Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisPoetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism examines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present. Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.

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Book SynopsisExperimental poetry responded to historical change in the decades after World War II, with an attitude of such casual and reckless originality that its insights have often been overlooked. However, as Benjamin Lee argues, to ignore the scenes of self and the historical occasions captured by experimental poets during the 1950s and 1960s is to overlook a rich and instructive resource for our own complicated transition into the twenty-first century.Frank O'Hara and fellow experimental poets like Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg offer us a set of perceptive responses to Cold War culture, lyric meditations on consequential changes in U.S. social life and politics, including the decline of the Old Left, the rise of white-collar workers, and the emergence of vernacular practices like hipsterism and camp. At the same time, they offer us opportunities to anatomize our own desire for historical significance and belonging, a desire we may well see reflected and reconfigured in the work of these poets.

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Book SynopsisWalt Whitman wrote three distinct editions of Leaves of Grass before the Civil War. During those years he was passionately committed to party anti-slavery, and his unpublished tract The Eighteenth Presidency shows that he was fully attuned to the kind of rhetoric coming out of the new Republican party. This study explores how the prophecies of the pre-war Leaves of Grass relate to the prophecy of this new party. It seeks not only to ground Whitman's work in this context but also to bring out features of party discourse that make it relevant to literary and cultural studies. Anti-slavery party discourse set itself the task of curing an ailing people who had grown compliant, inert, and numb; it fashioned a complete fictional world where the people could be reactivated into assuming their true role in the republic. Both as a cause and a result of this rejuvenation, they would come into their own and spread their energies over the land and over the body politic, thereby rescuing their country at the last minute from what would otherwise be the permanent dominion of slavery. Party discourse had long hinged its success on such magical transformations of the people individually and collectively, and Whitman's celebrations of his nation's potential need to be seen in this context: like his party, Whitman calls on the people to reject their own subordination and take command of the future, and redeem themselves as they also redeem the nation.Trade ReviewThis book is an exhilarating read for any student of American political thought and history. Political theorists have oft noted Whitman's general skepticism about party politics, but Grant proffers that Whitman's poetry had a far more complicated and evolving relationship to the discourse of his day." - John E. Seery, editor, A Political Companion to Walt Whitman"David Grant's work is a much needed new and uniquely vivid historical study of Whitman's politics and his relations to politics that further complicates while wonderfully deepening our understandings of the art and aesthetics of his prose and poetry. Of considerable value to a range of scholars and readers alike." - Morton Schoolman, author, A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics"Grant's work is well constructed, scrupulous in its deployment of evidence, extremely well read in the political pamphlets and poems of the period, and highly persuasive in its conclusions. It mounts an important challenge to the established view of Whitman during these years-an increasing rarity in the crowded field of contemporary Whitman studies." - M. Wynn Thomas, Swansea University

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Book SynopsisThe Collaborative Artist’s Book offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alexandra Gold provides a broad overview of the artist’s book form and the many ongoing debates and challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose. Gold presents five case studies and details not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Taking several of these books out of special collections libraries and museum archives and making them available to a broad readership, Gold brings to light a whole genre that has been largely forgotten or neglected.Trade ReviewTroubling the boundaries of their own artforms, the poets and artists who created the artists’ books brought to life in this study used the form of the book itself to create new modes of relationality and expression. Written with intelligence and an artistry of its own, The Collaborative Artist’s Book tells an exciting story about collaboration and experiment across media, and is sure to be of interest to students of experimental poetry and the avant-garde." —Brian Glavey, author, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis"The Collaborative Artist’s Book reveals the ways in which collaborative artists’ books—peripheral but enduringly engaging experimental forms—shape late twentieth and early twenty-first century American lyric subjectivities. This is a book about friendship, collaboration, multidimensionality, and creative unruliness, as delightful in style as it is in subject matter." —Rona Cran, author, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan"Gold demonstrates the relevance of artists’ books in the present time, as complement, substitute, or remedy for virtual realities. Scrupulous in her scholarship and careful in her arguments, Gold advocates boldly for the pleasure of artists’ books, especially those containing poetry." —Stephen Fredman, author, American Poetry as Transactional Art

