A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Notes on Nowhere was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The term utopia implies both "good place" and "nowhere." Since Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, debates about utopian models of society have sought to understand the implications of these somewhat contradictory definitions. In Notes on Nowhere, author Jennifer Burwell uses a cross section of contemporary feminist science fiction to examine the political and literary meaning of utopian writing and utopian thought.
Burwell provides close readings of the science fiction novels of five feminist writers-Marge Piercy, Sally Gearhart, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Monique Wittig-and poses questions central to utopian writing: Do these texts promote a tradition in which narratives of the ideal society have been used to hide rather than reveal violence, oppression, and social divisions? Can a feminist critical utopia offer a departure from this tradition by using utopian narratives to expose contradiction and struggle as central aspects of the utopian impulse? What implications do these questions have for those who wish to retain the utopian impulse for emancipatory political uses?
As one way of answering these questions, Burwell compares two "figures" that inform utopian writing and social theory. The first is the traditional abstract "revolutionary" subject who contradicts existing conditions and who points us to the ideal body politic. The second, "resistant," subject is partial, concrete, and produced by conditions rather than operating outside of them. In analyzing contemporary changes in the subject's relationship to social space, Burwell draws from and revises "standpoint approaches" that tie visions of social transformation to a group's position within existing conditions.
By exploring the dilemmas, antagonisms, and resolutions within the critical literary feminist utopia, Burwell creates connections to a similar set of problems and resolutions characterizing "nonliterary" discourses of social transformation such as feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and Marxism. Notes on Nowhere makes an original, significant, and persuasive contribution to our understanding of the political and literary dimensions of the utopian impulse in literature and social theory.
Jennifer Burwell teaches in the Department of English at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
In contrast with studies that characterized the nineteenth-century U.S. novel as a consensus-generating form complicit with disciplinary culture, Funchion shows how novels shaped a series of culture wars by advancing antagonistic nostalgias. Southern slave owners and their slaves or industrial magnates and their union opponents alike enlisted the power of nostalgia to validate their rival visions of the nation as lost moments awaiting recovery. Antagonistic nostalgias legitimated the political claims of movements as diverse as abolitionism, sectionalism, populism, socialism, anarchism, and cosmopolitanism. Novel Nostalgias provides a deep cultural historical understanding of the nineteenth-century United States, but ultimately, it also allows for a better understanding of how twenty-first-century movements function.
New Stories from the Midwest presents a collection of stories that celebrate an American region too often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature. The editors solicited nominations from more than three hundred magazines, literary journals, and small presses, and narrowed the selection to nineteen authors comprising prize winners and new and established authors.
The stories, written by midwestern writers or focusing on the Midwest, demonstrate how the quality of fiction from and about the heart of the country rivals that of any other region.
The anthology includes an introduction from Lee Martin and short fiction by emerging and established writers such as Rosellen Brown, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Christie Hodgen, Gregory Blake Smith, and Benjamin Percy.
The beauty and barrenness of the southwestern landscape naturallylends itself to the art of storytellers. It is a land of heat and dryness, aland of spirits, a land that is misunderstood by those living along thecoasts.
New Stories from the Southwest presents nineteen short stories that appeared in North American periodicals between January and December 2006. Though many of these stories vary by aesthetics, tone, voice, and almost any other craft category one might wish to use, they are nevertheless bound together by at least one factor, which is that the landscape of the region plays a key role in their narratives. They each evoke and explore what it means to exist in thisunique corner of the country.
Selected by editor D. Seth Horton, the former fiction editor for the Sonora Review, from a wide cross-section of journals and magazines, and with a foreword by noted writer Ray Gonzalez, New Stories from the Southwest presents a generous sampling of the best of contemporary fiction situated in this often overlooked area of the country. Swallow Press is particularly pleased to publish this wide-ranging collection of stories from both new and established writers.
Contributors to New Stories from the Southwest are:
- Alan Cheuse
- Matt Clark
- Lorien Crow
- Kathleen De Azvedo
- Alan Elyshevitz
- Marcela Fuentes
- Dennis Fulgoni
- Ray Gonzalez
- Anna Green
- Donald Lucio Hurd
- Toni Jensen
- Charles Kemnitz
- Elmo Lum
- Tom McWhorter
- S. G. Miller
- Peter Rock
- Alicita Rodriguez
- John Tait
- Patrick Tobin
- Valery Varble
Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present. Its contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to explore the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture.
Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah. Because contemporary American culture transcends the borders of the continental United States, the anthology also includes numerous transnational poets, from Julia de Burgos to Derek Walcott. Whether they are the works of oblique avant-gardists like John Ashbery or direct, populist poets like Allen Ginsberg, all of the selections are accompanied by extensive introductions and footnotes, making the great poetry of the period fully accessible to readers for the first time.
Volume I begins with a generous selection of Native American materials, then spans the years from the establishment of the American colonies to about 1900, a world on the brink of World War I and the modern era. Part One focuses on poetry from the very beginnings through the end of the eighteenth century. The expansion and development of a newly forged nation engendered new kinds of poetry. Part Two includes works from the early nineteenth century through the time of the Civil War. The poems in Part Three reflect the many issues affecting a nation undergoing tumultuous change: the Civil War, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and cultural diversification.
Such well-recognized names as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Stephen Crane appear in this anthology alongside such less frequently anthologized poets as George Horton, Sarah Helen Whitman, Elizabeth Oakes-Smith, Frances Harper, Rose Terry Cooke, Helen Hunt Jackson, Adah Menken, Sarah Piatt, Ina Coolbrith, Emma Lazarus, Albery Whitman, Owl Woman (Juana Manwell) Sadakichi Hartmann, Ernest Fenollosa, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and—virtually unknown as a poet—Abraham Lincoln. It also includes poems and songs reflecting the experiences of a variety of racial and ethnic groups.
Poetry today holds mainstream attention as never before. From community workshops to reading groups, from coffee house poetry slams to small press lit mags, from universities to web 'zines, the world of poetry has become part of our everyday lives. Demonstrating the range and vitality of the new generation of American writers, The New Young American Poets features the work of forty poets born since 1960.
