-- "Of Dark Love:1"
Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation by
Looking at contrast and similarity between the above three religions and their influence in South Africa, the central question in this book looks to the future. It asks whether it is possible to enter a new era in religious history without losing cultural tradition in the face of rapid social change. In juxtaposing these religions, the author finds points of contact between views that, at first glance, seem to be opposites.
Canto Hondo / Deep Song by
Canto hondo / Deep Song honors the Andalusian deep lyric, or canto hondo, poetry of famed Spanish writer Federico García Lorca through rich and expressive poems. Francisco X. Alarcón deftly places Spanish and English side-by-side in this bilingual collection that is a modern meditation on love, self, loss, and universal truths. In this new collection, Alarcón creates poetry with roots in Gypsy songs clapped out in the distinctively short rhythms of flamenco music. Each page lifts the heart and stirs the soul by delving deep into the struggle for self and sexual identity. Canto hondo / Deep Song includes 106 poems divided into four sections that articulate struggle, otherness, and the meaning of the poetic landscape. Like Lorca, Alarcón seeks out the fault lines where the lyric and the political bleed productively and proactively into one another. An important voice in Chicano and GLBT poetry, Alarcón writes with a complex, emotionally powerful style that is accessible to students and all lovers of poetry and poetic traditions.
What's gone can be a window
a circle in the eye of the sun.
What's gone can be a window
a circle, well, in the eye of the sun.
Take the circle from the world, girl,
you find the light have gone.
These is old blues
and I sing em like any woman do.
These the old blues
and I sing em, sing em, sing em. Just like any woman do
My life ain't done yet.
Naw. My song ain't through.
-- "Any Woman's Blues," 1975
The Peacock Poems by
Sherley Anne Williams first book of honest poetry The Peacock Poems, Sherley Anne Williams' first book of poetry, was nominated for a National Book Award. A former senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of Ghana and visiting professor at the University of Southern California and Cornell University, Williams is professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego. She had received an Emmy Award for a television performance of her poetry. She is advisory editor of Callaloo and Langston Hughes Review. Williams was graduated from California State University (B.A. 1966) and Brown University (M.A. 1972). Her home is in San Diego.
When you say "The Valley" in Los Angeles, most people assume that you mean the San Fernando Valley ... but make no mistake: we are talking not about the valley of the sound stages and the ranchettes but about the real valley, the Central Valley, the fifty thousand square miles drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and further irrigated by a complex network of sloughs, cutoffs, ditches, and the Delta-Mendota and Friant-Kern Canals.
-- Slouching Toward Bethlehem, 1968
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by
The "dazzling" and essential portrayal of 1960s America from the author of South and West and The Year of Magical Thinking (The New York Times). Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature's most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic. In twenty razor-sharp essays that redefined the art of journalism, National Book Award-winning author Joan Didion reports on a society gripped by a deep generational divide, from the "misplaced children" dropping acid in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to Hollywood legend John Wayne filming his first picture after a bout with cancer. She paints indelible portraits of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and folk singer Joan Baez, "a personality before she was entirely a person," and takes readers on eye-opening journeys to Death Valley, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, "the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements." First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been heralded by the New York Times Book Review as "a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country" and named to Time magazine's list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books. It is the definitive account of a terrifying and transformative decade in American history whose discordant reverberations continue to sound a half-century later.
We planted pomegranate trees. They were of the finest quality and very expensive. Altogether we planted about seven hundred of them, and I myself planted a hundred, while my uncle planted eight or nine. We had a twenty-acre orchard of pomegranate trees over in the middle of the dry desert, and my uncle was crazy about it.
-- "The Pomegranate Trees," in My Name is Aram, 1940
My Name Is Aram by 
Human Comedy by
A novel of an American family in wartime.
How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology by
Hmong history and culture can be found in the form of oral stories, oral poetry, textile art, and music but there is no written account of Hmong life, by a Hmong hand, passed down through the centuries. As an undergraduate, Burlee Vang experienced this void when he received valuable advice from his English professor: "Write about your people. That story has not been told. If you don't, who will?" How Do I Begin? is the struggle to preserve on paper the Hmong American experience. In this anthology, readers will find elaborate soul-calling ceremonies, a woman questioning the seeming tyranny of her parents and future in-laws, the temptation of gangs and drugs, and the shame and embarrassment of being different in a culture that obsessively values homogeneity. Some pieces revisit the ghosts of war. Others lament the loss of a country. Many offer glimpses into intergenerational tensions exacerbated by the differences in Hmong and American culture. How Do I Begin? signifies a turning point for the Hmong community, a group of people who have persevered through war, persecution, and exile. Transcending ethnic and geographic boundaries, it poignantly speaks of survival instead of defeat.
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