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3576 books match the query 'American' and 770 start with t

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The Collected Poems of Ada Hastings Hedges

Ada Hastings Hedges

Oregon State University Press, 2020

Although for the most part forgotten today, Ada Hastings Hedges was among Oregon’s foremost mid–twentieth-century poets. Famous in her lifetime, she was best known for her superb poems set in Oregon’s high desert, which offer a fascinating counterpoint to C.E.S. Wood’s seminal The Poet in the Desert.

Except for a twelve-year sojourn in southeastern Oregon and two years in Los Angeles, Hedges lived in Portland from 1910 until her death in 1980. She was assistant editor at Binfords & Mort Publishers and a supervising editor in the Works Progress Administration. She taught briefly at Warner Pacific College in the 1960s.

Hedges wrote in a style notable for precision, clarity, and smoothness of line. More than half of her poems in this collection are sonnets. A poet of the city as well as the desert, her work offers a compelling perspective on mid-century Portland life. In 1933 she published her only book, Desert Poems. That collection is reprinted here in its entirety, along with scores of additional poems published in a wide variety of venues, making this the first comprehensive collection of Hedges’s work.

A detailed introduction by the editors and annotations to the text provide information about revisions, publication dates, and notable features. Also included is an essay by Hedges asking “Can Poetry Be Taught?” In her afterword, Oregon poet Ingrid Wendt writes of her admiration for Hedges’s “fierceness of spirit, lack of sentimentality, and complex vision.”

For readers interested in women’s literature, Pacific Northwest poetry, and the literature of Eastern Oregon, this volume reintroduces a compelling regional voice.

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The Collected Poems of John Ciardi

John Ciardi

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

From twenty books of verse published between 1940 and 1993, John Ciardi gives us poems of love written with care and honest discernment and poems that tellingly render the ritual dance of human life and mortality.

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The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown

Sterling A. Brown

Northwestern University Press, 1996

Arguably the greatest African American poet of the century, Sterling Brown was instrumental in bringing the traditions of African American folk life to readers all over the world. This is the definitive collection of Brown's poems, and the only edition available in the United States.

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The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman

A Harlem Renaissance Reader

Singh, Amritjit

Rutgers University Press, 2003

This book is the definitive collection of the writings of Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), providing a comprehensive anthology of both the published and unpublished works of this bohemian, bisexual writer. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance scene, Thurman was a leader among a group of young artists and intellectuals that included, among others, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas. Through the publication of magazines such as FIRE!! and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, Thurman tried to organize the opposition of the younger generation against the programmatic and promotional ideologies of the older generation of black leaders and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley. Thurman also left a permanent mark on the period through his prolific work as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, and literary critic, as well as by claiming for himself a voice as a public intellectual.

The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman is divided into eight sections to highlight the variety of genres and styles Thurman practiced as he courageously pursued controversial subjects throughout his short and brilliant career. It includes Essays on Harlem, Social Essays and Journalism, Correspondence, Literary Essays and Reviews, Poetry and Short Fiction, Plays, and Excerpts from Novel.

Filling an important gap in Harlem Renaissance literature, this collection brings together all of Thurman’s essays, nearly all of his letters to major black and white figures of the 1920s, and three previously unpublished major works. These books are Aunt Hagar’s Children, which is a collection of essays and two full-length plays, Harlem, and Jeremiah the Magnificent. The introduction to the volume, along with the carefully researched introductory notes to each of the eight sections, provides a challenging new reevaluation of Thurman and the Harlem Renaissance for both the general reader and scholar.

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The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald

University of Alabama Press, 1997

The voice behind the legend—Zelda Fitzgerald in her own words.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been perceived as the tragic "other half" of the Scott and Zelda legend. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, the high-spirited tomboy turned flapper was talented in dance, painting, and writing but lived in the shadow of her husband's success. Her writing can be experienced on its own terms in Matthew Bruccoli's meticulously edited The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald.

The collection includes Zelda's only published novel, Save Me the Waltz, an autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds' adventures in Paris and on the Riviera; her celebrated farce, Scandalabra; eleven short stories; twelve articles; and a selection of letters to her husband, written over the span of their marriage, that reveals the couple's loving and turbulent relationship.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been an American cultural icon. The Collected Writings affirms her place as a writer and as a symbol not only of the Lost Generation but of all generations as she struggled to define herself through her art.

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The Color of Dusk

Robin Caton

Omnidawn, 2001

In The Color of Dusk, Robin Caton bridges traditions of secular, religious, modernist, and post modernist writing to encounter word at its most unsettling, provocative, and urgent. At times conversational, elliptic, meditative, minimalist, expansive, Caton's poems are unified by an insistence to reach, with language, through language, to turn words toward what is ever outside their ability to name.

