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A narrative-poetic retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of a 1990s teen poet
 
Daisy: Poems is a captivating and imaginative take on The Great Gatsby that puts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic in the hands of a messy, ambitious, and possibly devious teen poet. From her privileged yet precarious perch in the roaring 1990s, Daisy navigates the expectations of her parents, boyfriend, and lover, alongside her own artistic ambitions, as she explores whether freedom is what she truly desires—and wonders if it’s even possible. Rachel Feder puts a new spin on beloved characters: Jay, longtime and secret lover; Nick, somewhat mysterious and always meddling cousin; and Jordyn, best friend and companion in doomed relationships. A meditation on juvenilia, constructions of femininity, the purity myth, and canonical literary silences, Daisy is told in sparse, evocative verse that pulsates with youthful passion and offers a new elegy for our lost American dreams.

Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike. 

Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike. 

Wrestling with the experience of living online as a non-digital native 

Joanna Fuhrman didn’t grow up online. Her generation entered the digital age as adults, with optimism about the possibilities it would bring for community building. In the alien landscape of the internet, they indeed found moments of joy and connection, but they also watched in anguish as what had been sold as a utopian space instead magnified the anti-democratic demons of necrocapitalism. In this darkly comic and surreal collection, Fuhrman lets herself fall into the internet wormhole of these conflicting realities. With titles ranging from “You Won’t Believe How Your Favorite Childhood Star Looks Now” to “We’ll Burn That Algorithm When We Get to It,” the feminist prose poems in Data Mind remix the tropes of digital life with the puckishness and embodied urgency for which Fuhrman is celebrated. 

Decolonial Topophilia: Nature, Place, and History in Puerto Rican Poetry examines how four major poets—Luis Lloréns Torres, Luis Palés Matos, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Julia de Burgos—address the ecological and human consequences of colonial domination in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Their poetry raises questions about the capitalist transformation of land through monocultures like sugarcane, the reduction of nature to exploitable resources, and the ties between attachment to place and nationalism. In tracing these connections, this pathbreaking book reveals how poetic visions of place can challenge colonial histories and imagine more reciprocal ways of inhabiting the world.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred by Masood Ashraf Raja urges a new mode of reading, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other.

Raja argues that the lack of understanding of Muslim responses to the poetics of incitement in the West is the result of a lack of cross-cultural knowledge. He claims metropolitan universities often do not teach the proper social, historical, and religious context required for effectively reading these texts with any form of cultural knowledge. To remedy this, Raja offers and theorizes “democratic reading practices” and new ways for students to engage with texts. A genealogy of the Muslim Sacred is included, thereby giving readers the history and specific knowledge that constitutes an average Muslim reader of these texts, a subject who should be imagined and empathized with when those in the West read works of the poetics of incitement. 

In this formally inventive poetry collection, Sati Mookherjee resurrects a shared precolonial pan-South Asian identity, history, and culture in joyful defiance of the nationalist and sectarian movements of today. 

This unusual poetry collection emerged from the author’s interviews of her Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrant family and friends in her native Pacific Northwest about their personal histories: of partition and childhood, immigration experiences, and religious and metaphysical beliefs. The resulting poems reflect the kaleidoscopic identity of the South Asian (“desi”) diaspora—the world’s largest diaspora. At this ugly historic moment, desi-ness offers a real-world model of a joyful, plural community, even as such tolerance is under grave threat from both today’s American right-wing anti-immigrant movement and the toxic nationalism and sectarianism of South Asian geopolitics. The poems themselves are a diaspora of forms: hybrid cross-pollinations of American tradition (Frost, Penn Warren), ancient Indo-Persian-Arabic forms, and self-invention. In a time when hatred of the other is normalized, this book holds love, celebrating a kinship tradition and shared homeland—a Des—that is both precolonial and extant, borderless, found not on any map, but held in the collective un/consciousness of the desi diaspora. In defiance of nationalist rhetoric that would see us divided by language, religion, and country of origin, Des joins the decentralized global movement of scholars, artists, activists, and young people reclaiming the beauty of a shared, precolonial composite culture. 

A groundbreaking account of concepts of freedom in West Indian literature and visual culture.