Jewish theatre—plays about and usually by Jews—enters the twenty-first century with a long and distinguished history. To keep this vibrant tradition alive, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture established the New Play Commissions in Jewish Theatre in 1994. The commissions are awarded in an annual competition. Their goal is to help emerging and established dramatists develop new works in collaboration with a wide variety of theatres. Since its inception, the New Play Commissions has contributed support to more than seventy-five professional productions, staged readings, and workshops.
This anthology brings together nine commissioned plays that have gone on to full production. Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick have selected works that reflect many of the historical and social forces that have shaped contemporary Jewish experience and defined Jewish identity—among them, surviving the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the lives of newcomers in America, Israel, and Argentina. Following a foreword by Theodore Bikel, the editors provide introductory explanations of the New Play Commissions and an overview of Jewish theatre. The playwrights comment on the genesis of their work and its production history.
The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work, let alone influence Romantic-period giants like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson once declared that “the compositions published under her name are below dignity of criticism.” In recent decades, however, Wheatley’s work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been reconceived. In these never-before-published essays, fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers.
The pieces in the first section show that perhaps the most substantial measure of Wheatley’s multilayered texts resides in her deft handling of classical materials. The contributors consider Wheatley’s references to Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics and to the feminine figure Dido as well as her subversive critique of white readers attracted to her adaptation of familiar classics. They also discuss Wheatley’s use of the Homeric Trojan horse and eighteenth-century verse to mask her ambitions for freedom and her treatment of the classics as political tools.
Engaging Wheatley’s multilayered texts with innovative approaches, the essays in the second section recontextualize her rich manuscripts and demonstrate how her late-eighteenth-century works remain both current and timeless. They ponder Wheatley’s verse within the framework of queer theory, the concepts of political theorist Hannah Arendt, rhetoric, African studies, eighteenth-century “salon culture,” and the theoretics of imagination.
Together, these essays reveal the depth of Phillis Wheatley’s literary achievement and present concrete evidence that her extant oeuvre merits still further scrutiny.
John C. Shields is Distinguished Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the editor of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley and author of The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics; and Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation; and awarded honorable mention in competition for the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. As well, Shields serves as director of the Center for Classicism and American Culture and General Editor for the series of monographs on Classicism in American Culture to be published by the University of Tennessee Press.
Eric D. Lamore is an assistant professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, and a contributor to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry.
The first African American fiction writer to earn a national reputation, Charles W. Chesnutt remains best known for his depictions of Southern life before and after the Civil War. But he also produced a large body of what might best be called his “Northern” writings, and those works, taken together, describe the intriguing ways in which America was reshaping itself at the turn of the last century.
The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt collects for the first time eighteen Chesnutt stories—several of them first appearing in Northern magazines or newspapers—that portray life in the North in the period between the Civil War and World War I. Living in Ohio from 1883 until his death in 1932, Chesnutt witnessed and wrote about the social, cultural, and racial upheavals taking place in the North during a crucial period of American history. His Northern stories thus reflect his vision of a newly reconstituted America, one recommitted to the ideals of freedom and economic opportunity inherent in our national heritage.
The stories, compiled and edited with critical introductions to each by Professor Charles Duncan, offer a new Chesnutt, one fascinated by the evolution of America into an urban, multiracial, economically driven democracy.
The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt presents richly imagined characters, both black and white, working to make better lives for themselves in the turbulent and stimulating universe of the turn-of-the-century North. Indeed, Chesnutt stands virtually alone as the first African American chronicler of Northern culture, anticipating such figures as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. This critical edition of The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt is a significant addition to the body of African American literature.
--Harold Bloom, Genius
" . . . a truly literary study in the largest, most humane, sense. Instead of subjecting poems to the distortions of theory, it brings biography, theology, psychology, and cultural history to bear on the intricacies of language, where all the issues of the poet's life and work converge, contend, and seek resolution."
--Albert Gelpi, American Literature
" . . . insightful readings of many of Dickinson's difficult poems and . . . a significant contribution to Dickinson studies."
---Choice
"McIntosh shows the power of Dickinson's religious quest in word, in verse, and in truth. He shows that she was much more than an ever-adolescent angry rebel trying to subvert the religious oppression of benighted Amherst neighbors."
---Emily Dickinson Journal
Yet that image scarcely captures the fullness and vitality of Dickinson’s life, most notably her many connections—to family, to friends, to correspondents, to the literary tastemakers of her day, even to the unnamed, and perhaps unknowable, “Master” to whom she addressed three of her most breathtaking works of prose. Through an exploration of a relatively small group of items from Dickinson’s vast literary remains, this volume—an accompaniment to an exhibition on Dickinson mounted at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York—demonstrates the complex ways in which these often humble objects came into conversation with other people, places, and events in the poet’s life. Seeing the network of connections and influences that shaped Dickinson’s life presents us with a different understanding of this most enigmatic yet elegiac poet in American letters, and allows us more fully to appreciate both her uniqueness and her humanity.
The materials collected here make clear that the story of Dickinson’s manuscripts, her life, and her work is still unfolding. While the image of Dickinson as the reclusive poet dressed only in white remains a popular myth, details of Dickinson’s life continue to emerge. Several items included both in the exhibit and in this volume were not known to exist until the present century. The scrap of biographical intelligence recorded by Sarah Tuthill in a Mount Holyoke catalogue, or the concern about Dickinson’s salvation expressed by Abby Wood in a private letter to Abiah Root, were acquired by Amherst College in the last fifteen years. What additional pieces of evidence remain to be uncovered and identified in the attics and basements of New England?
Published to accompany The Morgan Library & Museum’s pathbreaking exhibit I’m Nobody! Who are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson—part of a series of exhibits at the Morgan celebrating and exploring the creative lives of significant women authors—The Networked Recluse offers the reader an account of the exhibit itself, together with a series of contributions by curators, scholars of Dickinson, and poets whose own work her words have influenced.
In 1853, when he was forty-nine and at the height of his literary career, Nathaniel Hawthorne accepted the post of U.S. consul at Liverpool, England, as a reward for writing the campaign biography of his college friend President Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne’s departure for Europe marked a turning point in his life. While Our Old Home, shrewd essays on his observations in England, The Marble Faun, a romance set in Italy, and the English Notebooks and French and Italian Notebooks were all results of his European residence, he returned to Concord in 1860 frustrated, depressed, and sick. He died in 1864.