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The Color of Sex

Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White Supremacy

Mason Stokes

Duke University Press, 2001

In The Color of Sex Mason Stokes offers new ways of thinking about whiteness by exploring its surprisingly ambivalent partnership with heterosexuality. Stokes examines a wide range of white-supremacist American texts written and produced between 1852 and 1915—literary romances, dime novels, religious and scientific tracts, film—and exposes whiteness as a tangled network of racial and sexual desire. Stokes locates these white-supremacist texts amid the anti-racist efforts of African American writers and activists, deepening our understanding of both American and African American literary and cultural history.
The Color of Sex reveals what happens when race and sexuality meet, when white desire encounters its own ambivalence. As Stokes argues, whiteness and heterosexuality exist in anxious relation to one another. Mutually invested in “the normal,” they support each other in their desperate insistence on the cultural logic of exclusion. At the same time, however, they threaten one another in their attempt to create and sustain a white future, since reproducing whiteness necessarily involves the risk of contamination
Charting the curious movements of this “white heterosexuality,” The Color of Sex inaugurates a new moment in our ongoing attempt to understand the frenzied interplay of race and sexuality in America. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in race theory, sexuality studies, and American history, culture, and literature.

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The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader

Nothing Else Like It in the Universe

Phineas T. Barnum. Edited by James W. Cook

University of Illinois Press, 2005

The P. T. Barnum Reader reveals the trailblazing American showman P. T. Barnum as, by turns, a moral reformer, a habitual hoaxer, an insightful critic, a savvy "puffer," a master of images, a sparkling writer, a relentless provocateur, and an early advocate of "family" entertainments. Taken together, these selections paint a new and more complete portrait of this complex man than has ever been seen before.

James W. Cook's The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader is the largest collection of Barnum's works ever produced. Included are excerpts from his pseudo-autobiographical novel The Adventures of an Adventurer (1841), his European letters from 1844-46 informing readers of the New York Atlas of his regal reception overseas, and a large selection from his Ancient and Modern Humbugs of the World, Barnum's 1864-65 insider's look into the frauds of nineteenth-century American culture. It offers a glimpse of Tom Thumb's minstrel and singing performances in front of Queen Victoria, Barnum's many fraudulent representations of the supposedly ancient Joice Heth, and a more immediate, less filtered sense of Barnum as cultural and social critic in his serialized writings and travelogues. This volume also features reproductions of difficult to find posters from Barnum's two-decade collaboration with the prominent New York lithographers, Currier and Ives, and vintage photographs.

Finally, the reader also helps us to understand Barnum's role in building the modern culture industry. We follow his career from itinerant hawker, hardly distinguishable from his pre-industrial forebears, to manager of the world's first show business empire, with a staff of thousands and brand recognition across four continents. The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader tracks the shifting personas of the great showman, his representational choices, and his publics across the nineteenth century.

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The Common

Gail Mazur

University of Chicago Press, 1995

At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place where wisdom and foolishness, fear and courage, rage and pity, love and diffidence, naturally co-exist.

Desire, ambition, devotion, and devastating loss are all subjects for Mazur's clear-eyed poems, which resonate with the contradictions between the body's yearning and the mind's acknowledgment of the consequences of our choices. In a poetry driven by unrelenting questioning, Mazur tries, in Rilke's worlds, "to love the questions themselves."

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The Common Lot and Other Stories

The Published Short Fiction, 1908–1921

Emma Bell Miles

Ohio University Press, 2016

The seventeen narratives of The Common Lot and Other Stories, published in popular magazines across the United States between 1908 and 1921 and collected here for the first time, are driven by Emma Bell Miles’s singular vision of the mountain people of her home in southeastern Tennessee. That vision is shaped by her strong sense of social justice, her naturalist’s sensibility, and her insider’s perspective.

Women are at the center of these stories, and Miles deftly works a feminist sensibility beneath the plot of the title tale about a girl caught between present drudgery in her father’s house and prospective drudgery as a young wife in her own. Wry, fiery, and suffused with details of both natural and social worlds, the pieces collected here provide a particularly acute portrayal of Appalachia in the early twentieth century.

Miles’s fiction brings us a world a century in the past, but one that will easily engage twenty-first-century readers. The introduction by editor and noted Miles expert Grace Toney Edwards places Miles in the literary context of her time. Edwards highlights Miles’s quest for women’s liberation from patriarchal domination and oppressive poverty, forces against which Miles herself struggled in making a name for herself as a writer and artist. Illustrations by the author and Miles family photographs complement the stories.

