Author Archives: Alexandra Byerly

UIUC Poetry Spotlight: Isaac Willis

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For today’s celebration of National Poetry Month, Isaac Willis, a student in UIUC’s Creative Writing MFA program, reads Jericho Brown’s “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry.”

Watch Willis’ reading on our Instagram and read his reflections below:

To me, this is a perfect poem. Maybe that’s because I may or may not have taken a field trip to a slaughterhouse. (My alma mater, Monmouth College, nearly touched one of the largest slaughterhouses in the Midwest.) Maybe that’s because I want another gimlet, another good book. It’s also the perfect poem for America right now. Written during a time of racial reckoning, of an international pandemic, of quarantine, the poem subtly navigates the politics of place and being in it. “I have PTSD / About the Lord,” says Brown’s speaker. But then, “God save the people who work / In grocery stores.” Audre Lorde famously said, “Poetry is not a luxury.” She also said, in the same essay, “it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

I can’t help but feel, when I read this Jericho Brown poem, that something new and necessary is being architected. I naively thought, a year ago, when the University and the world were effectively locked down, that staying shut up inside would make me a better person. If anything, it has exacerbated my fears and anxieties and biases even more. I texted something along those lines to a friend awhile back, and he responded, “Or you are a better person, and you don’t like what the new light has shown you.” Maybe so. Maybe grief, when it’s so thick you can touch it, is a balm. Maybe I’d rather be able to sit and talk with my friend, while we sip lavender gin. Maybe it’s a privilege to say so. Thank you. I’m sorry.

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UIUC Poetry Spotlight: Christopher Kempf

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Christopher Kempf is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English, where he teaches in the MFA Program. He is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021) and Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017).

His scholarly book, Writing Craft: The Workshop in American Culture, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, his poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Best American Poetry (2020), Boston Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, and PEN America, among others.

Professor Kempf offers his reflections on a recently published poem by Eavan Boland below:

Eavan Boland’s poem “The Break-Up of a Library in an Anglo-Irish House in Wexford: 1964” offers a haunting meditation on the vulnerabilities and violences implicit in western empire.

“[T]he end of empire is and will always be / not sedition nor the whisper of conspiracy,” Boland writes, “but that // slipper chair in the hallway / that has lost the name / no one will call it by again.”

Boland is writing here about the 17th and 18th century mansions from which a Protestant Anglo-Irish aristocracy ruled over a predominantly Catholic population.  But she is also—and perhaps more importantly—diagnosing how power continues to encode itself in and through language.  Echoing Ezra Pound’s maxim that “if a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays,” her words testify beautifully to the importance of an educated citizenry, one able to command language for its own uses rather than be commanded by it.  Boland neither celebrates nor mourns the passing of this aristocracy, but I detect in her tone a note of wistfulness, I think, for a richer, more accurate language—something wondrous has been lost, Boland suggests, even as something powerfully democratic has been gained.

I admire this ambivalence, and I am curious about its implications in the wake of an attack on the U.S. Capitol which, because of her untimely death, Boland never witnessed.

In a culture obsessed with “STEM” education and so linguistically impoverished, therefore, that we cannot distinguish between real and fake news, Boland reminds us that facility with language is the single most important—and contested—political instrument.  And poetry itself, Boland suggests, remains vital to both social justice and democratic belonging.

Watch Professor Kempf read Eavan Boland’s “The Break-Up of a Library in an Anglo-Irish House in Wexford:1964″ and a poem of his own, “National Anthem” on our Instagram!

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UIUC Poetry Spotlight: Nneoma Ohale

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The Literatures and Languages Library’s celebration of National Poetry Month continues with UIUC student Nneoma Ohale reading her poem “Love Made This Stone Brown.” Watch Ohale’s poetry reading on our Instagram and read her reflections below:

I am Nneoma Ohale, a 20 year old Nigerian-American artist. I am currently a junior at U of I studying English, Secondary Education and Creative Writing. I have been a poet since the age of fourteen when I got the opportunity to compete in Young Chicago Authors’ Louder Than A Bomb poetry festival. National Poetry Month means a lot to me and I am excited to celebrate it with fellow poets and lovers of poetry. I choose to share this poem because it took a lot for me to write it and I feel it is best when read aloud. This poem is my ultimate romantic daydream. I wrote this piece as a reflection of what love can be when lovers are able to truly be there for each other through it all. Despite what we might want to believe, love is not always easy because life isn’t always easy. It is important to be with someone who can stand the rain. The title “Love Made This Stone Brown.” is a nod to the transformative nature of love and its ability to inspire a different course of action. This poem is a celebration of my favorite things: music, life, lovers and nature.