"The Notebooks take us into his study, and here we can observe him, at last, in the very act of creation at his writing table."—Leon Edel, Atlantic Monthly
"A document of prime importance."—Edmund Wilson, New Yorker
A New Home is a vivid contribution to a new kind of narrative developed during the antebellum period, ethnographic fiction. Kirkland highlights the importance and the drama of local practices and everyday life in Montacute. She traces the way two groups of settlers slowly adjust to each other - the old hands and the newcomers from the East;. Dramatizing differences of class and culture, she also shows how the groups finally form a genuine community and a new, diverse culture. Kirkland also gives ethnographic fiction an original twist: she satirizes the provincialism and the rigidity of both groups of settlers.
After writing A New Home, Kirkland became a professional literary woman, working as an editor as well as a writer. In her introduction, Sandra Zagarell explores the implications of Kirkland's writing and professional career for our understanding of women, writing, and the world of literature in antebellum America.
Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer on a variety of topics, some that we readily associate with him, some that may be surprising. Each volume includes selections from his familiar published works as well as from less well known lectures, letters, and journal entries. The books include original engravings by renowned illustrator and book artist Barry Moser.
As New York and Paris began to modernize, new modes of entertainment, such as panoramas, dioramas, and photography, seemed poised to take the place of the more complex forms of literary expression. Dioramas and photography were invented in Paris but soon spread to America, forming part of an increasingly universal idiom of the spectacle. This brave new world of technologically advanced but crudely mimetic spectacles haunts both Whitman's vision of New York and Baudelaire's view of Paris. In New York-Paris, Katsaros explores the images of the mid-nineteenth-century city in the poetry of both Whitman and Baudelaire and seeks to demonstrate that, by projecting an image of the other's city onto his own, each poet tried to resist the apparently irresistible forward momentum of modernity rather than create a paradigmatically happy mixture of "high" and "low" culture.
"It has long been known that Dreiser devoted much effort during the final two decades of his lfe to the preparation of a major philosophical work which remained unfinished at his death....The best evidence of Dreiser's later thought would appear to be [t]his treatise, and it is appropriate that Marguerite Tjader and John J. McAleer--the two Dreiserians most sympathetic to the mystical religiosity of the later Dreiser--should make it available in published form." --American Literary Realism
Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion--his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War--as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control.
Edited and annotated by Robert Faggen, the notebooks are cross-referenced to mark thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings.
Born in 1915 to one of New England’s elite wealthy families, Isabella Gardner was expected to follow a certain path in life—one that would take her from marriageable debutante to proper society lady. But that plan was derailed when at age eighteen, Isabella caused a drunk-driving accident. Her family, to shield her from disgrace, sent her to Europe for acting studies, not foreseeing how life abroad would fan the romantic longings and artistic impulses that would define the rest of Isabella’s years. In Not at All What One Is Used To, author Marian Janssen tells the story of this passionate, troubled woman, whose career as a poet was in constant compromise with her wayward love life and her impulsive and reckless character.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway is an all-new sequel to Benson’s highly acclaimed 1975 book, which provided the first comprehensive anthology of criticism of Ernest Hemingway’s masterful short stories. Since that time the availability of Hemingway’s papers, coupled with new critical and theoretical approaches, has enlivened and enlarged the field of American literary studies. This companion volume reflects current scholarship and draws together essays that were either published during the past decade or written for this collection.
The contributors interpret a variety of individual stories from a number of different critical points of view—from a Lacanian reading of Hemingway’s “After the Storm” to a semiotic analysis of “A Very Short Story” to an historical-biographical analysis of “Old Man at the Bridge.” In identifying the short story as one of Hemingway’s principal thematic and technical tools, this volume reaffirms a focus on the short story as Hemingway’s best work. An overview essay covers Hemingway criticism published since the last volume, and the bibliographical checklist to Hemingway short fiction criticism, which covers 1975 to mid-1989, has doubled in size.
Contributors. Debra A. Moddelmog, Ben Stotzfus, Robert Scholes, Hubert Zapf, Susan F. Beegel, Nina Baym, William Braasch Watson, Kenneth Lynn, Gerry Brenner, Steven K. Hoffman, E. R. Hagemann, Robert W. Lewis, Wayne Kvam, George Monteiro, Scott Donaldson, Bernard Oldsey, Warren Bennett, Kenneth G. Johnston, Richard McCann, Robert P. Weeks, Amberys R. Whittle, Pamela Smiley, Jeffrey Meyers, Robert E. Fleming, David R. Johnson, Howard L. Hannum, Larry Edgerton, William Adair, Alice Hall Petry, Lawrence H. Martin Jr., Paul Smith
The "Simple" stories, Langston Hughes's satirical pieces featuring Harlem's Jesse B. Semple, have been lauded as Hughes's greatest contribution to American fiction. In Not So Simple, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper provides the first full historical analysis of the Simple stories.
Harper traces the evolution and development of Simple from his 1943 appearance in Hughes's weekly Chicago Defender column through his 1965 farewell in the New York Post. Drawing on correspondence and manuscripts of the stories, Harper explores the development of the Simple collections, from Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) to Simple's Uncle Sam (1965), providing fresh and provocative perspectives on both Hughes and the characters who populate his stories.
Harper discusses the nature of Simple, Harlem's "everyman", and the way in which Hughes used his character both to teach fellow Harlem residents about their connection to world events and to give black literature a hero whose "day-after-day heroism" would exemplify greatness. She explores the psychological, sociological, and literary meanings behind the Simple stories, and suggests ways in which the stories illustrate lessons of American history and political science. She also examines the roles played by women in these humorously ironic fictions. Ultimately, Hughes's attitudes as an author are measured against the views of other prominent African American writers.
Demonstrating the richness and complexity of this Langston Hughes character and the Harlem he inhabited. Not So Simple makes an important contribution to the study of American literature.
Through original research and close readings alert to the foreign prosody underlying Hughes’s work, New World Maker recuperates his political writing, which had been widely maligned by Cold War detractors and adherents of New Criticism, and affirms his place as a progenitor of African diasporic literature and within the pantheon of US modernists. Demonstrating the integral part translation played in Hughes’s creative process, this book challenges a number of common assumptions about this canonical thinker and offers important insights for scholars of African diasporic literature, comparative literature, and American, Caribbean, and translation studies.
