BiblioVault - Books about Smith, Bruce

AC-DC Power System Analysis

Jos Arrillaga

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1998

With the expansion of HV DC transmission throughout the world, and the increasing numbers of international interconnections, few power systems can continue to escape the effect of this technology in their planning and operation. The primary subject of this book is the incorporation of AC-DC converters and DC transmission in power system analysis. However, the concepts and methods described are also applicable to the FACTS (flexible AC transmission systems) technology.

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Devotions

Bruce Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG. These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what’s unspoken and unbidden. While we’re driving, while riding a bus, while receiving a call, while passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected—sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly—with the hum and buzz of the culture. The culture, whether New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, carries the burden of race and “someone’s idea of beauty.” The poems fluctuate between the two poles of “lullaby and homicide” before taking a vow to remain on earth, to look right and left, to wait and to witness.

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Mercy Seat

Bruce Smith

University of Chicago Press, 1994

Bruce Smith's new collection of poems presents a formidable vision of growing up "white male North American" in the fifties and sixties. With poems whose subjects range from football to politics to jazz, Mercy Seat is a book by a native son who has survived the brokenness of his country to sing a paradoxical new song for a new age.

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Moving Materials

Valerie American Library Association

American Library Association, 2009

The Other Lover

Bruce Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2000

The Other Lover is a collection of bittersweet American love poems. Writing with jazz-like verbal panache, Bruce Smith reaches for the paradoxical pulls between sweetness and bitterness. With carefully crafted rhyming stanzas and unpredictable free verse rhythms, these poems bristle and pop like the riffs of a virtuoso horn player. The book is a personal, passionate, disturbing collection that places the reader both inside and outside of the poet's life. Deftly filtering personal experiences through improvisatory structures and a wide range of idioms, Smith communicates the want, the lack, the desire for what is missing, the sweetness of absence and pain. The pleasure of The Other Lover is in the imagination's dance in the erotic spaces between the poet and the reader.

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Propaganda and Promotional Activities

An Annotated Bibliography

Harold Lasswell

University of Minnesota Press, 1935

Propaganda and Promotional Activities: An Annotated Bibliography was first published in 1935. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Every aspect of the subject of propaganda, or the “manipulation of collective responses,” is covered in the forty-five hundred titles listed in this exceptionally useful reference book. Included in the bibliography are books, pamphlets, and articles, many in foreign languages, dealing with the following topics:1. The aims and methods of propaganda in the fields of politics and government, international relations, business and the professions, public and private finance, labor and agriculture, religion and morals, education, and social reform.2. The media used in the dissemination of propaganda: the newspaper, the periodical, and the graphic arts; the radio; the press agent, the public relations counselor, and the advertising agency; the stage and screen; the lecture platform, the salon, and the tavern; the public fair, exposition, and museum.3. The effectiveness of the various propagandist methods.4. The function and regulation of propaganda in modern society.The volume opens with an essay by Professor Laswell on “The Study and Practice of Propaganda.” Complete subject and author indexes are also included.

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Songs for Two Voices

Bruce Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Part ancient Greek chorus, part Southern Baptist revival, Songs for Two Voices is an explosive showcase for Bruce Smith's jazz-like variations on sonnets and couplets, offering twenty-five duets: poems of call and response, song and countersong. In poems that groove and break, shimmy and dance, Smith filters his Miles Davis-like riffs through a post-World War II American sensibility to deliver verse without platitudes.

As Smith's speakers wander through the detritus of American materialism-encountering jazz, football, drag, class war, Reaganomics, and Vietnam-the poems dramatize the contradictions and peculiarities of growing up male in Cold War America, both sensing promise and suffering disillusion.

Each poem here speaks in two voices: one that attacks and one that cowers, one voice that leads while the other follows. But Smith's subjects are unencumbered by form, and their voices blossom in duet: the idealized lover is also a betrayer, the man is also a girl. These binaries of statement and contradiction give birth to a third voice in the unrealized possibilities of the two.

A mesmerizing follow-up to 2000's The Other Lover, Smith's Songs for Two Voices is carnal yet fiercely intellectual, laid out with the self-confidence of a poet who can invoke Mozart and Coltrane, Anna Akhmatova and John Wayne, Teddy Roosevelt and Augustine in the same incendiary breath.

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Spill

Bruce Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2018

“There are two schools: one that sings the sheen and hues, the necessary pigments and frankincense while the world dries and the other voice like water that seeks to saturate, erode, and boil . . . It ruins everything you have ever saved.”
Spill is a book in contradictions, embodying helplessness in the face of our dual citizenship in the realms of trauma and gratitude, artistic aspiration and political reality. The centerpiece of this collection is a lyrical essay that recalls the poet’s time working at the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg in the 1960s. Mentored by the insouciant inmate S, the speaker receives a schooling in race, class, and culture, as well as the beginning of an apprenticeship in poetry. As he and S consult the I Ching, the Book of Changes, the speaker becomes cognizant of other frequencies, other identities; poetry, divination, and a synchronous, alternative reading of life come into focus. On either side of this prose poem are related poems of excess and witness, of the ransacked places and of new territories that emerge from the monstrous. Throughout, these poems inhabit rather than resolve their contradictions, their utterances held in tension “between the hemispheres of songbirds and the hemispheres of men.”

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