Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher"

Browsing by Author "The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 41

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A face out of clay: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Ameneyro, Brent, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
The poems in this manuscript explore identity through several lenses, including ancestry and personal experiences living in both the United States and Mexico. Ameneyro spent several formative years of his childhood living in Puebla, Mexico. His father is from Mexico City and his mother is from Wisconsin-this duality is the impetus for exploring identity in this collection. Because identity is a constantly evolving concept and is often difficult to pinpoint, the poems are sometimes grounded by concrete imagery and narrative, and other times they float off in lyric, subconscious dream scapes. And because identity is also tied to place, both criticism and celebration of the author's two countries appear throughout the collection. In other words, the personal inevitably becomes political.--Provided by publisher.
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A lamp brighter than foxfire: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Nicholson, Andrew S., author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
Opening the space between the ordinary and the visionary, the poems in A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire uncover an intimate relationship with the world around them, from Las Vegas to Italy to the American Midwest. From a lime glowing in an orchard to a miraculous childhood attempt at levitation, Andrew S. Nicholson's poems ground themselves in the commonplace and leap for the luminous. Central to this collection are poems that retell stories of Jacob from the Old Testament, relocated behind casinos, glimpsed in miniature on kitchen floors, and heard speaking in a moment of decay. Through these retellings, Nicholson examines the creation of self, family relationships, and a generative sense of the divine--provided by publisher.
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Annulments
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Savich, Zach, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
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Beautiful flesh: a body of essays
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Stephanie G'Schwind, editor; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
Selected from among the country's leading literary publications--Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Creative Nonfiction, the Georgia Review, the Normal School, Prairie Schooner, and others--Beautiful Flesh gathers nineteen works of creative nonfiction to build a multi-gender, multi-ethnic body out of essays, each concerning a different part of the body: belly, blood, bones, brain, ears, eyes, feet, hair, hands, heart, knees, lungs, nose, ovaries, pancreas, sinuses, skin, spine, teeth, and vas deferens. The title is drawn from Wendy Call's contribution, "Beautiful Flesh," a meditation on the pancreas: "gorgeously ugly, hideously beautiful: crimson globes embedded in a pinkish-tan oval, all nestled on a bed of cabbage-olive green, spun through with gossamer gold." Other essays include Dinty W. Moore's "The Aquatic Ape," an exploration of the curious design and necessity of sinuses; Katherine E. Standefer's "Shock to the Heart, Or: A Primer on the Practical Applications of Electricity," a modular essay on the author's internal cardiac defibrillator and the nature of electricity; Matt Roberts's "Vasectomy Instruction No. 7," which considers the various reasons for and implications of surgically severing and sealing the vas deferens; Lupe Linares's "A Living Structure," concerning teeth and the "small mistakes that accumulate over time and add up to a loss that we can never forget"; and Peggy Shinner's "Elective," which examines the author's own experience with rhinoplasty and cultural considerations of the "Jewish nose." Echoing the myriad shapes, sizes, abilities, and types of the human body, these essays showcase the many forms of the genre--provided by publisher.
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Blue heron: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Robinson, Elizabeth, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
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Brenda is in the room & other poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2007) Teicher, Craig Morgan, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
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Dears, beloveds: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Phan, Kevin, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
The prose poetry in Kevin Phan's first collection, Dears, Beloveds, offers a fine-grained meditation on grief-personal, familial, ecological, and political. Informed by the author's engagement with Buddhism & mindfulness, the poems address looming absences: in our vanishing earth, the scraps of a haunting voicemail, or waiting at hospice with little to do. In these pages, the poet fights his way out of isolation, to establish filigrees of connectedness with himself, other humans, and the natural world. Whether meditating on the bodily loss of his cancer-stricken mother, the Black Lives Matter movement, or a shadow falling from a speck of dust in the kitchen, these lines are notable for their crisp and surprising movements, lucid imagery, aching tenderness, & humanity. Dears, Beloveds reminds us of the ironies, beauty, and complexity of our time on earth, as beings in time. Where we hurt. Where we heal each other.--Provided by publisher.