Known for his sometimes-gritty naturalism and use of Appalachian dialect, Harry Harrison Kroll (1888–1967) was a remarkably prolific Tennessee novelist and short-story writer during the middle decades of the twentieth century. His career spanned two of the three major shifts in publishing during the twentieth century: the heyday and decline of the fiction magazine market during the late 1920s, and the rise of nonfiction and solidification of paperback marketing during the 1950s. Never Been Rich explores details of Kroll’s humble, rural youth, his long delayed education and the development of his craft, before discussing his lengthy career and how it reflected changes in both public taste and the American publishing industry.
Kroll focused on writing not as a high art, but instead on what was popular—what would earn him a living. He preferred to write voluminously rather than exquisitely, and growing up in the rural south provided him with a broad and fertile field of experience to plow for his crop of stories. As a writing instructor, he had a profound influence on his students, particularly the well-known Appalachian triumvirate of James Still, Jesse Stuart, and Don West.
While Kroll may lack grand literary significance, Richard Saunders maintains that we should explore not merely the linguistic and thematic aspects of a writer’s work but also its broad economic and social contexts, including the idea that literature is both an art form and a marketable product in an extensive industry. His study of Kroll delves deeply into those contexts and shows that, while Kroll did not strive for a place among writers of high literature, he exemplifies the far more widely read popular literature of his times.
The Nightinghouls of Paris is a thinly fictionalized memoir of the darker side of expatriate life in Paris. Beginning in 1928, the story follows the changes undergone by Canadian youths John Glassco and his friend Graeme Taylor during their (mis)adventures in Paris while trying to become writers. There they meet Robert McAlmon, who guides them through the city’s cafes, bistros, and nightclubs, where they find writers and artists including Kay Boyle (with whom Glassco has a fling), Bill Bird, Djuna Barnes, Claude McKay, Hilaire Hiler, Peggy Guggenheim, and Ernest Hemingway.
Fleeing France in late 1940, Robert McAlmon lost his notebook manuscripts and draftedThe Nightinghouls of Paris from memory. Till now, it has existed solely as a typescript held by Yale University. Unlike most memoirs of American expatriates in the ‘20s, The Nightinghouls of Paris centers not only on writers, but also encompasses the racial, national, and social mélange they encountered in everyday life.
In Nabokov and Indeterminacy, Priscilla Meyer shows how Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight illuminates his later work. Meyer first focuses on Sebastian Knight, exploring how Nabokov associates his characters with systems of subtextual references to Russian, British, and American literary and philosophical works. She then turns to Lolita and Pale Fire, applying these insights to show that these later novels clearly differentiate the characters through subtextual references, and that Sebastian Knight’s construction models that of Pale Fire.
Meyer argues that the dialogue Nabokov constructs among subtexts explores his central concern: the continued existence of the spirit beyond bodily death. She suggests that because Nabokov’s art was a quest for an unattainable knowledge of the otherworldly, knowledge which can never be conclusive, Nabokov’s novels are never closed in plot, theme, or resolution—they take as their hidden theme the unfinalizability that Bakhtin says characterizes all novels.
The conclusions of Nabokov's novels demand a rereading, and each rereading yields a different novel. The reader can never get back to the same beginning, never attain a conclusion, and instead becomes an adept of Nabokov’s quest. Meyer emphasizes that, unlike much postmodern fiction, the contradictions created by Nabokov’s multiple paths do not imply that existence is constructed arbitrarily of pre-existing fragments, but rather that these fragments lead to an ever-deepening approach to the unknowable.
Gyorgyi Voros focuses on three governing metaphors in Stevens' poems—Nature as house, Nature as body, and Nature as self. She argues that Stevens' youthful wilderness experience yielded his primary subject—the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature—and that it spurred his shift from a romantic to a phenomenological understanding of nature. Most important, it prompted him to reject his culture's narrow humanism in favor of a singular vision that in today's terms would he deemed ecological.
A writer of wide experience, Ruth Suckow nevertheless remained focused on small-town life; one could even call her the Jane Austen of small-town America. Many of her characters were the “sparrows of Iowa,” ordinary folks whom she made extraordinary by writing about them. In her 1942 novel about the little community of New Hope, written during the desperate days of World War II, life is marked by unusual optimism, openness, mutual care, trust, communal spirit, democracy, and above all light.
Life in New Hope recaptures a feeling of youth that would seem overly idealistic if it were not for Suckow's unflinching realism. As seen through the eyes of its Edenic main characters—Clarence Miller, son of the town's banker and chief booster, and Delight Greenwood, daughter of the Congregational minister who serves New Hope during the two years of the novel—the town itself is the protagonist. Death, crime, and heartbreak intervene, but a sense of freedom and possibility, “where all were to share equally in the boundlessness of light and hope,” always illuminates the town. This sunlit novel, with its blend of romance and reality, reintroduces a regional writer whom H. L. Mencken called “unquestionably the most remarkable woman …writing stories in the republic.”
"The book and not the title is the thing," James Weldon Johnson insisted with regard to Nigger Heaven, and the book is indeed a nuanced and vibrant portrait of "the great black walled city" of Harlem. Opening on a scene of tawdry sensationalism, Nigger Heaven shifts decisively to a world of black middle-class respectability, defined by intellectual values, professional ambition, and an acute consciousness of class and racial identity.
Here is a Harlem where upper-class elites discuss art in well-appointed drawing rooms; rowdy and lascivious drunks spend long nights in jazz clubs and speakeasies; and politically conscious young intellectuals drink coffee and debate "the race problem" in walk-up apartments. At the center of the story, two young people--a quiet, serious librarian and a volatile aspiring writer--struggle to love each other as their dreams are slowly suffocated by racism.
This reissue is based on the seventh printing, which included poetry composed by Langston Hughes especially for the book. Kathleen Pfeiffer's astute introduction investigates the controversy surrounding the shocking title and shows how the novel functioned in its time as a site to contest racial violence. She also signals questions of racial authenticity and racial identity raised by a novel about black culture written by a white admirer of that culture.
No Lonesome Road allows Don West to speak for himself. It provides the most comprehensive collection of his poetry ever published, spanning five decades of his literary career. It also includes the first comprehensive and annotated collection of West's nonfiction essays, articles, letters, speeches, and stories, covering his role at the forefront of Southern and Appalachian history, and as a pioneer researcher and writer on the South's little-known legacy of radical activism.
