Mark Yakich

A new collection from a poet of "wily verve" whose work is "filled with more satire and jeopardy than anything going today" (Terrance Hayes) Mark Yakich's fifth collection of poetry is a dynamic and discerning journey of devotion and temptation in pursuit of the divine. Not trifling in ambiguity but diving headlong into it, Spiritual Exercises wrestles with popular gods as much as with personal ghosts. From autism to eroticism, from benediction to excommunication, and from grief to gratitude, this collection lays bare a full spectrum of emotional life, showing us how grace can be as playful as it is sincere.

Spiritual Exercises

"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"--

"A provocative and practical guide, written for students of creative writing as well as literary studies, to an art form that is both loved and feared"--

a survivor's guide

Poetry

Dr. Christopher Schaberg

Re-examining the strange and ordinary world of air travel, one flight at a time.

Airplane Reading

Mark Yakich is an original... In the unabashedly unwieldy title and in each poem, there are no borders drawn between the commonplace and the metaphysical. There are journeys, crossings, and departures—all evocative of the loneliness, alienation, and desire for identity with another (person or place), which, formalized, makes this work recognizable as art of a very high order.” —James Galvin, Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment of the Arts Fellow

Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide has earned high praise from students, teachers, and readers from around the globe for its playful sincerity and idiosyncratic humor and for its approach to a subject both loved and feared. Updated and expanded, including six new sections, the second edition probes a range of strategies for inspiring students and aspiring poets on the ways poetry relates to their own lives. These include the delights and pitfalls of individual meditation, the complications of identity and appropriation, and the uses and utility of poetry as a tool of social change. The second edition also includes a curated companion website for teachers, students, and aspiring poets that features poetry examples, writing prompts and exercises, and resources for publishing poetry.

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide

John Biguenet

Interviews from the Edge presents a selection of conversations, drawn from 50 years of the international journal New Orleans Review, that dive head-first into the most enduring aesthetic and social concerns of the last half century. From reflections on the making of literature and films to personal accounts of writing inside racial divides and working against capital punishment, the writers, poets, and activists featured in this book offer not only a fresh perspective on our present struggles but also perhaps a way through them-for writers and readers alike. I think it's frightfully important, and this is really much more difficult than it sounds, only to say what you absolutely believe.  Christopher Isherwood Most American writers probably do not think of their writing as a kind of activism. And it shouldn't have to be-I don't think we can impose that on writers-but it can be. I think for many writers, the ones I admire-it is.  Viet Thanh Nguyen Do you become a writer because you desire to become famous and make a lot of money? Or do you become a writer because there's something you discovered, this spark, this flash, that you want to share with other human beings knowing that they can enter into the words too?  Sister Helen Prejean The hardest part of developing a style is that you have to learn to trust your voice. If I thought of my style, I'd be crippled. Somebody else said to me a long time ago in France, 'Find out what you can do, and then don't do it.'  James Baldwin As I have grown older, I have come to see that the romantic notion of the outsider in love with death doesn't solve a thing. It only makes life worse. We have to find ways to create communities.  Valerie Martin

50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance

Interviews from the Edge

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.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When is the “beautiful game” at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What's right in front of fans that they never see? Football celebrates and scrutinizes the world's most popular sport-from top-tier professionals to children just learning the game. As an American who began playing football in the 1970s as it gained a foothold in the States, Mark Yakich reflects on his own experiences alongside the sport's social and political implications, its narrative and documentary depictions, and its linguistic idiosyncrasies. Illustrating how football can be at once absolutely vital and "only a game," this book will be surprising and insightful for the casual and diehard fan alike. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Football

An unconventional collection from a National Poetry Series award-winning poet, author of Spiritual Exercises Mark Yakich 's acclaimed debut collection, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, examined the blessing and curse of romantic love in its multiplicities. The poems in his new collection approach questions of suffering and atrocity (e.g., war, genocide, fallen soufflés) with discerning humor and unconventional comedy. These poems show how humor can be taken as seriously as straight-ahead solemnity and how we can re-envision solemnity in terms other than lamentation, protest, and memorial.

The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine

Introduction by Mark Yakich and John Biguenet -- Ernest J. Gaines -- Joseph Heller -- Christopher Isherwood -- Anaïs Nin -- Lina Wertmüller -- Bertrand Tavernier -- Eudora Welty -- James Tate -- Jorge Luis Borges -- Catharine Stimpson -- Carolyn Heilbrun -- Armando Valladares -- James Baldwin -- John Ashbery -- Valerie Martin -- Jack Gilbert -- Sheila Heti -- Susan Bernofsky -- Francine Prose -- Harold Jaffe -- Yuri Herrera -- Viet Thanh Nguyen -- Luisa Valenzuela -- Sister Helen Prejean.

Mark Yakich

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