The Ground I Stand on is Not My Ground
- ISBN-10
- 0988241625
- ISBN-13
- 9780988241626
- Category
- American poetry
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015
- Publisher
- Drunken Boat Media
- Author
- Collier Nogues
Description
Poetry. Art. THE GROUND I STAND ON IS NOT MY GROUND, selected by Forrest Gander as the winner of Drunken Boat's 2014 poetry book contest, is a hybrid of poetry and digital art. The poems erase historical documents related to the development and aftermath of the Pacific War, especially on the island of Okinawa. Erased into poems, these texts become spare narratives of how individual soldiers' and civilians' daily lives were transformed by the war. Using QR codes, each poem links to an interactive version at the book's companion website, where readers can explore original documents ranging from government documents and political manifestos to travel narratives, blockbuster adventure fiction, and science writing. Taken together, the poems and their original texts tell a larger story about the ways we imagine war, and the ways language can be used to record, justify, memorialize, or resist it. "This is the best book of erasure poems since Srikanth Reddy's Voyager. Nogues carves critical observations into slow motion (erasure isolating and elongating time) so that we seem to see inside the body's gestures. The book is an intense meditation on war, riddled with aporia and drawing on many resources documentary, epistolary, and even rhyming lyric- to create an empathic and deeply affecting experience of contact with the devastation war brings and "with the pain about to come." Forrest Gander "Collier Nogues is nothing short of brilliant in this necessary book, which lights up a long shadow two big governments have cast on a miraculous island and an indigenous people. Nogues comprehends how any war is a continuum of the same hell, yet each experience is specific: the chronic trauma of surviving amid the dead, the way history makes a "war" a narrative but the participants (victims/survivors/casualties) experience it only in fragments. The speakers of these poems are visionary; they are "one of us." And if we can see that, we can see what Nogues has envisioned here, see how our world can change in the direction of mercy, human dignity, survival." Brenda Shaughnessy "Collier Nogues, who grew up on a U.S. military base in Okinawa, explores how war has shaped the island of her childhood. Taken together, these poems not only express a desire to erase violence, but they also attempt to map the topography of islands and nations, caves and embrasures, weapons and flags, grace and dread. Nogues is a brave poet who disassembles the official discourses of empire to articulate a dream for an island of peace." Craig Santos Perez"
Get the book
Similar books
-
The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery
By Lucy Maud MontgomeryThe poems in this collection by Lucy Maud Montgomery were written to reach the readers she thought of as "kindred spirits" - those thousands of people who then, as now, would be as deeply moved as she was by beauty in nature and in spirit.
-
Iron Rose: New York Poems
By Douglas Nicholas... lines that, like so many magicians, conjure a rabbit there for her pleasure Spark-charged Jim, he'd throw off nine new ideas a minute; most were wildly impractical or even silly but some, some were ingenious; he could shower sparks ...
-
The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
By Edgar Allan PoeAn anthology of short stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "Annabel Lee," and "The Raven."
-
Edgar Allan Poe: Short Stories, Poems, Novels
By Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe: Short Stories, Poems, Novels
-
Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe
By Edgar Allan PoePresents a collection of tales from Edgar Allan Poe in an illustrated format by prominent artists working in the fields of comics, book illustration, and fine arts.
-
The Book of Assassinations: Prose Poems
By Robert GibbonsSo today I board the later , slower Matthew J. Hughes to do just that , fetch the burgeoning language . At the moment , the sun at stern , David's latest postcard , a Tapies collage sent from Barcelona marking the page I was reading ...
-
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Fairy Poems
By Laura Ingalls WilderLaura Ingalls Wilder shares her vision of the fanciful, ethereal, and mischievous world of the "Little People" in this first-ever collection of fairy poems she wrote in 1915.
-
Complicated Grief
By Laura MullenAnd not the least of this book's disconcerting, but strangely salutary, powers is that, under its stimulus, you can't help starting back.
-
Selected Poems: in Five Sets
By Laura, Laura RidingSelected Poems: in Five Sets
-
The Complete Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884-1935: Together with Commentary and Notes
By Charlotte Perkins GilmanThis book also makes available a full index of poem titles to assist scholars, students, and critics in finding and contextualizing Gilman's poetry.