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A provocative overview of avant-garde American poetry of the past 25 years that raises important questions about the practice of criticism.

Simulcast offers long overdue, highly opinionated, and penetrating examinations of a flourishing movement in American letters by one of its most perceptive practitioners. The four “experiments” in literary criticism gathered in this volume vary in style and point of view. Taken together, they reassess the fundamental relationship between poetry and criticism.

“The Anti-Hegemony Project” is a satire, employing the rhetoric of journalism and the colloquial exchanges of online fan groups to analyze one of the earliest appearances of a poetry community on the World Wide Web: the “Poetics List” maintained at the State University of New York, Buffalo. “Poe’s Poetics and Selected Essays” is a collection of polemical essays on subjects ranging from modernism to language poetry. The third experiment, “The Literati of San Francisco,” is a detailed portrait of the figures and ideas at the heart of an important literary scene a decade after language poetry’s inception. The final essay, “A Short History of Language Poetry,” provides a less polemical, more sober and even-handed analysis of that movement from its origins to the present and its prospects for the future.

These critical interventions and essays are important studies of an evolving poetic field, but they also represent an evolution in criticism itself. Friedlander’s unorthodox methodology is to create a critical text by rewriting prior examples of criticism, among them Jean Wahl’s A Short History of Existentialism and Edgar Allan Poe’s "Literati of New York City." The resulting critiques are themselves a kind of poetry. They explore the issues of style versus substance, artifice versus authenticity, and plausibility versus truth, while the shifts in perspective call into question the authority of any one critical account.
 

Rediscover the spirit, stories, and landscapes of Alabama through a timeless collection of observations and historical reflections.

In Sketches of Alabama, Mary Duffee offers a richly detailed portrait of a state shaped by diverse communities, enduring traditions, and a deeply rooted cultural identity. Through a series of engaging sketches, Duffee captures the essence of Alabama’s towns, people, and everyday life, preserving moments that might otherwise be lost to time.

Blending historical insight with narrative charm, this collection explores the character of Alabama from multiple perspectives—rural and urban, past and present. Readers encounter vivid depictions of local customs, notable figures, and the evolving social fabric of the region. Duffee’s work not only chronicles the state’s development but also reflects the broader story of the American South, illuminating its complexities, resilience, and sense of place.

This collection contains typescripts of some of Mary Gordon Duffee's Iron Age columns "Sketches of Alabama," manuscripts of seven of Duffee's poems, a typed biographical sketch of Duffee, undated, and Duffee's obituary from the Birmingham Age-Herald. Ideal for students, historians, and general readers alike, Sketches of Alabama serves as both a literary work and a cultural record. Its accessible style makes it an excellent introduction to Alabama’s heritage, while its thoughtful observations reward those seeking deeper understanding of Southern history and identity.

Whether you are drawn to regional storytelling, historical narrative, or the rich traditions of the Deep South, this work offers a compelling journey into Alabama’s past—one sketch at a time.

Sleeping in the Courtyard brings together historically isolated writers in community—and invites readers to join them around the table to share in their memories, secrets, tears, and joys. Featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic work by emerging and well-established writers, this collection shines a light on works by a diverse group of contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living in Kurdistan and in diaspora.

Recognizing the complex web of physical and lingual displacement of the Kurdish people and celebrating the diverse tapestry of their stories, this collection presents work originally written in English and work translated from Kurdish dialects as well as from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Swedish. A few works in Kurdish dialects appear alongside their translations, both in recognition of the experience of linguicide and to push against oppressive attempts to strip away Kurdish language.

Several works here explore the impact of the countless forms of militarized displacement, cultural destruction, and mass genocide that Kurds have endured. Other pieces illuminate Kurdish experiences of desire, friendship, empowerment, familial intricacies, and other topics spanning across universal human conditions. The writers in these pages take risks both in craft and content—and in some cases, just by daring to write and publish. What emerges in Sleeping in the Courtyard is the antithesis of erasure.

In the shadow of death, Levi Shalit wrote to remember—so we would never forget.

So We Died: A Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania (Azoy zaynen mir geshtorbn) is a powerful eyewitness account of the Shavl ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. Written in Yiddish by Levi Shalit and available now for the first time in English, the work fills a stark void in historical records.