Drawing from both primary and secondary sources, including previously unknown documents, correspondence, interviews, FBI files, and newspaper clippings, the introduction by Jeff Biggers stands as the most thorough, insightful biographical sketch of Don West yet published in any form.
The afterword by George Brosi is a stirring personal tribute to the contributions of West and also serves as a thoughtful reflection on the interactions between the radicals of the 1930s and the 1960s.
The best possible introduction to his extraordinary life and work, this annotated selection of Don West's writings will be inspirational reading for anyone interested in Southern history, poetry, religion, or activism.
The first new biography of America's foremost woman of letters in twenty years, No Gifts from Chance presents an Edith Wharton for our times. Far from the emotionally withdrawn and neurasthenic victim of earlier portraits, she is revealed here as an ambitious, disciplined, and self-determined woman who fashioned life to her own desires. Drawing on government records, legal and medical documents, and recently opened collections of Wharton's letters, Shari Benstock's biography offers new information on what have been called the key mysteries of her life: the question of her paternity, her troubled relations with her mother and older brothers, her marriage to manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, and her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton.
With an astonishing command of nature imagery, from sparrows to mastodons, Philip Appleman can deftly weave into a single poem an intricate pattern of ideas drawn from evolution, humanism, anthropology, religious skepticism, and everyday experience. Appealing to reason as well as to emotion and imagination, he writes poems of lyrical intensity and remarkable narrative depth. He creates characters—Eve or Darwin or a failed priest—with such wit, compassion, and subtle humor that they live on the page and surprise us with new insights into joy and sorrow, life and death. Set on the beach at Malibu, in the port of Trieste, or in a Manhattan subway, his poems evoke genuine feeling with out sentimentality and transform the personal into the universal.
Drawn from six previous books of poetry written over four decades, and with fourteen new poems, this collection shows the power and complexity of Appleman’s wide-ranging talent.
In these poems, Peter Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities, including challenges for the human species amid planetary transmutation and the impact of mass violence on the self and culture. At the collection’s heart is “No Sign,” another in Balakian’s series of long-form poems, following “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy” and “Ozone Journal,” which appeared in his previous two collections. In this dialogical multi-sectioned poem, an estranged couple encounters each other, after years, on the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. The dialogue that ensues reveals the evolution of a kaleidoscopic memory spanning decades, reflecting on the geological history of Earth and the climate crisis, the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, the Vietnam War, a visionary encounter with the George Washington Bridge, and the enduring power of love..
Whether meditating on the sensuality of fruits and vegetables, the COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma and memory of the Armenian genocide, James Baldwin in France, or Arshile Gorky in New York City, Balakian’s layered, elliptical language, wired phrases, and shifting tempos engage both life’s harshness and beauty and define his inventive and distinctive style.
This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry—proudly declaring itself “a totally inaccessible poem”—and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism—full of malaprops, mondegreens, nonsequiturs, translations of translations, sardonically vandalized signs, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. At the same time, political protest also rubs up against epic collage, through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of “our united fates.” These poems engage with works by contemporary painters—including Amy Sillman, Rackstraw Downes, and Etel Adnan—and echo translations of poets ranging from Catullus and Virgil to Goethe, Cruz e Souza, and Kandinsky.
Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent, and replete with both sharp edges and subtle intimacies, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.
“Professor Booth’s earnestness is graced by wit, irony, and generous humor.”—Louis Coxe, New Republic
Naked Lunch was banned, castigated, and recognized as a work of genius on its first publication in 1959, and fifty years later it has lost nothing of its power to astonish, shock, and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, it is the Black Book of the Beat Generation, the forerunner of the psychedelic counterculture, and a progenitor of postmodernism and the digital age. A work of excoriating laughter, linguistic derangement, and transcendent beauty, it remains both influential and inimitable.
This is the first book devoted in its entirety to William Burroughs’ masterpiece, bringing together an international array of scholars, artists, musicians, and academics from many fields to explore the origins, writing, reception, and complex meanings of Naked Lunch. Tracking the legendary book from Texas and Mexico to New York, Tangier, and Paris, Naked Lunch@50 significantly advances our understanding and appreciation of this most elusive and uncanny of texts.
Contributors:
Contributors:
Keith Albarn
Eric Andersen
Gail-Nina Anderson
Théophile Aries
Jed Birmingham
Shaun de Waal
Richard Doyle
Loren Glass
Oliver Harris
Kurt Hemmer
Allen Hibbard
Rob Holton
Andrew Hussey
Rob Johnson
Jean-Jacques Lebel
Ian MacFadyen
Polina Mackay
Jonas Mekas
Barry Miles
R. B. Morris
Timothy S. Murphy
Jurgen Ploog
Davis Schneiderman
Jennie Skerl
DJ Spooky
Philip Taaffe
If you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun.
Surprisingly, there is a poem about the Mississippi in which Cassity grew up. Unsurprisingly, it is a vision quite unlike others of that state. Its chilly and amusing precision is about as far from Southern Gothic as you can get, although elsewhere there are faint hints of a failed Good Ole Boy. Indeed, the final poems in the collection are a bit more personal than one expects of this writer.
As rigorous in form as they are in feeling, the poems of No Second Eden are not for those with preconceived ideas of poetry or its purpose. Early in Cassity’s career, James Merrill described Cassity’s work as “an opera house in the jungle.” True so far as it goes, but he might also have called it the jungle in the opera house: a glimpse at the savagery behind every façade.
for the 1996 National Poetry Series
The late poet James V. Dickey
was judge of the Yale Prize poetry competition when he wrote to A. V.
Christie, one of the finalists, "I have become very fond of your
poems, especially the elegiac ones. . . . Your work is heartfelt; one
believes every word of it. . . . You have given me much in-depth pleasure;
have moved me strongly."
The work in Nine Skies
is as Dickey described it--heartfelt, moving. Here is what others
say about it:
"Beautifully crafted
and sustained, with six or seven poems as fine as anything being written
today. This remarkable book is a rite of passage for the poet and speaks
of even better things to come." -- Elizabeth Spires
"Only the best poetry
is written this well, with this much craft and conviction. Of course the
poems are meditative and elegiac, brilliant and finely detailed, but they
are also thought through and wholly felt, so that even in their small
moments they celebrate."
