front cover of The Queen's Desertion
The Queen's Desertion
Poems
Carol Frost
Northwestern University Press, 2006
In her tenth collection of poems, Carol Frost describes a journey through loss. How can one regain equilibrium in the face of absences such as dementia and death? We have to keep moving, even while realizing that the loss of mind and body is the natural conclusion. At the beginning of the first poem Frost invokes the image of an empty or abandoned beehive:

Pretty to think of the mind at its end
as a metaphysician beekeeping
after the leaves have fallen at autumn's end.


The bee metaphor is handled brilliantly and subtly throughout the collection as a reminder of how often our constant activity, whether it is mental or physical, is taken for granted.

Frost continues her investigation of the mortal plight by entering into a Dantesque descent into the ebb and flow of the seascape. Body consumes body over and over again as fish are caught and killed and the poet observes the flora and fauna as they partake in the darker cycles of nature. A long narrative poem about the Spanish explorer de Baca and his harrowing travels from southern Florida to Mexico powerfully reinforces the certainty of consumption and loss as it comments on the colonizing of the new world. In the final section, Frost returns once more to the need for movement and summons the Greek god Pan, who dances a rite of acceptance through a metaphysical landscape on the verge of seasonal change--the bees are not dead, the dark woods are filled with music.
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Queer Tidalectics
Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature
Emilio Amideo
Northwestern University Press, 2021
In Queer Tidalectics, Emilio Amideo investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics. Water recurs as a figurative and material site to express the Black queer experience within the diaspora, a means to explore malleability and overflowing sexual, gender, and racial boundaries. Amideo triangulates language, the aquatic, and affect to delineate a Black queer aesthetics, one that uses an idiom of fluidity, slipperiness, and opacity to undermine and circumvent gender normativity and the racialized heteropatriarchy embedded in English. The result is an outline of an ever-expanding affective archive of experiential knowledge.
 
Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis—a major scholarly contribution.

 

 
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Queer Velocities
Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage
Jennifer Eun-Jung Row
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage explores how seventeenth-century French theater represents queer desire. In this book, the first queer theoretical treatment of canonical French theater, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row proposes that these velocities, moments of unseemly haste or strategic delay, sparked new kinds of attachments, intimacies, and erotics. Rather than rely on fixed identities or analog categories, we might turn to these affectively saturated moments of temporal sensation to analyze queerness in the premodern world.

The twin innovations of precise, portable timepieces and the development of the theater as a state institution together ignited new types of embodiments, orderly and disorderly pleasures, and normative and wayward rhythms of life. Row leverages a painstakingly formalist and rhetorical analysis of tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille to show how the staging of delay or haste can critically interrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty—the quotidian rhythms and paradigms so necessary for the biopolitical management of life. Row’s approach builds on the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of the chronobiopolitical to wager that queerness can also be fostered by the sensations of disruptive speed and slowness. Ultimately, Row suggests that the theater not only contributed to the glitter of Louis XIV’s absolutist spectacle but also ignited new forms of knowing and feeling time, as well as new modes of loving, living, and being together.
 
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The Question of God in Heidegger's Phenomenology
George Kovacs
Northwestern University Press, 1990
Several philosophers have developed theological perspectives out of Heidegger's ontology. Yet the question of God in Heidegger's thought itself has never received full elucidation. In this revealing new study, George Kovacs poses the problem of analyzing the idea of God as a process of questioning and thus subjects Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism to a process of exposition Heidegger himself employed.
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Questions in the Vestibule
Poems
Rachel Hadas
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Rachel Hadas reaches the peak of her poetic prowess in Questions in the Vestibule. A deeply personal and meditative collection in three sections, Questions moves through the liminal space of solitude and the coded landscape of dreams toward the startling power of a life-changing love.

Hadas’s voice and her formal elegance, as distinctive and distinguished as ever, endow this new work with a precise and thoughtful beauty. Questions in the Vestibule takes readers into a new territory of unapologetic bliss.

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Quickly Changing River
Poems
Meena Alexander
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship

With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.

In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.

 

Aletheia (Girl in River Water)
 
First I saw your face,
The your whole body lying still
Hands jutting, eyelids shut
 
Twin nostrils flare, sheer
Efflorescebce when memory cannot speak-
a horde of body parts glistening.
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Quicksand
Emmanuel Bove
Northwestern University Press, 1991
After the fall of France, colorless Joseph Bridet determines to go to Vichy and ingratiate himself with the regime there as a first step towards escaping to England, only to discover that he agrees with the suspicious and pitiless world of the Petainists. 
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Quiet Armor
Poems
Stevie Edwards
Northwestern University Press, 2023
New poetry from Stevie Edwards, author of Sadness Workshop

Quiet Armor, the third full-length collection from poet Stevie Edwards, examines how capitalism and patriarchy impact romantic relationships and, more broadly, intimacy. Edwards considers the ways in which confessional performances of vulnerability can be coercive, whether popular culture encourages men to seek validation through sexual excess and aggression, and how we encourage women to be complicit in figurative and literal violence against other women.

Drawing on historical and mythological figures—including Medusa, Persephone, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Christina—Edwards builds a fierce investigation into how rape culture has shaped the literary canon, academia, and the world at large. She brings readers into the quiet and intimate spaces we create despite trauma—or perhaps even because of it. Ultimately, Quiet Armor seeks to reclaim positive intimacy, showing us not only the desperate battles but also the healing embraces. All the while, these poems ask us: What does the end of rape culture look like? How do we get there?
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