Items related to Sign & Breath

9798990767812: Sign & Breath
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798990767812
Publisher: Etruscan Press, 2025

Synopsis

Sign & Breath is a new critical anthology that takes a different approach to exploring these questions: What is poetry? What defines voice? Featuring a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre – prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song – across diverse traditions. 


Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book features poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. Readers are introduced to a text followed by a discussion with the author about creating the piece, ties to creative lineage, and the definition of voice through their practice. 


 This anthology contributes to the dialogue among genres which will reframe the understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective on poetry while two questions remain: Do we have a clearer understanding of what defines poetry? Do we have a clearer understanding of voice?

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About the Authors

Arthur Sze is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. He has published eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award and Sight Lines (2019), which received the National Book Award for Poetry. His latest book is The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2024).



Shanta Lee is an award-winning artist, writer across genres, author, and public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that has been widely featured. Winner of the Abel Meeropol Social Justice award and a 2024 National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow (New England) , “Hallowed Hunted Body” is included in, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The...(Harbor Editions, 2024).  Her multimedia exhibition, Dark Goddess, which features her short film, interviews, and photography, and other items has been on view at the Fleming Museum of Art, the Southern Vermont Arts Center, and the Bennington Museum.  She has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. Lee, author of several collections and regular contributor to Ms. Magazine and Art New England. Shanta currently teaches poetry at Wilkes University. To learn more, please visit www.shantalee.com

Philip Brady’s newest book is The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics (Broadstone, 2021). He is the author of two essay collections, Phantom Signs and By Heart from the University of Tennessee Press; a book-length poem, To Banquet with the Ethiopians, a memoir, To Prove My Blood, and three previous books of poetry. He has edited a critical book on James Joyce and two anthologies of contemporary poetry.  

Brady’s work has received the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; a ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal; an Ohioana Poetry Award; the Ohio Governor’s Award; six Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council; and Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State. An essay earned Notable recognition in Best American Essays. He has held residencies at Yaddo, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and the Soros Centre for the Arts in the Czech Republic. 

Brady has taught at University College Cork, on Semester at Sea, at the University of Ibadan, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the University of Lubumbashi in the Congo. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Youngstown State University, where he founded the YSU Poetry Center and co-founded the NEOMFA. Currently, he is Executive Director of Etruscan Press and serves on the MFA faculty of Wilkes University. For more information please visit www.philipbrady.com


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Shark River Bridge” by Michael Waters 


That’s where I’ll jump some wintry predawn 

Once dementia has commenced, before it seeps 

Deeper into my brain & swerves me 

From my purpose, protects me from self-harm, 

Makes my death dependent 

Upon those whose love will stay their hand. 

I’ll wear my black woolen overcoat, its pockets

Jangling with silverware, & wash down 

With a tumblerful of vodka 

The long-amassed tablets of Ambien 

Before leaping toward oblivion. 

Watching our elders deepen into dementia, 

We rehearse escapes, our exit fantasies. 

I will not gaze like my mother beyond the son 

Who visits the memory care facility, will not 

Pluck incessantly a ghost-hair off my tongue 

Or spin & spin again the buttons of my cardigan 

Only to focus suddenly on his face & whisper— 

Those glinting hooks descending—“I want to kill you.” 

No. I will not. I’ve picked my spot. 



Excerpt from “Come Home, Lady” by Tim Seibles 


O, let me be that one 

come-hither morsel, that 

savory flavor and shine 

on your lips: what’s sorrow 

but a grown man 

stuffed in the trunk 

of his worry? 


Your legs! Lady, 

your legs—long as an Alaskan 

summer day! That easy gait: 

your velvet thighs, your deeply 

wise and wicked ways— 


when I see you 

we will dance like bumper cars 

on rubber streets, like lazy ducks 

on crazy lakes, like hippos and hobos 

in toe-shoes! 



Excerpt from "Blasphemy" by Morowa Yejide 


With these words I blaspheme. Because I’m a writer, and by nature I care less about what others 

think than about the happenings in my head. So, I say this now. Decipher it how you must. 


I’ll start in the middle, out here in the badlands. That’s where the blood and guts are. Where 

birth and destruction reign. Because everyone is busy running and jockeying and jousting and 

trying to survive the fray. There is the vigilance against destruction of social media platform 

and profile. There is the tireless culling of reviews and choices and picks scraped from the 

bottom of riverbeds like fool’s gold. The old Zulu flank the new. Balkanized groups born of 

aged interests shift alliance for proximity to fire and gaze. The stench of decomposing egos 

and ripe arrogance chokes the air. 


And there is no Writing Life for me. There is no cabin in a stand of three-hundred-year-old 

trees. No roaring fire. No antique typewriter or mahogany desk. There's just my life and how

writing fits into it.



Excerpt from “Write in imitation of KL, my friend PL says.”  by Ru Freeman


I write: 


I do not want to write to you, husband. I wanted to write a lie. I did not want to write honestly about immigrants like me. About brown bodies, and black hair, and brown superstitions, and black eyes, and brown aversions, and black ink, and brown curries, and black tea, and brown earth, and black tar. I did not want to write about green trees. I did not want to write about eighteen varieties of mangoes, fourteen of which are only found on my island. I did not want to write about how the land is owned by brown women and how the laws of the land favor brown women and how brown women get to pick which brown man they’d keep to cultivate those lands. 


I did not want to write about where we come from. I wanted to write an American memoir. 


I wanted to write a lie. 

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Publisher
Etruscan Press
Publication date
2025
Language
English
ISBN 13 
9798990767812
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
254
Editor
Lee Shanta, Brady Philip