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Objects of Liberty
British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs
Pamela Buck
University of Delaware Press, 2024
Objects of Liberty explores the prevalence of souvenirs in British women’s writing during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. It argues that women writers employed the material and memorial object of the souvenir to circulate revolutionary ideas and engage in the masculine realm of political debate. While souvenir collecting was a standard practice of privileged men on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, women began to partake in this endeavor as political events in France heightened interest in travel to the Continent. Looking at travel accounts by Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Martha Wilmot, Charlotte Eaton, and Mary Shelley, this study reveals how they used souvenirs to affect political thought in Britain and contribute to conversations about individual and national identity. At a time when gendered beliefs precluded women from full citizenship, they used souvenirs to redefine themselves as legitimate political actors. Objects of Liberty is a story about the ways that women established political power and agency through material culture.


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The Ocean on Fire
Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists
Anaïs Maurer
Duke University Press, 2024
Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Maurer identifies strategies of resistance uniting the region by analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in French, Spanish, English, Tahitian, and Uvean, ranging from literature to songs and paintings. She shows how Pacific nuclear survivors’ stories reveal an alternative vision of the apocalypse: instead of promoting individualism and survivalism, they advocate mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South transnational solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. Drawing upon their experience resisting both nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific storytellers offer compelling narratives to nurture the land and each other in times of global environmental collapse.
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Off the Walls
Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks
Sarah Waldorf
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2020
When life (in a global pandemic) imitates art . . .

Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reeled from the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), thousands of people around the globe, inspired by challenges from Getty and other museums, raided toy chests, repurposed pantry items, and enlisted family, roommates, and animals to re-create famous works of art at home. Astonishing in their creativity, wit, and ingenuity, these creations remind us of the power of art to unite us and bring joy during troubled times. Off the Walls: Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks celebrates these imaginative re-creations, bringing highlights from this challenge together in one whimsical, irresistible volume. Getty Publications will donate all profits from the sale of this book to a charity supporting art and artists.

 
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oh orchid o’clock
Endi Bogue Hartigan
Omnidawn, 2023
Poems that break down, expose, and reconsider our notions of time.
 
This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be close to time—collective time, with its alarms and brutalities, and bodily time, intricate and familial. She considers how can we be both captured and complicit within systems of measurement, and she invites us to imagine how to break from, create, or become immune to them. Her poems use language to expose the face of the clock to reveal how gears press against interconnecting systems—economic, capitalist, astronomical, medical, governmental, and fantastical.
 
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Oh, Touch Me There
Love Sonnets
Roger Armbrust
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2013


Witty, humorous and wise reflections on loving 


There is a mythic quality to the poetry of Roger Armbrust.  Whether his subject is surgery or angels, his language and vision—while expressed in an earthly lexicon—are focused on the life of the spirit.

We constantly heal each other, love, true
to our senses, sharing our secret vaults
of fear and longing, faith and confusion,
doubt and delight.

Armbrust’s love poems are not ethereal, however, but rooted in real bodies…

My poetry honors your architecture’s mystery.

Fanciful, yet rooted in real experience, Armbrust’s  one hundred-plus sonnets incite passion and introspection, so that the collection makes an inspired lover’s gift.

 


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oh, you thought this was a date?!
Apocalypse Poems
C. Russell Price
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Appalachian genderqueer punk writer C. Russell Price’s first full-length poetry collection is a somatic grimoire exploring desire, gender, and sexuality in multiverse littered with flowers and product placement. Part pop culture bubblegum lip smack, part battle cry, this collection asks, What is radical vengeance, and does true survivorship from sexual trauma exist only in fantasy, or is it an attainable reality?
 
