A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY45 start with A start with A
lbert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” It is in this vein that Sholeh Wolpé’s mesmerizing memoir in verse unfolds. In this lyrical and candid work, her fifth collection of poems, Wolpé invokes the abacus as an instrument of remembering. Through different countries and cultures, she carries us bead by bead on a journey of loss and triumph, love and exile. In the end, the tally is insight, not numbers, and we arrive at a place where nothing is too small for gratitude.
Cascading through each of the poems in Gina Franco’s The Accidental is a question: What does it mean to be human in a world where the soul is exalted but the body brutalized? Franco explores the terrain of the borderlands—not just the physical space of the American southwest, but the spaces where lines are drawn between body and soul, God and self, violence and ecstasy. Unfolding along these borders in a torrent of deep contemplation, Franco’s poems bring the reader to the line between accident and choice, delving into the role each plays in creating the lives we are born into and in determining how those lives end. A body caught in a tree after a flood—an accident—calls to mind deliberate violences: crucifixion and lynching.
Guided, even so, by a stark hopefulness, The Accidental makes a character of the soul and traces its pilgrimage from suffering toward transcendence. “The soul saw,” Franco writes, “that it saw through the wound.” This book tenders a creation myth steeped in existential philosophy and shimmering with the vernacular of the ecstatic.
From family gossip and beauty secrets, to women darning hand-me-downs, to reluctant hands carrying bodies across borders, Mora traverses the tangled threads of culture, community, family, gender, and injustice. Her vivid observations together with her deft handling of symmetry and meter make her poetry uniquely insightful, subtle, and elegant. Sprinkled with Spanish and plenty of spice, each ode is a sensory flurry of mind and body. Together they make a cauldron of flavorful, simmering language. They are meant to be savored as they slowly stir the soul.
Ogunyemi uses the novels to trace a Nigerian women's literary tradition that reflects an ideology centered on children and community. Of prime importance is the paradoxical Mammywata figure, the independent, childless mother, who serves as a basis for the new woman in these novels. Ogunyemi tracks this figure through many permutations, from matriarch to exile to woman writer, her multiple personalities reflecting competing loyalties—to self and other, children and nation. Such fragmented personalities characterize the postcolonial condition in their writing. Mapping geographies of pain and endurance, the work opens a space for addressing the palava between different groups of people. Valuable as the first sustained critical study of a substantial but little known body of literature, this book also counters the shortcomings of prevailing "masculinist" theories of black literature in a powerful narrative of the Nigerian world.
Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.
Scottish by birth, but long a resident of America, Mary Perrault is married to a Swiss-French gardener. Their life in South Encina, though anything but lavish, is gay, serene, and friendly. As their children mature and the world outside, less peaceful and secure than the Perrault home, begins to threaten the equilibrium of their tranquil lives, Mrs. Perrault becomes increasingly aware of a moral wilderness rising from the physical wilderness which her generation has barely conquered.
Her struggle to influence, while not invading the lives of her children, is the focus of this novel of family life during the Depression years.
“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner
Winner, 2022 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Prize for Best Fiction
In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
Agrippina the Younger follows one woman’s study of another, separated by thousands of miles and two millennia but bound by a shared sense of powerlessness. Agrippina was a daughter in a golden political family, destined for greatness—but she hungered for more power than women were allowed. Exhausted by the misogyny of the present, Diana Arterian reaches into the past to try to understand the patriarchal systems of today. In lyric verse and prose poems, she traces Agrippina’s rise, interrogating a life studded with intrigue, sex, murder, and manipulation. Arterian eagerly pursues Agrippina through texts, ruins, and films, exhuming the hidden details of the ancient noblewoman’s life. These poems consider the valences of patriarchy, power, and the archive to try to answer the question: How do we recover a woman erased by history?
The poems in Āina Hānau / Birth Land cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people. The ongoing environmental crisis in Hawaiʻi, inextricably linked to colonialism and tourism, is captured with stark intensity as McDougall writes, Violence is what we settle for / because we’ve been led to believe / green paper can feed us / more than green land. The experiences of birth, motherhood, miscarriage, and the power of Native Hawaiian traditions and self-advocacy in an often dismissive medical system is powerfully narrated by the speaker of the titular poem, written for McDougall’s daughters.