Shalit divided his work into four sections. In the first, he describes the German invasion of Šiauliai, the murder of thousands of Jews in the city and surrounding countryside, and the forced relocation of the surviving Jews into the Shavl ghetto. In the second, he describes daily life in the ghetto in engrossing detail. In the third, titled “The Masada Book,” Shalit describes ghetto residents’ attempt to organize a resistance group of which he himself was a member. In the fourth, he narrates the transformation of the ghetto into a concentration camp and the seizure and deportation of the community’s children.

Few accounts of the Shavl ghetto survived the war. Shalit’s work offers English-language readers a rare insight into a vital chapter of history. The translators artfully reveal Shalit’s literary prowess and the ways he illuminated the Shavl ghetto’s daily struggles, false hopes, and atrocities.

More than an account of a previously overlooked episode in Holocaust history, So We Died is a testament to the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable tragedy. It offers keen insight into a time of war, fascism, and resistance. A must-read for anyone seeking understanding and remembrance.

The third book in Charles Bowden’s “accidental trilogy” that began with Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing attempts to resolve the overarching question: “How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death?” As humanity moves further into the twenty-first century, Bowden continues to interrogate our roles in creating the ravaged landscapes and accumulated death that still surround us, as well as his own childhood isolation, his lust for alcohol and women, and his waning hope for a future. We witness post-Katrina New Orleans and terrorist-bombed Bali; we encounter our shared actions with the animal world and the desirous need for consumption; we see the clash and erosion of our physical and figurative borders, the savagery of our own civilization. A man of his time and out of time, Bowden seeks acceptance and a will to endure what may lie ahead.

2026 Outstanding Book Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Tejas Foco
2026 Silver Medal for the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural & Community Themed Book – English, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)

An expansive volume on Tejana identity and Tejanidad told through personal narratives, poetry, and essays.

Being Tejanx is different than just being from Texas. Being Tejanx means you are a border subject. Being Tejanx means living in and from a certain history of oppression, possibility, activism, and cultural-linguistic hybridity arising within the US-Mexico borderland that is home. And being Tejanx means something in particular if you are a woman.

In ¡Somos Tejanas!, editors Norma E. Cantú and Jody A. Marín assemble contemporary Tejanx writers who provide firsthand accounts of their experience of identity, enriching the field of Tejanx studies through an encounter with gender and sexuality. The contributions, including personal and scholarly essays, poems, criticism, and artworks, explore the heterogeneity of Tejana identity and the sociopolitical movements, stories, dances, music, and athletic feats that mark Tejanidad. Authors contemplate the history and memory of segregation in Texas, the struggles of surviving the unnatural disaster and blackouts of 2021 amid the global pandemic of COVID-19, and the drug-war violence and ever-tightening immigration restrictions that strangle a transborder way of life shared by millions. An unrepentant act of expression from women under attack by state policymakers, this collection dispels the silence imposed by colonial erasure.

"I believe every sunrise and I remember the smell of wet grass, the color of robins, and rustle of leaves on the big oaks that outlive nations, all this comes with each sunrise."

Sonata marks the sixth and final installment of Charles Bowden’s towering “Unnatural History of America” series. While his earlier volumes were suffused with violence and war, Bowden offers here a celebration of rebirth and regrowth. Rendered in Bowden's inimitable style, more prose poetry than reportage, he evokes panoramas that contain the potential for respite and offer a state of grace all but lost in the endless wars of man.

Bowden travels back in time to the worlds of artists Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh, the latter painting furiously against encroaching madness. “Van Gogh tries to dream a life of color,” writes Bowden. “Powder blue sheds, yellow stubble, pink skies—but the fears and dark things drag him down.” As Bowden’s vivid prose wrestles with the madness of the world, van Gogh’s paintings represent an act of resistance, ultimately unsuccessful, against depression and suicide.

Moving from the vibrant hues of van Gogh’s painted gardens to America’s southern border, Bowden returns once more to the Mexican asylum run by "El Pastor," Jose Antonio Galvan, who was first introduced to readers of the sextet in Jericho. Here, too, is the dream of a garden that will be planted in the desert, a promise of regeneration in a world gone mad. Poetic, elegiac, and elliptical, Sonata is the final, captivating book of Bowden’s monumental career.

This book debuts selected poetry by Kim Nam-ju (1946–1994) in English translation, along with the original Korean. Referred to as the “Che Guevara of South Korea,” and self-described a “warrior poet,” Kim Nam-ju remains, to this day, an enduring voice of the 1970s and 80s cultures of anti-authoritarian resistance in South Korea. Kim was arrested in 1979 for his involvement with the “South Josǒn” National Liberation Front, a leftist underground group organizing against the Yushin regime. Kim wrote prolifically while in prison (1979-1988), at times by etching his poems into scraps of foil, milk carton, or cigarette packages. The work he produced in prison alone totals around 360 poems. This bilingual volume selects 65 poems from Kim's oeuvre, sampling across many different chapters of the poet’s career. Readers will find autobiographical reflections on his childhood, love poems, missives from the prison cell, commemorations of the Kwangju Uprising, the poet’s calls to arms, and more. 

