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

Charles Dickens traveled to North America twice, in 1842 and twenty-five years later in 1867–68, and on both trips Massachusetts was part of his itinerary. Although many aspects of his U.S. travels disappointed him, Massachusetts was the one state that met and even exceeded Dickens's expectations for “the republic of [his] imagination.” From the mills of Lowell to the Perkins School for the Blind, it offered an alternate vision of America that influenced his future writings, while the deep and lasting friendships he formed with Bostonians gave him enduring ties to the commonwealth. 

This volume provides insight from leading scholars who have begun to reassess the significance of Massachusetts in the author's life and work. The collection begins with a broad biographical and historical overview taken from the full-length narrative of the award-winning exhibition Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation, which attracted thousands of visitors while on display in Lowell. Abundant images from the exhibition, many of them difficult to find elsewhere, enhance the story of Dickens's relationship with the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of Massachusetts. The second section includes essays that consider the importance of Dickens's many connections to the commonwealth.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Chelsea Bray, Iain Crawford, Andre DeCuir, Natalie McKnight, Lillian Nayder, and Kit Polga.

Marking a formal reinvention for the poet, this collection addresses the strangeness of time, blending writers and images from the past with contemporary scenes.

This book-length sequence of turbulent sonnets follows their speaker's impulses and imagination through the seasons of their composition. Written between 2016 and 2022, Divers is a collection shaped by contradiction and marks a new period of lyric experimentation for poet Sam Amadon. These poems are rigorously constrained while also making space for improvisation. They hold to a decasyllabic line while moving in and out of meter. They sing of time, and struggle to understand it. They find words for our moment in the pages of old books. Lines from great writers of the past—including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, and Michael Drayton—echo through Amadon's poems of contemporary menace and wonder. Here we see both the owls lining our fences and the black SUVs rolling down our streets. Out of these conflicts, Amadon’s sonnets step up, lift off, and dive into themselves.

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.

The trajectory of Don Gummer's career as a sculptor began in New York City in the late 1970s with his wall reliefs of painted wood, carefully layered geometric works exhibiting a strong architectural influence. Moving beyond wood to stone, bronze, stainless steel, aluminum, and glass as his primary materials, his artworks evolved into subtly inventive freestanding sculptures, often of monumental scale, that exhibit his unfailing attention to craftsmanship and detail.

In a 2001 interview with Peter Plagens, American artist and art critic, Gummer described his interest in sculpture as "the recontextualization of natural phenomena, of unaltered things brought into aesthetic balance by choosing and placing." Using balance, proportion, and his unique sense of harmony, the artist is able to make durable materials seem almost buoyant. Negative space becomes an intrinsic element in his work, imparting a sense that his exquisite, seemingly permanent forms are ultimately as fleeting as any of nature's creations would be. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to present Don Gummer, a new monograph on the artist and his highly acclaimed body of work.

In most of his half century of writing, John Dos Passos consistently tried to capture and define the American character. The complete range of his work builds to Dos Passos' concept of "contemporary chronicle," his own name for his fiction. In this first study of all Dos Passos' writing, Linda W. Wagner examines his fiction, poetry, drama, travel essays, and history—a body of work that evokes a vivid image of America meant to be neither judgmental nor moralistic.

From Manhattan Transfer to U. S. A. to District of Columbia to The Thirteenth Chronicle and Mid-century, Wagner illuminates Dos Passos' work with fresh readings and new interpretations. She makes extensive use of unpublished manuscript material so that this is a casebook of Dos Passos' interest in craft and method as well as a thematic study. In addition, this volume chronicles the years during which Dos Passos wrote—the immediate post-World War I period through the twenties and thirties and well into the fifties. This is an important book both in literary criticism and in American social history.