Changes explores the complex world in which the lives of professional working women have changed sharply, but the cultural assumptions of men's lives have not. Witty and compelling, Aidoo's novel, according to Manthia Diawara, "inaugurates a new realist style in African literature." "Aidoo writes with intense power in a novel that, in examining the role of women in modern African society, also sheds light on women's problems around the globe."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) Suggested for course use in: African literature African studies Family Studies Ama Ata Aidoo, one of Ghana's most distinguished writers, is the author of two other works of fiction, Our Sister Killjoy and No Sweetness Here (The Feminist Press), as well as plays, poems, and children's books. Tuzyline Jita Allan is associate professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY.

Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating separation of the races were thrown out. The country, which had been carved into a crazy quilt that reserved the most prosperous areas for whites and the most desolate and backward for blacks, was reunited. The dreaded and dangerous security force, which for years had systematically tortured, spied upon, and harassed people of color and their white supporters, was dismantled. But how could this country--one of spectacular beauty and promise--come to terms with its ugly past? How could its people, whom the oppressive white government had pitted against one another, live side by side as friends and neighbors? To begin the healing process, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by the renowned cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Established in 1995, the commission faced the awesome task of hearing the testimony of the victims of apartheid as well as the oppressors. Amnesty was granted to those who offered a full confession of any crimes associated with apartheid. Since the commission began its work, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha's extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey. Country of My Skull captures the complexity of the Truth Commission's work. The narrative is often traumatic, vivid, and provocative. Krog's powerful prose lures the reader actively and inventively through a mosaic of insights, impressions, and secret themes. This compelling tale is Antjie Krog's profound literary account of the mending of a country that was in colossal need of change.

Outside of her remarkable poems, we know next to nothing about Yu Xuanji, David Young writes. She was born in 844 and died in 868, at the age of twenty-four, condemned to death for the murder of her maid We owe the survival of her forty-nine poems to the ancient Chinese anthologists urge to be complete. The poems gathered in this bilingual (Chinese/English) edition will be read again and again for their beauty. The works preserve Yu Xuanji s passion, her sharp eye for detail, her often witty variations on familiar Chinese themes, all of which give the poems an immediacy one rarely finds in ancient, translated texts. Poems addressed to Yu Xuanji s husband and to other men (some famous poets) and women give us some sense of her relationships; the book also includes other traditional Chinese forms such as meditations on landscapes and occasional poems commemorating feast days. As noted in the introduction, the poetry also provokes us to think about the act of writing, about the culture and politics of the T ang Dynasty, and about gender. "

Drawn from Hong Kong International Poetry Nights 2011, The Metaphor of the Sea is a chapbook of poetry by Shuntaro Tanikawa, accompanied by English and Chinese translations. The Metaphor of the Sea is also available along with the works of other internationally renowned poets in Words and the World (Twenty-volume Set). Selected poems from this volume are featured in the anthology Words and the World: International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong.

This pocket-sized paperback is one of the twenty-two titles published for 2015 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. The theme of IPHHK2015 is "Poetry and Conflict". 21 international poets from 18 different places are invited to participate in recitations, symposia and sharing sessions of the Poetry Nights. A recitation focusing on 10 local Hong Kong poets, "Hong Kong Cantonese Poetry Night" is included. This collection seeks to make accessible the best of contemporary international poetry with outstanding translations.

Sarojini Naidu, born in 1879 in Hyderabad, India, was a celebrated poet and freedom fighter. She began writing poetry at a young age, and her first collection, The Golden Threshold, was published in 1905, earning her the title The Nightingale of India for her lyrical and evocative verses. Her poetry often reflected themes of Indian culture, nature, and nationalism, blending rich imagery with musical rhythm. Despite her deep involvement in the Indian independence movement, she continued to write and published several volumes of poetry. Naidu’s literary and political contributions made her one of India’s most influential voices in the early 20th century. She passed away in 1949, leaving behind a legacy of both artistic and political significance.

Sappho, the earliest and most famous Greek woman poet, sang her songs around 600 BCE on the island of Lesbos. Of the little that survives from the approximately nine papyrus scrolls collected in antiquity, all is translated here: substantial poems, fragments, single words - and, notably, five stanzas of a poem that came to light in 2014. Also included are new additions to five fragments from the latest discovery, and a nearly complete poem published in 2004. The power of Sappho's poetry - her direct style, rich imagery, and passion - is apparent even in these remnants. Diane Rayor's translations of Greek poetry are graceful and poetic, modern in diction yet faithful to the originals. The full range of Sappho's voice is heard in these poems about desire, friendship, rivalry, family, and 'passion for the light of life'. In the introduction and notes, internationally respected Sappho scholar André Lardinois presents plausible reconstructions of Sappho's life and work, the importance of the recent discoveries in understanding the performance of her songs, and the story of how these fragments survived.

Initially published in 1990, when the New York Times Book Review named it one of fourteen "Best Books of the Year," Judith Hemschemeyer's translation of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova is the definitive edition, and has sold over 13,000 copies, making it one of the most successful poetry titles of recent years. This reissued and revised printing features a new biographical essay as well as expanded notes to the poems, both by Roberta Reeder, project editor and author of Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (St. Martin's Press, 1994). Encyclopedic in scope, with more than 800 poems, 100 photographs, a historical chronology, index of first lines, and bibliography. The Complete Poems will be the definitive English language collection of Akhmatova for many years to come.

A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral's most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis--poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.             From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting "madwomen" who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral's poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral's final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated "madwoman" than most have ever known.    

One of the great masterpieces of contemporary Latin American fiction, Rosario Castellanos's The Book of Lamentations, which tells of an uprising of Mayan Indians in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, is now more relevant than ever, with the uprising of the Mayan Zapatista Liberation Army currently taking place in Chiapas and similar ethnic conflicts erupting across the globe.

An eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women Because my love's American, blisters blossom on my heart. Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet--alanday, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love--these are the subjects oflandays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago,landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave. After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect theirlandays. The poems gathered inI Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

A beautifully-written--almost poetic--ethnography of the Bedouins in Egypt as well as a study of gender relations through analysis of their oral lyric poetry.

Watch rupi kaur live now on Prime Video. "Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." -- The New Republic From rupi kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one's roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself. Divided into five chapters and illustrated by kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms. this is the recipe of life said my mother as she held me in her arms as i wept think of those flowers you plant in the garden each year they will teach you that people too must wilt fall root rise in order to bloom

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

From National Book Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying--her most powerful collection yet. Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all." In Bright Dead Things, Limón showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"--"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display--even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.

Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound.

"Like every major artist she challenges the reader's intellect and imagination."--Boston Herald

At her most moving and meditative, impressive and musical, Denise Levertov addresses in her poetry collection, Evening Train, the nature of faith and love, the imperiled beauty of the natural world, and the horrors of the Gulf War.

A collection of poetry by Sonia Sanchez. . . A rare poet indeed! Sonia Sanchez (born Wilsonia Benita Driver; September 8, 1934) is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.