-- Stanley Plumly
"A. V. Christie writes
with a Romantic's eye and a Realist's heart, so there is no sentimentality,
that sickness afflicting our age. The voice on these pages is hard-bitten,
luxuriant, and true." -- Henri Cole
"Nine Skies is
a graceful realization in each detail of elegy or celebration." --
Sandra McPherson
This is a book of sustenance, of fresh assurances that come to us—ready or not—out of the blue of this spirited poet’s most engaging work yet.
Through each example, she challenges the status quo and piques the reader’s awareness of persistent abuses of indigenous communities. The voices that Cook-Lynn brings to the texts are as varied as the genres in which she writes. They are astute and lyrical, fierce and heartbreaking. Through these intonations, she maintains a balance between her roles as a scholar and a poet, a popular teacher and a woman who has experienced deep personal loss.
A unique blend of form and content that traverses time, space, and purpose, this collection is a thoroughly original contribution to modern American Indian literature. Moreover, it presents an alternative narrative of the nation’s history and opens an important window into the political challenges that Natives continue to face.
Mark Cox’s youthful bravado has given way in these poems to an assured sense of understatement. The weight of fatherhood, the loss of a grandmother, the fear of loneliness—these are the details around which Cox plumbs the depths of mortality and memory.
Fully comfortable with the domestic tableau from which he writes, this is a poet never complacent. The penchants for metaphor and the resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox’s earlier work remain as vibrant as ever, indeed are heightened, as he masterfully affirms and celebrates the range of familial complexity and human connectedness.
In Names above Houses, Oliver de la Pazuses both prose and verse poems to create the magical realm of Fidelito Recto—a boy who wants to fly—and his family of Filipino immigrants. Fidelito’s mother, Maria Elena, tries to keep her son grounded while struggling with her own moorings. Meanwhile, Domingo, Fidelito's fisherman father, is always at sea, even when among them. From the archipelago of the Philippines to San Francisco, horizontal and vertical movements shape moments of displacement and belonging for this marginalized family. Fidelito approaches life with a sense of wonder, finding magic in the mundane and becoming increasingly uncertain whether he is in the sky or whether his feet are planted firmly on the ground.
Emanuel’s version of a “new and selected poems” turns convention on its head. She ignores chronology, placing new poems beside old, mixing middle and early poems with recent work, and liberating all her poems from the restraints of their particular histories, both aesthetic and autobiographical. Whether writing in the comedic drag of the cartoon strip, or investigating the Mobius strip relationship between reader and writer, or exposing the humor and hurt that accompany visitations from Frank O’Hara and Gertrude Stein, The Nerve of It both stings and pleases with its intelligence, wit and vivacity. It breaks through, in ways that are bold, sexy, haunting and wry, the die-hard opposition of new and old, personal narrative and linguistic play, sincerity and irony, misery and hilarity. Open the book. Something new is happening here.
Many of the poems in National Monuments explore bodies, particularly the bodies of indigenous women worldwide, as monuments—in life, in photos, in graves, in traveling exhibitions, and in plastic representations at the airport. Erdrich sometimes imagines what ancient bones would say if they could speak. Her poems remind us that we make monuments out of what remains—monuments are actually our own imaginings of the meaning or significance of things that are, in themselves, silent.
As Erdrich moves from the expectedly "poetic" to the voice of a newspaper headline or popular culture, we are jarred into wondering how we make our own meanings when the present is so immediately confronted by the past (or vice versa). The language of the scientists that Erdrich sometimes quotes in epigraphs seems reductive in comparison to the richness of tone and meaning that these poems—filled with puns, allusions, and wordplay—provide.
Erdrich's poetry is literary in the best sense of the word, infused with an awareness of the poetic canon. Her revisions of and replies to poems by William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and others offer an indigenous perspective quite different from the monuments of American literature they address.
Imagine, staring into the sun, then,
how the clouds spread out and open like wallets
over a few corrugated roofs.
Finalist, 2016 Society for Midland Authors Award for Biography & Memoir
During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922–1998) evaded biographical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didn’t allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Greenwich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market values into every corner of American culture.
By illustrating the interconnectedness of Gaddis’s life and work, Tabbi, among his foremost interpreters, demystifies the “difficult author” and shows a writer who was as attuned as any to the way Americans talk, and who sensitively chronicled the gradual commodification of artistic endeavor. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and masterful, Tabbi’s book gives us the most subtly drawn portrait to date of one of the twentieth century’s seminal novelists.
“A great poem of this end of our century. It is masterfully structured in recurring themes and voices which build on and off each other. Gardinier is above all a poet whose language and images are completely integrated so that in Keats's words, every rift is laden with ore. I found this a thrilling poem to read.” --Adrienne Rich
In the final section of Negro Mountain, C. S. Giscombe writes, “Negro Mountain—the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania—is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth.” Named for an “incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the “natural” world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe—who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania—understands location to be a practice, the continual “action of situating.”
The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages “count” or “don’t count” as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.
Between poems that consider the disappearance of language in an age of digital/binary communication, and poems that mourn the disappearance of fellow poets and artists, this collection attempts to stand on a nano-second that looks both backward and forward in time: the ever-shifting "now."
Hahn’s new collection wrestles with the elemental and enduring challenges of the human condition: What can we use from our spiritual heritage? How should we find relief? How, after it all, do we live? The poems are presented as a letter to the world from a woman preparing to leave it. In four sections—“The Bells,” “The Crosses,” “Widdershins,” and “Afterwor(l)d”—she contrasts the hope against the dark that is embodied by an amulet or cross with the abased resignation of torture, failed prayers, and witchcraft. Though Hahn’s vision is a dark one, its dramatic emotional depth speaks to a human power that, though damaged, can still engage.
from The Crosses (V)
Cross my fingers, cross my heart,
arms extended, legs together, not apart,
I make of myself a cross.
In my pockets bright blue beads,
small clay gods, scarabs,
four-leaf clovers, bejewelled mezuzahs.
In my hat cockleshells
to exorcize the demons,
to keep hidden the seventh chakra,
the tonsure, the bald compulsion.
Cross my fingers, cross my heart,
arms extended, legs together, not apart.
In my ears little bells of confusion,
to frighten away eyes of the evil.
On my breast a foul sachet
to repel the lick of the Devil.
Cross my fingers, cross my heart.
In my window a glass witch ball
to guard against the shatter
from intruders.
Cross my fingers.