Price’s cinematic approach to language and scene is on full display, as well as their dark humor and resilience. Within these pages, the surreal is familiar and grief is a national pastime. If the end is near, who among us would not put on Fleetwood Mac? Who would not clean up their eyeliner just a smidge? This collection pulses with the beat that follows destruction (whether human or natural), the moment the jaw unhinges. These poems are not for pearl clutchers. They are for those who have already felt their private apocalypse.
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Old And New Testaments
Lynn Powell
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
The Brittingham Prize in Poetry Winner of the 1996 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award Winner of the 1995 Norma Farber First Book Award "A radiance and clarity suffuses Lynn Powell's work." --Carolyn Kizer, Brittingham Prize Citation -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "In Lynn Powell's poems we rediscover the meaning of the word 'testament,' for they give us a full testimony of a life, a family, a world. Whether writing of grief, or The Rapture, of a junebug or Aunt Roxy at the age of one hundred, she brings us intense, crafted narratives of self­knowledge, of facts so vivid they are painful, becoming signs and also wonders of life. These are poems of the recovery of spiritual desire. This is an extraordinary book, and an extraordinary new talent."--Robert Morgan "These direct, loving, sober poems are the change we need from most recent verse. The intensity of the opening poems in Old & New Testaments builds throughout the book until, almost intolerable, it transforms into profound acceptance, the quietness that comes of acknowledging both life and death. These images and rhythms need no persuasiveness beyond themselves, brightening our spirits with the clarity of reality."--A. R. Ammons "Lynn Powell's Old & New Testaments is a reclaiming of spiritual texts and traditions for a woman's life in the body--a life of childhood physicality, female sexuality, procreation, and nurturing love. Playful, tender, and wise, Powell brings her gospel learning down to earth. We can hail her poems in an old phrase with a new meaning: they are full of grace."--Alicia Ostriker Lynn Powell was raised in East Tennessee and educated at Carson-Newman College and Cornell University. She has worked extensively as a writer in the schools for the Tennessee Arts Commission, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and currently, the Ohio Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio.
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Old English Ecotheology
The Exeter Book
Courtney Barajas
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book examines the impact of environmental crises on early medieval English theology and poetry. Like their modern counterparts, theologians at the turn of the first millennium understood the interconnectedness of the Earth community, and affirmed the independent subjectivity of other-than-humans. The author argues for the existence of a specific Old English ecotheology, and demonstrates the influence of that theology on contemporaneous poetry. Taking the Exeter Book as a microcosm of the poetic corpus, she explores the impact of early medieval apocalypticism and environmental anxiety on Old English wisdom poems, riddles, elegies, and saints’ lives.
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Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints
Mary Clayton
Harvard University Press, 2013

Religious piety has rarely been animated as vigorously as in Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Ranging from lyrical to dramatic to narrative, the individual poems show great inventiveness in reimagining perennial Christian topics. In different poems, for example, Christ expels Lucifer from heaven, resists the devil's temptation on earth, mounts the cross with zeal to face death, harrows hell at the urging of John the Baptist, appears in disguise to pilot a ship, and presides over the Last Judgment. Satan and the fallen angels lament their plight in a vividly imagined hell and plot against Christ and his saints.

In Andreas the poet relates, in language reminiscent of Beowulf, the tribulations of the apostles Andrew and Matthew in a city of cannibals. In The Vision of the Cross (also known as The Dream of the Rood), the cross speaks as a Germanic warrior intolerably torn between the imperative to protect his Lord and the duty to become his means of execution. In Guthlac A, an Anglo-Saxon warrior abandons his life of violence to do battle as a hermit against demons in the fens of Lincolnshire. As a collection these ten anonymous poems vividly demonstrate the extraordinary hybrid that emerges when traditional Germanic verse adapts itself to Christian themes.

Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints complements the saints' lives found in The Old English Poems of Cynewulf, DOML 23.

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Old English Psalms
Patrick P. O'Neill
Harvard University Press, 2016

The Latin psalms figured prominently in the lives of the Anglo-Saxons, whether sung in the Divine Office by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning by students, or recited in private devotion by lay people. They were also translated into Old English, first in prose and later in verse. Sometime in the middle of the eleventh century, the prose and verse translations were brought together and organized in a complementary sequence in a manuscript now known as the Paris Psalter. The prose version, traditionally attributed to King Alfred (d. 899), combines literal translation with interpretative clarification. In contrast, the anonymous Old English verse translation composed during the tenth century approaches the psalms in a spirit of prayer and devotion. Despite their differences, both reflect earnest attempts to capture the literal meaning of the psalms.

The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time. With this translation readers encounter the beginnings and the continuation of a long tradition of psalm renderings in English.

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The Oldest Living Things in the World
Rachel Sussman
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way.
 
Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present.  These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands.
 
Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.
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On Certainty
Karla Kelsey
Omnidawn, 2023
Lyrical poems that tell the story of a nameless woman navigating a technological dystopia.
 
In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems.
 
Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.
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On The Conjugial Angel
A S Byatt
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2020
From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession: A Romance (1990), On The Conjugial Angel is the latest book in the Swedenborg Society’s Archive Series. A S Byatt, alongside a series of readings from her novella ‘The Conjugial Angel’, explores Swedenborg’s influence on literature, the lives of the Tennysons and the conflict between religion and science. Also including an intimate insight into Dame Byatt’s writing process and interest in literature, On The Conjugial Angel is drawn from the transcript of a talk and Q&A given at Swedenborg House in 2010 for the bicentenary of the Society.

On The Conjugial Angel is sixth in the series of Swedenborg archive pocket books. Edited by Stephen McNeilly, and drawing on miscellaneous material from the Swedenborg archives, the aim of the series is to make available in printed form lectures, interviews and other unique items that would otherwise remain unseen by a broader audience.
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One Hundred Hungers
Lauren Camp
Tupelo Press, 2016
In her Dorset Prize-winning new collection, Lauren Camp explores the lives of a first-generation Arab-American girl and her Jewish-Iraqi parent. One Hundred Hungers tells overlapping stories of food and ritual, immigration and adaptation, evoking her father's boyhood in Baghdad in the 1940s at a time when tensions began to emerge along ethnic and religious lines. She also draws upon memories of Sabbath dinners in her grandparents' new home in America to reveal how family culture persists.
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One Small Farm
Photographs of a Wisconsin Way of Life
Craig Schreiner
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

“People’s lives are written on the fields of old farms. The rows of the fields are like lines on a page, blank and white in winter, filled in with each year’s story of happiness, disappointment, drought, rain, sun, scarcity, plenty. The chapters accumulate, and people enter and leave the narrative. Only the farm goes on.”—From the Introduction

In One Small Farm, Craig Schreiner’s evocative color photographs capture one family as they maintain the rhythms and routines of small farm life near Pine Bluff, Wisconsin. “Milk in the morning and milk at night. Feed the cows and calves. Plant crops. Grind feed. Chop and bale hay. Cut wood. Clean the barn. Spread manure on the fields. Plow snow and split wood in winter. In spring, pick rocks from the fields. Cultivate corn. Pick corn. Harvest oats and barley. Help calves be born. Milk in the morning and milk at night.”
There’s much more to life on the farm than just chores, of course, and Schreiner captures the rhythms and richness of everyday life on the farm in all seasons, evoking both the challenges and the joys and providing viewers a window into a world that is quickly fading. In documenting the Lamberty family’s daily work and life, these thoughtful photos explore larger questions concerning the future of small farm agriculture, Wisconsin cultural traditions, and the rural way of life.

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Only
Rebecca Foust
Four Way Books, 2022
Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust's Only insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, "Null. All. What's after death or before." This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: "I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go."
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Opening Zion
A Scrapbook of the National Park's First Official Tourists
John Clark
University of Utah Press, 2010

When Melissa Clark purchased a box of old scrapbooks online, she knew only that she had bought something relating to the University of Utah and Zion Park.  What came in the mail was much more than she had expected.  Instead of random mementos, two albums arrived full of photographs and newspaper clippings dating to 1920 that document a trip made by six young women from the University of Utah into the newly formed Zion National Park.  Part of a promotional campaign developed by the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad to advertise its national park shuttle service, the women entered Zion Canyon as its first offical tourists.  When Melissa bought those timeworn scrapbooks she found a forgotten treasure: the opening of Zion.

With text by John Clark, the scrapbooks are now the basis of a one-of-a-kind publication.  Part fashion spread, part adventure guide, and all Utah cultural treasure, Opening Zion is a stunning visual record of the park.  Remarkably detailed black-and-white photographs show the young adventurers scrambling over rocky outcrops, pondering the dizzying height of Zion's sheer walls, and singing camp songs by the campfire.  We are introduced anew to the "gigantic grandeur" of Zion National Park.  As one of the women wrote, "One can think only beautiful thoughts amid such splendor."

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The Orange Tree
Dong Li
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Debut collection of poems that weaves stories of family history, war, and migration.  
 
Dong Li’s The Orange Tree is a collection of narrative poems that braids forgotten legends, personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator examines a yellowed family photo to find resemblances and learns a new language, inventing compound words to conjure and connect family stories. These invented words and the calligraphy of untranslated Chinese characters appear in lists separating the book’s narrative sections.
 
