{"title":"Melissa Kwasny","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"toward-the-open-field-book-melissa-kwasny-9780819566072","title":"Toward the Open Field","description":"The historical writings that helped shape our current understandings of poetry.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49602540634385,"sku":"GOR010799946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50179276407057,"sku":"CIN0819566071G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51836406333713,"sku":"CIN0819566071VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52850344591633,"sku":"CIN0819566071A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0819566071.jpg?v=1750947191"},{"product_id":"reading-novalis-in-montana-book-melissa-kwasny-9781571314291","title":"Reading Novalis in Montana","description":"Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772-1801) a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions--indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and more--inform daily life.  Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Reading Novalis in Montana stretches boundaries with a section of \"reading poems\"--poems in dialogue with romantic and modernist poets, including Ezra Pound, H.D., Novalis, Dickinson, as well as a sequence that is a twenty-first century take on \"The Wasteland,\" included with stunning lyric poems.  Using luxuriant syntax to string together conditional clauses, these poems throw the reader backward and forward within a line and a poem. Alternatively, repetition offers a commentary on meaning, chopping perception into fragments. Combined with a charming self-qualification that deliberately interrupts momentum, this work smartly ties the reader back down to earth. Throughout details of lived experience emerge--hiking through the Pacific Northwest, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship --and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49632133972241,"sku":"GOR003857987","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49773634879761,"sku":"CIN1571314296G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51038395203857,"sku":"NIN9781571314291","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52820559397137,"sku":"NLS9781571314291","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1571314296.jpg?v=1750894385"},{"product_id":"where-outside-the-body-is-the-soul-today-book-melissa-kwasny-9780295742441","title":"Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today","description":"Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven series—one of linked prose poems called “Another Letter to the Soul” and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history.  Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in “Another Letter to the Soul” point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49881900548369,"sku":"CIN0295742445G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346587128081,"sku":"CIN0295742445VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0295742445.jpg?v=1757415168"},{"product_id":"i-go-to-the-ruined-place-book-melissa-kwasny-9780980028973","title":"I Go to the Ruined Place","description":"\"When we made our call for submissions for an anthology of poems in defense of human rights, the allegations of torture were foremost in our minds. We knew people were outraged, saddened, profoundly moved and ashamed. But we also wanted to reach people who had suffered violations of their own rights from circumstances across the globe, or whose families had, or for whom preventing or healing these violations had become a life's work. We drafted our call loosely: We are increasingly witness to torture, terrorisms and other violations of human rights at unprecedented degrees. What do our instincts tell us and what is our response to these violations? What is our vision of a future wherein human rights are not only respected but expanded? What we received were both first hand accounts of violation-see prisoner Adrian English's \"Raped Man's Stream of Consciousness,\" or Farnoosh Moshiri's poem recounting the terror of giving birth in Iran, or Li-Young Lee's \"Self-Help for Fellow Refugees\"-and responses from people who feel struck personally by the blows enacted on others: To speak for, to speak as, and to speak against. We were surprised at the range of issues spoken to by the poets. While torture remained a critical topic, as well as issues at stake in the Iraq War, there were also poems that addressed immigrant rights, prisoners' rights, the Holocaust, the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam, Serbia, South America, Palestine and Israel. We received poems that spoke of suicide bombing, violence against women, the aftermath of 9\/11, and outlawing marriage for gay Americans.  \"We were also moved at the range of experience among the responders: homeless advocates, civil rights workers, clinical social workers, medics, the mentally ill, veterans, humanitarian aid workers, teachers, conscientious objectors, and, of course, many writers who work and fight daily for social justice in their communities. We are particularly proud of the number of Native American poets included in this anthology, something unusual in anthologies of this sort. It seemed to us impossible to collect a group of poems on human rights issues if we didn't acknowledge the far reaching and often appalling violations that have taken place in our own country, upon the first citizens of this land who belong to five-hundred-sixty-two federally recognized tribes who function as sovereign nations. It is the acknowledgement of this history, among others, that will allow us to move forward as a country with a clearer conscience, extending our hand to other nations and other peoples who continue to endure neglect and abuse.\"—Melissa Kwasny \u0026amp; M.L. Smoker","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50096625647889,"sku":"CIN0980028973G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0980028973.jpg?v=1761386197"},{"product_id":"pictograph-book-melissa-kwasny-9781571314628","title":"Pictograph","description":"\"If you would learn the earth as it really is,\" N. Scott Momaday writes, \"learn it through its sacred places.\" With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home. The poems in this collection emerge from these visits and capture the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that, \"we make a sign and we receive.\" Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating \"a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.