The world will follow joy : turning madness into flowers (new poems)

The world will follow joy Turning madness into flowers (new poems)

Alice Walker, 1944-

Book - 2013

Saved in:
Place a Hold Save to List Email this

2nd Floor Show me where

811.54/Walker
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 811.54/Walker Checked In
Subjects
Poetry.
Genres
Poetry
Published
New York : The New Press 2013.
Language
English
Main Author
Alice Walker, 1944- (-)
Physical Description
xv, 191 pages ; 19 cm
ISBN
9781595588760
  • What makes the Dalai Lama lovable?
  • If I was president ("were may be substituted by those who prefer it")
  • From: poems for my girls
  • Don't be like those who ask for everything
  • Knowing you might someday come
  • Turning madness into flowers #1
  • What it feels like
  • Before I leave the stage
  • Remember?
  • Working class hero
  • The ways of water
  • You want to grow old like the Carters
  • The answer is: live happily!
  • Word reaches us
  • When you see water
  • This is a story of how love works
  • Alice and Kwamboka
  • May it be said of me
  • And do you see what they have bought with it?
  • She
  • Our martyrs
  • The tree of life has fallen
  • To change the world enough
  • Blessed are the poor in spirit
  • What do I get for getting old? a picture story for the curious!
  • Desire
  • March births
  • Two boys on a pink tricycle
  • Coming to worship the 1,000-year-old cherry tree
  • Listening to Bedouins, thinking of Bob
  • Peonies
  • Black and white cows
  • Worms won't need a menu
  • From paradise to paradise
  • Sailing the hot streets of Athens, Greece
  • Life takes its own sweet time
  • One meaning of the immaculate heart
  • To stand beaming and clapping
  • And in that sacred time
  • Why peace is always a good idea
  • Hope
  • Tranquil
  • The raping of maids
  • This human journey
  • In this you are wrong
  • Hope to sin only in the service of waking up
  • The part of God that stings
  • 9/11: an irrelevant truth
  • The Buddha's disagreeable relative
  • We who have survived
  • Racism dates us
  • The world we want is us
  • The joyful news of your arrest
  • Every revolution needs fresh poems
  • The foolishness of captivity
  • Despair is the ground bounced back from
  • Occupying Mumia's cell
  • Another way to peace
  • We pay a visit to those who play at being dead
  • Democratic womanism
  • Democratic motherism
  • After many years and much silliness
  • When I join you
  • Going out to the garden.
Review by Booklist Review

Walker knows that this sparkling poetry collection's central vision of a peaceful, joyful future in which we forswear war and the plundering of the planet will seem naive, but she counters: I believe / with all my heart / in the magic / and the power / of intention. Having grappled once again with torrents of injustice and suffering in her new essay collection, The Cushion in the Road, this tireless activist has freed her mischievous, sensual, and spiritual poetic self to write of nature, love, friendship, courage, and generosity with playful and crooning lyricism. Sweet praise songs to her musical, handy, salt-of-the-earth lover are matched by warm, incisive tributes to Gloria Steinem, Oprah, Gabrielle Giffords, Cornel West, and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. In verse and photographs, Walker tells the story of her adoption of an orphanage in Kenya for children who lost their parents to AIDS, a project bolstered by her receiving the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace. In her nimble poems of celebration, Walker distills struggles, crises, and tragedies down to bright, singing lessons in living with awareness and joy.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, among two score other works in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Walker offers a new poetry collection that is thematically of a piece with her previous writing. Her spirituality, concern for human rights, and almost old-fashioned, determined joyousness run deep, and her devoted readers will want to follow her as she turns "madness into flowers." Plain-spoken, plaintive, and not without witticism--one poem is titled "If I Was President ('Were' May Be Substituted by Those Who Prefer It")-these poems range from the Dalai Lama ("The Dalai Lama is Cool/ A modern word/ For/ 'Divine' ") to social and political concerns ("Racism dates us/ (Speciesism does too)") to personal reflection ("My desire/ is always the same; whenever Life/ deposits me; I want to stick my toe, & soon my whole body/ into the water"). VERDICT Walker stays true to long-held beliefs and a simple writing style; sophisticated poetry readers may not be interested, but Walker's readers and others who embrace her concerns will enjoy.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Similar Items