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The Complete Poetry of James Hearst

James Hearst

University of Iowa Press, 2001

"James Hearst wrote eloquently of the land, its pleasures and sorrows, carefully turning the language as one of his farmer heroes turns the soil. Scott Cawelti and his colleagues have done us all a favor by assembling this fine collection, ensuring the onward resonance of Hearst's words and sensibilities."--Robert James Waller " 'Write about what you know!' was the only advice given by the shy published poet to the shy girl who walked from her college to his farm, having begun to discover what she knew by crafting poems. Surely James Hearst knew pain and loss in plenty, but once he had sworn never again to 'uncover [his] door' to this kind of 'rain,' the world pitchforked its bounties to him through every window available to a poet. The results run from the perfect early nature lyric, 'Blue Again,' to the moving and rich domestic wisdom of 'Close Call.' This book is a late, uneven harvest, but a fine one."--Mona Van Duyn, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1992-1993 Part of the regionalist movement that included Grant Wood, SCOTT CAWELTI is professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of The Inventive Writer and Introduction to College Writing. He also writes a weekly column for the Waterloo Courier and has been a commentator for National Public Radio. In keeping with the tradition of small regional presses and fine printers-especially Prairie Press, which published Hearst's poetry throughout his lifetime-this edition was designed in collaboration with the University of Iowa Center for the Book.

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The Conjure Woman

Charles W. Chesnutt

University of Michigan Press, 1969

First published in 1899, these folk tales within a tale provide commentary on the social attitudes of the period

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The Conjure-Man Dies

A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem

Rudolph Fisher

University of Michigan Press, 1992

The first known mystery written by an African-American, set in 1930s Harlem

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The Constant Listener

Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet—An Imagined Memoir

Susan Herron Sibbet

Ohio University Press, 2017

In 1907, in a quiet English village, Theodora Bosanquet answered Henry James’s call for someone to transcribe his edits and additions to his formidable body of work. The aging James had agreed to revise his novels and tales into the twenty-four-volume New York Edition. Enter Bosanquet, a budding writer who would record the dictated revisions and the prefaces that would become a lynchpin of his legacy.

Embracing the role of amanuensis and creative counterpoint cautiously at first, Bosanquet kept a daily diary over the nine years that she worked with James, as their extraordinary partnership evolved. Bosanquet became the first audience for James’s compositions and his closest literary associate—and their relationship ultimately resulted in James’s famed “deathbed dictations.” At the same time, the homosexuality of each was an unspoken but important influence on their mutual support and companionship.

Susan Herron Sibbet’s posthumous novel gifts us with the voice of a young woman writer drawn into the intimate circle of an aging master, and is a moving addition to previous literary treatments of James and Bosanquet, even as it hews closer to fact than other works do. The Constant Listener is itself the work of an accomplished poet, and will speak to fans of James, historical fiction, and themes of art, love, sexuality, and identity.

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The Contemporary African American Novel

Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches

Bernard W. Bell

University of Massachusetts Press, 2004

In 1987 Bernard W. Bell published The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, a comprehensive history of more than 150 novels written by African Americans from 1853 to 1983. The book won the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the College Language Association and was reprinted five times. Now Bell has produced a new volume that serves as a sequel and companion to the earlier work, expanding the coverage to 2001 and examining the writings and traditions of a remarkably wide array of black novelists.

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The Courtesy

Alan Shapiro

University of Chicago Press, 1983

In this, his first book, Alan Shapiro vividly recreates some of the more memorable and poignant moments from his Jewish-American childhood, and in the process reveals his compassionate interest in the forgotten, the alienated, and the infirm. The Courtesy is an intelligent, reflective examination of the poet's own psychological history.

"The Courtesy is really an admirable book: it shows up the unreality of a lot of the other poetry one reads, dealing honestly and with that perversity which is a sign of thoughfulness, with the slight but heavy matter of our everyday defeats."—Michael Hoffman, Poetry Nation Review

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The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

John Carlos Rowe

Michigan Publishing Services, 2012

In The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies, leading American Studies scholar John Carlos Rowe responds to two urgent questions for intellectuals. First, how did neoliberal ideology use the issues of feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, transnationalism and globalization, class mobility, religious freedom, and freedom of speech and cultural expression to justify a new “American Exceptionalism,” designed to support U.S. economic, political, military, and cultural expansion around the world in the past two decades?
Second, if neoliberalism has successfully employed various cultural media, then what are the best means of criticizing its main claims and fundamental purposes? Is it possible under these circumstances to imagine a “counter-culture” which might effectively challenge neoliberalism or is such an alternative already controlled and contained by such labels as “political correctness,” “the far left,” “radicalism,” “extremism,” even “terrorism,” which in the popular imagination refer to political and social minorities, doomed thereby to marginalization?
Rowe argues that the tradition of “cultural criticism” advocated by influential public intellectuals like Edward Said can be adapted to the new circumstances demanded by the hegemony of neoliberalism and its successful command of new media. Yet rather than simply honoring important predecessors such as Said, we need to reconceive the role of the public intellectual as more than just an “interdisciplinary scholar” but also as a social critic able to negotiate the different media.

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The Culture and Commerce of Texts

Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England

Harold Love

University of Massachusetts Press, 1998

Long after the establishment of printing in England, many writers and composers still preferred to publish their work through handwritten copies. Texts so transmitted included some of the most distinguished poetry and music of the seventeenth century, along with a rich variety of political, scientific, antiquarian, and philosophical writings. While censorship was one reason for this persistence of the older practice, scribal publication remained the norm for texts that were required only in small numbers, or whose authors wished to avoid the “stigma” of print.