Desiring Freedom examines post-emancipation West Indian literature and visual culture to ask how they reimagine freedom. Ranging from emancipation in the 1830s to the arrival of independence in the 1960s, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard analyzes a literary and visual repertoire through which West Indians and Britons cast doubt on wage labor and domesticity as freedom. Whereas freedom was traditionally conceived around narratives of the self-governing individual, Parsard unearths a diverse range of materials—fiction, poetry, painting, photography, imperial correspondence, social scientific discourse, and economic history—in which this plot breaks down, finding practices of freedom in hoarding, pleasure-seeking, hustling, and siphoning. 

Parsard focuses on conceptions of freedom in Trinidad, British Guiana, and Jamaica. Along the way, she shows how indentured Indian women’s jewelry reveals contradictions in imperial capital, studies the short fiction of a 1930s Trinidadian literary collective called the Beacon group to reveal how women find both profit and pleasure in their affairs, and offers a fascinating reading of C. L. R. James’s only novel, Minty Alley—including a little-known alternative ending. In a key methodological contribution, Parsard develops proposition as a critical tool, drawing on its many valences—a sexual advance, a contract before its signing, and, in philosophy, the act of saying “this is how things stand.” Parsard’s own propositions show that West Indian culture offers new ways of seeing the relationships among race, labor, capital, gender, and sexuality after emancipation.

“I was gone before I left,” writes Grant Farred in his compelling philosophical meditation, Diaspora-in-Place. Building on a concept he introduced in his critique The Perversity of Gratitude, Farred rethinks diaspora as not just physical deracination and relocation, but also a state of being in exile at home while remaining, visibly, in place. Partially the consequence of growing up in South Africa during apartheid, Farred extends the concept to “the Palestinian condition” of living in/out of place in Gaza.

Divided into a series of witty fragments, evocative epigrams, and sobering aphorisms, Diaspora-in-Place builds on thinkers ranging from Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, to the poetry of Olivia Elias, to musicians Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane to examine how individuals process their national identity and subjecthood in a place where they feel out of place.

Farred writes eloquently about this expansive but not universal contradiction as being “a mobile immobility” or “an immobile mobility.” In doing so, he offers an entirely new and provocative way of conceiving how we understand diaspora.

Striking photographs and stories from more than two decades on the frontlines by a groundbreaking photojournalist—and the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

In 1941, twenty-two-year-old Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle sold her first photo essay to Look magazine. A year later, with World War II underway, she was photographing American soldiers in combat training in Panama. By the end of the war, she had captured the devastation at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and in the ensuing decades, Dickey and her camera were on the scene at many of the world’s hotspots—from Cuba and the Dominican Republic to Algeria and Lebanon to Vietnam and Laos. Dickey Chapelle Under Fire exposes her remarkable story and shares over 150 stunning images from her extraordinary career as a photojournalist.

In the male-dominated world of war journalism, Chapelle fought to be taken seriously. She eventually earned the respect of many of her male colleagues and broke down barriers for future generations of female journalists. She embedded herself with military units on frontlines around the globe, capturing not only the horrors of war but also the camaraderie and everyday routines of service men and women.

Always one to follow the action, Chapelle traveled with Algerian rebels across the North African desert and with Fidel Castro through the jungles of Cuba. She spent two months in a Hungarian prison after being caught smuggling aid to refugees fleeing a Soviet invasion. Beginning in 1961, Chapelle set her lens and viewfinder on Southeast Asia, capturing the growing conflict there, until she was killed while on patrol with marines in Vietnam in April 1965—making her the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

For twenty-five years, Chapelle's photographs graced the pages of National Geographic, the National Observer, Life, and other major publications. Despite her tragic end, Chapelle’s tenacity, courage, and compassion shine throughout her work, highlighting the human impact of war while revealing the larger stories beyond the battlefield. Her legacy lives on through this powerful collection. 

Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collection

Drawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic traditions, Differential Diagnosis introduces a deeply entangled transMad approach, investigating ways of knowing, loving, and living not legible to the normative eye. This collection challenges the architecture of institutional psychiatry and its popular “wellness” analogues, offering instead a counternarrative of forced institutionalization, disorderly embodiment, and transMad self-determination.

At once jarring and joyful, Differential Diagnosis interrogates psychiatric power and locates capacities for disabled and/or transMad resistance in the oblique, the speculative, and the “nonsensical.” Cavar’s inventive full-length debut defamiliarizes cis, sane, abled existence through linguistic play and speculative imagery, offering Madness not only as poetic content, but also as craft technique and, ultimately, as a new way of being in the normative world.

