Hopi culture has long received considerable attention from the outside world, but the Hopi language has remained much less well known. This is the first true dictionary of Hopi, containing approximately 30,000 entries. The dictionary is based on the dialect spoken today in villages on Third Mesa and was compiled in consultation with a large team of elder Hopi speakers. Its preparation has involved a comprehensive survey of the ethnographic and linguistic literature to identify Hopi vocabulary, and each item found has been checked against existing Third Mesa knowledge of Hopi. The dictionary is valuable not only for the number of its entries but also for its many illustrative sentences and its abundance of information on aspects of Hopi culture, such as often-misunderstood expressions concerning time and space. Main entries, presented for the simplest and most common forms of words, contain full information on inflection in addition to definitions and examples. Cross-references are made for inflected forms that are not easily predictable, such as plurals, less common variants, and combining forms. Many definitions are illustrated with line drawings. The volume also features an English-Hopi word-finder list and a sketch of Hopi grammar, which makes it possible for the user to determine the structure of almost any Hopi sentence. An invaluable reference in Uto-Aztecan languages, this dictionary permits informed reading of Hopi texts. It is a definitive source for understanding not only a language but also a way of life.

In recent decades, much of the most vital literature written in English has come from the former colonies of Great Britain. But while postcolonial novelists such as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, and V. S. Naipaul have been widely celebrated, the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected.

In The Hybrid Muse, Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English, infusing modern and contemporary poetry with indigenous metaphors and creoles. A rich and vibrant poetry, he contends, has issued from the hybridization of the English muse with the long resident muses of Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Starting with the complex case of Ireland, Ramazani closely analyzes the work of leading postcolonial poets and explores key questions about the relationship between poetry and postcolonialism. As inheritors of both imperial and native cultures, poets such as W. B. Yeats, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, A. K. Ramanujan, and Okot p'Bitek invent compelling new forms to articulate the tensions and ambiguities of their cultural in-betweeness. They forge hybrid figures, vocabularies, and genres that embody the postcolonial condition.

Engaging an array of critical topics, from the aesthetics of irony and metaphor to the politics of nationalism and anthropology, Ramazani reconceptualizes issues central to our understanding of both postcolonial literatures and twentieth-century poetry. The first book of its kind, The Hybrid Muse will help internationalize the study of poetry, and in turn, strengthen the place of poetry in postcolonial studies.