front cover of There's a Bobcat in My Backyard
There's a Bobcat in My Backyard
Living with and Enjoying Urban Wildlife
Jonathan Hanson
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Bobcats in your backyard? Javelinas tromping through your landscaping? Or maybe a packrat has found its way into the vent of your clothes dryer and decided to call it home. . . .

Human residents of the Sonoran Desert are sometimes not completely comfortable when confronted by the wild creatures with whom they share this fragile habitat. But have no fear—please! Not only do these critters mean you no harm, they can also be a source of immense delight.

In this entertaining guidebook, naturalist Jonathan Hanson introduces readers to the satisfaction of attracting and enjoying desert wildlife. Whether your home is deep within the city limits or on what is (currently) the edge of human settlement, you can turn your backyard into a miniature wildlife refuge by providing a simple combination of food, water, and habitat. An appropriately landscaped yard can become a home for a bevy of birds, beasts, and bugs, while even a condo patio can attract colorful hummingbirds and butterflies. Hanson advises you on what kind of birdseed to put out to attract the most interesting avian species, how to tell the difference between rabbits and jackrabbits, and when to worry about roving reptiles—which really isn't all that often. He'll even help you pick out a pair of binoculars to heighten your enjoyment.

Not all desert creatures offer people a positive experience, and Hanson tells how to cope with those that are sometimes considered pests—whether it's the Gila woodpecker announcing its presence on your roof at five in the morning, the rattlesnake slithering unconcerned across your porch, the coyote running amok with a taste for wandering housecats, or the aforementioned woodrat homesteading in a major appliance or car engine. From bears to bees to "creepy crawlies"—scorpions, spiders, and the like—he lets you know when you need to be cautious . . . and when you simply need to give a wild animal its space.

If you live in the desert, you're part of the desert. This book, generously laced with humor and brimming with helpful information, can turn you from a mere bystander into an active participant in an environment in which we all—people and wildlife—must coexist.
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There's a Disco Ball Between Us
A Theory of Black Gay Life
Jafari S. Allen
Duke University Press, 2021
In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.
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There's a Moose in My Garden
Designing Gardens in Alaska and the Far North
Brenda C. Adams
University of Alaska Press, 2013
What do you do when a young moose calf wants to dine on your freshly planted Lady’s Mantle for lunch? What plants can handle a summer of nearly endless sun? How do you harness the wild beauty of the north for your own backyard? There’s a Moose in My Garden is the first book to tackle these questions and more with practical, user-friendly advice from an award-winning gardener.

Adams provides helpful tips for Far Northern gardeners on how to design and implement successful landscape environments. The book outlines the entire planning and planting process, covering such aspects as handling low-angled sun, soft light, expansive vistas, and a cool climate.
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There’s No Place Like Home Video
James M. Moran
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Defines, examines, and elevates home video to its rightful place. From its recording of family events to its influence on filmmaking, home video defies easy categorization and demands serious consideration. In There's No Place Like Home Video, James Moran takes on this neglected aspect of popular culture. Moran offers a cultural history of amateur home video, exploring its technological and ideological predecessors, the development of event videography, and home video's symbiotic relationship with television and film. He also investigates the broader field of video, taking on the question of medium specificity: the attempt to define its unique identity, to capture what constitutes its pure practice. In Moran's discussion of video, he argues that previous scholars have not sufficiently dealt with its nature as hybrid, varied, and mutable. He argues that such a medium shouldn't be conceived as pure in and of itself; it is neither autonomous from other media nor entirely dependent on any other, but instead has a chameleonlike interface with films, television, computers, telephones, and even architecture. Rather than look for a grand narrative to define its specificity, Moran places video and home video at the intersections of multiple forms of communication. James M. Moran is adjunct professor of visual and media arts at Emerson College in Los Angeles.
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Very Close to Pleasure, There's a Sick Cat
And Other Poems
Shakti Chattopadhyay
Seagull Books, 2018
In the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation revitalized Bengali poetry in Calcutta, liberating it from the fetters of scholarship and the fog of punditry and freeing it to explore new forms, language, and subjects. Shakti Chattopadhyay was a cofounder of the movement, and his poems remain vibrant and surprising more than a half century later. In his “urban pastoral” lines, we encounter street colloquialisms alongside high diction, a combination that at the time was unprecedented. Loneliness, anxiety, and dislocation trouble this verse, but they are balanced by a compelling belief in the redemptive power of beauty.

This book presents more than one hundred of Chattopadhyay’s poems, introducing an international audience to one of the most prominent and important Bengali poets of the twentieth century.
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