front cover of Zapata's Disciple
Zapata's Disciple
Essays
Martín Espada
Northwestern University Press, 2016

The ferocious acumen with which the award-winning poet Martín Espada attacks issues of social injustice in Zapata’s Disciple makes it no surprise that the book has been the subject of bans in both Arizona and Texas, targeted for its presence in the Mexican American Studies curriculum of Tucson’s schools and for its potential to incite a riot among Texas prison populations. This new edition of Zapata’s Disciple, which won the 1999 Independent Publisher Book Award for Essay / Creative Nonfiction, opens with an introduction in which the author chronicles this history of censorship and continues his lifelong fight for freedom of expression. A dozen of Espada’s poems, tender and wry as they are powerful, interweave with essays that address the denigration of the Spanish language by American cultural arbiters, castigate Nike for the exploitation of its workers, reflect upon National Public Radio’s censorship of Espada’s poem about Mumia Abu- Jamal, and more. Zapata’s Disciple is a potent assault on the continued marginalization of Latinos and other poor and working-class citizens in American society, and the collection breathes with a revolutionary zeal that is as relevant now as when it was first published.

 

[more]

front cover of Zero at the Bone
Zero at the Bone
Rewriting Life after a Snakebite
Erec Toso
University of Arizona Press, 2008
Late one evening in the summer of 2003, Erec Toso arrived home to his wife and children after an ordinary day at his university office. In the darkness of his yard, a rattlesnake lay along the path, basking in the post-monsoon coolness. Toso, lost in thought, never saw the snake, which struck him on the foot and injected a huge dose of venom.

Zero at the Bone is a deeply personal narrative about Toso’s physical recovery and emotional transformation following this near-death experience. In elegant prose that inspires as much as it unsettles, Toso takes the reader along with him on his expedition into the uncharted territory of cellular damage, hallucination, and ultimately profound spiritual awakening. On all levels, it is a book about pain. Toso spares no detail in his accounts of agonizing hospital procedures, in his revelations about rattlesnake lore, or in his descriptions of the wide-ranging effects of snake venom. But quickly the reader realizes that the physical pain of the snakebite is only the more tangible marker of the psychological pain and turmoil that Toso endures in the emotional journey that ensues.

In the months that follow his terrifying attack, priorities, daily habits, family relations, and definitions of self all come into question. What is predictable becomes problematic; what is comfortable becomes disconcerting. In a story that hinges on a common fear about an unlikely event—that of a snakebite—Toso uncovers a more widespread reality that many of us do not fear enough—complacency.
[more]

front cover of Zion Canyon
Zion Canyon
A Storied Land
Text by Greer K. Chesher; Photographs by Michael Plyler
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Zion National Park has served as the stage set for more than twenty-five movies, including, most notably, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is also a popular tourist destination, boasting a visitor log of more than 2.5 million every year. During the summer months, tour buses rattle their way into the park almost hourly. Sightseers crowd polished-trestle-wood and river-rock inns, buy hand-woven bags imported from Guatemala, and sip icy margaritas from the porch of an old bar with a stunning view of irrigated Mexican primroses and glowing redrock cliffs. While Zion National Park is a familiar vista to millions of day-trippers and film viewers, few ever intimately experience the unpredictable, often hostile, but always magnificent reality of this rugged frontier.

Greer K. Chesher brings us the first personal and in-depth look at Zion. In striking and elegant prose, she vividly recounts experiences that only a park ranger and resident of the region for more than two decades could have. She also lucidly explains the area’s natural and geological wonders, including the dynamics of Zion’s ecology, changes to plant and animal species wrought through human technology, and what these changes mean for the future.

Beyond the region’s amazing array of flora and fauna, she describes the landscape’s lasting imprint on settlers and current residents, and explains the politics that have long surrounded its protection. Award-winning photographer Michael Plyler, also a resident of the region, captures the allure of the park in spectacular images that illustrate the intimate details and geological wonder of the place. These exquisite photographs make this book a stunning pictorial as well as literary tribute to a place that is known to so many but about which so little is truly understood.
[more]

front cover of Zoo World
Zoo World
Essays
Mary Quade
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
“A pocket adventure for environmentalists and those who enjoy meditative writing.” —Kirkus

We contain the elements of our world in archives, boxes, collections, mausoleums, history books, and museums, trying to stave off their eventual disappearance from our memory and from the earth in a futile attempt at redemption for our violence against them. In Zoo World, Mary Quade examines our propensity for damage, our relationships with other species, our troubling belief in our own dominion, and the reality that when you put something in a cage, it becomes your responsibility. Her subjects are as eclectic as mallard ducks, ancient churches, monarch butterflies, classrooms, tourism, street markets, zoos, and dairy cows and as global as migration, war, language, and climate change. Whatever the topic at hand, Zoo World considers how our stewardship of the earth and one another falls short, hoping that a more humble understanding of our place on the planet might lead not only to our mutual survival but also to the extinction of our hubris as human beings. Replete with Quade’s lyrical and observational gifts and refusing to let any of us off the hook in the name of inspiration or comfort, these essays are a fresh take on travel and nature writing, pushing both in thrilling new directions.
[more]

front cover of Zóbel Reads Lorca
Zóbel Reads Lorca
Poetry, Painting, and Perlimplín In Love
Federico García Lorca
Swan Isle Press, 2022
A cherished erotic play by Federico García Lorca, illustrated by a major Spanish artist.
 
Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel Reads Lorca, as Fernando Zóbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain’s most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico García Lorca’s haunting play about the wounds of love.
 
The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, an “erotic allelujia” which Lorca once called his most cherished play, was shut down in 1928 by Spanish government censors who confiscated the manuscript and locked it away in the pornography section of a state archive. Lorca rewrote the work in New York, and an amateur theater group brought it to the Spanish stage a few years later. Since his death, the play has also been transformed into ballet and opera.
 
Zóbel Reads Lorca presents Zóbel’s previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars. Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Zóbel’s development as a painter, Luis Fernández Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Zóbel’s Harvard and throughout the United States in the 1940s, and Christopher Maurer delves into musical and visual aspects of the play’s American productions.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter