“Mohja Kahf ’s Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, thrillingly artful in its execution. Its range is immense, its spiritual depth is profound, it negotiates its shifts between archaic and the contemporary with utmost skill. There’s lyricism, there’s satire, there’s comedy, there’s theology of a high order in this book.”
—Alicia Ostriker, author of For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book
“Hagar/ Hajar the immigrant/exile/outcast/refugee mother of a people is given multiple voices and significance in Mohja Kahf’s new book of dramatic monologues, which also reinvents Pharaoh’s daughter, Zuleika, Aïsha, and Mary in poems that are at once lively and learned, agnostic and devout. The sequence on an American mosque, and the poet’s ambivalent love for what it represents, is unique in American poetry.”
—Marilyn Hacker, author of A Stranger’s Mirror
“‘Where have all the goddesses gone,’ writes Mohja Kahf, ‘I tracked down Isis / incognito on Cyprus. /She told me Ishtar / lived under the radar / in southern Iraq. . . .’ In Hagar Poems, Mohja Kahf’s hallmark qualities—irreverence, imagination, wit, poignancy—are all exuberantly in evidence. A wonderful read.”
—Leila Ahmed, author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America
“This brilliant collection captures all the ‘patient threading of relationship’ between Hagar and Sarah as between women, and then between women and men, between human and God. . . . At every turn of the page [Kahf] refuses complacency and circumstance but opts instead for exposing the tenuousness of threads that tie and bind and then come loose before our eyes.”
—From the foreword by Amina Wadud
The central matter of this daring new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah—the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near Eastern heritage, such as Mary and Moses, and touch on figures from early Islam, such as Fatima and Aisha. Throughout, there is artful reconfiguring. Readers will find sequels and prequels to the traditional narratives, along with modernized figures claimed for contemporary conflicts.
Hagar Poems is a compelling shakeup of not only Hagar’s story but also of current roles of all kinds of women in all kinds of relationships.
BLACK POWER!
It was a phrase that consumed the American imagination in the 1960s and 70s and inspired a new agenda for black freedom. Dynamic and transformational, the black power movement embodied more than media stereotypes of gun-toting, dashiki-wearing black radicals; the movement opened new paths to equality through political and economic empowerment.
In Harambee City, Nishani Frazier chronicles the rise and fall of black power within the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) by exploring the powerful influence of the Cleveland CORE chapter. Frazier explores the ways that black Clevelanders began to espouse black power ideals including black institution building, self-help, and self-defense. These ideals challenged CORE’s philosophy of interracial brotherhood and nonviolent direct action, spawning ideological ambiguities in the Cleveland chapter. Later, as Cleveland CORE members rose to national prominence in the organization, they advocated an open embrace of black power and encouraged national CORE to develop a notion of black community uplift that emphasized economic populism over political engagement. Not surprisingly, these new empowerment strategies found acceptance in Cleveland.
By providing an understanding of the tensions between black power and the mainstream civil rights movement as they manifested themselves as both local and national forces, Harambee City sheds new light on how CORE became one of the most dynamic civil rights organizations in the black power era.
In 2015, Booklist observed, “the arrival of Hauser’s annual boxing review is akin to Christmas morning for fight fans. Nobody knows a sport any better than Hauser knows boxing.”
Each year, readers, writers, and critics alike look forward to Thomas Hauser’s annual collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene. He’s one of the last real champions of boxing and one of the very best who has ever written about the sport.
A Hard World continues this tradition of excellence with dressing-room reports from big fights like Canelo Alvarez vs. Miguel Cotto, a behind-the-scenes look at Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao, and a foray into the world of mixed martial arts for a compelling portrait of Ronda Rousey. Most importantly, this new collection contains Hauser’s groundbreaking two-part investigative report on the relationship between the United States Anti-Doping Agency and boxing, a report that shook the industry and raised fundamental questions regarding the integrity of USADA’s drug-testing procedures as applied to boxing.
Finalist, Miller Williams Poetry Prize
“The past is a flame you must learn to hold / your hand above,” Eric Leigh writes in this stunning first volume of poems, a poignant meditation on the harm that we can and cannot keep from those we love, and the harm that cannot be kept from us. Taking place in both the rural and the urban, in fields and on sidewalks, in gay bars and in laboratories, with topics as diverse and powerful as a father’s suicide, a mother’s resilience, coming out, lost love, and the continuing plight of HIV, Leigh’s poems locate the heartbreaking music in these struggles. At the center of this profound book about loss—of family, of love, of immunity—lies the spirit’s ability to persevere. “My worst fear has come true, / and I am still here walking,” Leigh writes. Indeed, these poems are as assured and brave as those steps toward an unknown future. At turns beautiful, disturbing, mournful, and redemptive, Harm’s Way is an accomplished debut.
Harm’s Way is part of the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer.
“A practical, highly informative, and sympathetic guide.”
—The Washington Post
Most of us will become a caregiver at some point in our lives. And we will assume this role for the most personal reason imaginable: wanting to help someone we love. But we may not know where to start, and we may be afraid of losing ourselves in this daunting task.
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, a longtime advocate for caregivers and mental health, knows firsthand the challenges of this labor of love. Drawing upon her own experiences and those of hundreds of others whose stories she gathered over many decades, Mrs. Carter offers reassuring, practical advice to any caregiver who has faced stress, anxiety, or loneliness.
Helping Yourself Help Others, reissued here with a new foreword, is as relevant as ever. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic inspired national conversations about the vast undervaluing of unpaid caregiving, the dangers of burnout, and the merits of self-care for relief, Rosalynn Carter was shining a light on these matters and everything else that caregivers confront. Filled with empathy, this encouraging guide will help you meet a difficult challenge head-on and find fulfillment and empowerment in your caregiving role.
The poems in celebrated poet Elton Glaser’s sixth collection journey through the seasons, from spring to spring, a pilgrimage down to the South, over the Midwest of snow and roses, and across the Romance countries of Europe. If the poet often finds himself “[h]alfway between grief and longing,” that may be his natural condition, rooted in this world against the pull of the next, his faith in the “purple evidence of plums, the testimony of wild persimmon” weathering the stormy preachers and the droughts of middle age.
Within that tension, the range of tones is unlimited, sometimes in the same poem, from the serious to the sublime, from anguish to awe. Holding everything together is Glaser’s unmistakable voice, a warm idiom made pungent by wintry wit: “my tongue of odd American, my mongrel sublime.” Whether the poems speak of ripe pears or minor prophets, they invite the reader to a feast of language that lets us taste how it feels to live on this earth, in the shadow of the afterlife.
Louise Thaden wrote High, Wide, and Frightened in the prime of her life, making this autobiography unique among books about the Golden Age of Aviation. Thaden, a contemporary of pioneering women pilots Amelia Earhart, Ruth Elder, Florence Klingensmith, and Ruth Nichols, was part of a small group of determined women who overcame discrimination and obstacles to become pilots in a time when air races and distance, altitude and endurance records were daily news in America. She became the first woman to win the Bendix Transcontinental Air Race, the premier air race of the day and, before her, a male-dominated one.
High, Wide, and Frightened is the story of Thaden’s life, of her achievements in aviation, and also of her childhood in Arkansas. She writes about her everyday personal life and her day-today experiences in aviation.
Originally published in 1907 and now reprinted for the first time, this is the only account published by a Union guerrilla in the border region of the central Ozarks, where political and civil violence lasted from the Civil War well into the 1880s.
There were probably many people who wanted to shoot Billy Monks. He was a Union patriot and skilled guerrilla fighter to some, but others called him a bushwhacker, a murderer, and a thief. His was a very personal combat: he commanded, rallied, arrested, killed, quarreled with, and sued people he knew. His life provides a striking example of the cliché that the war did not end in 1865, but continued fiercely on several fronts for another decade as partisan factions settled old scores and battled for local political control.
