Tag Archives: tracy

Tracy K. Smith’s Resistance Reading

Mother Jones

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We asked a range of authors, artists, and poets to name books that bring solace or understanding in this age of rancor. Two dozen or so responded. Here are some picks from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith.

Illustration by Allegra Lockstadt

Latest book: Ordinary Light: A Memoir
Also known for: Life on Mars
Reading recommendations: Poetry helps me contend with the smallness of spirit—the greed, the dishonesty, the disregard for the lives of others—at the root of American politics. When I feel beaten down by all of the wrongheadedness, I turn to the wisdom, on what often feels like a cosmic scale, running through The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. Clifton was one of America’s great poets, whose work throughout her lifetime was committed to chronicling and celebrating black lives. The honesty, joy, wisdom, and hope she brought to this task is regenerative. For years, I’ve been completely captivated by a poem cycle—”the message from the Ones (received in the late 70s)”—that appears in her 2004 collection, Mercy. What is the message? One we and our elected leaders need desperately to hear and to heed:

in the geometry
of knowing
we have no new thing
to tell
only the same old
almanac
January
love one another
February
whatever you sow
you will reap

Marie Howe’s The Kingdom of Ordinary Time is a slim monument, in which the poet wrestles with what it means to be an American in an “ordinary” time rife with war, materialism, injustice. Howe also urges us to consider the ways that our unmiraculous lives are run through with glimpses of the infinite, as in the poem “World”:

I couldn’t tell which stars were which or how far away any of one of them was,
or which were still burning or not—their light moving through space like a
long

late train—and I’ve lived on this earth so long—50 winters, 50 springs and
summers,
and all this time stars in the sky—in daylight

when I couldn’t see them, and at night when, most nights, I didn’t look.

I also take heart in young poets whose work helps to bring faraway lives into focus, erasing the distance that news reports and foreign policy try to insist is too wide to cross. Solmaz Sharif’s debut collection, Look, explores photos and personal effects of individuals touched by war—and it calls attention to the ways that official language has been employed in ways designed to deaden it (and us) of human feeling. “Personal Effects,” a 31-page poem for the poet’s uncle killed in the Iran-Iraq War, elegizes the lost and contrasts a living, feeling sense language, against terms drawn from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, which are set off in all caps:

Daily I sit

with the language
they’ve made

of our language

to NEUTRALIZE
the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS
like you.

You are what is referred to as
a “CASUALTY.” Unclear whether
from a CATALYTIC or FRONTAL ATTACK, unclear

the final time you were addressed

thou, beloved. It was for us a
CATASTROPHIC EVENT.

There is something mighty, and mightily sustaining, about voices like these, attuned—as little else seems these days to be—to the large, the permanent, the generous, and the humane.
_______
So far in this series: Kwame Alexander, Margaret Atwood, W. Kamau Bell, T Cooper, Dave Eggers, Reza Farazmand, Piper Kerman, Tracy K. Smith. (New posts daily.)

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Tracy K. Smith’s Resistance Reading

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The Piper Protocol – Tracy Piper & Eve Adamson

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Piper Protocol

The Insider’s Secret to Weight Loss and Internal Fitness

Tracy Piper & Eve Adamson

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 30, 2014

Publisher: William Morrow

Seller: HarperCollins


Ever wonder why movie stars, supermodels, and some of the most high-profile musicians and athletes look so camera-ready? Why they don&apos;t have poochy stomachs, puffy eyes, dull tired skin, and fatigue like most of the rest of us? Why do they look so vibrant, energetic, and slim? Hollywood&apos;s best-kept secret, A-list celebrity cleanse expert Tracy Piper, knows exactly how they got that way: It&apos;s internal fitness, and Tracy is the master. Now, in The Piper Protocol, Tracy makes her life-changing, body-transforming plan available to everyone! Tracy&apos;s cleanse program offers an amazing promise: lose up to twenty-five pounds in the first month. But weight loss is just the beginning. Her structured four-week eating plan will change the way you feel and the way you live. The Piper Protocol takes you on a journey to make your body, your mind, and your spirit feel better, look better, and function better on every level. Taking a holistic view, it focuses on weight loss and overall wellness. Here for the first time is the revolutionary four-week program Tracy&apos;s celebrity clients use to get red-carpet ready: Piper Protocol Week One: 50/50 Cleanse Initiation: Here you&apos;ll start exchanging bad habits for good, but don&apos;t worry—you won&apos;t have to do anything extreme. You can have your steak and eat it too during week one, as long as you fill 50% of your plate with raw veggies. You&apos;ll also learn about juicing! Piper Protocol Week Two: 80/20 Protein: During this week, Tracy ramps up the intensity—reduce your protein to 20% of your plate and increase your veggies to 80%. You&apos;ll immediately notice the difference in increased energy and dropped pounds and inches. Piper Protocol Week Three: 80/20 Carbs: It&apos;s time to experiment with a meat-free week. With 80% veggies and 20% whole grains on your plate, you&apos;ll stay full and keep getting slimmer. Piper Protocol Week Four: Liquid Feast Week: Now that your body is prepped for some serious celeb-level cleansing, try this all-liquid week. You&apos;ll fill up on nutrient-dense veggie-rich juices and smoothies with a hint of sweetness from fruit, and the weight loss you will experience during the week will amaze and inspire you to embrace your new, health-enhancing, beauty-boosting, radiant lifestyle. Including step-by-step instructions, more than sixty delicious recipes for cleansing and rejuvenating foods, powerful home remedies, and the inspiration to put it all into practice, The Piper Protocol will help you slim down, rev up, and get gorgeous.

