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These poems begin in the coming-of-age moments that change us by forcing recognition of physical weakness, the power of sex, the importance of family, the presence of evil, and the prevalence of mortality. The book opens with narratives taken primarily from childhood and then, divided by long poem sequences, moves to adulthood and confrontation with the identity we acquire through close relationships and the pressures of our appetites, finally ending with what reads as a universal prayer of redemption.

Writing Letters for the Blind presents the reader with visions of this world and all its beauty and sordidness, joy and disappointment. This poet reports the breaking news just in from the heart and soul, and the body as well. “My father has taught me the beatitudes of sight,” Fincke tells us, always aware of what we owe to those who brought us here. He stays up through the starry darkness in the insomnia of one who feels it his duty to pay passionate attention, a poet engaged in “the basic defense of simple things.”

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Examining Whitman’s poetic development through the documented influence of nineteenth‑century women reformers.

Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Women Reformers documents Whitman's friendships with women during the 1850s, the decade of Whitman's most creative period. The book reveals startling connections between the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and the texts generated by the women he knew during this period, many of whom were radical activists in the women's rights movement.

Sherry Ceniza argues that Whitman's editions of Leaves became progressively more radically 'feminist' as he followed the women's rights movement during the 1850s and that he was influenced by what he called the 'true woman of the new aggressive type . . . woman under the new dispensation.' Ceniza documents the progression of the National Woman's Rights movement through the lives and writings of three of its leaders- Abby Hills Price, Paulina Wright Davis, and Ernestine L. Rose. By juxtaposing the texts written by these women with Leaves, Ceniza shows that Whitman used many of the same arguments and rhetorical gestures as his female activist friends.

The book also discusses the influence of women engaged in women's rights outside the National Woman's Rights organization. And Ceniza's opening chapter is devoted to a fresh interpretation of the life and thought of another strong-minded woman who influenced the poet's writing-Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, Walt Whitman's mother.

 For Walt Whitman, living and working in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War, Reconstruction meant not only navigating these tumultuous years alongside his fellow citizens but also coming to terms with his own memories of the war. Just as the work of national reconstruction would continue long past its official end in 1877, Whitman’s own reconstruction would continue throughout the remainder of his life as he worked to revise his poetic project—and his public image—to incorporate the disasters that had befallen the Union. In this innovative and insightful analysis of the considerable poetic and personal reimagining that is the hallmark of these postwar years, Martin Buinicki reveals the ways that Whitman reconstructed and read the war.

Antonin Artaud’s last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time.

Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go “up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor,” and finally to erase him. The publisher who had commissioned the book, Louis Broder, was horrified at reading its incandescent, fiercely obscene, and anti-religious manuscript and refused to publish it. Ambitious and experimental in scale, fragmentary and ferocious in intent, it was not published until 1978, in an edition prepared by Artaud’s close friend Paule Thévenin. Artaud commented that it was an “impossible” book, and that “nobody has ever read it from end to end, not even its own author.”

Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began to work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman’s poetry magazine, Sulfur. This volume presents his translations with additional ones by Paul Buck, and Catherine Petit it in its complete form in English for the first time.
 

A wide-ranging consideration of water’s plenitude and paucity—and of our relationship to its many forms

Water is quotidian, ubiquitous, precious, and precarious. With their roots in this element, the authors of Water’s Edge reflect on our natural environment: its forms, textures, and stewardship. Born from a colloquium organized by the editors at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the anthology features a diverse group of writers and artists from half a dozen countries, from different fields of scholarship and practice: artists, biologists, geologists, poets, ecocritics, actors, and anthropologists. The contributors explore and celebrate water while reflecting on its disturbances and pollution, and their texts and art play with the boundaries by which we differentiate literary forms.

In the creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art collected here, water moves from backdrop to subject. Ashley Dawson examines the effects of industrial farming on the health of local ecosystems and economies. Painter Kulvinder Kaur Dhew captures water’s brilliance and multifaceted reflections through a series of charcoal pieces that interlace the collection. Poet Arthur Sze describes the responsibility involved in the careful management of irrigation ditches in New Mexico. Rather than concentrating their thoughts into a singular, overwhelming argument, the authors circulate moments of apprehension, intimation, and felt experience. They are like tributaries, each carrying, in a distinctive style, exigent and often intimate reports concerning a substance upon which all living organisms depend.

We Are Still in the Fort is a curated selection of about seventy poems by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy, divided into three sections spanning the quotidian, the amorous, and the political. The first part, “‘I Swipe Their String of Fish’: Poems of Mombasan Society,” features his often satirical commentary on daily life in Mombasa. The second part, “‘Take Your Misery With You’: Poems of Love and Marriage,” focuses on his psychologically sensitive observations on the volatility of love, marriage, and illicit affairs. The last part, “‘We Are Still in the Fort’: Poems of War and State,” includes epigrammatic critiques of local political leaders and a series of anti-imperialist poems defending Mombasa’s independence against the invading Omani Empire. The volume also features contextual materials on Muyaka and the context of Swahili poetry, a translator’s note, and introductions for each of the three sections.

Michigan poet laureate Melba Joyce Boyd’s tenth poetry collection, We See We, is a deeply emplaced volume, grounded in Boyd’s hometown of Detroit. The book takes its title from a poem in the collection dedicated to the late photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker Hugh Grannum, who trained his camera on Black Detroit. Boyd takes a similar approach in this volume, collecting poems “about seeing our collective selves within our interconnected individual lives.” Divided into two sections—Inflexions and Elegies—the poems evoke Detroit’s past and present through works about Romare Bearden at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Idlewild, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, Aretha Franklin, John Sinclair, and the varied lives of people Boyd knew and loved who demonstrate that you do not have to be famous to have historical impact. As former Michigan poet laureate Nandi Comer writes in the interview that concludes the volume, the poems in this collection are “filled with artists, friends, elders, and collaborators,” making the poems in the collection into “an education in Detroit’s artistic life.”