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Eighty-one poems spanning the career of the late George Starbuck, widely praised luminary of modern American verse.

Starbuck was known in his lifetime and is remembered today as a practitioner of verse remarkable for its pathos, intelligence, and wit. A master of American vernacular, sensitive to the rhythms of everyday speech, Starbuck was also a brilliant lyricist, at once erudite and irreverent. He addressed some of the most profound issues of his day with a playful ingenuity and a virtuosity of talent that Glyn Maxwell, poetry editor of the New Republic, writing in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, calls a “veritable arsenal of strategies against the darkness.”

Starbuck came to wide critical notice in 1960 with the publication of his first book, Bone Thoughts, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. He published work regularly in the New Yorker and other major literary journals in the United States. His work was consistently recognized with awards, among them the Prix de Rome, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the Beth Hokin Prize, a Notable Book of the Year designation from the New York Times, the Lenore Marshall poetry prize, and an Aiken-Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award.

Grouped together by decades, the poems reveal Starbuck's developing genius. His technical agility and his singular voice are evident. As Anthony Hecht declares in his foreword, "I come to this posthumous collection with serene and justified confidence in finding enormous pleasure, astonishment, admiration, and genuine satisfaction. [This book] is a generous sampling of a profound poetic legacy, one for which readers ought to be deeply grateful."

In the aftermath of the Stand Your Ground killing of his close friend’s father, poet Cassells explores, in his most fearless book to date, the brutality, bigotry, and betrayal at the heart of current America. Taking his cue from the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era poets and songwriters who inspired him in his youth, Cassells presents The World That the Shooter Left Us, a frank, bulletin-fierce indictment of unraveling democracy in an embattled America, in a world still haunted by slavery, by Guernica, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust, by climate catastrophe, by countless battles, borders, and broken promises—adding new grit, fire, and luster to his forty-year career as a dedicated and vital American poet.

Where nature meets democracy—John Dewey’s vision for a more connected world.

American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be one with the natural world. In his writings, particularly Art as Experience (1934), Dewey insists on the primacy of the environment in aesthetic experience. Dewey’s conception of environment includes both the natural and the man-made. The World in Which We Occur highlights this notion in order to define “pragmatist ecology,” a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural. Neil Browne finds this to be a significant feature of some of the most important ecological writing of the last century.

To fully understand human involvement in the natural world, Browne argues that disciplinary boundaries must be opened, with profound implications for the practice of democracy. The degradation of the physical environment and democratic decay, for Browne, are rooted in the same problem: our persistent belief that humans are somehow separate from their physical environment.

Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey’s philosophy. Among other texts examined are John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911); Sea of Cortez (1941) by John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts; Rachel Carson’s three books about the sea, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955); John Haines’s The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989); Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991). Together, these texts—with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation—challenge the dichotomies that we have become accustomed and affirm the principles of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic values go hand in hand.

New perspectives and rigorous scholarship shaping the histories of theatre and performance.

Theatre History Studies 2022, Vol. 41 presents a dynamic collection of peer‑reviewed essays that exemplify current directions in theatre and performance historiography. Edited by Lisa Jackson‑Schebetta, this volume brings together scholars whose work spans diverse periods, geographies, and performance traditions, demonstrating the field’s continued expansion in scope and methodology. As the official journal of the Mid‑America Theatre Conference, Theatre History Studies remains a vital venue for rigorous historical inquiry grounded in archival research, critical theory, and historiographic reflection.

Volume 41 engages pressing questions about how theatre histories are constructed, narrated, and mobilized in relation to social, political, and cultural contexts. Contributors explore performance as a site of embodied knowledge, identity formation, resistance, and memory, with essays that address race, gender, sexuality, labor, migration, and transnational exchange. The volume reflects a historiographic turn toward interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from dance studies, performance studies, critical race theory, and cultural history to reconsider established narratives and recover overlooked voices.

Together, the essays in this volume demonstrate the continued relevance of theatre history as both a scholarly practice and a critical framework for understanding performance’s role in shaping—and being shaped by—broader historical forces. Theatre History Studies 2022, Vol. 41 will be of particular value to scholars, educators, and graduate students in theatre and performance studies, as well as researchers in related fields who are interested in innovative historical methods and the evolving contours of performance scholarship.