This is the first book to consider the trade in manuscripts as an important supplement to that in printed books, and to describe the agencies that met the need for rapid duplication of key texts.

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The Culture of Spontaneity

Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America

Daniel Belgrad

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The Culture of Spontaneity is the first comprehensive history of the postwar avant-garde, integrating such diverse moments in American culture as abstract expressionism, bebop jazz, gestalt therapy, Black Mountain College, Jungian psychology, beat poetry, experimental dance, Zen Buddhism, Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology, and the antinuclear movement. Daniel Belgrad shows how a startling variety of artistic movements actually had one unifying theme: spontaneous improvisation.

"A compelling narrative, putting living flesh on shorthand intuitions that connect North Beach to Black Mountain College, Fenollosa to Pollock, Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace to Todd Gitlin's The Sixties."—Joel Smith, Boston Review

"An invaluable introduction to postwar modernism across the arts."—Thomas Augst, Boston Book Review

"Belgrad's extensive probing of the artists and movements with their profound sociological roots is timely as well as comprehensive....A major contribution for serious scholars."—Choice

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The DADA Reader

A Critical Anthology

Edited by Dawn Ades

University of Chicago Press, 2006

The revolutionary Dada movement, though short-lived, produced a vast amount of creative work in both art and literature during the years that followed World War I. Rejecting all social and artistic conventions, Dadaists went to the extremes of provocative behavior, creating “anti-art” pieces that ridiculed and questioned the very nature of creative endeavor. To understand their movement’s heady mix of anarchy and nihilism—combined with a lethal dash of humor—it’s essential to engage with the artists’ most important writings and manifestos. And that is is precisely where this reader comes in.

Bringing together key Dada texts, many of them translated into English for the first time, this volume immerses readers in some of the most famous (and infamous) periodicals of the time, from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire and Francis Picabia’s 391 to Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz. Published in Europe and the United States between 1916 and 1932, these journals constituted the movement’s lifeblood, communicating the desires and aspirations of the artists involved. In addition to providing the first representative selection of these texts, The Dada Reader also includes excerpts from many lesser-known American and Eastern European journals.

Compiled with both students and general readers in mind, this volume is necessary reading for anyone interested in one of the most dynamic and influential movements of the twentieth century.

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The Daily Henry James

A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master

Henry James

University of Chicago Press, 2016

A strange and delightful memento of one of the most lasting literary voices of all time, The Daily Henry James is a little book from a great mind. First published with James’s approval in 1911 as the ultimate token of fandom—a limited edition quote-of-the-day collection titled The Henry James Year Book—this new edition is a gift across time, arriving as we mark the centenary of his death. Drawing on the Master’s novels, essays, reviews, plays, criticism, and travelogues, The Daily Henry James offers a series of impressions (for if not of impressions, of what was James fond?) to carry us through the year.

From the deepest longings of Isabel Archer to James’s insights in The Art of Fiction, longer seasonal quotes introduce each month, while concise bits of wisdom and whimsy mark each day. To take but one example: Isabel, in a quote from The Portrait of a Lady for September 30, muses, “She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.” Featuring a new foreword by James biographer Michael Gorra as well as the original introductions by James and his good friend William Dean Howells, this long-forgotten perennial calendar will be an essential bibelot for James’s most ardent devotees and newest converts alike, a treasure to be cherished daily, across all seasons, for years, for ages to come.

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The Dance of the Intellect

Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition

Marjorie Perloff

Northwestern University Press, 1996

Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single," or can it accommodate the impurities Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions Marjorie Perloff addresses in these essays.

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The Day Underneath the Day

C. Dale Young

Northwestern University Press, 2001

Winner of 2002 Norma Farber First Book Award Finalist

Gifted with a vivid and exact skill, C. Dale Young's writing resembles an intricate anatomy lesson. His powers of observation probe the small energies of the natural world. Again and again the ordinary details of life transform themselves under the delicate pressure of his words--the movement of birds' wings, the color and texture of tropical flowers, the study of the ocean waves, the "scalpel of light" cutting through the beginning of the day. The language of Young's poems evokes an ultimate sense of place through a gorgeous marriage of tone and diction that echoes James Merrill and Amy Clampitt. As he meticulously maps out human passions and emotions, he explores both the surfaces and depths of everything that he surveys. His confident and polished verse unfolds intricate layers of landscape, seeking the order that lies beneath the unruly patterns of our lives.

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The Day's Hard Edge

Poems

Jose A. Rodriguez

Northwestern University Press, 2024

A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity

In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.

