front cover of Falling
Falling
Trebor Healey
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
In award-winning author Trebor Healey’s newest collection, Falling, characters lose their way, figuratively and literally, and confront the profound displacement of modern life. These are stories of hard-won redemption and transformation—a widower who finds meaning adopting refugee children, a painter who reconnects with his son after losing everything, a nun victimized and haunted by state terror, and a peripatetic gay man in utter despair and fatigue who finally bonds with his dying father. In Healey’s skilled hands, there is a flicker of hope in the hopeless, a way forward in the pathless wood, and a bridge—though rickety and swaying—across even the most harrowing chasm.
Together, these vignettes cover the dizzying breadth of human experience. From a contemporary reimagination of the life of Evita Perón with a gay man in the starring role to the story of an abandoned building full of ghosts in the center of Mexico City, this collection suggests other ways of seeing in a world overburdened by history.
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front cover of Falling in Love with Statues
Falling in Love with Statues
Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present
George L. Hersey
University of Chicago Press, 2009
If, as a child, you conducted conversations with beloved dolls, or if, as an adult, you have entered virtual worlds inhabited by digital humans who inspire devotion in real people, you have participated in one of humanity’s most potent yet least explored traditions. Falling in love (and out of love) with statues, George Hersey reveals here, has been an instrumental practice since antiquity in our efforts to understand, improve, and empower ourselves.
            Hersey’s history of statue love begins in Cyprus, home of the legendary sculptor Pygmalion, who famously grew enamored of his own creation. Examining the island’s prehistoric images of Aphrodite—the love goddess who brought Pygmalion’s sculpture to life—Hersey traces the origins of statue love back to the Cypriot followers who adored her terra-cotta likenesses. He goes on to explore ideas about human replicas in the works of Empedocles, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Ovid, whose definitive account of the Pygmalion myth introduced the notion that statues have the potential to induce physical responses in their viewers. Finding avatars of Ovid’s living image in everything from pagan idols and early Christian statuary to eighteenth-century painting to modern action figures and marionettes, Hersey concludes by investigating the concern that these automata will eventually replace humans.
            In the process, he narrates a powerful history of artificial life at a moment when—with the development of robot soldiers, ever more sophisticated genetic engineering, and a continually expanding digital universe—it seems more real than ever.
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front cover of In Praise of Falling
In Praise of Falling
Cheryl Dumesnil
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
The poems in this collection are the proverbial spring bulbs abandoned in the basement, growing toward a slim crack of sunlight. They are both aware of the limitations of social structures and forcefully committed to breaking out of those traps, urging toward a better way of living. The characters in these poems resist the twenty-first century’s prescription for a life of emotional-spiritual bankruptcy, reaching toward an ever-elusive glimmer on the horizon.
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front cover of The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories
The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories
Catherine Brady
University of Nevada Press, 2009

The stories in this collection explore those moments when the seemingly fixed coordinates of our lives abruptly give way—when mother love fractures, a faithful husband abandons his family, a conscientious middle-class life implodes, or loyalty demands an excruciating sacrifice. The characters share a fundamental predicament, the struggle to name and embrace some faith that can break their fall. In equal measure, they hunger for and resist this elusive possibility and what it demands of them.The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories deals with a range of circumstances and relationships, and with characters who must decide what they are willing to risk for the sake of transformation, or for the right to refuse it. The stories trace the effort to traverse the boundaries between one state and another—between conviction and self-doubt, recklessness and despair, resignation and rebellion. And each story propels the reader to imagine what will happen next, to register the unfinished and always precarious quality of every life.

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front cover of Meditations on Rising and Falling
Meditations on Rising and Falling
Meditations on Rising and Falling
Philip Pardi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Winner of the 2008 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by David St. John
From tumult to catharsis, the poems in Philip Pardi’s first collection, Meditations on Rising and Falling, explore the emotional tug-of-war that is the human experience. Present at every turn are people searching for meaning and sense in an elusive world: a doorman who plans to punch the senator who never speaks to him, a son who discusses ornithology with his father’s dying friend, a roofer who copes with his past as he senses his imminent fall to the ground. While the poems are witness to the turmoil of both body and soul, they are not without hope. Pardi finds grace in noise, and happiness in the mourning doves, showing us that often, the reasons for disbelief become precisely the reasons for belief. Pardi’s collection is a testimony to faith and resistance in a world where “falling is the given.”
 
Winner, Award for Poetry and Literary Criticism, The Writers’ League of Texas
 
Finalist, 2008 Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America
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