flynn, Asheville Poetry Review
Clive Hicks-Jenkins
The Book of Ystwyth
Regular price $15.95 Save $-15.95
Stories of saints and animals, dark worlds of folk tradition, inanimate objects as actors on a stage, otherworldly landscapes--all these tumble from the drawings and paintings of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has been described by Simon Callow as 'one of the most individual and complete artists of our time.' Over the past dozen years, many writers have been prompted to give word to the unspoken narratives in Hicks-Jenkins' images. The Book of Ystwyth offers twenty-seven poems, many published here for the first time, placed alongside images that inspired them or reflect them. They are by six insightful writers: Three American, and three British; three women and three men. Experiencing these images and poems together will take readers on imaginative journeys of their own, reflecting on the rich themes running through the pairings. Originally published by Gray Mare Press in Aberystwyth, Wales, and in association with the National Library of Wales, the book is distributed in the USA by Carolina Wren Press.
L. Lamar Wilson
Sacrilegion
Regular price $24.95 Save $-24.95
“L. Lamar Wilson reinvents the memoir in verse with the tour de force of his Sacrilegion. With a keen eye that toggles between reverie and our hopes for the future, Wilson offers a salve for any soul that knows what it feels like to be counted out only to fight back toward resurrection. Few collections will move the spirit like this one; from its incantatory moments to those that speak in tongues, you believe, with every line, that this poet does ‘feel everything everywhere else/more than most.’”—A.VAN JORDAN
Coyla Barry
The Flying Days
Regular price $17.95 Save $-17.95
Coyla Barry focuses her eyes and ears on the natural world, her response rising up in language as precise as a veery's cry or the snort of an antelope. ...As the second volume in Carolina Wren's Laureate Series, THE FLYING DAYS is a book to cherish and celebrate. --Kathryn Stripling Byer, NC Poet Laureate Emerita
Charles Wyatt
Goldberg—Variations
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95
Walter Pater's famous maxim that all art aspires to the condition of music is given rapturous embodiment in Charles Wyatt s Goldberg-Variations. Ekphrastic poetry might be enjoying a surprising renaissance, but Wyatt is the inheritor of an even rarer practice, call it auresis, or aural mimesis, that is poetry which imitates the pitch, rhythm and dynamics of music. Listen closely, for enthralling the ear and stimulating the mind, Goldberg-Variations is a major concerto of a book, demonstrating the proximity of our art forms and the sheer universe of delight they can provoke within us. --Ravi Shankar, 2014 contest judge
Ravi Shankar
What Else Could It Be
Regular price $18.95 Save $-18.95
"[T]he two of you rubber-banding / even with the inevitable decay into something / else" might be an apt description of the poetic process of Ravi Shankar's exhilarating new book, What Else Could It Be: collaboration as a seamless Möbius strip between Shankar and one of a myriad of other contemporary poets, interlaced with ekphrastic poems in dialogue with visual art and dance. --Sharon Dolin
Sam Witt
Little Domesday Clock
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95
“Little Domesday Clock is a brilliant, sweeping book which, like a time machine, transports a reader back and forth across boundaries of nation and history and, in doing so, exposes and indicts the human agency behind disaster.” — Lynn Emanuel
Andrea Selch
Succory
Regular price $12.95 Save $-12.95
Number two in the Carolina Wren Press poetry Chapbook series is Succory by Durham resident Andrea Selch. Politics gets personal in Selch’s debut, a volume spanning decades of memory and continents of care. Selch’s lifestyle is subtly explored in ten lyric poems and two longer sequences, humor and pain are doled out in equal heaping doses.
Sandra Becker
Foreign Bodies
Regular price $10.95 Save $-10.95
"Like Emily Dickinson, or more recently Paul Celan, Sandra Becker is a poet of ultimate moments rendered with spare, exacting strokes. These poems bring to difficult matters a spiritually attuned music that finds, in the ironies of illness, a luminous compassion." –Joseph Donahue, Judge, 2003 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Chapbook Contest
Evie Shockley
a half-red sea
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95
In a half-red sea, Evie Shockley is 'dreaming the lives of the ancestors.' Navigating against prevailing currents, these poems sail on eddy and backflow, taking inspiration from knots and twists of American history and culture. Whether improvising between the lines of a slave narrative in 'henry bibb considers love and livery,' amplifying Lady Day's most devastating blues in 'you can say that again, billie,' or going freestyle with 'double bop for ntozake shange,' Shockley's imagination travels every which away. In 'a thousand words' and other reflections on contemporary events, Shockley's firm grounding in history adds weight and depth to her observations of the recent past and present. --Harryette Mullen, Advance Reader
Linda Tomol Pennisi
Suddenly, Fruit
Regular price $12.95 Save $-12.95
"The poems of Suddenly, Fruit are indeed ripe--ripe with sensuality, with language that is palpable. As if an old rift had been healed, dream, myth, flesh, spirit, history and consciousness are reunited and shown to be inseparable. Whether it's cooking dinner to NPR or watching a child's Christmas pageant, Linda Pennisi has a remarkable ability to see the mythic structures underpinning ordinary experience. And just as remarkably she hears how the ancient myths continue to speak. Her Persephone in modern dress reveals the dark currents tugging at our lives and shows us how experience, the dark and light of it, can-indeed, must-be embraced. These poems are womanly, wise, elegant, and profoundly generous in their affirmation of life, 'as if you had all along been praying for just this.'" --Betsy Sholl, Advance Reader
Shirlette Ammons
Matching Skin
Regular price $17.95 Save $-17.95
A second collection of poetry by Shirlette Ammons, poet and musician, which also includes the music CD "John Anonymous."
