Rita Dove Bücher

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives.Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness.At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”

A debut novel by the 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, about an artist on a journey of self-discovery—navigating a family secret, racism, and the conflict between marriage and career. “Skillfully evokes the mood of a decade when social change seemed not only possible but imminent.” —Washington Post Book World When a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown as an artist-in-residence to teach puppetry to schoolchildren, her homecoming also means grappling with artistic ambition, memories of rejected love, and shocking truths about her family.

The Climate Crisis affects all of us. It is critical we address this. Published by Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts and The Black Earth Institute, this timely anthology brings together a hundred plus poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, including Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Martin Espada, Naomi Shihab Nye, Richard Jackson, Camille T. Dungy, J. Drew Lanham, Patricia Spears Jones, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Octavio Quintanilla, Brenda Peterson and more to discuss Climate Change and its affects on human and nonhuman populations, on urban and wild environments. Writings deal with Western wildfires, Eastern floods, rising sea temperatures and acidification, the disappearance of glaciers as well as also how the Climate Crisis intersects with social issues like racism, poverty, sexism, etc. This is not a doom & gloom collection, but one that aims at finding solutions to the Climate Crisis. All profits from sales will be donated to nonprofit groups aimed at preserving endangered species, such as grizzly bears, wolves, northern jaguars and large wild cats, and orcas.