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Book SynopsisWalt Whitman has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry. But how did Whitman, a non-Jewish, American-born poet, become so instrumental in this area of poetry, especially for poets whose parents, and often they themselves, were not “born here?” Dara Barnat presents a genealogy of Jewish American poets in dialogue with Whitman, and with each other, and reveals how the lineage of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond the likes of Allen Ginsberg. From Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Gerald Stern, this book demonstrates that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against exclusionary and anti-Semitic elements in high modernist literary culture. The turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity.Trade Review“The arrival of this virtuosic study is surely cause for celebration. Barnat brilliantly illuminates the rich tapestry of complex intersections between America’s ‘Bard of Democracy’ and generations of significant Jewish American poets whom he inspired and provoked. Truly groundbreaking, it is an indispensable gift to scholars of Whitman and Jewish literature alike.” - Ranen Omer-Sherman, author, Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film“In Barnat’s highly readable, well-researched account, the enduring affinity between Jewish poets and Whitman becomes a prism through which to understand the history of Jewish American poetry itself. A welcome and timely contribution to the ongoing conversation about the remaking of Jewish culture and identity in the United States.” - Julian Levinson, author, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture“From Emma Lazarus to Allen Ginsberg and beyond, Jewish American poets’ reactions to Whitman have been intense and nuanced, and formative of some of our country’s most impressive and influential literature. In this compact, long-overdue study, Barnat shows how these poets and others, have interpreted Whitman as ‘implicitly Jewish’ and in doing so redefined Whitman, themselves, and the American poetic tradition.” - Matt Miller, coeditor, Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments

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Book SynopsisDissonant Voices uncovers the interracial collaboration at the heart of the postwar avant-garde. While previous studies have explored the writings of individual authors and groups, this work is among the first to trace the cross-cultural debate that inspired and energized mid-century literature in America and beyond. By reading a range of poets in the full context of the friendships and romantic relationships that animated their writing, this study offers new perspectives on key textual moments in the foundation and development of postmodern literature in the U.S. Ultimately, these readings aim to integrate our understanding of New American Poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and the various contemporary approaches to poetry and poetics that have been inspired by their examples.Trade ReviewDissonant Voices takes on a fascinating, understudied topic: the role played by jazz and interracial dialogue in the formation of postwar ‘New American Poetry.’ Pizza’s exciting book breaks new ground and opens fertile territory for the study of both American poetry and the deep influence of jazz on American literature and culture." - Andrew Epstein, author, The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945"Back in my student days, I read the minutes of a Black Mountain College meeting that discussed admitting African American students in a state that was segregated by law. I recognized the importance of that set of minutes, and have been awaiting the arrival of a scholar who would look into this history more closely. Joseph Pizza is the first to do this so thoroughly." - Aldon L. Nielsen, author, The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka

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Book SynopsisIn Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, Carrie Allen McCray (1913–2008) uses poignant and personal verse to trace the ill-fated life of the Congolese pygmy who was famously exhibited in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 before being taken in by the McCray family of Lynchburg, Virginia. Rooted in the rich historical and autobiographic context of her own experiences with Benga, McCray offers compelling, dexterous poems that place Benga’s story within the racial milieu of the early twentieth century as the burgeoning science of social anthropology worked to classify humans based on race and culture. The theme of this book is a study of humanity, of people of all kinds, in which Benga’s vitality becomes the measure against which everyone is measured. With poems that revel in African American signifying, spirituality, and traditional storytelling, McCray’s collection establishes a sincere legacy for Ota Benga as she shares her friend’s harrowing tale with new generations.Trade Review“In a narrative that moves like a classical tragedy, Ota Benga is ‘caught in a web / of flawed science,’ but emerges as a complex and real figure, a man out of time, out of place, whose dignity and humanity have left us with a harrowing story shared here by one who knew him best. Carrie Allen McCray weaves a rich tapestry in this cultural epic. We hear African rhythms and tribal voices, we encounter poems that seem like plays and chants and rituals and journal excerpts, and we witness the ‘birth of anthropology’ with an awful, embedded racism in its infancy. In McCray’s loving portrait of Ota Benga, we come to relish the small touches as much as the large ones—the landscape of turn-of-the-century Virginia, the manners of folks at work and play, the sense of tribal and familial loyalty, and the voices that accumulate into a cultural symphony, sometimes broken into grief, sometimes sustained by joy.”—David Baker, poetry editor, Kenyon Review |“From the deep forests of the Congo, to the black churches of Virginia, to the steel cages of the Bronx Zoo, to the hearth of the McCray household, Ota Benga wished only to be seen as a man. When we read Carrie Allen McCray’s beautiful, haunting poems, we share her great empathy and devotion to sharing the life of another human being once here, but now gone. This is a story about humanity, cultural differences, the beginnings of anthropology, the middle of racism, and how sweetly we used to take each other in and care for the stranger walking the earth just as we cared for our own. McCray carried Ota Benga in her head and heart until she was ready to craft his cautionary tale into something truly wonderful. Now it is our turn to bear this story, to remember who we are, and to act as who we wish to be.”—Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner for Head Off & Split