‘Āina Hānau reflects on what it means to be from and belong to an ʻāina hānau, as well as what it means to be an ‘āina hānau, as all mothers serve as the first birth lands for their children.
Inspired by the Greek myth of Alcestis, this poetry collection brings to life myriad voices who venture beyond the known world and exist between realities.
In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”
Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”
Alibi, in Latin, meant “elsewhere,” and “lullaby”—from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by—has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of “thrill, dread, certainty.”
In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, “empathy through distress,” unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.
The skeleton of this fine collection is a series of direct addresses to the author’s fourteen-year-old self, caught at the moment between girlhood and womanhood, when her perspective on everything suddenly changes. Swearingen-Steadwell’s poetic adventures through worlds within and without reveal the restlessness of the seeker. They offer unabashed tenderness to anyone who reckons with solitude, and chases joy.
Kaivola has worked out a strikingly original means of reading difference—and reading differently—in order to account for what has been inexplicable in different literary texts by women. All Contraries Confounded seeks to problematize feminist theory that celebrates resistance in fiction by women, for it questions the ability of dominant modes of feminist critical theory to recognize and address fully the forms of contradiction and ambivalence that riddle women's writings—and women's lives.
With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.
Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.
Elizabeth Stoddard was a gifted writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism; successfully published within her own lifetime; esteemed by such writers as William Dean Howells and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and situated at the epicenter of New York’s literary world. Nonetheless, she has been almost excluded from literary memory and importance. This book seeks to understand why. By reconsidering Stoddard’s life and work and her current marginal status in the evolving canon of American literary studies, it raises important questions about women’s writing in the 19th century and canon formation in the 20th century.
Essays in this study locate Stoddard in the context of her contemporaries, such as Dickinson and Hawthorne, while others situate her work in the context of major 19th-century cultural forces and issues, among them the Civil War and Reconstruction, race and ethnicity, anorexia and female invalidism, nationalism and localism, and incest. One essay examines the development of Stoddard’s work in the light of her biography, and others probe her stylistic and philosophic originality, the journalistic roots of her voice, and the elliptical themes of her short fiction. Stoddard’s lifelong project to articulate the nature and dynamics of woman’s subjectivity, her challenging treatment of female appetite and will, and her depiction of the complex and often ambivalent relationships that white middle-class women had to their domestic spaces are also thoughtfully considered.
The editors argue that the neglect of Elizabeth Stoddard’s contribution to American literature is a compelling example of the contingency of critical values and the instability of literary history. This study asks the question, “Will Stoddard endure?” Will she continue to drift into oblivion or will a new generation of readers and critics secure her tenuous legacy?
Fiercely feminist, Black, American, and powerful, Williams speaks for a generation of obsessive social media influencers and consumers, revealing the complex ways in which we are all actors, witnesses, and victims in our public and private performances. Though we may be permanent residents of this soulless cultural landscape, this stunning collection refuses to let it define us.
off the conveyor belt, hugging the bolts & wires
spilling from her vivisection. I’m last year’s model
with a sleeker, softer system of cool disdain for
my Internet addictions.
—Excerpt from "I Intend to Outlast"
"A meticulously researched, highly informed, carefully argued, and very accessible account of American socialism, socialists, and socialistic thinking, from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s . . . challenges the intellectual and political legacy of Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, whose spirit still hovers over animated discussions about the 'failures' of socialism in the United States."
---James A. Miller, George Washington University
"A valuable rethinking and reframing of the traditions of leftist literary scholarship in the U.S."
---Sylvia Cook, University of Missouri, St. Louis
American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois explores the contributions of three writers to the development of American socialism over a fifty--year period and asserts the vitality of socialism in modern American literature and culture.