Li’s lyrical and experimental collection transcends the individual, placing generations of family members and anonymous others together in a single moment that surpasses chronological time. Weaving through stories of people with little means, between wars and celebrations, over bridges and walls, and between trees and gardens, Li’s poems offer intimate perspectives on times that resonate with our own. The result is an unflinching meditation on family history, collective trauma, and imaginative recovery.
 
The Orange Tree is the recipient of the inaugural Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize for 2023.
 
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Ordinary Misfortunes
Emily Yoon
Tupelo Press, 2017
Korea continues to grapple with the shared memory of its Japanese and US occupations. The poems in Ordinary Misfortunes incorporate actual testimony about cruelty against vulnerable bodies—including the wianbu, euphemistically known as “comfort women”—as the poet seeks to find places where brutality is overcome through true human connections. Emily Jungmin Yoon asks Why do we write poems amid such violence? What can I, and what can poetry, do? Her response to those tough questions is a sequence of reverberating poems that blend documentary precision with impassioned witness, bringing to bear both scholarship and artistry.
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Ore Choir
The Lava on Iceland
Katy Didden
Tupelo Press, 2022
Part miracle, part oracle, in these poems lava speaks “with the focus of a burning glass,” lighting lyric core samples through geo-historical and cultural texts about Iceland. Shifting the ground so “nouns are never still,” the lava reveals how language itself is a record of collisions: poem as matter, sound as forge, form as friction. And what does it mean to be human in the face of such ancient forces, especially as climate change unsettles the earth that anchors us? By the light of the “sphere’s credo,” can we, too, be remade?
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Orientalism's Interlocutors
Painting, Architecture, Photography
Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds.
Duke University Press, 2002
Until now, Orientalist art—exemplified by paintings of harems, slave markets, or bazaars—has predominantly been understood to reflect Western interpretations and to perpetuate reductive, often demeaning stereotypes of the exotic East. Orientalism's Interlocutors contests the idea that Orientalist art simply expresses the politics of Western domination and argues instead that it was often produced through cross-cultural interactions. Focusing on paintings and other representations of North African and Ottoman cultures, by both local artists and westerners, the contributors contend that the stylistic similarities between indigenous and Western Orientalist art mask profound interpretive differences, which, on examination, can reveal a visual language of resistance to colonization. The essays also demonstrate how marginalized voices and viewpoints—especially women's—within Western Orientalism decentered and destabilized colonial authority.

Looking at the political significance of cross-cultural encounters refracted through the visual languages of Orientalism, the contributors engage with pressing recent debates about indigenous agency, postcolonial identity, and gendered subjectivities. The very range of artists, styles, and forms discussed in this collection broadens contemporary understandings of Orientalist art. Among the artists considered are the Algerian painters Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim; Turkish painter Osman Hamdi; British landscape painter Barbara Bodichon; and the French painter Henri Regnault. From the liminal "Third Space" created by mosques in postcolonial Britain to the ways nineteenth-century harem women negotiated their portraits by British artists, the essays in this collection force a rethinking of the Orientalist canon.

This innovative volume will appeal to those interested in art history, theories of gender, and postcolonial studies.

Contributors. Jill Beaulieu, Roger Benjamin, Zeynep Çelik, Deborah Cherry, Hollis Clayson, Mark Crinson, Mary Roberts

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Original Copy
Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination in Nineteenth Century American Literature
Christa Holm Vogelius
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

When critics of poet Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a collection of poetry, dismiss her work as derivative, they fail to see her writing as part of a new creative pantheon, sitting alongside other works that, like the popular copybooks in antebellum America, are structured as a conversation between artistic allies. Different kinds of copying in this period were distinctly feminized practices, such as artistic copying, pedagogical recitation, and literary imitation. Ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of visual art, reveals a particularly interesting form of copying, as the artwork in question becomes a kind of mediated space between author and reader; this practice, then, becomes the emblematic form of literature as collective production.

