Anya Achtenberg

Tervetuloa Pohjoismaiden suurimpaan verkkokirjakauppaan! Adlibris kannattaa sananvapautta, ja haluamme edistää kirjallisuuden ja tiedon saatavuutta.

This early collection of Achtenberg's poetry treats the intersection of the inner and the outer life through issues of social justice that remain crucial, and the ways history and its traumas sit in us. Her themes include women's rights, poverty, war, racism, and sexual abuse. Her vision of concern spans the world, from her own inner city neighborhoods to the wider world, anywhere people are oppressed. "I can't tell you how wonderful and naked these poems are and a rare thing for a woman to be able to give it. What you are writing is not just something for this day you are wringing ringing out a cry you are privy to a great cry out a wonderful vision of a woman's agony. You have a witch's terrible straight look and you must go on with this vision . . . to show the utter depravity and cruelty of the oppressors, amidst screams of destruction, the past and future hiroshimas. This is the poetry of our resurrection. For the blood, for the healing. For love." -- Meridel Le Sueur (excerpts from letters to the author) "I didn't know how much I needed this book until I read it. And I didn't know how much I'd been longing for a northamerican poetry that speaks with passion and authority of both the inner and outer life, as well as the point where they intersect; that place that is 'political' understood in its most fierce and fearful, sad and triumphant sense. Achtenberg's eye for detail is accurate and often startling, both compassionate and ironic; the rhythms of her language are resonant and complex beyond what we have come to expect from northamerican poetry. Anya Achtenberg's poetry gives both pleasure and courage." -- Jim Moore, author of Invisible Strings ANYA ACHTENBERG is an award-winning author of the novel Blue Earth, and novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl (both with Modern History Press); and poetry books, The Stone of Language (West End Press 2004; MHP 2020); and I Know What the Small Girl Knew (Holy Cow Press; MHP 2020). Her fiction and poetry have received numerous prizes and distinctions, and been published in numerous literary journals, including Harvard Review; Malpaís Review; Gargoyle; Tupelo Quarterly; Hinchas de poesía; Poet Lore; and many more. Learn more at TheDisobedientWriter.comFrom Modern HIstory Press www. ModernHistoryPress.com

Blue Earth is a compelling novel of Minnesota, a land that guards its secrets. Carver Heinz loses both farm and family in the farm crisis of the 1980s. Displaced into urban Minneapolis, he becomes obsessed with Angie, a beautiful child he rescues from a tornado in an encounter he insists they keep silent. Her close friendship with a Dakota Indian boy fuels Carver's rage and unleashes a series of events that reveal the haunting power of each character's past and of their shared histories, especially the 1862 Dakota Conflict and public hanging of 38 Dakota--the largest mass execution in U. S. history. "We... see our own lives reflected in Blue Earth's dark mirror, even as we learn a tragic history kept from us by those who would forever erase our origins... This is a brilliant novel by one of our truly intuitive and accomplished writers" --Margaret Randall, author of Ruins "Achtenberg's passionate, brilliantly crafted language, combined with her profound ethical imagination, makes Blue Earth one of the most important books to appear at this moment in our history." --Demetria Martinez, author of Mother Tongue "Achtenberg creates morally complex and culturally diverse characters whose lives are affected by loss, poverty, disease, and war, but whose ultimately redemptive encounters with one another take Blue Earth far beyond its Midwester setting." --Martha Collins, author of Blue Front "In the great tradition of Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner, Anya Achtenberg writes of the violence, past and present, that shapes the people of the vast American Midwest. Deep and searing, Blue Earth is perhaps one of the best novels of the past decade." --Kathleen Spivack, author of With Robert Lowell and His Circle Learn more at www. AnyaAchtenberg.com From the Reflections of History Series at Modern History Press www. ModernHistoryPress.com

Following the troubled course of the last decade, these poems move from the stories of individual lives to the events that have entered our global consciousness. They explore the world of work, from circuses to wedding ring factories to classrooms; and the world of war, from the agonies of Israel/Palestine to the Bosnian war to New York of 9/11. They examine the need for flight and the recovery of ancestral knowledge. While they rage against injustice, they also search for healing. Above all they are songs of the people's struggle. In the words of Luis Francia of the Village Voice, ""Achtenberg is a poet of lyrical intensity...interested in detail for the wealth of revelation and music it will yield up."" Prior to publication, the manuscript won recognition as a finalist in five competitions: the Philip Levine Poetry Contest, the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, the May Swenson Award from Utah State University Press, Cleveland State University's Poetry Center Prize, and the Alice James Books awards.