Drawing upon a wide range of texts including archival sources, Mark W. Van Wienen demonstrates the influence of reform-oriented, democratic socialism both in the careers of these writers and in U.S. politics between 1890 and 1940. While offering unprecedented in-depth analysis of modern American socialist literature, this book charts the path by which the supposedly impossible, dangerous ideals of a cooperative commonwealth were realized, in part, by the New Deal.
American Socialist Triptych provides in-depth, innovative readings of the featured writers and their engagement with socialist thought and action. Upton Sinclair represents the movement's most visible manifestation, the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901; Charlotte Perkins Gilman reflects the socialist elements in both feminism and 1890s reform movements, and W. E. B. Du Bois illuminates social democratic aspirations within the NAACP. Van Wienen's book seeks to re-energize studies of Sinclair by treating him as a serious cultural figure whose career peaked not in the early success of The Jungle but in his nearly successful 1934 run for the California governorship. It also demonstrates as never before the centrality of socialism throughout Gilman's and Du Bois's literary and political careers.
More broadly, American Socialist Triptych challenges previous scholarship on American radical literature, which has focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and Communist writers. Van Wienen argues that radical democracy was not the phenomenon of a decade or of a single group but a sustained tradition dispersed within the culture, providing a useful genealogical explanation for how socialist ideas were actually implemented through the New Deal.
American Socialist Triptych also revises modern American literary history, arguing for the endurance of realist and utopian literary modes at the height of modernist literary experimentation and showing the importance of socialism not only to the three featured writers but also to their peers, including Edward Bellamy, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Claude McKay. Further, by demonstrating the importance of social democratic thought to feminist and African American campaigns for equality, the book dialogues with recent theories of radical egalitarianism. Readers interested in American literature, U.S. history, political theory, and race, gender, and class studies will all find in American Socialist Triptych a valuable and provocative resource.
Valeria Miani’s Amorous Hope is a play of remarkable richness, subtlety, and verve. It presents a scathing exposure of society’s double-standards and it champions women’s dramatic agency by centering on the bleak reality they often faced, a reality that attempted to harm and silence its victims. The play’s salient episodes reflect realities modern women still face today.
Miani’s literary achievements attest to her emergence as a cultural protagonist alongside Europe’s most talented women writers, such as Isabella Andreini, and she challenged the premodern notion that a woman’s eloquence is an indication of her sexual promiscuity.
Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry that draw unmistakably on contemporary antisemitic discourse.
Amy Levy: Critical Essays brings together scholars working in the fields of Victorian cultural history, women’s poetry and fiction, and the history of Anglo-Jewry. The essays trace the social, intellectual, and political contexts of Levy’s writing and its contemporary reception. Working from close analyses of Levy’s texts, the collection aims to rethink her engagement with Jewish identity, to consider her literary and political identifications, to assess her representations of modern consumer society and popular culture, and to place her life and work within late-Victorian cultural debate.
This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students offering both a comprehensive literature review of scholarship-to-date and a range of new critical perspectives.
Contributors:
Susan David Bernstein,University of Wisconsin-Madison
Gail Cunningham,Kingston University
Elizabeth F. Evans,Pennslyvania State University–DuBois
Emma Francis,Warwick University
Alex Goody,Oxford Brookes University
T. D. Olverson,University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Lyssa Randolph,University of Wales, Newport
Meri-Jane Rochelson,Florida International University
With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.
Winner of the 1991 Arkansas Poetry Award, 1992 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, and 1993 Bess Hokin Prize
Others may lament the uncertainties and disappointments of life, but Julie Suk, winner of the second annual Arkansas Poetry Award, embraces its tumult. Turning from the unsullied angels and the paradises captured by generations of artists, these poems focus instead on those who have abandoned heaven for the world of such mundane matters as family, loneliness, love, and loss. Rousing us to the passion and wonder that define our essential humanity, The Angel of Obsession celebrates the full, ragged canvas of living.
Suk’s poetry has previously appeared in The Georgia Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry, and other important literary magazines. The Angel of Obsession was selected for publication from a field of more than five hundred entries by the poet John Stone.
Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences. Krista Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric.
Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies.
Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes’ "The Old Rhetoric" to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of— and apart from—these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy.
Lyrically enacting the cognitive dissonance and embodied contradictions of our contemporary age, Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal Is Chemical collects innovative poems that straddle the frontiers of language and scientific knowledge. She brilliantly draws on her own experience as a medical editor and her family’s history of Holocaust survival to write into the hybrid legacy of Western medicine: part clinical empiricism, part human fallibility and moral bankruptcy. Displaying a robust formal range, these poems move from feverish elegies to drug-pamphlet erasures, tangible articulations of Bar-Nadav’s epigenetic, cultural, and memorial inheritance as a writer navigating chronic illness and pain. In these pages, Nazi medical experiments, pharmaceutical literature, and manifestations of intergenerational trauma collide in the lyrical archive of Bar-Nadav’s latest collection, winner of the 2022 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Just as she illuminates the paradox of time — that we may think of the past as something gone and yet always present in context and legacy — Bar-Nadav proves the enduring ambivalence of pharmakon, that antidote which poisons us, the medicine that kills. This febrile, fierce book casts spells and confronts illusions, ignites grief and awe, and challenges our assumptions about what it means to heal our bodies, our families, and our shared histories. Perhaps this work fulfills the specious salvation it describes in its opening pages, performing an exorcism of truth-telling that harnesses the heat of a “myth in which a god sets us / on fire and then sets us free.”
In Animal Purpose, Michelle Y. Burke explores the lives of men and women as they stand poised between the desire to love and the compulsion to harm. In one poem, a woman teaches a farmhand the proper way to slaughter a truckload of chickens. In another, a couple confronts the recent loss of a loved one when a stranger makes an unexpected confession in a crowded restaurant. Set in both rural and urban spaces, these poems challenge received ideas about work, gender, and place. Danger blurs into beauty and back again. Burke scours the hard edges of the world to find “fleeting softness,” which she wishes “into the world like pollen that covers everything.”
In 1654, Anna Trapnel — a Baptist, Fifth Monarchist, millenarian, and visionary from London — fell into a trance during which she prophesied passionately and at length against Oliver Cromwell and his government. The prophecies attracted widespread public attention, and resulted in an invitation to travel to Cornwall. Her Report and Plea, republished here for the first time, is a lively and engaging firsthand account of the visit, which concluded in her arrest, a court hearing, and imprisonment. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part impassioned defense of her beliefs and actions, the Report and Plea offers vivid and fascinating insight into the life and times of an early modern woman claiming her place at the center of the tumultuous political events of mid-seventeenth-century England.
The Other Voice in Early Modern Women: The Toronto Series volume 70
From award-winning author Barrie Jean Borich comes Apocalypse, Darling, a narrative, lyric exploration of the clash between old and new. Set in the steel mill regions of Chicago and in Northwest Indiana, the story centers on Borich’s return to a decimated landscape for a misbegotten wedding in which her spouse’s father marries his high school sweetheart. The book is a lilting journey into an ill-fated moment, where families attempt to find communion in tense gathering spaces and across their most formative disappointments. Borich tells the story of the industrial heartland that produced the steel that made American cities, but also one of the most toxic environmental sites in the world.
As concise as a poem and as sweeping as an epic novel, Apocalypse, Darling explores the intersection of American traditional and self-invented social identities and the destruction and re-greening of industrial cityscapes. Borich asks: can toxic landscapes actually be remediated and can patriarchal fathers ever really be forgiven? In a political climate where Borich is forced to daily re-enter the toxic wastelands she thought she’d long left behind, Apocalypse, Darling is an urgent collision of broken spaces, dysfunctional affections, and the reach toward familial and environmental repair.
The poetry of Laynie Browne’s Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.
Finalist, 2025 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
“When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,” writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, the midwestern landscape beyond these rooms—the same landscape that infuses the low, horizontal forms of Wright’s Prairie Style buildings—shapes the figures in Architect as well as their fates: “For years after my brother’s death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deaths—boys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didn’t know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming.”
Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.
Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors.
In Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Archon / After, the archive is revealed as both a form of violence and of memory, of site and of event. As keeper of the archive, Kocher’s archon determines what pieces of the past may be preserved, housed, documented, ordered, and reviewed. Through these poems, the archon dives deep into memories and into the mysteries of daily life, and, in governance over the future, determines what will be and should be forgotten. The act of forgetting becomes archival violence, with the archon not only serving as the guardian of what remains in the archive but also as an eradicator who decides what is purged.
The imagistic and surreal language of this collection invites us to explore a non-logical terrain as we follow the protagonist into her darkest memories and find a path for our own journey of self-discovery.
Taking the warp of dream, sometimes nightmare, and weaving it with the ordinary world, the poems of The Armillary Sphere, Ann Hudson’s award-winning debut collection, do not simplify the mystery but deepen it. Just as the interlocking rings of the armillary sphere of the title represent the great circles of the heavens, so do the poems herein demonstrate out of the beautiful, the extraordinary, and the cast off, a fresh scaffolding, a new way to see out from the center of our selves, a new measure of our relationship to the things of this world and the next.
Chosen from hundreds of manuscripts as this year’s winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Ann Hudson’s The Armillary Sphere possesses, in the words of final judge Mary Kinzie,
“… a brightness of spirit and quickness of thought that are conveyed with extraordinary care as she frames moments of experience. Her style is unobtrusive—no fireworks of phrasing obscure the thing felt and seen. So simple a device as taking an intransitive verb transitively can shed strong light on the moment: “A fine sheen /of sweat glistens the cocktail glasses,”—and Hudson studies emotions with a brave restraint that resists cliché, while deftly joining together intuitions that bring contradictory or opposing charge.… Both circular and digressive, Hudson’s portrayal of beings of all ages poised on their varying thresholds brings a novelist’s sense of details unfolding into their future under the control of a fine poet’s pure and condensed language of likeness.”Insomnia
If you were awake too, I’d tell you
the whole story, how I dreamt
we never saw the child, how easily
we forgot. Instead I shuffle
to the porch to watch
traffic pass the house
and an occasional bat dive
under the streetlamps, ruthless
after its dark targets.
Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance by Francesca D’Alessandro Behr focuses on the classical reception in the works of female authors active in Venice during the Early Modern Age. Even in this relatively liberal city, women had restricted access to education and were subject to deep-seated cultural prejudices, but those who read and wrote were able, in part, to overcome those limitations.
In this study, Behr explores the work of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella and demonstrates how they used knowledge of texts by Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle to systematically reanalyze the biased patterns apparent both in the romance epic genre and contemporary society. Whereas these classical texts were normally used to bolster the belief in female inferiority and the status quo, Fonte and Marinella used them to envision societies structured according to new, egalitarian ethics. Reflecting on the humanist representation of virtue, Fonte and Marinella insisted on the importance of peace, mercy, and education for women. These authors took up the theme of the equality of genders and participated in the Renaissance querelle des femmes, promoting women’s capabilities and nature.
In Art for the Ladylike, Whitney Otto limns the lives of eight pioneering women photographers—Sally Mann, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Ruth Orkin, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Madame Yvonne, and Grete Stern—to in turn excavate her own writer’s life. The result is an affecting exploration of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an artist, and the perils and rewards of being both at once. In considering how feminism, career, and motherhood were entangled throughout her subjects’ lives as they tirelessly sought to render their visions and paved the way for others creating within the bounds of domesticity, Otto assesses her own struggles with balancing writing and the pulls of home life. Ultimately, she ponders the persistent question that artistic women face in a world that devalues women’s ambition: If what we love is what we are, how do those of us with multiple loves forge lives with room for everything?
In 1671, Marie Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu of Clermont-Ferrand, sent a treatise on the art of childbirth to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant. The story of how Baudoin’s knowledge and expertise as a midwife came to be expressed, recorded, and archived raises the question: Was Baudoin exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant’s careful archival practices? Either way, Baudoin’s treatise invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives “could be and do” in seventeenth-century France. Grounding Marie Baudoin’s text in a microanalysis of her life, work, and the Jansenist network between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, this book connects historiographies of midwifery, Jansenism, hospital administration, public health, knowledge and record-keeping, and women’s work, underscoring both Baudoin’s capabilities and the archival accidents and intentions behind the preservation of her treatise in a letter.