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Escape velocity: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Arning, Bonnie, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
From the moment of a marriage's heated inception to its period of luminous crowding and onward into distance and darkness, Bonnie Arning's Escape Velocity asks if it's possible to exist outside the only universe we've ever known. In modes both lyric and narrative, we are given a peephole into the height and decline of a marriage that begins beneath the moving lights of Las Vegas, Nevada, and traverses the devastating terrain of gambling problems, miscarriage, infidelity, and violence. Arning gives voice to divergent aspects of love and violence through her use of math problems, erasures, dictionary entries, structured stanzas, and sprawling free verse. This multiplicity of forms comes together to explore everything from pop-culture references of domestic violence to cultural notions of victims and victimhood. However dark, collectively these poems tell a love story--an acceptance of our capability to love those who hurt us, but also the love-of-self required to slowly and steadily reach the velocity to be everleaving." In the tradition of Eavan Boland and Louise Glück, Arning wrestles down and examines the terrible without flinching. We journey with her, engrossed by each difficult truth: a precipice near which we are both terrified to stand and transfixed by its unnerving insistence on beauty.--Provided by publisher.
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Exit theater
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Lala, Mike, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
Selected by Tyrone Williams for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Exit Theater casts classical elegy, with dazzling formal innovation, into a staggering work of contemporary, political polyphony. Through monologues, performance scripts, and poems of exquisite prosody, Mike Lala examines the human figure--as subject and object, enemy and ally--in the context of a progressively de-figured and hostile world. Catullus, Shakespeare, Cy Twombly, and Lydia Delectorskaya echo across engagements with Israeli generals, accused terrorists, State Department employees, nuclear scientists, Saturday Night Live actors, war criminals, malware, and a host of mythic, literary, and half-extant spectral characters. Amid the cacophony, Lala implicates every actor, including himself, in a web of shared culpability vis-a-vis consumerism, representation, speaking, writing, and making art against the backdrop of the endless, open wars of a post-Cold War, post-2001 era. Exit Theater is a debut of and against its time--a book about war, art, and what it means to make art in a time of war.
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Family system
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Christian, Jack, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
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Furthest ecology: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Fagin, Adam, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
Furthest Ecology takes up the life and labor of Abbott Thayer, the prickly, irrepressible American painter and naturalist nicknamed "the father of camouflage." In 1896, Thayer discovered countershading, also known as "Thayer's Law," the theory of animal coloration often credited for laying the groundwork for military camouflage in World War I. Fagin's poetry follows Thayer through "pure leafy space" ringing with "hypertelic / rhythms of a redpoll," examining in lush, panoramic detail "the clairvoyance of the artist's attention." But this idyllic portrait unravels as Thayer's story proceeds. Grieving the death of his first wife and, later, cutting a frenzied path through wartime Europe, Thayer encounters darker forces, within and without. With spare beauty and sharp-edged syntax, Fagin conjures the painter's world: Loss, despair, obsession, ecstasy, and the aesthetic sublime. Furthest Ecology is a vivid and powerful debut that will haunt readers with its singular vision of artistic pursuit.--Provided by publisher.
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House of sugar, house of stone: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Pérez, Emily, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
These poems are suggested by themes and characters found in Grimm's Fairy Tales.
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Human is to wander: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Lürssen, Adrian, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
If we are always at war, is all poetry then war poetry? Adrian Lürssen's Human Is to wander is a book of dislocation, migration, and witness at a time of war-but whose war, fought where, and at what costs to whom? Born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa, Lürssen migrated to the U.S. as a teen in order to avoid military service at a time when the country's authoritarian regime engaged in a protracted, largely unknown war in Angola. Years later, as a father of young children in his adopted country, echoes of everything his family thought they had left behind has returned: endless bloody conflicts on the horizon; an alarming rise of authoritarianism and nationalistic fervor; pervasive racism, inequality, and daily violence in a country whose mythic promise was once held as freedom, equality, opportunity. In Human Is to wander, Lürssen explores these echoes of his personal history within a landscape that is familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Neither the brutally oppressive South Africa of his childhood nor the precarious United States of today, Lürssen's landscape emerges in the broken rhyme between "troop" and "troupe" where "our captions / are picture less" and "the plan to explain is absolute, but only an entrance." His is an inner landscape as song no longer sung in a mother tongue, in which the human cost of war, climate crisis, and forced migration is "all part of the explanation." Lürssen uses collage, constrained cut-up, Oulipean procedures, abecedarian, and other generative play to allow poems to emerge that respond to the turmoil and dislocation of this violent century, attempting to witness if not understand his-and our-place in it.--Provided by publisher.