Original Copy frames ekphrasis and other forms of literary and visual copy-work as key concepts for understanding the discussions of nationalism, originality, and gender that dominated US literary circles during the first half of the nineteenth century. Christa Holm Vogelius focuses on four major writers of the period—Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Hawthorne, and Henry Longfellow—to offer a narrative of a self-consciously feminine antebellum literary culture that was equally invested in literary nationality and convention. The explicitly feminized forms of the copy between and within media, she argues, became a productive means by which writers across a variety of genres interrogated the ill-defined but ubiquitous idea of an “original” American literature. Original Copy bridges three bodies of scholarship that have remained largely distinct—studies of literary nationalism and transnationalism, scholarship on gender in nineteenth century literary culture, and aesthetic and media theory—to argue for the significance of both imitation and intimate author-reader relations to the development of an American literature. 

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Our Animal
Meredith Stricker
Omnidawn, 2016
Our Animal hybridizes novel flaking into poetic forms like a gnat swarm, magnetic filings, or migratory flux. It’s a fierce inquiry into Othering, tracking Kafka’s life through his deep identification with animals, especially those hunted or outcast. Graphically complex with metamorphic text layers, the chapters shape-shift in relation to crows, dragonflies, a frog; there are deer, swallows, a goldfinch, humans, a hybrid Beast, wolf, Insekt, a small unidentified animal in its burrow. We are entangled in biography as biology— paradisiacal transfiguration that leaves out no being.
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Our Bearings
Poems
Molly McGlennen; Foreword by Ben Burgess
University of Arizona Press, 2020
Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Throughout the collection, McGlennen weaves the natural elements of Minnesota with rich historical commentary and current images of urban Native life. Reverence for wildlife and foliage is pierced by the sharp man-made skylines of Minneapolis while McGlennen reckons with the heavy impact of industrial progress on the souls and everyday lives of individuals.

While working with both traditional and contemporary form, McGlennen’s unique use of space and rhythm creates poetry that is both captivating and accessible. Our Bearings does not attempt to speak for a population; rather it offers vibrant stories and moments that give voice to pieces of a large and complex tapestry of experiences. Through keen observation and a deep understanding of Native life in Minneapolis, McGlennen has created a timely collection that contributes beautifully to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.
 
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Our Cancers
Poems
Dan O'Brien
Acre Books, 2021
Poet and playwright Dan O’Brien chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife were treated for cancer.

On the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11—an event that caused their downtown apartment to become “suffused with the World Trade Center’s carcinogenic dust”—Dan O’Brien’s wife discovers a lump in her breast. Surgery and chemotherapy soon follow, and on the day of his wife’s final infusion, O’Brien learns of his own diagnosis. He has colon cancer and will need to undergo his own intensive treatment over the next nine months.

Our Cancers is a compelling account of illness and commitment, of parenthood and partnership. This spare and powerful sequence creates an intimate mythology that seeks meaning in illness while also celebrating the resilience of sufferers, caregivers, and survivors.

As O’Brien explains in an introduction, “The consecutiveness of our personal disasters, with a daughter not yet two years old at the start of it, was shattering and nearly silencing. At hospital bedsides, in hospital beds myself, and at home through the cyclical assaults of our therapies, these poems came to me in fragments, as if my unconscious were attempting to reassemble our lives, our identities and memories . . . as if I were in some sense learning how to speak again.”
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Our Lady Of Victorian Feminism
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
Kimberly VanEsveld Adams
Ohio University Press, 2000

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.

In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal—the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful, and wise Virgin Mothers.

In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history, and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the nineteenth-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments, that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.

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Our Portion
New and Selected Poems
Philip Terman
Autumn House Press, 2015
The new and selected collection of Philip Terman's illustrates the poet's deep understanding and compassion for our world. Spanning 20 years of poetry, this collection of poems focuses on themes of nature, literature, family, and Judaism.
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Out of Focus Nuyoricans
Adál Maldonado
Harvard University Press

Adál’s artistry is neither conventional nor pleasing for the spectator, as it is acquired through the continuous questioning of the particular condition of Puerto Ricans in the United States. The blurry portraits in this collection reflect the Nuyorican experience, but such a lesson becomes an ethical one: we are requested to learn to appreciate them in their opacity, because just as Rev. Pedro Pietri proclaims in the accompanying text, the Out of Focus Nuyoricans are proud “to not be figured out,” ever. If there is anything we should clearly get out of these out-of-focus portraits it is that to look fuzzy to some and opaque to others is not a condition to be feared or dreaded, but an achievement to be attained.

This book was published as a companion to the exhibits “Auto-Portraits/Blue Bananas on Fire” and “Blueprints for a Nation” at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in 2004.