At times personal, at others political, slipping back and forth between lyric and narrative and drawing on various languages and geographies, Asterism is a collection of grace and grit, the work of a mind at work—in, and on, a world that is simultaneously expanding and contracting. Both accessible and legitimately experimental, these poems invite and challenge the reader, moving between registers and modes with ease.
In her new collection of poems, Glancy explores the history of loss that has marked the Cherokee community. In a voice that is as economical as it is eloquent and as sophisticated as it is exhilarating, she describes the loss of family, the loss of cultural heritage, and the loss of old worlds as new ones encroach. In one poem, a farm auction becomes an auction of culture, of heritage, of the past. In others, ancestors meet in a twenty-four-hour café, lunch is shared with a great-grandmother who has been traveling the universe, Christ appears as a cowboy in an apocalyptic vision, and Clytemnestra is discovered in a snakeskin. Some of the poems are as campy as a duck-decoy Custer in a shooting gallery. Some glitter with dime-store glue. Others speak with the reflection of sunlight off a stream. Sometimes the verse produces a shortstop language on the baseline of experience. In whatever form they take, Glancy’s poems stimulate and challenge the reader with their unfettered, unadorned, and unpretty purity. This collection is not only a spirited ride across the Great Plains, it is also an important addition to the literature of white–Native American cultural relationships.
In this haunting collection of poems we travel through zones of violence to reach the crystalline depths of words: Meena Alexander writes, "So landscape becomes us, / Also an interior space bristling with light." At the heart of this book is the poem cycle "Indian Ocean Blues," a sustained meditation on the journey of the poet as a young child from India to Sudan. There are poems inspired by the drawings of children from war-torn Darfur and others set in present-day New York City. These sensual lyrics of body, memory, and place evoke the fragile, shifting nature of dwelling in our times.
Aunt Bird is an astonishing, hybrid poetry of witness that observes and testifies to social, political, and historical realities through the recovery of one life silenced by the past. Within these pages, poet Yerra Sugarman confronts the Holocaust as it was experienced by a young Jewish woman: the author’s twenty-three-year-old aunt, Feiga Maler, whom Sugarman never knew, and who died in the Kraków Ghetto in German-occupied Poland in 1942. In lyric poems, prose poems, and lyric essays, Aunt Bird combines documentary poetics with surrealism: sourcing from the testimonials of her kin who survived, as well as official Nazi documents about Feiga Maler, these poems imagine Sugarman’s relationship with her deceased aunt and thus recreate her life. Braiding speculation, primary sources, and the cultural knowledge-base of postmemory, Aunt Bird seeks what Eavan Boland calls “a habitable grief,” elegizing the particular loss of one woman while honoring who Feiga was, or might have been, and recognizing the time we have now.
When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.
A comprehensive volume on the life and work of renowned Chicana author Sandra Cisneros.
Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), author of the acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, was the first Chicana to be published by a major publishing house. ¡Ay Tú! is the first book to offer a comprehensive, critical examination of her life and work as a whole. Edited by scholars Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano, this volume addresses themes that pervade Cisneros’s oeuvre, like romantic and erotic love, female friendship, sexual abuse and harassment, the exoticization of the racial and ethnic “other,” and the role of visual arts in the lives of everyday people. Essays draw extensively on the newly opened Cisneros Papers, housed in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and the volume concludes with a new long-form interview with Cisneros by the award-winning journalist Macarena Hernández.
As these essays reveal, Cisneros’s success in the literary field was integrally connected to the emergent Chicana feminist movement and the rapidly expanding Chicanx literary field of the late twentieth century. This collection shows that Cisneros didn’t achieve her groundbreaking successes in isolation and situates her as a vital Chicana feminist writer and artist.
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