이 책은 김남주 시인(1946~1994)의 시 65편을 한국어 원문과 함께 영문 번역으로 처음 선보인다. ‘한국의 체 게바라’로 불리며 스스로를 ‘전사 시인’이라 칭했던 김남주는 오늘날까지도 한국의 1970·80년대 반독재 저항운동을 대표하는 사라지지 않는 목소리로 남아 있다. 김남주는 유신정권에 맞서 결성된 좌파 지하조직 ‘남조선민족해방전선준비위원회’에 가담한 혐의로 1979년에 체포되었다. 1979년부터 1988년에 이르는 수감 기간에도 꾸준히 창작 활동을 이어갔으며, 때로는 은박지 조각이나 우유곽, 담뱃갑 등에 시를 새겨 집필하기도 하였다. 이 시기에 쓴 작품만 해도 360여 편에 이른다.  이 영역시집은 시인의 전체 작품 중에서 65편의 시를 엄선하여 시인의 생애와 창작 활동의 다양한 시기를 아우르는 시적 여정을 한눈에 보여준다. 독자들은 시인의 어린 시절에 대한 자전적인 회고, 사랑의 시, 옥중 서한,  5·18 광주항쟁을 추모하는 시, 민중의 투쟁을 촉구하는 시 등 다양한 작품을 만나볼 수 있을 것이다. 

English-Korean Bilingual Edition 
영-한 이중언어판

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)

“Swann's ‘concrete’ renderings of the poems are visually striking and are meant to embody the notions of silence and cycle that are so important in Native American culture. . . . [He] does a fine job of encouraging readers to return to return to these original songs and poems from a culture that most latter-day Americans know far too little about.”—Anne Bromley, Georgia Review

Based on the work of anthropologist collectors, this compendium of more than 100 Native American chants and songs revises and updates a prior edition out of print since 1989. ‘These poems are not translations,’ argues Swann. They're versions that have gone through ‘a series of mediations and filters and exist somewhere between the individual lyric voice’ and a diverse, multileveled Native American imaginative-mystical identity. Whether versions, translations, or poems, whether sung at a Crazy Dance, potlatch, corn-grinding, or curative or marriage ceremony, whether celebrating buffalo, maize, red fox, or tobacco, these works capture the ‘otherness’ of the primeval spirit of the Native American fusion of natural and supernatural, animal and deity. Originally performed aloud, these ‘verbal artifacts’—which are sometimes breathtakingly pure, sometimes obscure—reveal that there can be no conventional or single notion of ‘the Indian.’”—Library Journal

Honorable Mention, Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Nonfiction, 2006

Grover Lewis was one of the defining voices of the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. His wry, acutely observed, fluently written essays for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice set a standard for other writers of the time, including Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Eszterhas, Timothy Ferris, Chet Flippo, and Tim Cahill, who said of Lewis, "He was the best of us." Pioneering the "on location" reportage that has become a fixture of features about moviemaking and live music, Lewis cut through the celebrity hype and captured the real spirit of the counterculture, including its artificiality and surprising banality. Even today, his articles on Woody Guthrie, the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, directors Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, and the filming of The Last Picture Show and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest remain some of the finest writing ever done on popular culture.

To introduce Grover Lewis to a new generation of readers and collect his best work under one cover, this anthology contains articles he wrote for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Playboy, Texas Monthly, and New West, as well as excerpts from his unfinished novel The Code of the West and his incomplete memoir Goodbye If You Call That Gone and poems from the volume I'll Be There in the Morning If I Live. Jan Reid and W. K. Stratton have selected and arranged the material around themes that preoccupied Lewis throughout his life—movies, music, and loss. The editors' biographical introduction, the foreword by Dave Hickey, and a remembrance by Robert Draper discuss how Lewis's early struggles to escape his working-class, anti-intellectual Texas roots for the world of ideas in books and movies made him a natural proponent of the counterculture that he chronicled so brilliantly. They also pay tribute to Lewis's groundbreaking talent as a stylist, whose unique voice deserves to be more widely known by today's readers.