In this remarkable collection of essays, Stephen Harrigan explores, with an unfailing depth of feeling, the human longing to feel at home in the world of nature. In vivid and convincing prose, he evokes the landscape of his home territory, Texas, and his own reactions, sometimes droll, sometimes haunted, to the extraordinary power of place that Texas projects.
Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a river of faces and phrases, jottings and reflections—a personal pilgrimage and collective parade of love, mock-prophecy, and chiste. Tuning in voices from numerous time zones, languages, and minds, Herrera recalls his childhood and coming of age, his participation in the Chicano Movement, and the surreal aspects of postmodern America. He uses broad strokes to paint a historical, social, and familial portrait that moves from the twilight of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, then takes up a finer brush to etch the eternal tension between desire and frustration, hope and disillusionment, violence and tenderness.
Here are transamerican sutras spanning metrocenters from Mexico City to San Francisco, or slinking across the border from Juárez to El Paso. Outrageous, rhythmic lists—"Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About," "Things Religion Makes Me Do"—that fire the imagination. Celebrations of his Plutomobile that "runs on ham hawks & bird grease," and of Chicano inventions such as cilantro aftershave and "the art of eating Vicks VapoRub with your dedos."
Pushing forms to the edge of possibility while forcing readers to rethink reality as well as language, Herrera invokes childhoods and neighborhoods, stand-up clowns and Movimiento gypsies, grandmothers of the buñuelo kitchen and tragicomic soliloquies of dizzy-headed outcasts of paradise. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a crucible of flavorful language meant to be rolled lazily on the mind's tongue—and then swallowed whole to let its hot and savory sweetness fill your soul.
---Laura Kasischke, MLFA judge
"I read A Near-Perfect Gift from start to end without stopping, and, when I finished, found myself sitting in my darkened office, infused with an unexpected sense of peace."
---Eileen Pollack, MLFA judge
The stories in A Near-Perfect Gift revolve around the often hardscrabble small-town life in one rural village. Like any other community inhabited by the human race, it's a place where the banal and the improbable coalesce, a place with its share of common tragedies and uncommon madmen: some howl at the moon, while others turn out to be heroes. There are the two old ladies down the street who might be witches and must be exorcised, and the man who plucks chickens for a living. It is within the perimeter of this offbeat microcosm of the world that seemingly small questions---often the kind that children ask, arising from a child's imagined understanding of how the adult world works---assume an eerie portent: Was that a snake beneath the woodpile? Could a pregnant bat climb out of a hole in the ground? The answers never cease to surprise.
Winner of the eighth annual Arkansas Poetry Award, Martin Lammon writes poems that deal fearlessly and directly with their subjects. Tenderness, complexity, compassion, reverence, and condemnation are all within his range.
Writing of love, he can speak broadly and universally of the heart, yet in the same poem, he can intricately describe a woman’s hand, a fire on a beach, or the hollows around a lover’s eye. Even when he works in the voice of a suicide, his precision can be devastating, as in these lines: “When you lie beside me under stars, each needlepoint / of light pricks my bare arms.”
With equal ease, Lammon travels across miles, cultures, and time, writing of kilns and potters in Japan, long-dead Eskimos in Alaska, or Blue Hole Cave in Pennsylvania.
Full of grace and candor, these poems pursue the stories that shimmer behind the day’s headlines, seeking the spirit at stake in the “lives beside [our] own whose secrets are worth loving.”
At the Indian artisans show in Santa Clara Pueblo, Cecelia Bluespruce sits with her wares in the middle of a row of booths—a good place to catch buyers. She is a successful Native American artist, a sculptor and potter of renown. But Cecelia is in the middle of something deeper than an art show, for she has become trapped by dreams and shadows of her past.
Night Sky, Morning Star is a story of remembrance and reconciliation in one Native American family separated by time and chance. Cecelia’s grown son, Jude, now wants to learn about the father he has never known. Political activist Julian Morning Star, imprisoned twenty years for a crime he did not commit, is unaware that his son even exists. Troubled by dreams, lies, and denial of the past, Cecelia is guided toward wholeness by family and friends who have their own pasts to confront.
This compelling novel plunges readers into the hubbub of the Indian arts market and into the grim reality of prison life. Evelina Zuni Lucero introduces us to experiences we may find unfamiliar: diverse Native American traditions, life on a BIA Indian agency compound, the making of an Indian activist. But she also reintroduces us to two things we all live for: the power of story and the power of love.
Night Sky, Morning Star is the fiction winner of the 1999 First Book Awards competition of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
This collection is organized through broad topics in order to provide entrances into his challenging work: myth, literature, and seriality; music, performance, and collaboration; syncretism, synopsis, and what-saying. It engages Mackey’s spiritual and esoteric disposition along with his attention to what Amiri Baraka called the “enraged sociologies” of Black music. In his manifesto “Destination Out,” Mackey describes his work as “wanting to bid all givens goodbye” and as “centrifugal.” It is also centripetal, manifesting a reflexive interiority that creates itself through recurring forms.
Contributors: Maria Damon, Joseph Donahue, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Luke Harley, Paul Jaussen, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Peter O’Leary, Anthony Reed
In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written.
The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career.
In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana.
Various and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices.
Prize-winning novelist Jay Neugeboren's third collection of short stories focuses on Jews in various states of exile and expatriation—strangers in strange lands, far from home. These dozen tales, by an author whose stories have been selected for more than fifty anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories, span the twentieth century and vividly capture brief moments in the lives of their characters: a rabbi in a small town in New England struggling to tend to his congregation and himself, retirees who live in Florida but dream of Brooklyn, a boy at a summer camp in upstate New York learning about the Holocaust for the first time, Russians living in Massachusetts with the family who helped them immigrate. In "The Other End of the World," an American soldier who has survived life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp grieves for members of his family murdered in a Nazi death camp, and in "Poppa's Books" a young boy learns to share his father's passion for the rare books that represent the Old World. "This Third Life" tells of a divorced woman who travels across Germany searching for new meaning in her life after her children leave home, while both "His Violin" and "The Golden Years" explore the plight of elderly Jews, displaced from New York City to retirement communities in Florida, who struggle with memory, madness, and mortality.
Set in various times and places, these poignant stories are all tales of personal exile that also illuminate that greater diaspora—geographical, emotional, or spiritual—in which many of us, whether Jews or non-Jews, live.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky."