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The Daybreak Boys

Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation

Gregory Stephenson

Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

In these critical essays Gregory Stephenson takes the reader on a journey through the literature of the Beat Generation: a journey encompassing that common ethos of Beat literature—the passage from darkness to light, from fragmented being toward wholeness, from Beat to Beatific. He travels through Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend,following Kerouac’s quests for identity, community, and spiritual knowledge. He examines Allen Ginsberg’s use of transcendence in “Howl,” discovers the Gnostic vision in William S. Burroughs’s fiction, and studies the mythic, visionary power of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry. Stephenson also provides detailed examinations of the writing of lesser-known Beat authors: John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Richard Fariña, and Michael McClure. He explores the myth and the mystery of the literary legend of Neal Cassady. The book concludes with a look at the common traits of the Beat writers—their use of primitivism, shamanism, myth and magic, spontaneity, and improvisation, all of which led them to a new idiom of consciousness and to the expansion of the parameters of American literature.

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The Dead Alive and Busy

Alan Shapiro

University of Chicago Press, 2000

In his sixth book of poems, Alan Shapiro once again shows that he is a master at articulating the secrets of the heart. The Dead Alive and Busy deals with issues of personal identity as revealed through examining the intimate bonds of family life. The poems explore these familial relations in terms of the religious, social, and literary contexts that inform them, delving into such universal themes as human frailty, illness and death, bereavement, and thwarted desires. By turns lyrical and narrative, slangy and elevated, analytical and visionary, this collection showcases one of America's most important poets in his top form.

Praise for Alan Shapiro: "Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his subjects with high-minded flourishes or stylistic gimmicks."—J. D. McClatchy, New York Times Book Review

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The Death of Things

Ephemera and the American Novel

Sarah Wasserman

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A comprehensive study of ephemera in twentieth-century literature—and its relevance to the twenty-first century

“Nothing ever really disappears from the internet” has become a common warning of the digital age. But the twentieth century was filled with ephemera—items that were designed to disappear forever—and these objects played crucial roles in some of that century’s greatest works of literature. In The Death of Things, author Sarah Wasserman delivers the first comprehensive study addressing the role ephemera played in twentieth-century fiction and its relevance to contemporary digital culture.

Representing the experience of perpetual change and loss, ephemera was central to great works by major novelists like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. Following the lives and deaths of objects, Wasserman imagines new uses of urban space, new forms of visibility for marginalized groups, and new conceptions of the marginal itself. She also inquires into present-day conundrums: our fascination with the durable, our concerns with the digital, and our curiosity about what new fictional narratives have to say about deletion and preservation.

The Death of Things offers readers fascinating, original angles on how objects shape our world. Creating an alternate literary history of the twentieth century, Wasserman delivers an insightful and idiosyncratic journey through objects that were once vital but are now forgotten.

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The Declarable Future

Jennifer Boyden

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

The poems in this book inhabit a world uneasily familiar and promising, but from the distance of a few possibilities into the future. In this collection of sharp, hallucinatory, and often darkly humorous poems, a lost man wanders among the towns of people who can't remember what they named the children, how to find each other's porches, or whether their buildings are still intact. That's why they need the person with the loupe. Among the poems where doorknobs emit the daily news, stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world's harvest is whatever swims too close, the person with the loupe steadfastly verifies only what can be measured, while the lost man is witness to the unquantifiable and the limitless. And throughout, precise and observant language leads us expertly into the gorgeous, precarious wilderness of The Declarable Future.

Finalist, Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, Oregon Book Awards

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The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Matthew Tuckner

Four Way Books, 2025

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend's illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief — how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble — but also in joining the discrete experience of one person's sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.

Describing a trip to Japan, Tuckner evokes the brute force of appetite alongside the delicacy of life as he recalls "memories of its greedy koi fish, a ceramic bowl / of goji berries perfectly balanced on a tree branch." Beholden to a ticking clock, we catalogue, becoming evidentiary and encyclopedic in our impulses. "We fatten the time until it bursts into artifacts: / sixteen photographs of a single puddle // taking shape in the red glow of your darkroom." In borrowing the title of Edward Gibbon's seminal 6-volume history, Tuckner anchors the associative detours of his sprawling intellect and executes a stunning metacommentary on his own lyrics: time collapses every era into a spattering of sentences, tyrannical as it forcibly converts the present to the past, and yet the barbarous recursion of human feeling resists oblivion, evoking the eternity of emotional significance. Tuckner's shrewd balance of irony and tenderness make this cerebral inversion possible: this friendship is the poet's canon event, the Rome at which every road in his mind arrives, and yet it is also the singular dialect that will not cede to death's subsuming lingua franca.

Damien Hirst's taxidermy art, The John Keats House, superfund sites in Rome, NY, the 2023 Ohio Train Derailment, a children's book titled Oil Spill! — these poems travel widely in their topics to understand the specific ravages of disease on the human body, and in turn, the ravages of human beings on the planet. Its trenchant criticism isn't pessimistic, though — its redemption is the restorative, unending love that made these elegies possible. Equally gutted and mesmerized by our infinite, arbitrary ability to discern meaning in mess, these poems ask us to bear witness to what we can develop if we will sit in the darkness. To read the photo essay of a storm's aftermath. It tells an ancient story that becomes brand new, the one about "a puddle you glimpsed the moon in & stopped for. // A puddle that was just plain rain until it fell."

