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History—natural history, human history, and personal history—and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. Stephen Harrigan's career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors' village in the Czech Republic. And now, in this new edition, he movingly recounts in "Off Course" a quest to learn all he can about his father, who died in a plane crash six months before he was born.

Harrigan's deceptively straightforward voice belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be "unknowable." Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, the motives of a caged tiger, or a father we never met, but Harrigan's gift—a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist—is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth.

New perspectives on the battles that opened the Confederacy to invasion

In early 1862, the Civil War had been raging for almost ten months, and the Confederacy had enjoyed virtually uninterrupted success. From seizing federal property to early battlefield victories, Southern forces had effectively expelled Union authority from nearly all of the Confederacy’s eleven states. The Union suffered repeated setbacks, while modest victories in western Virginia and Kentucky had little strategic impact. By the end of February, however, much had changed.

On February 6, Union gunboats under the joint command of Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, opening a crucial waterway into the Confederacy. Just days later, Grant moved against Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. After several days of fighting, the fort surrendered on the 16th, along with more than 13,000 Confederate troops—the largest surrender in US history to that point. These twin victories shattered Confederate control of Kentucky and western Tennessee, allowing Federal soldiers and sailors to use the rivers to threaten the Confederacy’s interior. This first major strategic breakthrough of the war signaled a dramatic shift in momentum and elevated Grant’s national profile.

In this essay collection, leading and emerging scholars provide in-depth analyses of previously overlooked aspects of the Forts Henry and Donelson campaign. Contributors examine how ecological forces influenced the campaign, the effectiveness of the joint command between the Union army and navy, and Union brigadier general Charles F. Smith’s assault that doomed Fort Donelson. They also explore the battle’s impact on the military career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the effects of surprise during the Confederate breakout attempt from Fort Donelson, Confederate colonel Gabriel Wharton’s memoir, and how the loss of the forts showed Texans that the fight to preserve the enslaved South would cost them more than they had imagined.

In the aftermath of the Forts Henry and Donelson campaign, most of the Civil War still lay ahead. The Confederacy would have many opportunities to regain its momentum and exhaust the Union will to prevail. However, with a few key exceptions, for the rest of the war, the Confederacy fought to defend itself rather than to take new territory. It was in this massive shift of momentum during ten days in 1862 that the war’s military outcome was foreshadowed.

Praise for Lawrence Joseph:

"Poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness… Joseph gives us new hope for the resourcefulness of humanity, and of poetry."
---John Ashbery

"Like Henry Adams, Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know."
---David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

"The most important lawyer-poet of our era."
---David Skeel, Legal Affairs
  
 A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

Essays on poetry by the most important poet-lawyer of our era

The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose presents works by prominent poet and lawyer Lawrence Joseph that focus on poetry and poetics, and on what it is to be a poet. Joseph takes the reader through the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, a lineage that includes Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, switching critical tracks to major European poets like Eugenio Montale and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and back to American masters like James Schuyler and Adrienne Rich.

Always discerning, especially on issues of identity, form, and the pressures of history and politics, Joseph places his own poetry within its critical contexts, presenting narratives of his life in Detroit, where he grew up, and in Manhattan, where he has lived for 30 years. These pieces also portray Joseph’s Lebanese, Syrian, and Catholic heritages, and his life as a lawyer, distinguished law professor, and legal scholar.

John Hanson Mitchell has long written about his garden outside of Boston, and about the plants and animals with whom he shares this land. In 2022, the United Nations and others started reporting the true severity of the climate crisis as the Earth passed a point of no return. All across the globe it was the worst year on record for climate-related disasters, including extinctions, deadly floods, massive fires, and dramatic droughts, all of which have worsened since that year. Mitchell, like so many, felt overwhelmed. He looked to the story of Voltaire’s Candide, and settled on the famous aphorism from that book: “We must cultivate our garden.”

The Garden at the End of Time features Mitchell’s trademark blend of science, literature, and anecdote as he processes both the information he is reading from various sources and what it prompts him to do in his own small corner of the world. The story that unfolds is one of Mitchell diversifying his plantings; fighting what he sees as unnecessary local development; walking through and observing changes in the wild lands nearby; continuing to read the news from around the world; and meditating on other moments, real and imagined, when people sought refuge even as they did their part to improve a personally and collectively stressful situation. 

Readers discover the impossibility of separating gardening from global warming, while also seeing the solace that exposure to plants can offer, in addition to their contribution to carbon consumption. With gravitas, kindness, and wit, Mitchell offers a model for maintaining a connection to nature even as it reels from manmade threats.  

Essays mapping how modern art confronts mortality in an age of war and annihilation.

While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting.

It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler’s exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond: Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s Death in Venice; and the author’s own long fascination with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler’s analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane’s 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.
 

Southern Arizona is a world-renown hummingbird destination. The Great Hummingbird Chase chronicles John P. Schaefer and Ken Lamberton’s passionate quest to photograph all fifteen of Arizona’s hummingbird species.

From the Foreword by Geneva Overholser

What is it about really fine writers, how they delight, intrigue, compel us?

Style, you say. But style is not something you begin with. Rather, it's what you end up with, a result of far more fundamental traits. Traits such as an ear and an eye and a heart, traits that Madeleine Blais has honed superbly well. 

This is a book well named: The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism. The heart is surely first among Blais's gifts. Whether she is writing about the famous—playwright Tennessee Williams, novelist Mary Gordon—or about the least elevated among us—a teenage prostitute infected with the AIDS virus, a homeless schizophrenic—she brings to her subjects an incomparable empathy.

“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” —Kirkus

In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.

Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.

19th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards Poetry Finalist

The Imaginary Present by award-winning poet and professor Amy Catanzano explores cutting-edge scientific fields such as particle physics and astrophysics, and branches of physics such as quantum theory and relativity, through a poetic vision equally loyal to the imagination and rationality. Drawing upon her groundbreaking research and artist residencies at major scientific research centers like CERN and the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, as well as talks and poetry readings at esteemed institutions, Catanzano invites enthusiasts of poetry and science to consider what can be achieved through greater collaboration between these fields. 

In linked chapters that fluidly blend lyric essay, literary and scientific analysis, poetry, theory, and memoir, The Imaginary Present offers refreshing new insights on a wide range of thinkers over the past 100 years, including poets Rae Armantrout and M. NourbeSe Philip, novelists Alfred Jarry and Virginia Woolf, comic book writer Grant Morrison, and physicists Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The introduction explores why poetry and physics are capable of jointly investigating our most fundamental questions about the universe and discusses the history of the art-science connection in addition to the author’s own journey. In searching for the groundbreaking ways that artists and scientists can collaborate, The Imaginary Present offers readers both reasoned grounding and poetic framing for an interdisciplinary poetics and praxis based on science.