Tiffany Higgins
and Aeneas stares into her helmet
Regular price $18.95 Save $-18.95
This is Aeneas, once son of Venus, now a warfighting daughter of America deployed 'from Charlottesville to Fallujah,' straining in the thick of modern war's most perverse miasma. Tiffany Higgins' anachronistic and recast hero is one brilliantly charged nexus of exploitation and war; she is captured, tortured, and released as a sequence of heart-breaking lyrics. A stunning book. --Patrick Herron, author of The American Godwar Complex
Andrea Selch
Startling
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95
A collection of lyric and experimental poems and poem-series, including the Twentieth Century Valentines (STD poems), the Euphonics (especially "The Ballad of the Bee"), and, The Truth about Meat, and many other poems about cancer, birth, and love. The collection was runner-up in the 2003 Turning Point competition and was first published by Turning Point in 2004. It was reprinted by Cockeyed Press in 2009.
Yvonne C. Murphy
Aviaries
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95
Aviaries is a first collection of poetry determined to integrate the intellect with lyric intensity. Whether alighting on the public or the private--city streets, parks, apartments, nests, crowds, carnival rides, famous inventors and thinkers, family--these poems do not segregate emotion from thought, logic from intuition, abstractions from concretion. Birds are the central motif and while they often remain themselves, they also evoke the arts and transcendence (flight). The birds are hardy and fragile, persistent yet flighty. They are seekers that embody how humans yearn, pursue, and in spite of splendor along the way, never quite arrive.
Karen Leona Anderson
Punish honey
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95
No. 12 in the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, Karen Leona Anderson's work was selected for publication by Evie Shockley. This slim volume of poems showcases Anderson's careful eye for detail and astute ear for music.
Andrea Selch
Boy Returning Water to the Sea
Regular price $15.95 Save $-15.95
Inspired by the titles of works in William Kelly Fearing's retrospective catalog, these poems are fully engaged with the images themselves. Some poems are mere gestures, others lyrical, still others are open-ended. Arranged in chronological order, the poems offer a narrative on a life-scale--elements of the author's and of Fearing's life sneak onto the surface like bits of paper on a single collage--nevertheless, each poem remains a striking word-picture.
Nancy Simpson
Living Above the Frost Line
Regular price $16.95 Save $-16.95
Partly underwritten by a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, Living Above the Frost Line is the first in our Laureate Series which features manuscripts chosen by past or present North Carolina Poets Laureate.
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Inside the Money Machine
Regular price $15.95 Save $-15.95
Inside the Money Machine is poetry for the immense majority for those who work for a living, out of the house or at home, from the laundromat to the classroom, from blue-collar construction sites to white-collar desk jobs. These fresh, gritty and passionate poems are about the people who survive and resist inside the money machine of 21st-century capitalism: those who've looked for work and not found it, who've held a job but wanted more out of life, who believe a better world is still possible. Inspired by the poetic prose of The Communist Manifesto, Inside the Money Machine draws its power from Pratt s own working life and grass-roots organizing, and the struggles of neighbors, co-workers, political activists and loved ones. Pratt writes from inside the failing money machine: The problem is, the plan is not ours. In the tradition of the socially engaged poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes, Nazim Hikmet of Turkey and Pablo Neruda of Chile, these poems speak to the unfinished work of this moment in history, in a way that poetry seldom does. Inside the Money Machine urges: Let us follow ourselves into a present not ruled by the past.
Erica Hunt
Piece Logic
Regular price $14.95 Save $-14.95
"Core the questions, comma the nouns." The poems of Piece Logic buzz with a familiar terror as they expose the seams and piece the goods. As with Hunt's earlier books, Piece Logic eavesdrops with an unfailing ear on the sentences and corridors of power, but with a renewed sense of urgency: "The shoemaker's children have no shoes."
Piece Logic was designed by Dave Wofford of Horse & Buggy Press. The covers, recycled entirely from post-consumer waster content, were letterpress printed by hand from metal type, and the book was hand-sewn with linen thread.
Lee Ann Brown
Crowns of Charlotte
Regular price $15.95 Save $-15.95
Lee Ann Brown's ikebana sentences link material and maternal worlds to wreathe and doubly crown portraits of her home town with historical teeth marks. Take this auricular tour by a poet who knows what to do with skin texts we are too tight with. Here's a textural, textual matrix from a mother of invention. --Julie Patton
Dana Koster
Binary Stars
Regular price $17.95 Save $-17.95
In her debut collection Binary Stars, Dana Koster bravely scouts the fierce, alien, and surprisingly dangerous landscapes of family life and relationships. From the epigraph, ''The Moon Smells Like Burnt Gunpowder,'' we are situated in alien territory where even ''the molecules . . . [are] all wrong.'' From this sense of displacement, Koster writes--with spare and tender language--of the wild, fairy tale nature of the domestic everyday, where a father resembles a werewolf, where mothers perceive their infants as parasitic grotesques. In this extraordinary first book, lovers, mothers, children, and siblings are inextricably linked to one another--and just like binary stars, they threaten to destroy each other, as well. Koster's dark humor becomes the dark matter imbuing her poetic cosmos, which ''fills/the gaps/in the night/with seeming.''; dark matter is the medium by which ghosts, living and not, haunt this collection. --Stella Beratlis, author of Alkali Sink