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in AppalachiaSince his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O’Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction— attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.The editors contend that Rash’s work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face.The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash’s work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash’s artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash’s work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies.Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.

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Book SynopsisIn the late 1950s the notion of a 'mother poem' emerged during a confessional literary movement that freed poets to use personal, psychosexual material about intimate topics such as parents, childhood, failed marriages, children, infidelity, and mental illness. In Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother, Hannah Baker Saltmarsh argues that male poets have contributed to what we think of as the literature of motherhood — that confessional and post-confessional modes have been formative in the way male poets have grappled with the stories of their mothers and how those stories reflect on the writers and their artistic identities. Through careful readings of formative elegies and homages written by male poets of this time, Saltmarsh explores how they engaged with femininity and feminine voices in the 1950s and 60s and sheds light on the inheritance of confessional motifs of gender and language as demonstrated by postconfessional writers responding to the rich subject matter of motherhood within the contexts of history, myth, and literature. A foreword is provided by Jo Gill, professor of twentieth-century and American literature in the Department of English and associate dean for education at the University of Exeter.

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Book Synopsis Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil's Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias's "Canção do exílio." Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, "Song of Exile" has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem's Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation or to criticize it via parody, exposing a litany of issues that have plagued the country's progress over the years. Based on a core of five hundred texts painstakingly gathered over a five-year span, this book catalogs the networks of the poem's reinvention as pastiche and parody in Brazilian print culture from nineteenth-century periodicals to new media. Mapping the reoccurrences of the original's keywords and phrases over time, the book uncovers how the poem has been used by successive generations to write and rewrite the nation's history. This process of reinvention has guaranteed the permanency of "Song of Exile" in Brazilian culture, making it not only the nation's most popular poem, but one of the most imitated in the world.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter One: "Minha terra tem palmeiras" : A Brief Introduction to Brazil's Most Popular Poem Chapter Two: "Adeus Coimbra inimiga": Precedents and Contexts Chapter Three: "Onde canta o rouxinol": Early Portuguese Responses Chapter Four: "Onde canta o periquito": The First Republic to the Vargas Era (1889–1945) Chapter Five: "Minha terra só tem tanques": The Military Regime (1964–1985) Chapter Six: "As sirenes que aqui apitam": Twenty-First-Century Songs of Exile (1999–2015) Chapter Seven: "Sou ali": Variations by Female Authors (1867–2015) Chapter Eight: "As aves que aqui twittam": Twitter, Instagram, and Beyond Chapter Nine: The Word, the Database, and the Algorithm Afterword: Literary Research as Data Art: An Experiment in Critical Reading (Manuel Portela) Appendix: Table of 500 Texts Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisCartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analyzes the poetic works of this twentieth-century Colombian writer as a manifestation of cosmopolitanism, global cultural cartographies, and a self-fashioned poetic genealogy. Ramírez Rojas approaches de Greiff's poems as cultural maps that reveal both a desire of connectivity with the world and a need for reorganizing the imaginary library of world literature. From a self-assumed position of eccentricity, de Greiff builds a network of global connections and disputes the binary division of cultural centers and peripheries, revendicating marginality as a productive condition. The study of this alternative cosmopolitanism brings de Greiff's writings into current debates about Latin America's cultural positionality within the frame of global cultural networks and world literature.Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analiza la obra de este poeta colombiano del siglo XX como una manifestación de cosmopolitismo, cartografías culturales globales y la construcción de una genealogía poética. Ramírez Rojas se acerca a los poemas de León de Greiff como mapas culturales que revelan tanto un deseo de conexión con el mundo como una necesidad de reorganizar el archivo imaginario de la literatura mundial. Desde una asumida posición de excentricidad, de Greiff construye una red de conexiones globales y pone en cuestión las divisiones binarias de centro y periferia, reivindicando así su marginalidad como una condición productiva. El estudio de este cosmopolitismo alternativo contextualiza los textos de León de Greiff en los debates actuales sobre el posicionamiento de América Latina dentro de las redes de cultura global y de la literatura mundial.