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The Piper Protocol – Tracy Piper & Eve Adamson

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Sochi Cheat Sheet: 18 Olympians Worth Rooting For

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, during slopestyle qualifiers at the Winter Olympics, Dutch snowboarder Cheryl Maas became the first Olympian to act in direct opposition of Russia’s bigoted anti-gay law when she stared into a television camera and shoved a rainbow-colored unicorn glove at the lens. In doing so, the defiant winter veteran—one of only six openly gay competitors in Sochi—carried on a long tradition of athletes injecting a little character and dissent into the Games, reminding us just why we love sports to begin with.

Considering the staggering tales of mismanagement, corruption, and regional terrorist threats, here are 17 more Olympians we’re hoping do the same:

THE FIVE OTHER OPENLY GAY ATHLETES

SSA TV/Youtube

Partly because of boycotts, and partly because of Russia’s anti-LGBT law, just five other gay athletes—all women—are joining Maas in openly competing in this year’s Games. Four of them—Ireen Wüst (a gold-medal-winning Dutch speed skater), Sanne van Kerkhof (a Dutch short-track speedskater), Barbara Jezeršek (a Slovenian cross-country skier), and Anatasia Bucsis (a Canadian speed skater) are also previous Olympians. For Belle Brockhoff, an Australian snowboarder who came out as gay specifically to protest the Russian law, Sochi is her first Olympic competition. In an interview with the BBC, she explained: “I want to go there because I’m not afraid of these laws and I want others that live in Russia, who are homosexuals, to see that.”

SHIVA KESHAVAN

Imago/Zuma

Last year, the Indian Olympic Association was suspended on allegations of corruption. As a result, none of India’s three Olympic athletes will be allowed to compete under the Indian flag in Sochi. But luger Shiva Keshavan is sliding anyway—and he’s doing so in a multicolored, patterned cap intended to represented his home village. Keshavan is no stranger to fighting the odds: At 16, became the youngest luger in history, and now competes without a coach or winter sports infrastructure. Despite Keshavan winning gold in the 2011 and 2012 Asia cups, acting IOA president Vijay Kumar Malhotra insists that the Indian winter athletes don’t stand a chance of winning. Still, this will be Keshavan’s fifth Olympiad—with or without his country’s official backing.

LANNY BARNES

WBUR/Flickr

Perhaps this year’s quintessential Olympic tale of selflessness, Lanny and Tracy Barnes’ story will melt the icy cockles of your cynical heart. The twin sisters were both expected to qualify for Sochi, but during the final round of US biathlon qualifiers, Lanny fell too ill to compete and was forced to stay home. Tracy, though, made the cut. A week later, Tracy sacrificed her spot so Lanny could race instead. “Love is selfless dedication,” she explained in an interview. “Love means giving up your dream so somebody else can realize theirs.” Though they’re both Olympic veterans, Tracy’s withdrawal comes only four years after barely missing the 2010 Olympics.

NORWEGIAN CURLING TEAM

Cameron Yee/Flickr

In recent years, curling has seen an unexpected and surging growth in popularity. If you tuned in to the 2010 Vancouver Games, you might recall Norway’s amazing patterned pants during its silver-medal-winning performance. In Sochi, the team will don even more outrageous outfits: 1970s-inspired red, blue, and white zig-zag suits referencing the nation’s flag. Appreciation for the team’s loud sense of style even spawned a Facebook page with more than 540,000 fans—nearly as many people as live in Oslo.

YOHAN GOUTT GONCALVES

Yohan Goutt Goncalves/Wikimedia Commons

Goncalves is the first athlete to ever compete in the Winter Olympics for East Timor, a country that’s never seen snow. In fact, the country’s annual temperature stays around 85 degrees. Competing in the ski slalom, Goncalves wants to go to Sochi as a “diplomat” to show that there is “more to East Timor than war.” That’s more than we can say about his mariachi-suited slalom competitor.

JAMAICAN BOBSLED TEAM

Olympics/Youtube

Heading to the Winter Olympics for the first time in more than a decade, the Jamaican bobsled team has fans hoping for Cool Runnings 2.0. Jamaica’s inaugural bobsled run, in the 1988 Calgary Olympics, ended in a disastrous crash. Upon arriving in Sochi, the team was further hindered as a result of the airport temporarily losing the competitors’ clothes and equipment. Still, 12 years since their last appearance, and crowd-funded by more than $184,000, the two-man team is looking for redemption.

US WOMEN’S SKI JUMPING TEAM

Mht54321/Wikimedia Commons

2014 marks the first year women’s ski jumping will be an Olympic event, with advocacy by American Lindsay Van largely responsible for bringing it there. In an interview on Rock Center With Brian Williams, Van explained how sexism kept the event out of the Olympics for years. (In 2006, International Ski Federation President Gian Franco Kasper said, “It’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”) Now, along with teammates Jessica Jerome and Sarah Hendrickson—a medal favorite who’s recovering from an ACL injury—Van finally will see her hard work come to fruition at the Olympics.

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Sochi Cheat Sheet: 18 Olympians Worth Rooting For

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