\"","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50100786954513,"sku":"CIN1571314628G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037360455953,"sku":"NIN9781571314628","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52820821344529,"sku":"NLS9781571314628","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1571314628.jpg?v=1751055886"},{"product_id":"putting-on-the-dog-book-melissa-kwasny-9781595348647","title":"Putting on the Dog","description":"Explores the age-old relationship between humans and animals, providing fascinating details about the historic and current use of animals as clothing","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50202037846289,"sku":"CIN1595348646VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50423134847249,"sku":"CIN1595348646G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1595348646.jpg?v=1751245408"},{"product_id":"thistle-book-melissa-kwasny-9780976211419","title":"Thistle","description":"These thirty-seven poems are eccentric in the true meaning of the word off-centre. Their titles, bearing the names of weeds, flowers, herbs, trees, are merely points of departure. \"How hard can it be,\" the poet asks, \"to lie down in the green \/ mussed bed of the senses ... In clover.\" Whether it's clover or rue, aspen or moss, the reader is invited into that rumpled but rich bed.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50374135775505,"sku":"CIN0976211416G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0976211416.jpg?v=1778580132"},{"product_id":"nine-senses-book-melissa-kwasny-9781571314376","title":"The Nine Senses","description":"In this groundbreaking fourth collection comprised of exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers.  The questions that have informed much of Kwasny's previous work--how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?--find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal.  \"Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined it--as resolution of the real and the dream,\" Kwasny writes in the title poem.  Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50383195177233,"sku":"CIN1571314377G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037411508497,"sku":"NIN9781571314376","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52820562346257,"sku":"NLS9781571314376","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1571314377.jpg?v=1751276400"},{"product_id":"putting-on-the-dog-book-melissa-kwasny-9781595349705","title":"Putting on the Dog","description":"In Putting on the Dog, Melissa Kwasny explores the age-old relationship between humans and the animals that have provided us with our clothing: leather, wool, silk, feathers, pearls, and fur. From silkworms grown on plantations in Japan and mink farms off Denmark’s western coast to pearl beds in the Sea of Cortés, Kwasny offers firsthand accounts of traditions and manufacturing methods—aboriginal to modern—and descriptions of the marvel and miracle of the clothing itself. What emerges is a fresh look at the cultural history of fashion.  Kwasny travels the globe to visit both large-scale industrial manufacturers and community-based, often subsistence production by people who have spent their lives working with animals—farmers, ranchers, tanners, weavers, shepherds, and artisans. She examines historical rates of consumption and efforts to move toward sustainability, all while considering animal welfare, worker safety, environmental health, product accountability, and respect for indigenous knowledge and practice.  At its heart, Putting on the Dog demonstrates how what we choose to wear represents one of our most profound engagements with the natural world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50383854993681,"sku":"CIN1595349707G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51038761615633,"sku":"NIN9781595349705","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52453787500817,"sku":"NLS9781595349705","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1595349707.jpg?v=1751024051"},{"product_id":"cloud-path-book-melissa-kwasny-9781639550920","title":"The Cloud Path","description":"An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying.  At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny’s seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. “I have come here for their peace and instructions,” she writes, listening to the willows, the “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.”  What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature’s many lively colors—the “burnt orange” of foxes, “cedar \/ bark cast in the greenest impasto,” white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world’s harsher elements—a dark bog’s purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life’s constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. “Why not,” she asks, “believe it matters?  Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50434110259473,"sku":"CIN1639550925G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51043504423185,"sku":"NIN9781639550920","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52107208491281,"sku":"CIN1639550925VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52648081096977,"sku":"NLS9781639550920","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1639550925.jpg?v=1751343441"},{"product_id":"earth-recitals-book-melissa-kwasny-9780899241289","title":"Earth Recitals","description":"Essays on the life of the image and its role in visionary experience through a range of cultural practices focus primarily on poetry but include painting, sculpture, and song.  Earth Recitals engages with the image in the history of poetry, as well as with contemporary poets, philosophers, archaeologists, artists, and cultural critics.  It outlines the major tenets of Imagism and sketches the transformations the image underwent in modernism and surrealism. The book's central preoccupation is with questions of interiority and exteriority--the image's appearance as being and its subsequent reappearance in the mind--and introduces the writings of the renowned Sufi scholar Henry Corbin.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50492292595985,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50492294267153,"sku":"CIN089924128XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":51938020065553,"sku":"CIN089924128XLN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/089924128X.jpg?v=1778580132"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-melissa-kwasny.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}