English Literature

Now in its fourth edition, Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the exciting and diverse world of poetry. Jeffrey Wainwright's accessible introduction demystifies poetic forms and traditions, which can at first seem bewildering. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Dylan Thomas, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain pleasure from poetry. This comprehensive guide explores poetry's relationship to everyday language and introduces major genres and technical aspects. Each chapter proceeds through chronological examples from a wide range of English language poems. They cover all the major genres with informative studies of metre, rhyme, and stanza, showing how these features have developed through traditional to contemporary forms like rap. The book also features an exhaustive glossary to help imbed these technical terms and approaches. This clear and concise guide offers detailed insight into the nuts and bolts of poetry, as well as exploring its ability to inspire. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of poetry, whether as a reader, writer, or student.

A collection of playfully elucidating essays to help reluctant poetry readers become well-versed in verse Developed from Adam Sol's popular blog, How a Poem Moves is a collection of 35 short essays that walks readers through an array of contemporary poems. Sol is a dynamic teacher, and in these essays, he has captured the humor and engaging intelligence for which he is known in the classroom. With a breezy style, Sol delivers essays that are perfect for a quick read or to be grouped together as a curriculum. Though How a Poem Moves is not a textbook, it demonstrates poetry's range and pleasures through encounters with individual poems that span traditions, techniques, and ambitions. This illuminating book is for readers who are afraid they "don't get" poetry but who believe that, with a welcoming guide, they might conquer their fear and cultivate a new appreciation.

In Bait & Switch, Jim Johnstone—poet, editor, and erstwhile physiologist—turns his considerable analytic powers to Canadian poetry, presenting a series of essays and reviews exploring the state of Canadian poetry in the 21st century through the lens of a trained scientist. With characteristic empathy and a researcher’s eye, Johnstone explores a variety of topics, including the legacy of science poetry in Canada, the spark that gives rise to the pre-poem moment, and technology and its attendant opportunities for artistic collaboration. He also considers major works by both prominent and up-and-coming Canadian poets, from Christian Bök and Karen Solie to Nyla Matuk and Michael Prior, and takes a deep dive into career retrospectives by Don McKay, bill bissett, and Carmine Starnino. But Bait & Switch is far from a cold dissection of contemporary verse; it offers a look into Johnstone’s personal evolution as he opts for a writing life based on the ‘irresistible force’ that is poetry, and gives a behind-the-scenes look at his editorial experience mentoring and promoting Canadian authors.

This accessible writer's guide provides a helpful framework for creating poetry and navigates contemporary concerns and practices. Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

Part exploration of a key group of Black Canadian poets, part literary, cultural, and musical history, Soundin' Canaan demonstrates how music in Black Canadian poetry is not solely aesthetic, but a form of social, ethical, and political expression. Soundin' Canaan refers to the code name often used for Canada during the Black migration to Canada. The book analyzes the contributions of key Black Canadian poets, including their poetic styles and their performances. The book has several key objectives, including recuperating the collision of the historical and the Biblically derived figure of Canaan, the promised land of freedom and security for an African American population seeking to leave the shackles of slavery behind and the northern terminus of the underground railroad. Centering around the poetry of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Wayde Compton, and rapper K'naan, it delves into how these poets draw inspiration from African American and Afro-diasporic musical genres, such as blues, jazz, reggae and dub, hip-hop, and remix, to reshape the notions of identity and citizenship. Soundin' Canaan asks: what does Canadian citizenship sound like, especially when voiced by Black Canadian poets who embrace a fluid and multicultural form of citizenship that moves between local and global spaces, much like music does? Using a DJ Methodology, the author mixes in close readings of poetry, music, cultural and literary history, as well as various interviews with the poets. The book includes an accompanying soundtrack to further enhance the reading experience. Listening to the poets in this book--that is in listening closely to the poems, sounds, and musical samples they bring into the mix--constitutes "sonic citizenship." This co-performative act of reading, listening, and sounding serves as a reminder of how citizens inhabit and negotiate life in Canada beyond the formal legal framework of the nation-state.

Playful and serious, unforgiving and compassionate, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide offers an original take on a subject both loved and feared. In a series of provocative and inspiring propositions, the act of reading a poem is made new, and the act of writing one is made over. Questions of poetry's difficulty, pretension, and relevance are explored with insight and daring. In an age of new media and social networking, this handbook-cum-manifesto provides fresh reverence for one of our oldest forms of art.

Poetry: A Writers' Guide and Anthology is a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing poetry. The authors map out more than 25 key elements of poetry including image, lyric, point of view, metaphor, and movement and use these elements as starting points for discussion questions and writing prompts. The book guides the reader through a range of poetic modes including: - Elegy - Found poems - Nocturne - Ode - Protest poems - Ars Poetica - Lyric - Narrative Poetry also offers inspiring examples of contemporary poetry covering all the modes and elements discussed by the book, including poems by: Billy Collins, Sherman Alexie, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Natalie Diaz, Traci Brimhall, Terrance Hayes, Richard Blanco, Danez Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Mark Halliday, Eileen Myles, Mary Jo Bang, Tracy K. Smith, Ocean Vuong, and many others.

Founded in 2010, the Montreal International Poetry Prize has established itself as a major event in contemporary poetry. The 2024 anthology again listens for that vocal register capable of imagining justice and confessing desolation in tones at once private and resonant, the register that is the lyric. In forms recognizable and new, these poems speak their commentary and comment on their speech, plunging us into the sounds and self-reflections that distinguish poetic self-knowing as one of the oldest and highest arts. A door opens onto the unextinguished splendour of a lost mother’s life. An ice sculpture turns to vapour and back to ice again, like the poem on the page. A heart surgeon flies off into figurative language. A museum visitor sees herself in the glass of an archeological exhibit, in palindromic terms. A mind splits and sinks through trance-like repetition into the underworld in quest of a missing child. A dedicated team of professors and students at McGill University recruited the distinguished international jury to sift the entries to the 2024 competition, and from those thousands, these sixty-five poems were chosen for their meaning to the average reader. A.E. Stallings, Oxford Professor of Poetry, then judged the finalists, selecting the one poem -- included in this collection -- to take the 20,000 dollar prize. From Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and elsewhere, these lyrics voice a reality that you will recognize as strangely yours.

TMU AUTHOR.

2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY A collection inspired by Hoa's mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe, is verse meditation on Vietnam's diaspora. Hoa Nguyen's latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-"Fall-of-Saigon" and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.

Watch rupi kaur live now on Prime Video. "Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." - The New Republic #1 New York Times bestseller milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

With a sure voice, Groulx, an Anishnaabe writer, artistically weaves together the experiences of Indigenous peoples in settler Canada with those of the people of Palestine, revealing a shared understanding of colonial pasts and presents.