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Out of the Woods
A Bird Watcher’s Year
Ora E. Anderson
Ohio University Press, 2007

Out of the Woods: A Bird Watcher’s Year is a journey through the seasons and a joyous celebration of growing old. In fifty-nine essays and poems, Ora E. Anderson, birder, bird carver, naturalist, and nature writer, reveals the insights and recollections of a keen-eyed observer of nature, both human and avian. The essays follow the rivers and creeks, the highways and little-known byways of Appalachia, and along the way we become nearly as familiar with its numerous bird, plant, and animal species as with the author himself.

These are not the memories of a single year, however, but of a long lifetime spent immersed in the natural world. Out of the Woods, presented with humor and passion, is an account of a well-lived, productive, and satisfying life. The essays offer an intimate portrait of a half century of Anderson's life on his beloved old farm (more nearly a nature preserve), where he lived in harmony with birds and nature and followed the rhythm of the seasons. We are invited to share the joys—and the disappointments and sorrows—inherent in such a life.

Generously illustrated with Julie Zickefoose’s detailed and evocative drawings, this book will delight bird watchers, artists, naturalists, backyard gardeners, and anyone who is ever tempted to take a rutted, overgrown path just to see where it leads.

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Outside the Pale
The Architecture of Fay Jones
Department of Arkansas Heritage
University of Arkansas Press, 1999

Honored with the 1990 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for a lifetime of outstanding achievement, Fay Jones is an Arkansas original. In receiving the medal from Prince Charles of Great Britain, Jones was hailed as a “powerful and special genius who embodies nearly all the qualities we admire in an architect” and as an artist who used his vision to craft “mysterious and magical places” not only in Arkansas but all over the world.

This book accompanied a special museum exhibit of Jones’s life and work at the Old State House in Little Rock. It traces Jones’s development from his early years as a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff, to the culmination of his ability in such arresting structures as Pinecote Pavilion in Picayune, Mississippi; Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Chapman University Chapel in Orange, California. Through the black-and-white photographs of the homes, chapels, and other buildings that Jones has created and the accompanying captions and interviews of the architect, the reader is allowed a view into this man’s remarkable talent.

Designing structures that fuse architecture and landscape, the organic and the man-made, Jones has created special places which touch their viewers with the power and subtlety of poetry. Herein we learn why.

From the Foreword by Robert Adams Ivy Jr.:

“Fay Jones’s architecture begins in order and ends in mystery. . . . His role can perhaps best be understood as mediator, a human consciousness that has arisen from the Arkansas soil and scoured the cosmos, then spoken through the voices of stone and wood, steel and glass. Art, philosophy, craft, and human aspiration coalesce in his masterworks, transformed from acts of will into harmonies: Jones lets space sing.”

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front cover of Owl Question
Owl Question
Poems
Faith Shearin
Utah State University Press, 2004
Winner of the sixth annual May Swenson Poetry Award, The Owl Question underscores and relishes life's transitions from young girl to woman, from child to wife to mother, and from isolation to connection this poet's bright sense of abundance and awe, here expressed in finely tuned detail and refreshingly open observation, reads like a collective memory. Though private and closely held, these questionings are as familiar as our own souls, and in their transformation to poetry, Shearin has created the very "map" she wishes to guide her when she "can't learn the world fast enough."
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front cover of Owning the Moon
Owning the Moon
Poetry
Linda Sillitoe
Signature Books, 2017
In her final poetry collection, Linda Sillitoe transformed
ordinary events into thoughtful, funny, and
sharp commentaries on the human condition. A
mother painstakingly alters a dress for a beloved
daughter, and the “cloth and needle weave her daughter’s
dreams.” Later a daughter mourning her father’s
death remembers how “something vital vanished.”
From warning a friend against growing “spoiled
just a bit for ordinary men” to trying to “fit this
time among our dearest and darkest demons” when
moving back to Utah, Sillitoe reveals a world “where
poems hold such power,” and each stanza carries
multiple meanings.
Despite, or perhaps in conjunction with, life’s joy
and sorrow, Sillitoe’s verses reveal an unconventional
spirit determined to transcribe life’s experiences
in a manner that is both accessible and extraordinary,
ending with a promise to continue “scribbling
warranties in the sand. / Over time, we lose what we
own / and learn the motions that bring it back— /
like this moon, as caught, as wild, as we.”
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