Poetry Collections by Gillian Conoley
Woman Speaking Inside Film Noir
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Some Gangster Pain
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Tall Stranger
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Beckon /
Lovers in the Used World /
Profane Halo
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Some Gangster Pain
By Gillian Conoley
Eunice is tired of pain, everyone
else's.
She wants some gangster pain,
to strut her thick ivories
in a collision of dreams, the
pajamas-to-work
dream, the magnolia siege dream.
What ya got there Eunice, say
Johnny and the boys.
Eunice lives behind the bus,
another fleeing place,
riot of exhaust. She doesn't
have much to say,
but she says it, hello.
When the boys talk
she feels the mole on her cheek
shift to the corner she took.
She sees them snap their fingers
to no dog. She knows
they wouldn't understand.
She knows her feet point
themselves forward
but she keeps walking backwards in
rain,
her heels too fast, or the rain
seeps
into trees, she can't tell. She
likes this street.
Johnny and the boys got on
jackets that twitch.
Eunice wears a lot of accessories.
The boys
paint a circle on the wall
the color of lips.
Source: Some Gangster Pain (1987) |
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* * * Gillian Conoley—the recipient of several Pushcart Prizes and
the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review—is Poet-in-Residence and Associate Professor at Sonoma State
University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt
magazine. Conoley is the author of four poetry
collections, including the highly praised Some Gangster
Pain and Tall Stranger.
Conoley's poetry has appeared in the American
Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, Ironwood, Zyzzyva,
Ploughshares, the Denver Quarterly, the Missouri Review and
other publications.
Her honors and awards include four Pushcart
Prize publications, the Academy of American Poets Award, a
fellowship from the Washington State Arts Commission, residency at
the MacDowell Colony and a grant from Northwest Institute for
Advanced Study.
Conoley's work has been anthologized in
"Best American Poetry," "Poets of the
Northwest," "The Carnegie-Mellon Anthology of
Poetry," "American Poetry Annual" and "Jazz
Poetry Anthology."
Conoley has taught literature and poetry at several
universities. She also has worked as a curator, a literary
editor and a professional journalist. The
American Book Review says of Conoley's poetry: "Even
above the powerfully inventive language and clear,
compressed style is a poetic vision that seems utterly
transforming. These are poems born of Flannery
O'Connor's short stories, with their oddball grace,
their undeniable redemption. Combined with Gillian
Conoley's dark humor are an eye for detail and a
sensibility that are mysteriously compelling. Her
characters discover the power of the transforming image
and in so doing create an inner life that is rich,
surprising, transcendent. It is this odd hopefulness,
this recourse to the imagination which transforms the
landscape of ordinary lives and longing into something
rare, mysterious, and dangerous that are Conoley's
special talent."
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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updated 7 January 2010
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