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Book SynopsisCartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analyzes the poetic works of this twentieth-century Colombian writer as a manifestation of cosmopolitanism, global cultural cartographies, and a self-fashioned poetic genealogy. Ramírez Rojas approaches de Greiff's poems as cultural maps that reveal both a desire of connectivity with the world and a need for reorganizing the imaginary library of world literature. From a self-assumed position of eccentricity, de Greiff builds a network of global connections and disputes the binary division of cultural centers and peripheries, revendicating marginality as a productive condition. The study of this alternative cosmopolitanism brings de Greiff's writings into current debates about Latin America's cultural positionality within the frame of global cultural networks and world literature.Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analiza la obra de este poeta colombiano del siglo XX como una manifestación de cosmopolitismo, cartografías culturales globales y la construcción de una genealogía poética. Ramírez Rojas se acerca a los poemas de León de Greiff como mapas culturales que revelan tanto un deseo de conexión con el mundo como una necesidad de reorganizar el archivo imaginario de la literatura mundial. Desde una asumida posición de excentricidad, de Greiff construye una red de conexiones globales y pone en cuestión las divisiones binarias de centro y periferia, reivindicando así su marginalidad como una condición productiva. El estudio de este cosmopolitismo alternativo contextualiza los textos de León de Greiff en los debates actuales sobre el posicionamiento de América Latina dentro de las redes de cultura global y de la literatura mundial.

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Book SynopsisUnited States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) describes her mode as elegiac. Although the loss of her murdered mother informs each book, Trethewey's range of forms and subjects is wide. In compact sonnets, elegant villanelles, ballad stanzas, and free verse, she creates monuments to mixed-race children of colonial Mexico, African American soldiers from the Civil War, a beautiful prostitute in 1910 New Orleans, and domestic workers from the twentieth-century North and South.Because her white father and her black mother could not marry legally in Mississippi, Trethewey says she was ""given"" her subject matter as ""the daughter of miscegenation."" A sense of psychological exile is evident from her first collection, Domestic Work (2000), to the recent Thrall (2012). Biracial people of the Americas are a major focus of her poetry and her prose book Beyond Katrina, a meditation on family, community, and the natural environment of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.The interviews featured within Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cites diverse influences, from Anne Frank to Seamus Heaney. She emotionally acknowledges Rita Dove's large impact, and she boldly positions herself in the southern literary tradition of Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Commenting on ""Pastoral,"" ""South,"" and other poems, Trethewey guides readers to deeper perception and empathy.

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Book SynopsisPhilip Levine came to teach at Fresno State in 1958 and Peter Everwine followed in 1962; C.G. Hanclicek came in 1966 and the initial group of Fresno poets collected here became students and colleagues of theirs. Sadly, about one third of the poets in Naming the Lost are no longer with us. This book focuses then on the community of poets first coming through Fresno, beginning in the early 1960s, starting it all off.Naming the Lost preserves an amazing nexus of poetic talent and fellowship, and documents the providence that brought so many outstanding poets to Fresno - early '60s through the '80s - a confluence and coincidence of talent and personalities unlikely to be seen again.

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Book SynopsisIn the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists.Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.

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Book SynopsisIn the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists.Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.

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Book SynopsisInformation science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury.Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet's library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.

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Book SynopsisInformation science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury.Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet's library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.

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Book SynopsisAfter years of studying piano as a young woman in her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson curated her music book, a common practice at the time. Now part of the Dickinson Collection in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, this bound volume of 107 pieces of published sheet music includes the poet's favorite instrumental piano music and vocal music, ranging from theme and variation sets to vernacular music, which was also enjoyed by the family's servants.Offering a fresh historical perspective on a poetic voice that has become canonical in American literature, this original study brings this artifact to life, documenting Dickinson's early years of musical study through the time her music was bound in the early 1850s, which tellingly coincided with the writing of her first poems. Using Dickinson's letters and poems alongside newspapers and other archival sources, George Boziwick explores the various composers, music sellers, and publishers behind this music and Dickinson's attendance at performances, presenting new insights into the multiple layers of meaning that music held for her.