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UIUC Poetry Spotlight: Professor Corey Van Landingham

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Corey Van Landingham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. A nationally acclaimed poet, she is the author of Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, forthcoming from Tupelo Press, and Antidote, winner of the 2012 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. To learn more about Professor Van Landingham, please visit her website https://www.coreyvanlandingham.com.

Watch Professor Corey Van Landingham read selections from Brigit Pegeen Kelly on our Instagram. She offers her reflections below:

For National Poetry Month, I wanted to pick two poems that are connected to the C-U community. Brigit Pegeen Kelly taught here at UIUC for many years, and is still, it seems, part of the soul of this program, this place. Brigit and her husband, the poet Mike Madonick (mentioned in the poem’s dedication tag), have shaped hundreds of poets here in the prairie. I never met Brigit, but Song was the first book I read during my MFA, and her work has left a deep mark on me—as it has on so many poets of my generation. I can’t go to Allerton without seeing her poems almost materialize amidst the statues. I’ll often wonder, driving through the cornfields, if the rare “hill” I see is one from her poems. Brigit’s poems do that—I might say all great poems do—they make you see the world differently. They change the relationship between language and landscape. They heighten it, and they trouble it.

“Near the Race Track” is from her first book, To the Place of Trumpets. This poem is wildly different from her later work, from the long poems that cascade and build and weave and repeat to create, across many pages, their own mythic worlds. I’ve heard those worlds aren’t so distant, though, that what may seem mythic or surreal or magical is often grounded in something from her very own surroundings, her life. “Near the Race Track” isn’t set here, but, because of Brigit and Mike, I can’t help but associate it with Illinois. There are few poems about joy that I care to return to. Here, it’s the way joy can be a spectacle to behold, but also something that can rise away from us—that’s what makes me come back to this poem again and again. That, and picturing Mike cursing with that umbrella in hand.

It doesn’t feel right to spend too much time here discussing my own work, when in Brigit’s realm. “O-Matoes” revolves around the desire to catch something of joy, though, and originated from getting to know one of our truly joyous neighbors here in Champaign. This poem is, as is probably obvious, for Caleb, who is six.

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Comics in the Time of Corona: Angoulême Prize Winners

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Each year, the town of Angoulême in southwestern France plays host to the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême (FIBD), which is frequently known as the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Started in 1974, the four-day event is devoted to the ninth art (as comics are often called in France) and celebrates achievements in the medium.

The Angoulême International Comics Festival also administers several prestigious prizes, referred to as Fauves (“Wild Cats”) in reference to FIBD’s mascot. The Angoulême Fauves honor the versatility and transgressive power of the art form. Prizes include the coveted Fauve d’Or (“Golden Wildcat”) for best comics album of the year, as well as prizes for best artwork, best script, and best new work in a series.

The festival is internationally renowned and typically attracts around 200,000 artists, journalists, and comics enthusiasts to Angoulême every January. Attendees typically take part in workshops, master classes, and panels dispersed throughout the city. However, as with many other highly-anticipated events, this year was far from typical. To accommodate the travel restrictions and social distancing requirements brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, FIBD was split into two parts. The announcement of the 2021 prize winners took place at its usual time in late January, while the in-person events are delayed until late June.

To celebrate the first part of the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the Literatures and Languages Library is highlighting Fauve winners coming soon to our collection. These French-language works, full of innovative story-telling and stunning visuals, will have you dreaming of Angoulême in June.

Click here to learn more about the prizes and prize-winners.

Cover art for Anaïs Nin sur la mer des mensonges

PRIX DU PUBLIC FRANCE TÉLÉVISIONS: Anaïs Nin, sur la mer des mensonges by Léonie Bischoff

Cover art for Paul à la maison

PRIX DE LA SÉRIE: Paul à la maison by Michel Rabagliati

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cover art for Tanz!