This memoir was Monks’s last salvo at his old foes, by turns self-defense and an uncompromising affirmation of the Radical Union cause in the Ozarks. The editors include a new biographical sketch of the author, fill in gaps in his narrative, identify all the people and places to which he refers, and offer a detailed index. Monks himself illustrated the volume with staged photographs of key events re-created by aged comrades who appear to have been just barely able to hoist the muskets they hold as props.
Belonging with the work of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar, this richly drawn story runs the gamut from lyrical to violent to pastoral. Originally published in 1975, Cavalls cap a la fosca was hailed by the public and critics alike as perhaps the most incisive Catalan novel since the Spanish Civil War. It was honored with four prestigious literary prizes, including the 1976 Spanish Literary Critics’ Award
In Horses into the Night, the narrator’s search for his roots—especially for his father—among the myths, stories, lies, and truths of his family and hometown, strikes a universal chord. As the plot becomes increasingly textured with piracy, smuggling, the Inquisition, morbid familial relationships, eroticism, and occult occurrences, it is all but impossible to resist this epic story described by El Pais as a “Mediterranean novel flooded with light and bathed in darkness.”
Laurence Gonzales began his successful publishing career in 1989 with the publication of The Still Point and later The Hero’s Apprentice (1994), both with the University of Arkansas Press. From these collections of essays he went on to write for renowned magazines in addition to publishing several books, including the best selling Deep Survival. His journalism garnered two National Magazine Awards, and his latest nonfiction book, Surviving Survival, was named by Kirkus as one of the best books of 2012.
This new collection of essays shows us the sometimes hair-raising, sometimes heart-wrenching writing that Gonzales has become known for. This “compelling and trustworthy guide” (Booklist) takes us from a maximum-security prison to a cancer ward, from a mental institution to the World Trade Center. Among the essays included is “Marion Prison,” a National Magazine Award finalist, with its intimate view inside the most maximum security prison in America. “House of Pain” takes the reader into the life of a brain surgeon at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, a grim world that few ever see. “Rites of Spring,” another National Magazine Award finalist, follows Gonzales and his wife on their journey through cancer, not once, but twice.
Other stories venture above the Arctic Circle, flying deep into the Alaskan wilderness among grizzly bears and trumpeter swans; explore aerobatics in high-performance aircraft; and eulogize Memphis and Miami as American cities that mourn their fates in uniquely different ways.
“We need a new poetry lexicon—a new way of moleculing the poem on the page, even—and Maya Salameh brings it. We need all the strange Arabic-diasporic ways we can find for being in this terrible and joyful and often frighteningly banalizing world, and Salameh’s poems are a generous find. Her writing is an unexpected cousin in the colonized and capitalism-razed city, bewildering and divining things you’ve never heard but want to learn. . . . Prepare to be stretched and delighted.”
—Mohja Kahf, from the Foreword
The divine and the digital achieve a distinct corporality in Maya Salameh’s HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE, winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Layering prayer with code, Salameh brings supposedly unassailable technological constructs like algorithm, recursion, and loop into conversation with the technologies of womanhood, whether liner, lipstick, or blood. Exploring the relationships we have with our devices, she speaks back to the algorithm (“a computer’s admission to blood”), which acts simultaneously as warden, confidant, and data thief.
Here Salameh boldly examines how an Arab woman survives the digitization of her body—experimenting with form to create an intimate collage of personal and neocolonial histories, fearlessly insinuating herself into the scripts that would otherwise erase her, and giving voice to the full mess of ritual.
This post-revisionist study examines the motives and the concerns of the ex-slaves in South Carolina who supported a movement that eventually led to white supremacy.
Although most freedmen throughout the states of the former Confederacy were Republicans loyal to the party of the Federal government that had emancipated them, they were factions of African-American voters who aligned themselves with local white Democratic leaders. one such group of black conservatives joined the “Red Shirts,” white paramilitary clubs that attempted to restore antebellum values in electing former Confederate general Wade Hampton governor of South Carolina in 1876.
Drago’s fine analysis recovers and explains this lost aspect of Southern black history. Drawing on primary sources that include testimonies of several black Red Shirts before a Congressional investigation of the election and eleven slave narratives, he de-romanticizes the black experience by examining the relationship between black initiative and southern paternalism.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press