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Book SynopsisCutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on acoustics around 1800. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 25 features a special section on acoustics around 1800, edited by Mary Helen Dupree, which includes, among others, contributionson sound and listening in Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert (Robert Ryder) and on the role of the tympanum in Herder's aesthetic theory (Tyler Whitney). The volume also contains essays on Goethe and stage sequels(Matthew Birkhold), on figures of armament in eighteenth-century German drama (Susanne Fuchs), on the dialectics of Bildung in Wilhelm Meister (Galia Benziman), on the Gothic motif in Goethe's Faust and "Von deutscher Baukunst" (Jessica Resvick), on Goethe and Salomon Maimon (Jason Yonover), on Goethe's "Novelle" (Ehrhard Bahr), and on Schiller's Bürger critique (Hans Richard Brittnacher). Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Galia Benziman, Matthew H. Birkhold, Hans Richard Brittnacher, Linda Dietrick, Mary Helen Dupree, Susanne Fuchs, Deva Kemmis, Jessica C. Resvick, Robert Ryder, Patricia Anne Simpson, Chenxi Tang, Tyler Whitney, Jason Yonover, Chunjie Zhang. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford University. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis.Table of ContentsWhat Goethe Heard: Special Section on Hearing and Listening in the Long Eighteenth Century Behind Herder's Tympanum: Sound and Physiological Aesthetics, 1800/1900 Becoming the Listener: Goethe's "Der Fischer" Of Barks and Bird Song: Listening in on the Forgotten in Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert Garden Empire or the Sublime Politics of the Chinese-Gothic Style Die Austreibung des Populären: Schillers Bürger-Kritik Goethe and the Uncontrollable Business of Appropriative Stage Sequels Repetition and Textual Transmission: The Gothic Motif in Goethe's Faust and "Von deutscher Baukunst" "Die gewalt'ge Heldenbrust": Gender and Violence in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris Literary Form and International World Order in Goethe: From Iphigenie to Pandora Two Gifts from Goethe: Charlotte von Stein's and Charlotte Schiller's Writing Tables Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and the Refusal to Grow Up: The Dialectics of Bildung "So steh' ich denn hier wehrlos gegen dich?" - Figures of Armament and Disarmament in German Drama before and after the French Revolution Goethe, Maimon, and Spinoza's Third Kind of Cognition Die Neuvermessung von Lyrik und Prosa in Goethes Novelle Book Reviews

