<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0"><channel><title><![CDATA[subject results for "Poets, American — 21st century — Biography."]]></title><description><![CDATA[subject results for "Poets, American — 21st century — Biography."]]></description><link>https://gateway.bibliocommons.com/v2/libraries/bellingham/rss/search?query=%22Poets%2C%20American%20%E2%80%94%2021st%20century%20%E2%80%94%20Biography.%22&amp;searchType=subject&amp;origin=core-catalog-explore&amp;view=grouped</link><generator>RSS for Node</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 02:40:51 GMT</lastBuildDate><item><title><![CDATA[Girl Warrior]]></title><description><![CDATA["Informed by her own experiences and those of her ancestors, Harjo offers inspiration and insight for navigating the many challenges of maturation. She grapples with parents, friendships, love, and loss. She guides young readers toward painting, poetry, and music as powerful tools for developing their own ethical sensibility. As Harjo demonstrates, the act of making is an essential part of who we are, a means of inviting the past into the present and a critical tool young women can use to shape a more just future. Lyrical and compassionate, Harjo's call for creativity and empathy is an urgent and necessary work."--Provided by publisher.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C754587</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C754587</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Harjo, Joy]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/754587150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>On Coming of Age</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781324094173/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Priestdaddy]]></title><description><![CDATA[Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence, from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group, with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents' household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details her education of a seminarian who is also living at the rectory, tries to explain Catholicism to her husband, who is mystified by its bloodthirstiness and arcane laws, and encounters a mysterious substance on a hotel bed with her mother. Lockwood pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood. Priestdaddy is an entertaining, unforgettable portrait of a deeply odd religious upbringing, and how one balances a hard-won identity with the weight of family and tradition.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C256573</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C256573</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Lockwood, Patricia]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/256573150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle></subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781594633737/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Catching the Light]]></title><description><![CDATA[In this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet. Comprised of intimate vignettes that take us through the author's life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory. Harjo insists the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure--to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C613268</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C613268</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Harjo, Joy]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/613268150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle></subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780300257038/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Poet Warrior]]></title><description><![CDATA[Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Weaving together the voices that shaped her, Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, the teachings of a changing earth, and the poets who paved her way. She explores her grief at the loss of her mother and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member. Moving fluidly among prose, song, and poetry, Poet Warrior is a luminous journey of becoming that sings with all the jazz, blues, tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C565885</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C565885</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Harjo, Joy]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/565885150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>A Memoir</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780393248524/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Minor Feelings]]></title><description><![CDATA[Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition--if such a thing exists? Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C495459</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C495459</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Hong, Cathy Park]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/495459150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>An Asian American Reckoning</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781984820365/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Ten Bridges I've Burnt]]></title><description><![CDATA["A wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir in verse."-- Provided by publisher.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C672685</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C672685</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Purnell, Brontez]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/672685150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>A Memoir in Verse</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780374612696/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Molly]]></title><description><![CDATA[Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents. Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly's death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was. A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love. Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C677795</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C677795</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Butler, Blake]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/677795150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle></subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781648230370/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Poet Warrior]]></title><description><![CDATA[Three-term poet laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, and the messengers of a changing earth--owls heralding grief, resilient desert plants, and a smooth green snake curled up in surprise. She celebrates the influences that shaped her poetry, among them Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Walt Whitman, Muscogee stomp dance call-and-response, Navajo horse songs, rain, and sunrise. In absorbing, incantatory prose, Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member. Moving fluidly between prose, song, and poetry, Harjo recounts a luminous journey of becoming, a spiritual map that will help us all find home. Poet Warrior sings with the jazz, blues, tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C571954</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C571954</guid><category><![CDATA[EBOOK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Harjo, Joy]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/571954150</comments><format>EBOOK</format><subtitle>A Memoir</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780393248531/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Minor Feelings]]></title><description><![CDATA["Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition--if such a thing exists? Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth"-- Provided by publisher.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C509265</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C509265</guid><category><![CDATA[EBOOK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Hong, Cathy Park]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/509265150</comments><format>EBOOK</format><subtitle>An Asian American Reckoning</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781984820372/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Poetry of Strangers]]></title><description><![CDATA[It might surprise you who's a fan of poetry -- when it meets them where they are.Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said "Poetry Store" and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, "What do you need a poem about?" To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian's poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.In The Poetry of Strangers, Brian tells the story of his cross-country journey in a series of heartfelt and insightful essays. From Minnesota to Tennessee, California to North Dakota, Brian discovered that people aren't so afraid of poetry when it's telling their stories. In "dying" towns flourish vibrant artistic spirits and fascinating American characters who often pass under the radar, from the Mall of America's mall walkers to retirees on Amtrak to self-proclaimed witches in Salem.In a time of unprecedented loneliness and isolation, Brian's journey shows how art can be a vital bridge to community in surprising places. Conventional wisdom says Americans don't want to talk to each other, but according to this poet-for-hire, everyone is just dying to be heard.Thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening, The Poetry of Strangers is an unforgettable portrait of America told through the hidden longings of one person at a time, by one of our most important voices today. The fault lines and conflicts which divide us fall away when we remember to look, in every stranger, for poetry.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C530376</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C530376</guid><category><![CDATA[EAUDIOBOOK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Sonia-Wallace, Brian]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/530376150</comments><format>EAUDIOBOOK</format><subtitle>What I Learned Traveling America With A Typewriter</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780062989710/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Minor Feelings]]></title><description><![CDATA[A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human"Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human."--Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C506276</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C506276</guid><category><![CDATA[EAUDIOBOOK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Hong, Cathy Park]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/506276150</comments><format>EAUDIOBOOK</format><subtitle>An Asian American Reckoning</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780593164747/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Prince of Los Cocuyos]]></title><description><![CDATA["A ... memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities"--Amazon.com.