Regally bearing its Latin title, Rara Avis captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional — a rarified specimen, a strange bird. A son, a husband, and now a father, seasoned poet Blas Falconer explores the relationships among men — between peers, lovers, parents and children — to consider and question existing models of authority and power. Falconer’s lucid but feeling gaze reveals social complexities with searing and graceful imagery, asking what it means to live outside the heteronormative experience while existing as a man, simultaneously a casualty and a participant in the project of masculinity. 

These poems carefully delineate the casual cruelties of queer youth and the beautiful and bitter revelations of adulthood. The wisdom propelling Rara Avis is the knowledge that we are each of us that rare bird; we share our singularity. Everyone has a pancreas, but only one organ matters when Falconer learns his father is afflicted. Alchemized by love, one thing, unlike any other, becomes all things. “All day, everything, / no matter how / small, makes me // think of it” … The bee / crawling in / blossoms // scattered on / the glass/tabletop. The sound of // a pitcher fill- / ing slowly / with water.” 

James Allen Hall returns to poetry with Romantic Comedy, a sophomore collection sounding the parameters of genre to subvert cultural notions of literary value and artistic legitimacy. What realities do stories authorize, and which remain untold? “This story,” they profess in “Biography,” “is mine: there was / a wound, then a world.” Rather than playing into the attention economy’s appetite for sensationalism, Hall’s poems resist the formulaic while paying homage to the oeuvre, a formal balancing act that celebrates queer life.The poems create liberatory narratives that break constraints or speak through them. Hall parses music from the blizzard — as when “one year / [they] watched the snow / pile to [their] door / all December, all / January,” “the year [they] wanted / to die,” and, faced with winter’s architecture, “learned / another song. Sang / another way.” Whether grieving the death of their father, documenting the survival of sexual assault, interrogating the scripts of addiction, or revisiting an ’80s crime thriller, Hall’s second collection constantly affirms the ingenuity of self-definition as a technology of survival.

The collection of poems in The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam circles the U.S. Civil War and the failed revolution of Reconstruction, and Matthew Moore makes incursions into the histories and beliefs of the era through architectures of sound, but also via ancillary histories and histories stacked upon histories—densely and visibly scrawled—like Anselm Kiefer's sculptures of lead books, melted and dripping with the texts of illegible songs. His poems include the figure of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and her voices; the explosion of the U.S. prison system and racial legal fictions amid the groundswell of mass terror in the wake of the U.S. Civil War; the politically poisoned poetic lineage that moves from Modernism, to New Criticism, and dead-ends in Southern Agrarianism; and the destructive colonial histories of the sugar and cotton industries.  

The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam stands imbricated with the spell of language-the-testament; language as hard rhyme and difficult music, evanescence and violence; and the invocation of names and events at their meeting places in history. Moore’s poems stand against sentiment and pity, and against the consolation of that which cannot be consoled. 

Romulus was the founder of Rome; and those tossed outside the city-gate are not Romulus’s children but the cast-offs living in hovels, the Rumphulus. However, this isn’t ancient Rome, but rather the nature preserve of a contemporary American suburb. The outcasts don’t understand why they’ve been relegated to the
woods. Nor do they know if they will ever summon the courage to cross the roads that act as a physical and psychological barrier to their reentry into conventional society. Daily they negotiate the harsh conditions of the wild and the dangerous presence of one another while they contemplate their exiles. That is until society
comes for one of them.

The Rumphulus have grown their beards long, and when they can no longer stand life they howl like wolves; only they are not wolves but the stranded city outcasts who howl in pain.

Romey's Order is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry.

As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records--and tries to order--the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his "blood-home" and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform "every burn-mark and blemish," to “bind our river-wrack and leavings," Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral, Atsuro Riley's poems bristle with musical and imaginative pleasures, with story-telling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind. 

The Early Romantics met resistance from artists and academics alike in part because they defied the conventional wisdom that philosophy and the arts must be kept separate. Indeed, as the literary component of Romanticism has been studied and celebrated in recent years, its philosophical aspect has receded from view. This book, by one of the most respected scholars of the Romantic era, offers an explanation of Romanticism that not only restores but enhances understanding of the movement's origins, development, aims, and accomplishments--and of its continuing relevance.

Poetry is in fact the general ideal of the Romantics, Frederick Beiser tells us, but only if poetry is understood not just narrowly as poems but more broadly as things made by humans. Seen in this way, poetry becomes a revolutionary ideal that demanded--and still demands--that we transform not only literature and criticism but all the arts and sciences, that we break down the barriers between art and life, so that the world itself becomes "romanticized." Romanticism, in the view Beiser opens to us, does not conform to the contemporary division of labor in our universities and colleges; it requires a multifaceted approach of just the sort outlined in this book.

This remarkable first novel depicts life in the small Mexican town of Ixtepec during the grim days of the Revolution. The town tells its own story against a variegated background of political change, religious persecution, and social unrest. Elena Garro, who has also won a high reputation as a playwright, is a masterly storyteller. Although her plot is dramatically intense and suspenseful, the novel does not depend for its effectiveness on narrative continuity. It is a book of episodes, one that leaves the reader with a series of vivid impressions. The colors are bright, the smells pungent, the many characters clearly drawn in a few bold strokes. Octavio Paz, the distinguished poet and critic, has written that it "is truly an extraordinnary work, one of the most perfect creations in contemporary Latin American literature."