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The Democratic Surround

Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

Fred Turner

University of Chicago Press, 2013

We commonly think of the psychedelic sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture.

In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ’50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. Turner tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the most well-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe.

Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today.

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The Desert Remembers My Name

On Family and Writing

Kathleen Alcalá

University of Arizona Press, 2007

My parents always told me I was Mexican. I was Mexican because they were Mexican. This was sometimes modified to “Mexican American,” since I was born in California, and thus automatically a U.S. citizen. But, my parents said, this, too, was once part of Mexico. My father would say this with a sweeping gesture, taking in the smog, the beautiful mountains, the cars and houses and fast-food franchises. When he made that gesture, all was cleared away in my mind’s eye to leave the hazy impression of a better place. We were here when the white people came, the Spaniards, then the Americans. And we will be here when they go away, he would say, and it will be part of Mexico again.

Thus begins a lyrical and entirely absorbing collection of personal essays by esteemed Chicana writer and gifted storyteller Kathleen Alcalá. Loosely linked by an exploration of the many meanings of “family,” these essays move in a broad arc from the stories and experiences of those close to her to those whom she wonders about, like Andrea Yates, a mother who drowned her children. In the process of digging and sifting, she is frequently surprised by what she unearths. Her family, she discovers, were Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition who took on the trappings of Catholicism in order to survive.

Although the essays are in many ways personal, they are also universal. When she examines her family history, she is encouraging us to inspect our own families, too. When she investigates a family secret, she is supporting our own search for meaning. And when she writes that being separated from our indigenous culture is “a form of illiteracy,” we know exactly what she means.

After reading these essays, we find that we have discovered not only why Kathleen Alcalá is a writer but also why we appreciate her so much. She helps us to find ourselves.

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The Devil's Workshop

Poems

Demetria Martínez

University of Arizona Press, 2002

"I can no more describe love," writes Demetria Martínez, "than mystics can light."

Don't believe it for a minute. In this collection of fifty-three poems, the author of the award-winning novel Mother Tongue explores the themes that have long characterized her writing: the creative and destructive powers of romantic love, the failure of political systems, the spiritual life, and the need to forgive oneself in order to move on with the work of transformation, both social and personal. Through poems that confront mortality even as they demand social justice, Martínez writes of surviving in a culture where traditional values often get lost in the complexities of everyday life. Of nurturing relationships with nieces, nephews, and parents while pondering questions of life and death, love and loss. Of caring for one's own body when "each cough is an underground nuclear explosion, / Unraveling your body’s hard-won peace accord." Martínez cauterizes old wounds inflicted by various agents: death, political repression, betrayal, and of course failed romance: "Don’t bother, I did it / First. Broke my own / Damn heart." Here are "kernels of loneliness too stubborn to grind / Down to blue meal," and the struggle for a renewed sense of self as middle age approaches:

At this age you touch what little sanctity you can muster.
The yearning burns to do more, to do more by hand.
To thread your very life through a needle's eye.

Martínez serves up a heady blend of political and sensual imagery. Her keen observations and compassionate voice lead the reader on a journey of self-exploration, of coping with life's mundanities as well as its heartaches: "I could use a loving word, / A loaf of bread, a rose, / Help with the laundry." Through her unquenchable passion for life, Demetria Martínez leaves the devil’s workshop and brings us closer to an understanding of what is real.

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The Dialectics of Our America

Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History

José David Saldívar

Duke University Press, 1991

Joining the current debates in American literary history, José David Saldívar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies.

Saldívar pursues this goal through an array of oppositional critical and creative practices. He analyzes a range of North American writers of color (Rolando Hinojosa, Gloria Anzaldúa, Arturo Islas, Ntozake Shange, and others) and Latin American authors (José Martí, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Gabriel García Márquez, and others), whose work forms a radical critique of the dominant culture, its politics, and its restrictive modes of expression. By doing so, Saldívar opens the traditional American canon to a dialog with other voices, not just the voices of national minorities, but those of regional cultures different from the prevalent anglocentric model.
The Dialectics of Our America, in its project to expand the “canon” and define a pan-American literary tradition, will make a critical difference in ongoing attempts to reconceptualize American literary history.

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The Disappearing Trick

Len Roberts

University of Illinois Press, 2006

In The Disappearing Trick, Len Roberts wrestles with the loss of loved ones--whether that loss be through death, a son moving away to college, or simply how people fade from our lives and memories. Hybrids of the narrative and lyric form, these poems are models of indirect statement that have, as Sharon Olds has said, “emotional courage, powerful music, and a deep balance.” Like the light shining on a face, or a girl’s thigh back in a sixth-grade class, the poems often come as Proustian flashes--lasting just a second, but seeming eternal--amid an increasing darkness.

