"Harper's poetry is not limited by color or attitude. In Images of Kin, Harper amazes with his keen sense of political and personal histories, his breadth of expression. This collection fixes Harper as one of the dominant poetic voices of his generation" -- Chicago Sun-Times
"It is Mr. Harper's achievement to have projected his most difficult and complex insights and feelings through the epical manner, yet at the same time carried us along to identify with him." -- New York Times Book Review

The title of Michael Van Walleghen's new collection evokes thematic preoccupations that have shadowed him throughout his long career. Appearing as a phrase in the poems themselves, In the Black Window more generally points to Van Walleghen's enduring interest in the intersection between inner and outer worlds of experience--those liminal moments in other worlds where we become aware of ourselves. We live at once in a strictly personal, material dimension but also in a distinctly spiritual one. Yet, when looking from a lighted kitchen into a night-black window on a winter evening, we might perhaps become suddenly aware not only of our own reflection, but also of our complicity in some deeper mystery altogether.
 

This is the first comprehensive study in the English language of the commentaries of Didymus the Blind, who was revered as the foremost Christian scholar of the fourth century and an influential spiritual director of ascetics.
 
The writings of Didymus were censored and destroyed due to his posthumous condemnation for heresy. This study recovers the uncensored voice of Didymus through the commentaries among the Tura papyri, a massive set of documents discovered in an Egyptian quarry in 1941.
 
This neglected corpus offers an unprecedented glimpse into the internal workings of a Christian philosophical academy in the most vibrant and tumultuous cultural center of late antiquity. By exploring the social context of Christian instruction in the competitive environment of fourth-century Alexandria, Richard A. Layton elucidates the political implications of biblical interpretation.
 
Through detailed analysis of the commentaries on Psalms, Job, and Genesis, the author charts a profound tectonic shift in moral imagination as classical ethical vocabulary becomes indissolubly bound to biblical narrative. Attending to the complex interactions of political competition and intellectual inquiry, this study makes a unique contribution to the cultural history of late antiquity.
 

  "Rolfe's voice is one that many of us feared was buried forever.
        . . . He stands in the forefront of an entire 'lost generation' of left-wing
        writers who fused artistic craft with irrepressible political commitment."
        -- Alan Wald, author of The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected
        Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment
      "[Rolfe's] Spanish Civil War poems may be the best written by an
        American writer, and his McCarthy era poems brilliantly counteract the
        often apolitical, rather socially aseptic poetry of their time."
        -- Reginald Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly
      The radical journalist and poet Edwin Rolfe wrote eloquently of the hardships
        of the Great Depression, the experience of war, and McCarthy era witch-hunts.
        More than fifty of his best poems--some beautifully lyrical and some devastatingly
        satiric--are included in Trees Became Torches. Rolfe was widely
        known as the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans
        who volunteered to help defend the elected Spanish government during the
        1936-39 civil war.
 

With a voice emerging from class tensions, labor struggles, the Great Depression, and World War II, Vincent Ferrini lived as a people's poet crying out for an end to exploitation and organized greed. Radical Christian gnosis and the conviction that poetry should be more than a display of word-craft distinguished him from poets like T. S. Eliot, infusing his work with dynamic images of Christ as a fighter, a revolutionary, and a martyr in opposing the mighty for the sake of the poor.
 

This is the collected work of a major, versatile American poet passionately engaged with everything from the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War to his love for New York City and his wife. The editors argue that his long poem sequence, Denmark Vesey, stands as the most ambitious poem about African American history ever written by a white American. Wicked Times includes previously unpublished poems and the first detailed account of Kramer's life, along with photos and extensive explanatory notes.