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Book SynopsisNew essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles. Robert Lowell (1917-1977) holds a place of unchallenged prominence in the poetic pantheon of the twentieth-century United States. He is an essential focal point for understanding the connection between poetry and American history,social justice, and personal identity. A recent spate of publications both by and about him, as well as allusions to him in the work of major American poets such as Wanda Coleman and Claudia Rankine, attest to his continued relevance. In March 2017, leading Lowell scholars from Europe and America gathered at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in commemoration of his 100th birthday. The essays deriving from the conference and presented here aftercareful revision reveal new aspects of Lowell: for instance, the poet's influence on his peers, discussed by Thomas Travisano, the biographer of Elizabeth Bishop; or echoes of Milton in Lowell's work, discussed by Saskia Hamilton, editor of the forthcoming Dolphin Letters between Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Other essays examine Lowell's struggles with bipolar illness, with marriage, and with money; his economic views and his early personality issues with respect to his poetic production; his extended sojourn in Amsterdam; and his special relationship with Ireland. Several essays focus on his 1961 volume Imitations, his major poetic engagement with the European tradition, unjustly neglected in the US. The essays will appeal to the wide audience that Lowell scholarship continues to command. Contributors: Steven Gould Axelrod, Massimo Bacigalupo, Philip Coleman, Ian D. Copestake, Astrid Franke, Jo Gill, Saskia Hamilton, Frank J. Kearful, Grzegorz Kosc, Diederik Oostdijk, Francesco Rognoni, Thomas Travisano, Boris Vejdovsky. Thomas Austenfeld is Professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg.Trade ReviewIn using new forms of critical appreciation to revisit Lowell's oeuvre, the authors of these essays regularly reaffirm his status as a unique talent who appreciated the ambiguity of living and challenged the ability of language to represent the subtleties of existence. ...The collection should inspire both students and teachers to fall in love with the big gun from Boston once more. * Irish Journal of American Studies *Robert Lowell in a New Century suggests a new, capacious view of this New England poet and of postwar American poetry. * New England Quarterly *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Thomas Austenfeld Revisiting Robert Lowell's Mental Hospital Poems - Astrid Franke Sensual Drift and Ethnic Longing in Robert Lowell - Steven Gould Axelrod Reworking the Same Water: Robert Lowell Transported - Jo Gill "Sweet salt embalms me": A Hippocratic Approach to the Role of the Sea in the Poetry of Robert Lowell - Ian D. Copestake More Delicate Than the Historian's Are the Map-Maker's Colors: Correspondences between Lowell's Poetics of History and Bishop's Poetics of Space - Boris Vejdovsky Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound's Economics - Grzegorz Kosc Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound in Washington and Rapallo - Massimo Bacigalupo "Why Holland?": Robert Lowell in Amsterdam - Diederik Oostdijk Lowell and Ungaretti: Imitations and Beyond - Francesco Rognoni Robert Lowell's Credo - Frank J. Kearful "Marriage? That's another story": Reconsidering the Marital Trope in Robert Lowell's Poetry - Philip Coleman "Oh No"/"Yes Yes": Lowell and the Making of Mistakes - Saskia Hamilton Robert Lowell: The Power of Influence - Thomas Travisano Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis year's volume is highlighted by a special section on Goethe's narrative events in addition to a range of other articles from emerging and established scholars. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 26 features a special section on Goethe's narrative events, with contributions on "Narrating (against) the Uncanny: Goethe's "Ballade" vs. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann," "The Absence of Events in Die Wahlverwandtschaften," and "Countering Catastrophe: Goethe's Novelle in the Aftershock of Kleist." This issue also showcases work presented atthe 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference (Re-Orientations around Goethe), including contributions by Eva Geulen on morphology and W. Daniel Wilson on the Goethe Society of Weimar in the Third Reich. In addition there are articles by emerging and established scholars on Klopstock, Schiller, Goethe and objects, dark green ecology, and texts of the Goethezeit and beyond through the lens of world literature. Book reviews conclude the volume. Contributors: Lisa Marie Anderson, Thomas O. Beebee, Fritz Breithaupt, Christopher Chiasson, Patrick Fortmann, Sean Franzel, Eva Geulen, Willi Goetschel, Stefan Hajduk, Samuel Heidepriem, Bryan Klausmeyer, Lea Pao, Elizabeth Powers, James Shinkle, Heather I. Sullivan, Christian P. Weber, W. Daniel Wilson, Karin A. Wurst. The Goethe Yearbook is edited, beginning with this volume, by Patricia Anne Simpson, Professor of German and Chairperson of Modern Languages at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Birgit Tautz, George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book Review Editor is Sean Franzel, Associate Professor of German at the University ofMissouri-Columbia.Table of ContentsREORIENTATIONS AROUND GOETHE I Morphologie und gegenständliches Denken - Eva Geulen REORIENTATIONS AROUND GOETHE II "Global Mission": The Goethe Society of Weimar in the Third Reich - W. Daniel Wilson SPECIAL SECTION on GOETHE'S NARRATIVE EVENTS What Is an Event for Goethe? - Fritz Breithaupt Much Ado about Nothing? The Absence of Events in Die Wahlverwandtschaften - Christopher Chiasson Countering Catastrophe: Goethe's Novelle in the Aftershock of Heinrich von Kleist - Lisa Marie Anderson Narrating (against) the Uncanny: Goethe's "Ballade" versus Hoffmann's Der Sandmann - Christian P. Weber Remembering Klopstock's Mitausdruck - Lea Pao Strategic Indecision: Gender and Bureaucracy in Schiller's Maria Stuart - Samuel Heidepriem The Dark Green in the Early Anthropocene: Goethe's Plants in Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären and Triumph der Empfindsamkeit - Heather I. Sullivan The Dark Green in the Early Anthropocene: Goethe's Plants in Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären and Triumph der Empfindsamkeit - James Shinkle Abschlussbewegungen: Goethe, Freud, and Spectral Forms of Life - Bryan Klausmeyer Ein Mythos und sein doppelter Entzug des Modernen: Prämissen für einen Ausweg aus der Unübersichtlichkeit der Faustforschung - Stefan Hajduk Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Conversation with Things - Karin A. Wurst World Literature Turns Political, 1835/36: The Early Afterlife of Goethe's Pronouncement in German Cultural-Politics and in the Young Germany Movement - Patrick Fortmann Fritz Strich and the Dilemmas of World Literature Today - Elizabeth Powers A Jewish Faust Commentary: Notes on Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption - Willi Goetschel From Idylle to idílio: Mário de Andrade's Parody of Hermann und Dorothea - Thomas O. Beebee Koselleck's Timely Goethe? - Sean Franzel Book Reviews