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The Disordered Alphabet

Cintia Santana

Four Way Books, 0

Cintia Santana’s virtuoso debut collection, The Disordered Alphabet, reckons with the emotional anarchy of our lives, baring the difficulty of wrestling experience into language. She surveys a cosmic crossroads, “the sluices of heaven wording as we [stand] in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning.” These poems pay homage to inherited forms while fashioning their own shapes — Santana writes in alliterative verse, in footnotes, in epistles to consonants and vowels, in ekphrasis, in thrall. Ranging from A to Z in style, subject, and mood, Santana’s poetic encyclopedia chronicles life’s ubiquitous elegies alongside the world’s innumerable wonders — true to jumbled experience, they arrive in no particular order, or in the particular order of all the time and all at once. If “let there be” enabled light, it released every other sublime liquid, for then also “there was lie. // Lapse. And lake. Luck and leap. Little by little. Letter by letter. And it was late. / And there was bloom.”

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The Displaced of Capital

Anne Winters

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Winner of the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

The long-awaited follow-up to The Key to the City—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986—Anne Winters's The Displaced of Capital emanates a quiet and authoritative passion for social justice, embodying the voice of a subtle, sophisticated conscience.

The "displaced" in the book's title refers to the poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised who populate New York, the city that serves at once as gritty backdrop, city of dreams, and urban nightmare. Winters also addresses the culturally, ethnically, and emotionally excluded and, in these politically sensitive poems, writes without sentimentality of a cityscape of tenements and immigrants, offering her poetry as a testament to the lives of have-nots. In the central poem, Winters witnesses the relationship between two women of disparate social classes whose friendship represents the poet's political convictions. With poems both powerful and musical, The Displaced of Capital marks Anne Winters's triumphant return and assures her standing as an essential New York poet.

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The Divided States

Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

What is an “American” identity? The tension between populism and pluralism, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, has marked the United States since its inception. In The Divided States, leading scholars and critics argue that the US is, and has always been, a site where multiple national identities intersect in productive and challenging ways. Scrutinizing conflicting nationalisms and national identities, the authors ask, Whose stories get told and whose do not? Who or what promotes the idea of a unified national identity in the United States? How is the notion of a unified national identity disrupted? What myths and stories bind the US together? How representative are these stories? What are the counternarratives? And, if the idea of national homogeneity is a fallacy, what does tie us together as a nation?

Working across auto/biography studies, American studies, and human geography—all of which deal with the current interest in competing narratives, “alternative facts,” and accountability—the essays engage in and contribute to critical conversations in classrooms, scholarship, and the public sphere. The authors draw from a variety of fields, including anthropology; class analysis; critical race theory; diasporic, refugee, and immigration studies; disability studies; gender studies; graphic and comix studies; Indigenous studies; linguistics; literary studies; sociology; and visual culture. And the genres under scrutiny include diary, epistolary communication, digital narratives, graphic narratives, literary narratives, medical narratives, memoir, oral history, and testimony.

This fresh and theoretically engaged volume will be relevant to anyone interested in the multiplicity of voices that make up the US national narrative.

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The Dove of the Morning News

Poems

Bruce Bond

University of Nevada Press, 2024

2022 Test Site Poetry Prize winner

In poems both personal and historical, The Dove of the Morning News explores conceptions of collectivity, inflected by each psyche, as a force of both connection and division. In its look at tribalism and systemic cruelty as rooted in shame, dread, and insecurity, the book seeks a better understanding of how power needs, spurred by communities of hatred, weaponize the brain’s tendencies to think in animated figures, caricatures, erasures, or, as in the book’s mediation on vellum, texts written across the bodies of others.

As a lens into contemporary life, the title sequence interrogates the vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose sense of our increasingly interwoven cultural conversation figures now as a premonition of the internet. If his hope for the noosphere as a fulfillment of divine promise feels problematic, it nonetheless sees our globe as an organism whose long-term survival depends on the capacity of each to forge friendship across difference, to take the health and integration of the individual as emblematic of the whole.

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The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800-1865

Michael J. Collins

University of Michigan Press, 2016

The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800–1865 argues that to truly understand the short story form, one must look at how it was shaped by the lively, chaotic, and deeply politicized world of 19th-century transatlantic theater and performance culture. By resurrecting long-neglected theatrical influences on representative works of short fiction, Michael J. Collins demonstrates that it was the unruly culture of the stage that first energized this most significant of American art forms. Whether it was Washington Irving’s first job as theater critic, Melville’s politically controversial love of British drama, Alcott’s thwarted dreams of stage stardom, Poe and Lippard’s dramatizations of peculiarly bloodthirsty fraternity hazings, or Hawthorne’s fascination with automata, theater was a key imaginative site for the major pioneers of the American short story.