Only a scholar as rich in learning as I. Bernard Cohen could do justice to a theme so subtle and yet so grand. Spanning five centuries and virtually all of scientific endeavor, Revolution in Science traces the nuances that differentiate both scientific revolutions and human perceptions of them, weaving threads of detail from physics, mathematics, behaviorism, Freud, atomic physics, and even plate tectonics and molecular biology, into the larger fabric of intellectual history.

How did “revolution,” a term from the physical sciences, meaning a turning again and implying permanence and recurrence—the cyclical succession of the seasons, the “revolutions” of the planets in their orbits—become transformed into an expression for radical change in political and socioeconomic affairs, then become appropriated once again to the sciences?

How have political revolutions—French, American, Bolshevik—and such intellectual forces as Darwinism further modified the concept, from revolution in science as a dramatic break with the past to the idea that science progresses by the slow accumulation of knowledge? And what does each transformation in each historical period tell us about the deep conceptual changes in our image of the scientist and scientific activity?

Cohen’s exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether or not there has been a revolution, and the creative factors in producing a revolutionary new idea. His book is a probing analysis of the history of an idea and one of the most impressive surveys of the history of science ever undertaken.

A thought-provoking examination of the intersections of knowledge and violence, and the quandaries and costs of modern, technoscientific warfare.

Science and violence converge in modern warfare. While the finest minds of the twentieth century have improved human life, they have also produced human injury. They engineered radar, developed electronic computers, and helped mass produce penicillin all in the context of military mobilization. Scientists also developed chemical weapons, atomic bombs, and psychological warfare strategies.

Rational Fog explores the quandary of scientific and technological productivity in an era of perpetual war. Science is, at its foundation, an international endeavor oriented toward advancing human welfare. At the same time, it has been nationalistic and militaristic in times of crisis and conflict. As our weapons have become more powerful, scientists have struggled to reconcile these tensions, engaging in heated debates over the problems inherent in exploiting science for military purposes. M. Susan Lindee examines this interplay between science and state violence and takes stock of researchers’ efforts to respond. Many scientists who wanted to distance their work from killing have found it difficult and have succumbed to the exigencies of war. Indeed, Lindee notes that scientists who otherwise oppose violence have sometimes been swept up in the spirit of militarism when war breaks out.

From the first uses of the gun to the mass production of DDT and the twenty-first-century battlefield of the mind, the science of war has achieved remarkable things at great human cost. Rational Fog reminds us that, for scientists and for us all, moral costs sometimes mount alongside technological and scientific advances.

From the ancients’ first readings of the innards of birds to your neighbor’s last bout with the state lottery, humankind has put itself into the hands of chance. Today life itself may be at stake when probability comes into play—in the chance of a false negative in a medical test, in the reliability of DNA findings as legal evidence, or in the likelihood of passing on a deadly congenital disease—yet as few people as ever understand the odds. This book is aimed at the trouble with trying to learn about probability. A story of the misconceptions and difficulties civilization overcame in progressing toward probabilistic thinking, Randomness is also a skillful account of what makes the science of probability so daunting in our own day.

To acquire a (correct) intuition of chance is not easy to begin with, and moving from an intuitive sense to a formal notion of probability presents further problems. Author Deborah Bennett traces the path this process takes in an individual trying to come to grips with concepts of uncertainty and fairness, and also charts the parallel path by which societies have developed ideas about chance. Why, from ancient to modern times, have people resorted to chance in making decisions? Is a decision made by random choice “fair”? What role has gambling played in our understanding of chance? Why do some individuals and societies refuse to accept randomness at all? If understanding randomness is so important to probabilistic thinking, why do the experts disagree about what it really is? And why are our intuitions about chance almost always dead wrong?

Anyone who has puzzled over a probability conundrum is struck by the paradoxes and counterintuitive results that occur at a relatively simple level. Why this should be, and how it has been the case through the ages, for bumblers and brilliant mathematicians alike, is the entertaining and enlightening lesson of Randomness.

When the first X-ray detectors revealed many places in the universe that are too hot to be seen by optical and radio telescopes, pioneering X-ray astronomers realized they were onto something big. They knew that a large X-ray observatory must be created if they were ever to understand such astonishing phenomena as neutron stars, supernovas, black holes, and dark matter. What they could not know was how monumental in time, money, and effort this undertaking would be. Revealing the Universe tells the story of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

From the first proposal for a large X-ray telescope in 1970 to the deployment of Chandra by the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999, this book chronicles the technical feats, political struggles, and personal dramas that transformed an inspired vision into the world's supreme X-ray observatory. With an insider's knowledge and a storyteller's instincts, Wallace and Karen Tucker describe the immense challenges that this project posed for such high-tech industry giants as TRW, Eastman Kodak, and Hughes Danbury Optical Systems (now Raytheon Optical Systems). Their portrayal of the role of NASA is itself an extraordinary case study of multibillion-dollar government decisionmaking, and a cautionary tale for future large space astronomy missions.Revealing the Universe is primarily the story of the men and women whose discoveries, skills, failures, and successes made the Chandra X-ray Observatory possible.