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Hungry moon: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Goodman, Henrietta, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
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Instead of dying: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Haldeman, Lauren, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
Invoking spiders and senators, physicists and aliens, Lauren Haldeman's second book, Instead of Dying, decodes the world of death with a powerful mix of humor, epiphany, and agonizing grief. In the spirit of Calvino's Invisible Cities, these poems compulsively imagine alternate realities for a lost sibling ("Instead of dying, they inject you with sunlight & you live" or "Instead of dying, you join a dog-sledding team in Quebec"), relentlessly recording the unlived possibilities that blossom from the purgative magical thinking of mourning. Whether she is channeling Google Maps Street View to visit a scene of murder ("Because / a picture of this place is / also a picture of you"), or investigating the origins of consciousness ("Yes, alien / life-forms exist / they are your thoughts"), Haldeman wrenches verse into new sublime forms, attempting to both translate the human experience as well as encrypt it, inviting readers into realms where we hover, plunge, rise again, and ascend.--Provided by publisher.
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Intimacy: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Imbriglio, Catherine, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
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&luckier: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Johnson, Christopher J., author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
In his first collection of poems, &luckier, Christopher J Johnson explores the depths to which we can know our most intimate friends, habits, and--even more so--selves. From a mosaic of coffee cups, dinner engagements, razors, walks around his city, and the wider realm of nature, the poet continually asks to what degree our lives can be understood, our joys engaged with, and our sorrows mitigated. In a voice that is at once contemporary and yet almost primal, these poems seek an affinity with the natural world, the passing of history, and the deepness and breadth of ancestry; they do not question the mystery of life, but ask rather how we have become separated from and might return to a more aware place within the frame of it. These are poems rich with metaphor and music, but also direct in their voice. Johnson exhibits a poetic tradition that--rather than employing academic allusions and direct personal statements--remains elusive in its use of the poetic "I." The reader is never certain if they are reading about the poet, their friends, or themselves--supplied by publisher.
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Magnifier: poems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Krieg, Brandon, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
A magnifier praises what's larger and a magnifier concentrates poisons. Brandon Krieg's Magnifier is a book of spirits invoked by destroyers. It trains its gaze on the deep dependencies we are urged daily to hide from ourselves and interrogates the ways we insulate ourselves from the environmental and social degradations we perpetrate, often at many removes. Magnifier is a book of systems of our collective making that have taken on a life of their own, which we pretend to control. It is a book mourning Romanticism's naiveté, even as it cannot help but engage in a search for meanings not commercial or ideological in the more-than-human world. And yet, the poems in Magnifier refuse to let slip from their focus the human everywhere, or to retreat into a mystifying "wilderness." If a maple seed is to astonish, it must do so in the neighborhood of a reactor. Formally various, balanced on the edge of order and chaos, the poems in Magnifier cry out for "something more" from the "nothing but" even as they zero in on the damage we have done--provided by publisher.
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Man in the moon: essays on fathers & fatherhood
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Stephanie G'Schwind, editor; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
Selected from the country's leading literary journals and publications-Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, and others-Man in the Moon brings together essays in which sons, daughters, and fathers explore the elusive nature of this intimate relationship and find unique ways to frame and understand it: through astronomy, arachnology, storytelling, map-reading, television, puzzles, DNA, and so on. In the collection's title essay, Bill Capossere considers the inextricable link between his love of astronomy and memories of his father: "The man in the moon is no stranger to me," he writes. "I have seen his face before, and it is my father's, and his father's, and my own." Other essays include Dinty Moore's "Son of Mr. Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers," in which Moore lays out an alphabetic investigation of fathers from popular culture-Ward Cleaver, Jim Anderson, Ozzie Nelson-while ruminating on his own absent father and hesitation to become a father himself. In "Plot Variations," Robin Black attempts to understand, through the lens of teaching fiction to creative writing students, her inability to attend her father's funeral. Deborah Thompson tries to reconcile her pride in her father's pioneering research in plastics and her concerns about their toxic environmental consequences in "When the Future Was Plastic." At turns painfully familiar, comic, and heartbreaking, the essays in this collection also deliver moments of searing beauty and hard-earned wisdom.--Provided by publisher.
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Manifest west: transitions and transformations
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Todd, Mark, author; The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher
Volume 7, Manifest West Series, Western Press Books What changes, alters, undergoes renewal or metamorphosis in the West? The space shared and sparred-over in urban Oregon versus remote Colorado casts doubt on the concept of a true continuity to the west. Where and when do those frontiers, borders, or alterations in course occur? Each watershed and microclimate is a slight shift from the next, each city center and community hall a locus of both change and tradition, and the emotional landscapes can be as dramatic or serene as those on the map. Language can do some of the work of capturing that flux: tracking transition and transformation to get at the heart of a life lived. The poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction essays collected here raise as many questions as they answer about that often fraught, always exciting liminal space between the proverbial here and there, the now and now again. Manifest West is Western Press Books' literary anthology series. The press, affiliated with Western State Colorado University, produces one anthology annually and focuses on Western regional writing.