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Giuseppe Fornari’s groundbreaking inquiry shows that Friedrich Nietzsche’s neglected importance as a religious thinker and his “untimeliness” place him at the forefront of modern thought. Capable of exploiting his own failures as a cognitive tool to discover what other philosophers never wanted to see, Nietzsche ultimately drove himself to mental collapse. Fornari analyzes the tragic reports of Nietzsche’s madness and seeks out the cause of this self-destructive destiny, which, he argues, began earlier than his rivalry with the composer and polemicist Richard Wagner, dating back to the premature loss of Nietzsche’s father. Dramatic experience enabled Nietzsche to detect a more general tendency of European culture, leading to his archaeological and prophetic discovery of the death of God, which he understood as a primordial assassination from which all humankind took its origin. Fornari concludes that Nietzsche’s fatal rebellion against a Christian awareness, which he identified as the greatest threat to his plan, led him to become one and the same not only with Dionysus but also with the crucified Christ. His effort, Fornari argues, was a dramatic way to recognize the silent, inner meaning of Christ’s figure, and perhaps to be forgiven.

Winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, selected by Michael Prior

Dissent, the third book of poems by Austin Allen, explores division, resistance, and exile in a variety of settings, from nineteenth-century New England to distant solar systems. Here readers will find snapshots of warring planets and pandemic-era France, revelations from government servers and Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls, and a testimonial from a fringe religious sect in the New Mexico desert.

The poems capture the dignity of eccentricity and the uncertainties of protest (“I speak out. I feel that I must. / I hear my own spiel with disgust”). Featured along the way are many lively dissenters and outsiders: Yoko Ono, a reclusive mathematician, a brain in a jar. Futuristic scenarios mingle with personal elegies and love lyrics—efforts to preserve bonds and memories threatened by an age of schisms.

Avoiding allegiance to any one school or style, the collection serves up apocalyptic limericks, a “high-octane blockbuster sonnet,” a catalog of items cleared out of a parent’s home, and instruction pieces in the style of Ono’s Grapefruit. Whether depicting a visionary mailman or happy thieves on Christmas, Dissent probes the unorthodox corners of a world where poetry itself can feel heretical.

Published by the University of Cincinnati Press

Born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1939, Dr. Alvin Crawford grew up and attended medical school in a segregated world. Beginning with his early life in Orange Mound—a self-contained community for freed slaves established in the 1890s—Crawford’s autobiography describes his flirtation with a music degree and time spent playing in jazz bands through the segregated South. In 1960, Crawford began his ground-breaking medical career with his entrance into the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, becoming the school’s first African American student. After completing his medical training and traveling the world as a surgeon for the Navy, Crawford found himself in Cincinnati, where he established the Comprehensive Pediatric Orthopedic Clinic at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the first in the region.

Underlying this story are the systemic and very personal incidents of racism Crawford experienced throughout his career. His autobiography is a personal account of segregation, integration, ambition, hard work, and taking risks.