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The great tradition of Irish poetry courses through Seán Mac Falls’ blood and into his lines, as if he has spent a lifetime inhaling the sea breezes, cliffs, and peat bogs, ennobled from William Butler Yeats to Seamus Heaney to Eavan Boland. Here in a generous volume is a stunning treasury of pleasures, direct and appealing in voice, earthbound and empyrean in spirit, epistemological and rare.

Gendered Defenders: Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces delivers dynamic and original analyses of how women perform in super heroic spaces. Contributors from a range of disciplinary perspectives—communications, international relations, cultural and media studies, English, history, and public policy—take on Marvel’s representations of women and gender to examine how relations of power are (re)produced, understood, and challenged. Through vivid retellings of character-based scenarios, these essays examine Carol Danvers, Jessica Jones, Ms. Marvel, Shuri, Pepper Potts, Black Widow, and Squirrel Girl across media forms to characterize and critique contemporary understandings of identity, feminism, power, and gender. Collectively, Gendered Defenders challenges notions about female identity while illuminating the multidimensional portrayals that are enabled by the form of speculative fiction. Making explicit the connections between women’s lived experiences and the imagined exploits of superheroines, contributors explore how these pop culture narratives can help us understand real-world gender dynamics and prepare pedagogical, political, and social strategies for dealing with them. Contributors: Bryan J. Carr, Meta G. Carstarphen, Julie A. Davis, Rachel Grant, Annika Hagley, Amanda K. Kerhberg, Gregory P. Perreault, Mildred F. Perreault, CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Maryanne A. Rhett, Stephanie L. Sanders, J. Richard Stevens, Anna C. Turner, Kathleen M. Turner-Ledgerwood, Robert Westerfelhaus

In Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead, writer Kent Gramm and photographer Chris Heisey tell the famous battle’s story through the eyes of those who lived and died there. Unlike histories that simply recount the three furious days in July 1863, this book transports readers onto the battlefield and into the event’s historical echoes, making for a delightful, immersive experience.
 
Creative nonfiction, fiction, dramatic dialogue, and poetry combine with full-color photographs to convey the essential reality of the famous battlefield as a place both terrible and beautiful. The living and the dead contained here include Confederates and Yankees, soldiers and civilians, male and female, young and old. Visitors to the battlefield after 1863, both well known and obscure, provide the voices of the living. They include a female admiral in the U.S. Navy and a man from rural Virginia who visits the battlefield as a way of working through the death of his son in Iraq. The ghostly voices of the dead include actual participants in the battle, like a fiery colonel and a girl in Confederate uniform, as well as their representatives, such as a grieving widow who has come to seek her husband.   
 
Utilizing light as a central motif and fourscore and seven voices to evoke how Gettysburg continues to draw visitors and resound throughout history, alternately wounding and stitching the lives it touches, Gramm’s words and Heisey’s photographs meld for a historical experience unlike any other. Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead offers a panoramic view wherein the battle and battlefield of Gettysburg are seen through the eyes of those who lived through it and died on it as well as those who have sought meaning at the site ever since. 
 

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

Harry Humes carved out a unique place in American literature by chronicling Appalachian working-class life, natural landscapes, and disappearing rural traditions in Appalachian Pennsylvania with rare lyricism, humility, and precision. He wrote unflinchingly about the austerity and horrors of extraction as well as his deep connection with family and the area mountains and valleys not gutted by the anthracite coal industry.

This volume of Humes’s new and selected poems not only preserves the work of a significant American poet, offering scholars, teachers, and general readers a generous overview of the clarity, beauty, craft, and emotional depth of his substantial body of work. It allows future generations to rediscover poetry that deepens our understanding of how our labor, our landscapes, and our love shape us and change the ways we live and what we care about.

Vignettes of working-class life create a panoramic portrait of the emotional wages of surviving in America

In Gold Country, Vanesha Pravin crafts indelible vignettes of labor, race, and contemporary existence that together offer a panoramic view of today’s United States. Through each life that she conveys line by startling line, she traces the disparity between aspiration and reality when it comes to the American dream: an undocumented worker waits on a celebrity, a government contractor compromises his integrity to secure the future of his children, a career waiter is haunted by the contrast between his inner life and reality, and an orderly steals credit cards for a fix. Wistful and weary, her protagonists wrestle with thwarted dreams and personal shame, but in stitching together a patchwork from their lives, Pravin asks us all to confront the wider realities of deprivation, greed, and their insidious influence on how we function as a society. Gold Country offers a gorgeously nuanced portrait of working life in a supposedly democratic country, airing hard truths about labor, complicity, and the rifts between us.

A powerful collection that includes the viral hit poem "Good Bones" -- Public Radio International's Official Poem of 2016!

Good Bones is a collection of modern poetry that speaks to the world we live in. Maggie Smith contemplates the past and our future, life and death, childhood and motherhood. She writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. Smith takes in the dark world around her with a critical eye, always searching for the hidden goodness: compassion, empathy, honesty. “There is a light,” she tells us, “and the light is good.” Smith skillfully reveals the layers of the world around us through lyric language and vivid imagery: “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake.” These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world. We come away from this collection hopeful about making the world a better place, a place to share with future generations. As Smith tells us in Good Bones, “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Published in 1979 by Gnomon Press

In Groundwork, Robert Morgan offers a vivid poetic excavation of Appalachian life, memory, and landscape. Drawing deeply from his upbringing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Morgan crafts a collection that is both intimate and elemental. These poems explore the textures of rural existence—its labor, rituals, and natural rhythms—through language that is spare, musical, and richly evocative.

Morgan’s verse is rooted in place, yet it transcends regionalism through its mythic resonance and emotional clarity. He sifts through family lore, childhood recollections, and local history to recover what he calls “pieces of the morgenland”—a personal and cultural terrain shaped by hardship, resilience, and wonder. The poems in Groundwork are populated by grandparents, farmers, and mountain folk, rendered with a quiet reverence that elevates the everyday to the numinous.

This collection marks a foundational moment in Morgan’s career, establishing the poetic voice that would inform his later fiction and nonfiction. With titles like “Mountain Bride,” “Burning the Hornet’s Nest,” and “Baptism of Fire,” the poems evoke both the physical and spiritual dimensions of Appalachian life. Groundwork remains one of Morgan’s most concentrated and enduring tributes to the Southern mountains and their people.

Essential for readers of American poetry, Appalachian studies, and environmental literature, Groundwork is a lyrical testament to the power of memory and place.

god’s breath hovering across the waters begins with the story of Arthur Penzias’s discovery of the echo of the big bang through a cryogenic microwave receiver and from there explodes into a meditation on the author’s mother’s untimely and tragic death. Memories, history, war, science, horror movies, space exploration, and the RCA dog are just some of the subjects that expand and contract, intersect and repel, throughout the arc of the collection. Praise for previous books: “Such lovely doubts in these poems….These rescues are almost always simply human—a couple making love, a child drawing—as the edge here, the dread, is so humanly complex. This is simultaneously a raw and restrained book. Israeli doesn't spew or explain but remains open to the need so consistently embodied in these poems.” —Bob Hicok “Israeli is visceral and brilliant, intransigent in his doubts. His poems lead deeper into the wilderness—toward the human, the ambivalent, the paradox Dorothy Day called ‘a hard and dreadful love.’’   —D. Nurkse