It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. <I>No Heaven</I> rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations.
Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.
In choosing the winning manuscript for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, judge Andrew Hudgins remarked: “With immense poetic verve, Pelizzon finds flamboyance in places where it has been forgotten and brings it back to vivid life—and she sees it for what it is. Her vision is then both passionate and dispassionate at the same time, a maturity of perspective that is just one of the many accomplishments of this superb first book.”
In Nostos (the voyage of return) V. Penelope Pelizzon demonstrates again and again a worldly perspective, made clear and complex by her intelligence that is itself a treat to witness at play. Whether set in a Purgatory garden or on the platform of a bombed train station, these poems enthrall with language that is, in the words of one reader, “both the vehicle for vision and the vision itself.”
Nostos is indeed a voyage—of the mind and heart—guided by Pelizzon’s compelling images and rhythms and one that returns us to where we started, but not unchanged.
The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises evokes and investigates—from a Jewish American perspective and in the forms of poetry, essays, and interviews—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America’s involvement as both perpetrator and victim of events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the multiple ways that poetics can respond to political imperatives.
The poems range from the immediately lyrical to the experimental forms of the “Apple Anyone Sonnets” series, which relies heavily on the Arabic but has Shakespeare as its scaffolding.
In the essays, Schwartz calls on the power of poetry—and of some of the great poets in the Arabic, Jewish, and American traditions—to help rethink the battle lines of the contemporary Mid-East, with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber looming large.
The interviews provide Schwartz’s discussions with Israeli poet and activist Aharon Shabtai, political philosopher Michael Hardt, and the late, great American poet Amiri Baraka.
In these creative, analytical, and conversational moments, Leonard Schwartz rethinks the battle lines of the contemporary Middle East and calls on the power of language as the essence of our humanity, endlessly fluid, but also the source of an intentional confusion there is a necessity to counter.
—Major Jackson
Known for his storytelling, Shelton crafts a tale of poverty and its attendant sorrows: alcoholism, neglect, and abuse. But the tenacity of the human spirit shines through. This is an epic tale of Steinbeckian proportions, but it is not fiction. This is memoir in its finest tradition, illuminating today’s cultural chasm between the haves and have-nots. In the author’s words, Nobody Rich or Famous is “the story of a family and how it got that way.”
Epiphanic and rich with striking imagery, Anita Skeen’s new collection of poetry documents the fragmentary nature of life and celebrates the desire to make a meaningful narrative from momentary experience. In Never the Whole Story, the past is never past, and the present comes filled with the miracle of small gestures—singular moments that have the power to transport the mind from one geographic place to the next, one emotional world to another. Memory is incomplete, events unfold from multiple perspectives, and secrets unspool from the ordinary. Following in the tradition of James Wright, Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Robert Hass, and other writers whose work is grounded in the detail of ordinary life, Never the Whole Story will be a welcome addition to the libraries of those who turn to literature to find deeper connections between their own lives and the natural world.
Praise for Cole Swensen:
"One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry."
---Library Journal
"Engaging and delightful."
---Publishers Weekly
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
Ezra Pound famously said that literature is "news that stays news," but recent experiments in poetry and the sciences allow us to enlarge the statement to bring information theory and biology to bear on the issue---in particular, how the information theory–based model of self-organization from noise offers a way to look at language as an art material as well as a mode of communication. This concept directs these essays on poetry by contemporary poet Cole Swensen.
Noise That Stays Noise covers a variety of subjects relevant to contemporary poetry and will give the general reader a broad notion of the issues that inform discourse around poetry today. Space---the conceptual geometry of poetry and its concrete mise-en-page---is an underlying theme of this collection, sometimes approached directly through the work of other twentieth-century poets, sometimes more obliquely through considerations of the role of the visual arts in contemporary poetry. This question of space and the shapes it includes and acquires offers a different way to look at some familiar writers, such as Mallarmé and Olson, and a way to introduce several more recent writers who may not yet be known to the general public.
Margo Tamez’s voice is that of the cicada and the cricket, the raven and the crane. In this volume of poetry, she shows us that the earth is an erotic current linking all beings, a vibrant network of birth, death, and rebirth. A sacred intertwining from which we as humans have become disconnected. Tamez shares the perspective of other creatures in images that remind us of Nature's beauty and fragility. An invocation of birds: “Sudden hum / wings touching / wings in swift turn / hush / a fast red out of the flux.” An appreciation for the delicacy of insects, for spiderwebs “like a hundred needle-thin tubes of blown glass.”
Here too are reflections on childbirth and children—and on miscarriage, when damage inflicted on the environment by herbicides comes back to haunt all of us in our skin and bones, our very wombs. Warning of “the chemical cocktail seeping into the air ducts,” she brings the voice of someone who has experienced firsthand what happens when our land and water are compromised. For Tamez, earth, food, and family are the essentials of life, and we ignore them at our own peril. “If a person / does not admit the peril . . . that becomes a dangerous / form of existence.”
Written with the wisdom of one who knows and loves the land, her lyrical meditations speak to the naked wanting in us all.
Helmut Sanchez is a young researcher in the employ of the renowned scholar Werner Hopfgartner. By chance Sanchez discovers a letter written in the 1950s by Hopfgartner mocking feelings of guilt over the Holocaust. Appalled, he digs into the scholar's life, determined to find the truth and finally uncovering the evidence of Hopfgartner's sordid past. Sure of his conclusions, Helmut decides that only one shocking act is morally correct. When he does, the consequences are immense, and the toll taken on his mind and conscience is amplified when one of his friends is wrongly accused of the crime-and is wrongly left to pay for it.
Intelligent and literate, The Nature of Truth breaks new ground in Latino literature, focusing on how a contemporary man of unique heritage--a Mexican-German who has come to America by way of Germany--navigates a complex moral universe and how his journey reflects the tension between justice and righteousness in American life.
Further information about the author can be found at his web site: <A HREF="http://sergiotroncoso.com">http://sergiotroncoso.com.</A>
. . . I'm not saying it's our story. I'm not saying it isn't. It might be yours. "How do you tell a story that cannot be told?" writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining. Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son's ethnicity. "You are not a Mexican!" his mother once screamed at him. "Why can't you be called Louis instead of Luis?" He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love. "I am nobody's son. I am everybody's brother," writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war—both in the political arena and in their own homes—to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody's Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.
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