CONTRIBUTORS
Angela K. Ahlgren / Samer Al-Saber / Kelly I. Aliano / Gordon Alley-Young / Melissa Blanco Borelli / Trevor Boffone / Jay Buchanan / Matthieu Chapman / Joanna Dee Das / Ryan J. Douglas / Victoria Fortuna / Christiana Molldrem Harkulich / Alani Hicks-Bartlett / Jeanmarie Higgins / Lisa Jackson-Schebetta / Erin Rachel Kaplan / Heather Kelley / Patrick Maley / Karin Maresh / Lisa Milner / Courtney Elkin Mohler / Heather S. Nathans / Heidi L. Nees / Sebastian Samur / Michael Schweikardt / Teresa Simone / Dennis Sloan / Guilia Taddeo / Kyle A. Thomas / Alex Vermillion / Bethany Wood

 

A selection of poems that form a narrative about psychological and spiritual somnambulance in our current age and the ever-urgent need to wake up.

In Them That Slept, Larissa Szporluk gathers three decades of work into a single incandescent arc—poems that braid feminist theology, eros, and myth into a lyric of fierce awakening. Borrowing its title from First Corinthians—“the firstfruits of them that slept”—this collection asks what it means to rise, not into certainty, but into desire, voice, and embodiment. Here, virgins become saints and saints become women of appetite. Daughters speak back to fathers. The sea mothers and devours. Joan of Arc lingers in her cell. Venus tweets. The body is never merely symbolic—it is radiant, wounded, knowing. Szporluk’s women are not passive figures in inherited narratives; they are theologians of touch, architects of longing, midwives of their own transformations. 

Across selections from six previous books and a powerful suite of new poems, Szporluk reimagines sacred language as intimate speech. Biblical cadences shimmer against domestic interiors, fields, bedrooms, and storm skies. Eros is not an ornament but a form of knowledge; faith is not obedience but risk. These are poems that refuse to sleep through history. They burn toward revelation— sensual, subversive, and alive.

One of the original "Duveneck boys" who studied in Munich at the Royal Academy, Theodore Wendel followed his mentor to Florence and Venice; he later went on to Paris and ultimately joined a colony of young artists at Giverny. The scenes and subject matter in the works he completed there are among the earliest by an American artist to adopt and evolve Impressionist strategies. Upon his return to America, he spent the next decades rendering scenes of the farmland and coast north of Boston that contemporary critics acclaimed as some of the best they had seen. Yet despite his talent and the significant accolades earned during his career, in the near-century following his death the recognition of his achievements has faded. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to have the opportunity to remedy this siutation with its forthcoming monograph on the artist, Theodore Wendel: True Notes of American Impressionism.

Laurene Buckley's years of exhaustive research inform an engaging and detailed narrative of Wendel's time in Europe and his many years capturing the essence of the farms and fishing villages along the rural coast of Massachusetts. Thanks to her efforts, the book will feature many of his best works, a number of which are in private collections. An informative introduction by William H. Gerdts provides significant artistic context for Wendel and explains the artist's deft ability to draw the viewer into a scene. Concluding the monograph, an extensive chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography complete the scholarship on this long overdue tribute to a master of American Impressionism.

In Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach works through the increasing convergences between digital humanities and literary studies to explore the meaning and primacy of the book as a literary, material, and cultural artifact. Rohrbach assembles a rather unlikely cohort of nineteenth-century women writers—Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, Augusta Evans, and Mary Chesnut—to consider the publishing culture of their period from the perspective of our current digital age, bringing together scholarly concepts from both print culture and new media studies. 

In nineteenth-century America, women from a variety of racial and class affiliations were bombarding the print market with their literary productions, taking advantage of burgeoning rates of literacy and advances in publishing technology. Their work challenged prevailing modes of authorship and continues to do so today. Each chapter of Thinking Outside the Book positions a focal figure as both paradigmatic and problematic within the context of key terms that define the study of the book. In lieu of terms such as literacy, authorship, publication, edition, and editor, Rohrbach develops an alternate typology that includes mediation, memory, history, testimony, and loss. Recognizing that the field spans radio, cinema, television, and the Internet, she draws comparisons to the present day, when Web 2.0 allows writers from varying backgrounds and positions to seek out readers without “gatekeepers” limiting their exposure. 

More than a literary history, this book takes up theories of recovery, literacy, authorship, narrative, the book, and new media in connection with race, gender, class, and region.

To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical. To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season. This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.

A pioneering exploration of how poetry and experimental cinema intersect to reconstruct meaning across visual and linguistic forms.

As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies.

The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. At the same time, Child's films are noted for their incisive political commentary on issues such as gender and sexuality, class, voyeurism, poverty, and the subversive nature of propaganda.

In the essays of This Is Called Moving, Child draws on her long career as a practicing poet as well as a filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross-fertilize her work. For Child, poetry and film are both potent means of representation, and by examining the parallels between them—words and frames, lines and shots, stanzas and scenes—she discovers how the two art forms re-construct and re-present social meaning, both private and collective.