The book shows how perspectives from theater studies, anthropology, and performance studies can enrich readings of the short-story form. Moving beyond arbitrary distinctions between performance and text, it suggests that this literature had a social life and was engaged with questions of circumatlantic and transnational culture. It suggests that the short story itself was never conceived as a nationalist literary form, but worked by mobilizing cosmopolitan connections and meanings. In so doing, the book resurrects a neglected history of American Federalism and its connections to British literary forms.

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The Dreamhouse

Tom Sleigh

University of Chicago Press, 1999

In The Dreamhouse, Tom Sleigh's poetry is a medium for both revelation and linguistic invention. The meditative clarity of Sleigh's poems, his ability to range between the plain and high style with complete naturalness of intonation, and the varying and always surprising musical effects he accomplishes in each poem display his unequaled flair for innovation that is never willful or forced but which always works to forward the poems' emotional and intellectual resonances. The Dreamhouse marks Sleigh as one of the most inventive and provocative poets of his generation.

Praise for Tom Sleigh:

"Through sheer artistry, Tom Sleigh manages to write . . . in a transcendent way, and without appeal to the metaphysical assumptions transcendence usually requires. The Chain . . . floods darkness with brilliant craft."—Gray Jacobik, Boston Globe

"Tom Sleigh's second book of poems, Waking, is so fine one can hardly do justice to it in a review. . . . Sleigh is nearly as prodigal with his gifts as Yeats."—Liz Rosenberg, New York Times Book Review

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The Driftless Reader

Edited by Curt Meine and Keefe Keeley

University of Wisconsin Press, 2017

Ancient glaciers passed by the Driftless Area and waterways vein its interior, forming an enchanting, enigmatic landscape of sharp ridgetops and deep valleys. Across time, this rugged topography has been home to an astonishing variety of people: Sauk, Dakota, and Ho-Chunk villagers, Norwegian farmers and Mexican mercado owners, Dominican nuns and Buddhist monks, river raftsmen and Shakespearean actors, Cornish miners and African American barn builders, organic entrepreneurs and Hmong truck gardeners.

The Driftless Reader gathers writings that highlight the unique natural and cultural history, landscape, and literature of this region that encompasses southwestern Wisconsin and adjacent Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The more than eighty selected texts include writings by Black Hawk, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldo Leopold, David Rhodes, and many other Native people, explorers, scientists, historians, farmers, songwriters, journalists, and poets. Paintings, photographs, maps, and other images complement the texts, providing a deeper appreciation of this region's layered natural and human history.

Highlights include excerpts and art from:

Carol Ryrie Brink

William Cronon

John T. Curtis

August Derleth

Richard Eberhart

Fabu

Hamlin Garland

Pedro Guerrero

Hoowaneka (Little Elk)

Juliet Kinzie

Patty Loew

Ben Logan

Truman Lowe

Jacques Marquette

Ken McCullough

Edna Meudt

Mountain Wolf Woman

Zebulon Pike

Henry Schoolcraft

Clifford D. Simak

Wallace Stegner

Pearl Swiggum

Frank Utpatel

Mark Wunderlich

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The Edible and the Endangered

Animals, Empire, Extinction

John Levi Barnard

Duke University Press, 2027

In The Edible and the Endangered, John Levi Barnard traces the entwined histories of US imperialism, the industrial food system, and global ecological calamity. Interrogating conventional distinctions between the animals we eat and those we protect, Barnard reveals the tangled relations between a mainstream environmentalism concerned with the preservation of endangered species and the industrial animal food system that drives their endangerment. Through a rich and eclectic archive of literary and cultural productions, Barnard shows how foods ranging from the Thanksgiving turkey to the Chicken McNugget have come to be viewed as essential to both material existence and national identity in the United States, even as they have contributed significantly to a planetary ecological emergency. Despite the grim realities of climate change and mass extinction, The Edible and the Endangered holds out hope for a better world, demonstrating how understanding the historical emergence of these human-animal relations can help bring about a just and sustainable future for humans and animals alike.

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The Ella E. Hall Recipe Book

Ella E. Hall Foreword by Jessica Kenyatta Walker

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Ella E. Hall, a Black cook and landlord in Ann Arbor, Michigan, collected her favorite recipes in a journal between 1920 and 1939. Published for the first time, Hall’s recipe book contains not only recipes from family and friends, but also articles, clippings, and advertisements, which provide a glimpse into the food culture and daily life of the time. The book includes over 50 recipes that will interest and delight food historians, like sour milk griddle cakes, Lady Baltimore cake, pepper hash, green tomatoes pickles, campfire pineapple ham, and beverages such as root beer, ginger ale, and even home-brewed beer. This recipe book has been held in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive within the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan Library, and this first published edition makes Hall’s charming collection accessible to more readers. Introductory essays by Jessica Kenyatta Walker, scholar of African American history and foodways, and Susan Wineberg, who found and donated the recipe collection to the Special Collections Research Center, flesh out Ella Hall’s story and help position this book in the context of Ann Arbor in the first half of the twentieth century.

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