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C198217</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C198217</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Blanco, Richard]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/198217150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>A Miami Childhood</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780062313768/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Mennonite Meets Mr. Right]]></title><description><![CDATA[After reconnecting with her family roots, poet and professor Janzen starts dating the most unlikely of men-a weight-liftin', church-goin', truck-drivin' rocker named Mitch and begins a surprising journey to faith and love.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C166154</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C166154</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Janzen, Rhoda]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/166154150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>A Memoir of Faith, Hope, and Love</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781455502875/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Does This Church Make Me Look Fat?]]></title><description><![CDATA[Rhoda Janzen had reconnected with her family and her roots, though her future felt uncertain. But when she starts dating a churchgoer, the skeptic begins a surprising journey to faith and love. Rhoda doesn't slide back into the dignified simplicity of the Mennonite church. Instead she finds herself hanging with the Pentecostals, who really know how to get down with sparkler pom-poms. Amid the hand waving and hallelujahs, Rhoda finds a faith richly practical for life.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C140686</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C140686</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Janzen, Rhoda]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/140686150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>A Mennonite Finds Faith, Meets Mr. Right, and Solves Her Lady Problems</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781455502882/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[My Dyslexia]]></title><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C120693</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C120693</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Schultz, Philip]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/120693150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle></subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780393079647/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Long Goodbye]]></title><description><![CDATA[From one of America's young literary voices, this is a portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, the author found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief, its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies, an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. Her story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness, and separating from her husband, left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. This work conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, this memoir about the death of her mother and grieving aftermath, the author, both a poet and journalist, ponders the eternal human question: how do we live with the knowledge that we will one day die?]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C126710</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C126710</guid><category><![CDATA[EBOOK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[O'Rourke, Meghan]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/126710150</comments><format>EBOOK</format><subtitle></subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781101485316/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Mennonite in A Little Black Dress]]></title><description><![CDATA[Just after her 40th birthday, Rhoda Janzen experienced the worst week of her life. First, her husband left her for another man. Then she was in a serious car accident. Here, Janzen reveals her subsequent spiritual exploration and healing.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C100687</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C100687</guid><category><![CDATA[BOOK_CD]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Janzen, Rhoda]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/100687150</comments><format>BOOK_CD</format><subtitle></subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781598879070/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Mennonite in A Little Black Dress]]></title><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C90228</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C90228</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Janzen, Rhoda]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/90228150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>A Memoir of Going Home</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780805089257/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Body Is A Doorway]]></title><description><![CDATA["In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores-with searing insight and honesty-the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves. At age sixteen Sophie Strand-bright, agile, fearless-is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore? In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness-a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck. The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being?"-- Provided by publisher.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C735655</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C735655</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Strand, Sophie]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/735655150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>A Memoir : A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780762487417/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Body Is A Doorway]]></title><description><![CDATA[In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores—with searing insight and honesty—the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves. At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore? In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness—a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck. The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being? A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C765460</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C765460</guid><category><![CDATA[EAUDIOBOOK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Strand, Sophie]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/765460150</comments><format>EAUDIOBOOK</format><subtitle>A Memoir : A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781668646915/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[You Could Make This Place Beautiful]]></title><description><![CDATA[Poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman's personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman's love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is "extraordinary" (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C703458</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C703458</guid><category><![CDATA[LPRINT]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Smith, Maggie]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/703458150</comments><format>LPRINT</format><subtitle>A Memoir</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9798891641570/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[You Could Make This Place Beautiful]]></title><description><![CDATA["[Smith]...reminds you that you can...survive deep loss, sink into life's deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new." --Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Good Housekeeping, Goodreads, Zibby Mag, Newsweek, BookPage, and LitHub The bestselling poet and author of the "powerful" (People) and "luminous" (Newsweek) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age."Life, like a poem, is a series of choices." In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman's love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet's attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C642273</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C642273</guid><category><![CDATA[EBOOK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Smith, Maggie]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/642273150</comments><format>EBOOK</format><subtitle>A Memoir</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9781982185879/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Amanda Gorman]]></title><description><![CDATA[From an early age, Little Amanda read everything she could get her hands on, from books to cereal boxes. Growing up with an auditory processing disorder and a speech impediment, Amanda had to work hard, but ultimately she took great strength from her experiences. After hearing her teacher read aloud to the class, she knew that she wanted to become a poet, and nothing would stand in her way. At the age of 19, she became America's first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate. And, after performing her inspiring poem 'The Hill We Climb' at the Presidential Inauguration in January 2021, she became an icon across the world. This inspiring book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the incredible young poet and activist's life so far.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C591601</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C591601</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Sánchez Vegara, Ma Isabel]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/591601150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle></subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780711270718/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item><item><title><![CDATA[Places I've Taken My Body]]></title><description><![CDATA[In sixteen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body-in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder. In spite of-indeed, in response to-physical constraints, Brown leads a peripatetic life: the essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, ranging from the rural American South of her childhood to the cobblestoned streets of Bologna, Italy. Moving between these locales and others, Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the world's oldest anatomical theater, the American Eugenics movement, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Throughout, Brown offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences, woven together in consideration, always, of what it means to be human-flawed, potent, feeling.]]></description><link>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C513653</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S150C513653</guid><category><![CDATA[BK]]></category><category><![CDATA[eng]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Brown, Molly McCully]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><comments>https://bellingham.bibliocommons.com/item/comment/513653150</comments><format>BK</format><subtitle>Essays</subtitle><language>eng</language><image_url>https://secure.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780892555130/MC.GIF&amp;client=wclsiii&amp;type=xw12&amp;oclc=</image_url></item></channel></rss>