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Book SynopsisA new Forum section focuses on the impact of Digital Humanities on Goethe scholarship and on eighteenth-century German Studies, alongside articles on a diverse range of authors and topics. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, showcasing North American and international scholarship on Goethe and other authors and aspects of the Goethezeit. Volume 27 features the yearbook's first Forum, a discussion of the impact of Digital Humanities (DH) and "computational criticism" on Goethe scholarship and eighteenth-century German Studies more broadly. For this launch, invited contributors were askedto consider the canon in comparison to "the great unread" (Margaret Cohen): the vast expanse of uncanonized texts. The contributions evince approaches that go beyond the established binary of scholarly methods vs. data sciences; they also explore DH as a way of navigating the gendered fault lines of canon formation. Beyond the Forum, there are articles on Goethe's self-marketing, on several of his major works, and on pivotal topics in them (orientation, der Gang, and transgression); on nascent anthropology, on Creativity Studies, and on other eighteenth-century figures (Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Phillip Moritz). A newly discovered text by August von Kotzebue, sample entries fromthe prodigious work in progress Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts, and the customary book review section round out the volume. Richard B. Apgar, Constanze Baum, Jane K. Brown, Matt Erlin, Renata Fuchs, Matthew Handelman, Katrin Henzel, Stefan Höppner, Julie Koser, James Manalad, Clark Muenzer, Maike Oergel, Andrew Piper, Mattias Pirholt, Michael Saman, Renata Schellenberg, Helmut J. Schneider, Oliver Simons, Leif Weatherby, George S. Williamson, Karin A. Wurst. Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Birgit Tautz is George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin College. Book review editor Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Columbia.Table of ContentsEditors' Preface "O dass kein Flügel mich vom Boden hebt": Gang und Blick als Figuren der Überschreitung in Goethes Dichtung (Werthers Leiden, Hermann und Dorothea, Wahlverwandtschaften, Faust) Werther's Pulse Moritz's Veil: Observations and the Rupture of Individuality in Magazin zur Erfahrungsseekenkunde Disinterested Love: Ethics and Aesthetics in Karl Philipp Moritz's "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" Refugee Reception in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea "Sie hat den Gegenstand": Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Subliminal Dialogue with Goethe Cultural Heritage v. Legal Inheritance Towards Goethean Anthropology: From Nature and Art to Human Society The Creative Experiment Weimar FORUM: THE GREAT UNREAD Introduction From Literature to Metadata Recovery and Obsolescence: Feminist Scholarship, Computational Criticism, and the Canon Literarische Kleinformen als Mittler zwischen Kanon und "The Great Unread" am Beispiel des Stammbuchs der Goethezeit Temporary Canonicity and the Horizontal Perspective: Digitization and the Emergence of "Forgotten Canons" Kanon und Digitalität Measuring Unreading Digital 1800 Forum Bibliography SPECIAL SECTION: NEW MATERIALS Tales of Love and Folly: August von Kotzebue's Mein Umgang mit dem schönen Geschlecht Notes on the Following Text: Mein Umgang mit dem schönen Geschlecht by August von Kotzebue Mein Umgang mit dem schönen Geschlecht SPECIAL SECTION: SAMPLE ENTRIES from the GOETHE-LEXICON of PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS Begriff Irrlichtelieren Book Reviews