PRIX RÉVÉLATION: Tanz! by Maurane Mazars

cover art for Black-out

PRIX GOSCINNY DU SCÉNARIO: Black-out by Loo Hui Phang and Hugues Micol

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cover art for La Mécanique du Sage

PRIX DE L’AUDACE: La Mécanique du Sage by Gabrielle Piquet

 

 

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New Resource Spotlight: Project Muse Literature Ebook Collection

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Exciting news! The UIUC library recently acquired Project Muse’s 2020 and 2021 Literature eBook collection. The collections are international in scope, represent the highest quality scholarship published by academic presses throughout the United States, and include literary criticism and literary theory, biographies of authors, and fiction/poetry from before 1950.

In total, this acquisition includes approximately 700 titles, providing patrons with convenient access to new and relevant scholarship. Access Project Muse through UIUC here.

These ebooks are now available to browse and read.  You can find a full list of the titles in each collection here.

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New Fiction Spotlight: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

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Cover art for the Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“I don’t question God,” declares the titular character of “Eulah,” the first story in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

“But maybe you should question the people who taught you this version of God. Because it’s not doing you any favors,” the narrator replies.

This exchange is at the crux of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection. The collection is full of hope, heartbreak, hunger, and love. Its protagonists find themselves torn between the demands of church and family and those of their own bodies. They wrestle with their appetites, illicit or otherwise, and usually come out on top in one way or another.

The nine stories that make up The Secret Lives of Church Ladies span a wide array of turbulent and fascinating relationships with mothers, fathers, sisters, and lovers. In “Dear Sister,” a woman writes a letter to the half-sister she’s never met to inform her of the death of their father. In “Snowfall,” the narrator struggles to adjust to both the realities of living in a northern climate and her mother’s disavowal of her relationship with another woman.

Despite these tumultuous relationships, the stories are full of comfort—offered from sister to sister, daughter to mother, and lover to lover. These offerings are often in the form of food, whether it be homemade, fast-food, or frozen.

One of the collection’s most powerful stories, for example, is “Peach Cobbler,” which begins: “My mother’s peach cobbler was so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife.” Like many in the collection, “Peach Cobbler” deals with infidelity, unhealthy relationships, and the ache to be loved with wry humor and compassion.

Each story is told in the first-person, lending the collection a powerful intimacy. The reader is left feeling as though they really have been let in on the secret lives of these powerful storytellers. In The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Philyaw paints nuanced portraits of vulnerable and resilient women who rely upon each other and create communities worth treasuring.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is available now at the Literatures and Languages Library.

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Resource Spotlight: African American Poetry

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This week, we are spotlighting one of our databases, which highlights African Americans’ contributions to American literature: African American Poetry! 

This comprehensive collection allows you to explore the extraordinary early history of African American poetry. This database includes over 3,000 poems from the 18th and 19th centuries, capturing a wide array of subjects and experiences, and relating them as broadsides, ballads, sonnets, Romantic odes, and historical epics. 

And the lives of the poets whose work is featured in African American Poetry were often as riveting as their work. Explore the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, who was abducted from West Africa at a young age, sold as a slave in Boston, and went on to become “one of the major American poets of the Colonial period.” The piercing intelligence, mastery of allusion, and stirring pathos evident in her work led to her becoming the first African-American and the second American woman to publish a volume of poetry.

Or delve into the verses of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a staunch abolitionist, suffragist, and one of the first African-American women to publish a novel (Iola Leroy, in 1892). Her political activism is particularly evident in her poetry, which often showcased the horrors of slavery through the lens of motherhood. Her powerful “The Slave Mother, a Tale of the Ohio,” was based on the same real-life events that inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

The final stanza of Harper’s moving “Bury Me in a Free Land” reads:

 I ask no monument, proud and high

To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;

All that my yearning spirit craves,

Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

African American Poetry also includes the work of Lucy Terry Prince, Jupiter Hammon, James Monroe Whitfield, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and many more early African American poets. Access African American Poetry here and here.

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Reading Recommendations For Native American Heritage Month

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“I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite / can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this / when the war ended.” So begins the titular work of Postcolonial Love Poem, the latest  collection from award-winning poet Natalie Diaz. 