A new, expansive collection by one of the most provocative and inventive poets of our time. 

In Dodging, Charles Bernstein pushes his poetics toward new kinds of formal and tonal attentions. This multifaceted work brings together comic velocity, pointed political critique, and passages of lyric intensity. Bernstein calls these poems “too late”: written late in life as irreversibility presses against reflection, regret, and renewed resistance—a situation in which dodging is not evasion but survival, a way of moving through political catastrophe and personal loss without being silenced by either.

The collection unfolds in three interrelated “fits”—a term suggesting bursts of composition, rhythmic surges, and formal groupings—titled “Dodging,” “Struggle,” and “Reflection.” These sections move from a series of flashes and fragments, then to assembled riffs and collaborations with poet Tracie Morris, and finally turn to refractions and aphorisms that embrace active contradiction. Together they trace a shifting field of contrasts: between satire and elegy, volatility and concentration, comedy and grief.

Both fundamentally true to Bernstein’s voice and radically radiant in its range, Dodging is a work that moves restlessly across forms and tones—by turns sly, searching, and unguarded, where humor and grief occupy the same ground.

Many people dream of "someday buying a small quaint place in the country, to own two cows and watch the birds," in the words of Texas ranchwoman Amanda Spenrath Geistweidt. But only a few are cut out for the unrelenting work that makes a family ranching operation successful. Don't Make Me Go to Town presents an eloquent photo-documentary of eight women who have chosen to make ranching in the Texas Hill Country their way of life. Ranging from young mothers to elderly grandmothers, these women offer vivid accounts of raising livestock in a rugged land, cut off from amenities and amusements that most people take for granted, and loving the hard lives they've chosen.

Rhonda Lashley Lopez began making photographic portraits of Texas Hill Country ranchwomen in 1993 and has followed their lives through the intervening years. She presents their stories through her images and the women's own words, listening in as the ranchwomen describe the pleasures and difficulties of raising sheep, Angora goats, and cattle on the Edwards Plateau west of Austin and north of San Antonio. Their stories record the struggles that all ranchers face—vagaries of weather and livestock markets, among them—as well as the extra challenges of being women raising families and keeping things going on the home front while also riding the range. Yet, to a woman, they all passionately embrace family ranching as a way of life and describe their efforts to pass it on to future generations.

A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception

How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs. Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.

Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems 1987-2024 is a panoramic collection of Daniel Tobin’s most exemplary, ambitious, and accomplished poems from nearly forty years at work in the art. These range from his award-winning first book, Where the World is Made, through successive volumes that reveal a progressive deepening of his essential themes even as the poems evolve to an ever more refined technical risk and mastery. These themes include the unflinching encounter with time, suffering, and mortality, as well as what one earlier reviewer called “a quest for transcendence, a search for the sacred.” They seek, in short, to do, as another reviewer observed, what Yeats said was “one ideal for poetry: to hold justice and reality in a single thought.” In so doing, Tobin’s poems probe the individual life in relation to the pressures of history, including his own family’s perilous and traumatic immigration from famine in the 19th century—a backstory he explores in The Narrows, which he has called “a mural in verse.” At the same time, his “Homage to Bartolomeo de las Casas” delves into the fraught early colonial history of the Americas through the eyes of the eponymous friar, a repentant colonizer. 

These earlier works establish Tobin’s mastery of the poetic sequence, among a wide variety of other formal displays, all amply evident in the books that follow, including the lyrically meditative orchestrations of Second Things, the award-winning poems of Belated Heavens, The Net, and Blood Labors, characterized at once by their compendious erudition, their sense of intellectual and cultural history, as well as their emotional urgency and formal variousness. This generous selection from Tobin’s work is intended to be a companion volume to The Mansions, his trilogy of book-length poems that explore twentieth century history, and the counter claims of science and religion, through three exemplary lives, which reviewers said inspired genuine awe. Finally,  Dusk, Empire leads with a gripping selection of new work that engages the enormous pressures and troubles of the present historical moment, set in dialogue with Tobin’s characteristic passion for what would transcend it. Or as he asks in “The Sand Painting,” “What is that joyous singing inside the rock / Though each intricate, lovely thing will be erased?”