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Scroll for details on our Poetry Month 2021 Virtual Book Display.
All selections available online through JumpStart.
Finna: Poems by Nate MarshallThese poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America's vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.
A Brief History of Fruit: Poems by Kimberly Quiogue AndrewsIn Kimberly Quiogue Andrews's award-winning full-length debut, A Brief History of Fruit, we are shuttled between the United States and the Philippines in the search for a sense of geographical and racial belonging. Driven by a restless need to interrogate the familial, environmental, and political forces that shape the self, these poems are both sensual and cerebral.
Owed by Joshua BennettBennett's new collection, Owed, is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care.
Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline GumbsIn these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity.
Ledger by Jane HirshfieldJane Hirshfield’s urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives’ dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees.
Entering Sappho by Sarah DowlingAn abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement. Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible.
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John MurilloJohn Murillo’s second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation.
Our Bearings: Poems by Molly McGlennenOur Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements--earth, air, water, and fire-- the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Throughout the collection, McGlennen weaves the natural elements of Minnesota with rich historical commentary and current images of urban Native life.
We Inherit What the Fires Left: Poems by William EvansIn We Inherit What the Fires Left, award-winning poet William Evans embarks on a powerful new collection that explores the lived experience of race in the American suburbs and what dreams and injuries are passed from generation to generation. Fall under the spell of Evans's boldly intimate, wise, and emotionally candid voice in these urgent, electrifying poems.
For the Ride by Alice NotleyAlice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work.
Just In Digital Book Display - April
Just In Digital Resources
This display includes newly acquired e-books and films, all accessible online through JumpStart.
The Sixties in the News : How an Era Unfolded in American Newspapers, 1959-1973 by William J. RyczekThe 1960s were one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Included in this book are examinations of newspaper articles from 1959 to 1973, to which the author provides background and often an epilogue showing what happened to some of the dramatic players. The subjects of sex, drugs, rock and roll, marriage, politics, entertainment, and more are discussed in both a serious and humorous vein, with the perspective of more than 50 years. For those who lived through the 1960s, this book will bring back memories. For those too young to remember the era, this is an opportunity to learn more about why parents are the way they are.
Traveling Black : A Story of Race and Resistance by Mia BayWhy have white supremacists and Black activists been so focused on Black mobility? From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought for over a century to move freely around the United States. Curious as to why so many cases contesting the doctrine of “separate but equal” involved trains and buses, Mia Bay went back to the sources with some basic questions: How did travel segregation begin? Why were so many of those who challenged it in court women? How did it move from one form of transport to another, and what was it like to be caught up in this web of contradictory rules?
Star Wars : The Triumph of Nerd Culture by Josef BensonStar Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture engagingly reveals how the most popular film franchise of all time sprang from the mind of a deeply insecure nerd, who then inspired and betrayed a generation of fans. In Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture, Josef Benson offers an unauthorized and provocative expose of the most popular film franchise of all time.
A Recipe for Daphne : A Novel by Nektaria AnastasiadouAn American-born traveler to one of Istanbul’s oldest communities receives an unexpected welcome in this heart-warming and romantic debut Fanis is at the center of a dwindling yet stubbornly proud community of Rum, Greek Orthodox Christians, who have lived in Istanbul for centuries. When Daphne, the American-born niece of an old friend, arrives in the city in search of her roots, she is met with a hearty welcome.
Reading Swift's Poetry by Daniel Cook. Over a long career, from the early 1690s to the late 1730s, Jonathan Swift thrived on a creative tension between original poetry-making and the filching of familiar material from the poetic archive. The most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years, Reading Swift's Poetry offers detailed readings of dozens of major poems, as well as neglected and recently recovered pieces. This book reaffirms Swift's prominence in competing literary traditions as diverse as the pastoral and the political, the metaphysical and the satirical, and demonstrates the persistence of unlikely literary tropes across his multifaceted career. Daniel Cook also considers the audacious ways in which Swift engages with Juvenal's satires, Horace's epistles, Milton's epics, Cowley's odes, and an astonishing array of other canonical and forgotten writers.
Film - On Her Shoulders by Oscilloscope PicturesNadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi genocide and ISIS sexual slavery survivor, is determined to tell her story. As her journey leads down paths of advocacy and fame, she becomes the voice of her people and their best hope to spur the world to action.
Film - Black Art: In The Absence Of Light by HBOAt the heart of this feature documentary is the groundbreaking “Two Centuries of Black American Art” exhibition curated by the late African American artist and scholar David Driskell in 1976. Held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this pioneering exhibit featured more than 200 works of art by 63 artists and cemented the essential contributions of Black artists in America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibit would eventually travel to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Brooklyn Museum. The film shines a light on the exhibition’s extraordinary impact on generations of African American artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-century art world.
Film - NOVA: The Planets by PBSIn this five-part series, NOVA explores the awesome beauty of The Planets. With special effects and extraordinary footage captured by orbiters, landers and rovers, you'll get up-close look at Saturn's 45,000-mile-wide rings, Mars' towering ancient waterfalls, and Neptune's supersonic winds. Scientists share the inside story of the missions that revealed everything from methane lakes on a distant moon to the mysterious unfrozen sea in Pluto's heart. Along the way, NOVA reveals how each of these spectacular worlds has shaped our own planet: Earth.
MLK Anniversary Book Display
Digital Book Exhibit:
Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Visit to Dickinson
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr., Clayborne CarsonAccording to Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom, his memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, is “the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth”.
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr by Martin Luther King, Jr., Clayborne CarsonThis history-making autobiography is Martin Luther King: the mild-mannered, inquisitive child and student who chafed under and eventually rebelled against segregation; the dedicated young minister who continually questioned the depths of his faith and the limits of his wisdom; the loving husband and father who sought to balance his family's needs with those of a growing, nationwide movement; and the reflective, world-famous leader who was fired by a vision of equality for people everywhere.
To Shape a New World : Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr by Tommie Shelby, Brandon TerryShelby and Terry write that the marginalization of King's ideas reflects a romantic, consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative. Celebrated authors join in critical engagement with King's understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice.
King and the Other America : The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality by Sylvie LaurentIn 1967, King envisioned and designed the Poor People's Campaign, an interracial effort that was carried out after his death. This campaign brought together impoverished Americans of all races to demand better wages, better jobs, better homes, and better education. Laurent explores this overlooked and obscured episode of the late civil rights movement, deepening our understanding of King's commitment to social justice and also of the long-term trajectory of the civil rights movement.