November is Native American Heritage Month, also known as American Indian Heritage Month. To celebrate, we are highlighting a few recently published works by Indigenous authors in our collection. The books linked below are as unique and multifaceted as the cultures they depict. They explore such ideas as reconciliation, dream-sharing, feminine power, resilience, and what it means to create a home. They grapple with trauma, violence, and racism in turn, but they are also touched with a deep sense of hope and love.

Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age By: Darrel McLeod

As a small boy in remote Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod is immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. There he is surrounded by her tales of joy and horror. And there young Darrel learns to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that will guide him throughout his life.

But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turns wild and unstable, and their home life becomes chaotic. Mamaskatch traces McLeod’s struggles to keep his life and family together, and come to terms with his sexual identity, amidst violence and chaos. 

 

Postcolonial Love Poem By: Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Sabrina & Corina By: Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Rebel Poet (Continuing the Oral Tradition): more stories from the 21st century Indian By: Louis V. Clark III (Two Shoes)

This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother’s alcoholism and his young sister’s death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash he faced as an Indian on the job, and celebrates the hard-fought sense of home he and his wife have created. Rebel Poet continues the author’s tradition of seamlessly mixing poetry and prose, and is at turns darker and more nuanced than its predecessor

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Translating the Classics, Graphically

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What’s on your to-read list?

If you’re anything like us, your to-read list is ever-expanding, as exciting new books jump the queue over hulking classics you’re a little embarrassed you haven’t read by now.

The internet is replete with articles like “Classic Novels Everyone Should Read” and “30 Classics You Should Read Before You Die.” These lists are populated by novels like Great Expectations, Moby Dick, and Animal Farm. Intimidating lists like these can discourage even the most intrepid reader.

Some people give up on the classics before they’ve truly started them, intimidated by their length or density. Others are skeptical of their relevance to modern life. Many more simply lack the time and energy to wade through “the great books.”

But while there is no required reading list for life, who among us would not like to know these classics? Or at least know them well enough to understand what’s so very “great” about them?

A page from Tim Hamilton’s graphic adaption of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

This is where the graphic adaptation comes in. This increasingly popular format blends words, panels, and illustrations to create a highly readable and accessible new work. Some of these graphic interpretations are so innovative and beautiful they could qualify as literary masterpieces in their own right.

A quick internet search will reveal that an astonishing number of literary classics have been adapted in this way. Everything from The Great Gatsby to Paradise Lost to The Stranger has received the graphic novel treatment.

And why not? Because they distill stories into essential dialogue and visuals, graphic novels are quick reads. They can thus provide fascinating introductions to topics, ideas, and even genres of literature a reader might have otherwise discounted as out of reach. In this way, a graphic adaptation can provide a point of entry to a whole new world of stories.

Have you read any great graphic adaptations of literary classics? If not, we’ve included 3 of our favorites below to help you get you started.

Thoreau at Walden, adapted by John Porcellino

 Each artist has their own interpretation of the text, and some books are more suited to the graphic treatment than others.  As in any adaptation, sometimes sacrifices have to be made to fit the new format.

John Porcellino’s Thoreau at Walden, for example, distills Henry David Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond into its most essential lessons, telling the rest of the story through deceptively simple illustrations.

 

 

Meg, Jo Beth, and Amy, adapted by Rey Terciero and Bre Indigo 

Some artists use graphic adaptations to put a modern spin on a much-beloved classic. Jo, Beth, Meg and Amy, for example, reimagines the March sisters as part of a multi-ethnic blended family coming up, and coming out, in modern-day New York City. It’s hard to imagine, Louisa May Alcott, a staunch abolitionist and feminist, would object to this adaptation of Little Women.

 

To Kill A Mockingbird, adapted by Fred Fordham

 In 2018, PBS launched an eight-part series called The Great American Read. The series was designed to get Americans reading and talking passionately about books, and encouraged viewers to cast their votes in determining America’s top 100 best-loved novels. The results were a fascinating mix of classic and modern titles included on many people’s to-read lists.

But America’s number one best-loved novel proved to be Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, a coming-of-age story told against the backdrop of simmering racial tensions in small town Alabama. If this classic is on your to-read list, check out Fred Fordham’s graphic adaptation, available in the Literatures and Languages Library’s very own collection.

 

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