Ava Leavell Haymon's Books

Kitchen Heat

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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Kitchen Heat records in woman's language the charm and bite of domestic life. Ava Leavell Haymon's poems form a collection of Household Tales, unswerving and unsentimental, serving up the strenuous intimacies, children, meals, pets, roused memories, outrages, and solaces of marriage and family. Some of the poems are comic, such as "Conjugal Love Poem," about a wife who resists giving her husband the pity he seeks when complaining about a cold. Others find myth and fairy tale lived out in contemporary setting, with ironic result. Others rename the cast of characters: husband and wife become rhinoceros and ox; a carpool driver, the ominous figure Denmother.An elderly female is Old Grandmother, who creates time and granddaughters from oyster stew. The humidity of Deep South summers and steam from Louisiana recipes contribute to a simmering language, out of which people and images emerge and into which they dissolve again. Denmother went to college in the 60s, could pin your ears back at a cocktail party. Her laugh had an edge to it, and her yard was always cut.She grew twisted herbs in the flower beds, hid them like weeks among dumpy marigolds. The wolfsbane killed the pansies before they bloomed much.She'd look at you real straight and talk about nuclear power plants or abortion. At home alone she boiled red potatoes all night to make the primitive starch that holds up the clouds. -- "Denmother's Conversation

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122

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807131725

ISBN 13

9780807131725

Eldest Daughter

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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Eldest Daughter

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

In Eldest Daughter, Ava Leavell Haymon displays her mastery of the craft and engages us with the poetic gifts we have come to expect from her. As in previous collections, she combines the sensory and the spiritual in wild verbal fireworks. Concrete descriptions of a woman's life in the mid-twentieth-century American South mix with wider concerns about family lies and truths, and a culture that supports or forbids clear speech. In a passage from "The Holy Ghost Attends Vacation Bible School," the physical world of children interplays with the divine: The least likely place the Holy Ghost ever descended was in east Mississippi. Red clay hills and church politics soured on years of inbreeding. Every deacon drove a pickup. At Bible School, the kids played red rover and rolled down the sharp slope behind the Baptist church. He recognized the dizziness at the bottom and the fear of having your name called, but the grass stains, the torn blouses and sprained wrists—these were beyond Him. Haymon's poems encourage us to revel in the natural world and enjoy its delights, as well as to confront the difficult realities that keep us from doing so.

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LSU Press

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ISBN 10

0807153389

ISBN 13

9780807153383

The Strict Economy of Fire

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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The Strict Economy of Fire

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

On a pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Nepal, a group of American women trek into the Himalayas, beginning and ending in Kathmandu. They ascend, turn back just short of reaching their destination because of impassable snow, and descend. “Say what you see,” smoke rising on a distant mountain seems to command, and Ava Leavell Haymon responds with language that strives to reconcile the extremes of this exotic place— danger and awesome beauty, community and abandonment, death and life, flame’s heat and altitude’s cold, an alien landscape and the poet’s own deep memories. Fires—of cooking, festivals, cremation, deforestation, and starvation—rage through the poems; like the name of the Hindu goddess Kali, fire is “destruction and creation / in one word.” An exacting yet exhilarating poetry collection, The Strict Economy of Fire asks what we can know and what we can never know “on this far side of the earth.”

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LSU Press

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ISBN 10

0807129941

ISBN 13

9780807129944

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

In Ava Leavell Haymon's third collection, an unremarkable, harried, contemporary woman named Gretel finds herself at midlife overtaken by the Grimms' household tale "Hansel and Gretel." The violence and terror in that story supplant the memory of her own childhood, and the fairy tale retells itself in a sharp succession of surprising poems. The witch, the sugar house, Gretel's brother, her passive father, his cruel second wife, the sinister forest -- all these and more rise like jazz motifs to play themselves in the present. Addressing themes such as hunger, child abuse, betrayal, cannibalism, and murder in a tone by turns disturbing and humorous, Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread is most certainly not a book for children.

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LSU Press

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ISBN 10

0807135860

ISBN 13

9780807135860

The Strict Economy of Fire

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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The Strict Economy of Fire

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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ISBN 10

0807129933

ISBN 13

9780807129937

Kitchen Heat

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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Kitchen Heat

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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121

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LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807157635

ISBN 13

9780807157633

Eldest Daughter

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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Eldest Daughter

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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Published Date

ISBN 10

0807153397

ISBN 13

9780807153390

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

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Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

Poems

By: Ava Leavell Haymon

One of the most critically acclaimed yet least recognized contemporary writers, African American author John Edgar Wideman creates work often described as difficult, even unfathomable. In Writing Blackness, James Coleman examines Wideman’s prolific body of work with the goal of making his often elusive imagery and dense style more accessible and thus broadening his readership. More so than for most writers, Coleman shows, Wideman’s life has affected his writing. Born in 1941, Wideman grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb where he attended an integrated high school, starred on the basketball team, and was senior class president and valedictorian. At the University of Pennsylvania he studied creative writing and became an all–Ivy League basketball player. Winning a Rhodes scholarship, he studied at Oxford, after which he returned to Penn and became its first black tenured professor. Wideman published his first novel, A Glance Away, at age twenty-six and by 1973 had published two more works of fiction. But for all this success, something began to wear on him. In 1973, his grandmother died, and after listening to family stories when he traveled home for the funeral, Wideman began to change his world view. Between 1973 and 1981 Wideman published nothing and immersed himself in African American culture, reading widely and—even more important—moving much closer to his family. Since 1981, Wideman has refocused his life and writing on blackness and published twelve experimental works, all very different from his earlier books. Coleman examines nearly all of Wideman’s work, from A Glance Away (1967) to Fanon (2008). He shows how Wideman has developed a unique style that combines elements of fiction, biography, memoir, history, legend, folklore, waking life, and dream in innovative ways in an effort to grasp the meaning of blackness—an effort that makes his writing challenging but that holds more than ample rewards for the perceptive reader. In Writing Blackness, Coleman demonstrates why Wideman ranks among the best of contemporary American writers.

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LSU Press

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ISBN 10

080713757X

ISBN 13

9780807137574

Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

By: Ava Leavell Haymon,Robert Bixby

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Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

By: Ava Leavell Haymon,Robert Bixby

The poems in Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow scout a tricky landscape: incest, memory recovery, family love and violence, the resilience of a child, the resolution of a woman. -- Back cover.

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ISBN 10

1882983149

ISBN 13

9781882983148

Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

By: Ava Leavell Haymon,Robert Bixby

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Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

By: Ava Leavell Haymon,Robert Bixby

The poems in Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow scout a tricky landscape: incest, memory recovery, family love and violence, the resilience of a child, the resolution of a woman. -- Back cover.

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ISBN 10

1882983149

ISBN 13

9781882983148

Book's by Ava Leavell Haymon

Kitchen Heat

Kitchen Heat

Eldest Daughter

Eldest Daughter

The Strict Economy of Fire

The Strict Economy of Fire

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

The Strict Economy of Fire

The Strict Economy of Fire

Kitchen Heat

Kitchen Heat

Eldest Daughter

Eldest Daughter

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread

Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

Why the Groundhog Fears Her Shadow

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