Results by title

With clarity and precise detail, Dan Masterson creates a narrative of how we live, love, and die. In blank verse and rhymed stanzas, in free verse and taut lyrics, he delivers the story of a woman trap ped in an avalanche, a husband daring himself to death in an ocean swim, or a son arranging the final affairs of his parents. There is always an edge to Masterson’s characters—they are everyday people, but we meet them on the one day when the stakes are highest.

He holds a reverence for the particulars of a place, for gardens and homes, for dresser drawers and work benches, for cabins in the Adirondacks, ponds, tree houses, and ornamental stones. The leavings of loved ones—strong boxes, pajamas, rosaries—are passed on as relics that both heal and trouble. In Masterson’s world, characters learn how to lose, how to change, and even how to survive their most painful memories.

Selected from thirty years of work, and including an eclectic selection of new poems, this book unfurls Masterson’s full canvas of abilities: his penchant for startling descriptions, his keen insight into our nobility and fallibility, and his skill at making us live his poems.

Eve's Longing: The Infinite Possibilities in All Things is a story of a modern fictional saint in the making. In the course of Eve's twin spiritual and physical journeys. Deborah McKay's moving yet unsentimental novel explores alarming real-life resolutions to universal complexities and offers instead of answers the seductive and dangerous experience of its captivating central character. Eve is a shockingly original character: at once a philosopher, an artist with a highly developed visual imagination, and a visionary mystic. Her longing, as the subtitle suggests, is for: the Infinite Possibilities in All Things." In the course of her journey, this longing, which is essentially spiritual and philosophical in origin, becomes for us immediately tangible, sensuous, and fully real. Eve's longing takes her from New York City to a monastery in Assisi, Italy, the home of St. Francis, then back again to New York. Along the way her longing grows into a desire so intense that it engenders a compassion verging on the saintly and a cruelty equally as extreme. Her desires, when unfulfilled, lead to sexual excesses, hallucinations, and transformative spiritual visions. In the course of Eve's journey we meet characters both alive and dead: her sister Claire, her parents, her lovers, St. Francis, and the Virgin Mary: and two of her most intimate companions, the Spiral and the Pearl String, both creations of her own mind. Eve's Longing creates almost a new literary genre in literature. It combines the intimacy of an entrusting autobiography with the intrigue of a novel and the cool detachment of a clinical study. The consequence of Eve's Fascination with "The Infinite Possibilities in All Things"—the temptation to which the original and our Eve succumb—is both an end and a beginning.

With masterful storytelling, Bergland and Hayes demonstrate how Lapham blended his ravenous curiosity with an equable temperament and a passion for detail to create a legacy that is still relevant today.
—John Gurda

In this long overdue tribute to Wisconsin’s first scientist, authors Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes explore the remarkable life and achievements of Increase Lapham (1811–1875). Lapham’s ability to observe, understand, and meticulously catalog the natural world marked all of his work, from his days as a teenage surveyor on the Erie Canal to his last great contribution as state geologist.

Self-taught, Lapham mastered botany, geology, archaeology, limnology, mineralogy, engineering, meteorology, and cartography. A prolific writer, his 1844 guide to the territory was the first book published in Wisconsin. Asked late in life which field of science was his specialty, he replied simply, “I am studying Wisconsin.”

Lapham identified and preserved thousands of botanical specimens. He surveyed and mapped Wisconsin’s effigy mounds. He was a force behind the creation of the National Weather Service, lobbying for a storm warning system to protect Great Lakes sailors. Told in compelling detail through Lapham’s letters, journals, books, and articles, Studying Wisconsin chronicles the life and times of Wisconsin’s pioneer citizen-scientist.

This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection—often tested, but never wholly severed—across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo, and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.

In The Story of All Things Marshall Grossman analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action. To explore these conceptions of the self, Grossman focuses on the narrative poetry in the English Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Relating subjectivity to the nature of language, Grossman uses the theories of Lacan to analyze the concept of the self as it encounters a transforming environment. He shows how ideological tensions arose from the reorganization and "modernization" of social life in revolutionary England and how the major poets of the time represented the division of the self in writings that are suspended between lyric and narrative genres. Beginning with the portrayals of the self inherited from Augustine, Dante, and Petrarch, he describes the influence of historic developments such as innovations in agricultural technology, civil war and regicide, and the emergence of republican state institutions on the changing representation of characters in the works of Spenser, Donne, Marvell, and Milton. Furthering this psychoanalytic critique of literary history, Grossman probes the linguistic effects of social and personal factors such as Augustine’s strained relationship with his mother and the marital disharmony of Milton and Mary Powell. With its focus on these and other "literary historical events," The Story of All Things not only proposes a new structural theory of narrative but constitutes a significant challenge to New Historicist conceptions of the self.