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Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.

Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets—not just their work—appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks.

The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.

The inaugural volume of the Cinemas of Asia series, this book offers a fresh perspective on South Korean director Lee Kwang-mo’s 1998 film Spring in My Hometown (아름다운 시절). Written and directed by Lee, the intensely personal film tells the story of his grandfather’s relationship with his ten-year-old father during the Korean War. This volume examines the industrial context in which Lee attempted to bring his film into production, the cinematic cycle from which it emerged, and the unique style that captivated festival juries but divided audiences. Jackson’s book offers a rare, historical insight into an important Asian cinematic industry on the verge of commercial transformation at the end of the last century.

Cinemas of Asia is the first series dedicated to the cinemas of South, Southeast, East, Central Asia, and global Asian diasporas. Each volume provides a critical analysis and interpretation of a notable film from Asian cinema and consists of thematic chapters, accessible writing, and screenshots and illustrations. Authors analyze each film from a variety of angles, including film, literary, historical, gender, post-/decolonial studies, and each volume is accessibly written, informative, and appeals to academics, students, cinephiles, and non-experts alike. 

A new edition of an evergreen back-to-nature book in the tradition of Thoreau.
 
For nearly twenty-five years, poet Baron Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. They considered themselves part of the “back to the land” movement, but their choice to live off the grid was neither a statement nor a protest: they simply had built their house too far from the road and could not afford to bring in power lines. Over the years, they settled into a life that centered on what Thoreau would have called “the essential facts.” In this graceful meditation, Wormser similarly spurns ideology in favor of observation, exploration, and reflection. “When we look for one thread of motive,” he writes, “we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” His refusal to be satisfied with the obvious explanation, the single thread of motive, makes him a keen and sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community, a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is a series of candid personal essays on community and isolation, nature, civilization, and poetry. Lovely and rich, The Road Washes Out in Spring is an immersive read. A new preface by the author rounds out this new edition.