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Book SynopsisThis book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today. Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, DuBois, Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: Present Valor 1: Anglo-American Poetry, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the Haitian Revolution in United States Poetry 2: Antislavery Poetry in Public: George Moses Horton, John Pierpont, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 3: Witness against Slavery: John Greenleaf Whittier, William Wells Brown, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney 4: Present Valor and the Trauma of Slavery: James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 5: Frances E. W. Harper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Preaching, Poetry, and Pedagogy 6: Aspects of America: James M. Whitfield, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman Epilogue: W. E. B. DuBois and the Legacy of Antislavery Poetry Index

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Book SynopsisA fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and culture.The first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates his poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The study examines poems drawn from the eleven volumes of verse that Harper (1938-2016) produced between 1970 and 2010, bringing attention to his poetry's sustained engagement with music, literature, and the visual arts. Author Michael A. Antonucci offers readers an account of the poet's career while assessing his verse and providing a sense of its perspective on Black America and American experience.Throughout his examination of Harper's verse, Antonucci builds upon the critical attention the poet received at the outset of his career—he was twice nominated for the National Book Award. Exploring the poet's celebrated examinations of history, kinship, and Black music, Understanding Michael S. Harper develops and expands critical dialogues about the poet and his body of work, which, Antonucci argues, presents a counter narrative about the composition and origins of the United States, reshaping prevailing discourse about race, nation, and identity.

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Book SynopsisA fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and culture.The first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates his poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The study examines poems drawn from the eleven volumes of verse that Harper (1938-2016) produced between 1970 and 2010, bringing attention to his poetry's sustained engagement with music, literature, and the visual arts. Author Michael A. Antonucci offers readers an account of the poet's career while assessing his verse and providing a sense of its perspective on Black America and American experience.Throughout his examination of Harper's verse, Antonucci builds upon the critical attention the poet received at the outset of his career—he was twice nominated for the National Book Award. Exploring the poet's celebrated examinations of history, kinship, and Black music, Understanding Michael S. Harper develops and expands critical dialogues about the poet and his body of work, which, Antonucci argues, presents a counter narrative about the composition and origins of the United States, reshaping prevailing discourse about race, nation, and identity.

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding Etheridge Knight introduces readers to a major—but understudied—American poet. Etheridge Knight (1931-1991) survived a shrapnel wound suffered during military service in Korea, as well as a drug addiction that led to an eight-year prison sentence, to publish five volumes of poetry and a small cache of powerful prose. His status in the front ranks of American poets and thinkers on poetry was acknowledged in 1984, when he won the Shelley Memorial Award, which had previously gone, as an acknowledgement of "genius and need," to E.E. Cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W. S. Merwin. In this first book-length study of Knight and his complete body of work, Michael Collins examines the poetry of a complex literary figure who, following imprisonment, transformed his life to establish himself as a charismatic voice in American poetry and an accomplished teacher at institutions such as the University of Hartford, Lincoln University, and his own Free Peoples Poetry Workshops. Beginning with a concise biography of Knight, Collins explores Knight's volumes of poetry including Poems from Prison, Black Voices from Prison, Born of a Woman, and The Essential Etheridge Knight. Unpdated to include a new preface, Understanding Etheridge Knight brings attention to a crucial era in African American and American poetry, and to the literature of the incarcerated, while reflecting on the life and work of an original voice in American poetry.Trade ReviewA superb venture in literary criticism and intellectual biography. Michael Collins brings erudition, intelligence, shrewdness, and deftness of expression to this study of a significant if little-known American poet." - Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University"Collins has written the book that Knight has long deserved." - American Literary Scholarship"An illuminating excavation of Knight's poetry and legacy." - The Journal of African American History

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings. Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Russell M. Hillier and Robert W. Reeder, Introduction Part I: Negative Theology, Political Theory, and the Lyric Chapter 1: Kirsten Stirling, “Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross” Chapter 2: Angela Balla, “Prayer as Political Theory: Conscience, Sovereignty, and Natural Law in Donne and Herbert” Part II: Encounters: Exchange and Collaboration Chapter 3: Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, “‘Resplendence of women, men’s means to zeal’: Fashioning Female Sanctity in Donne and Herbert’s Commemoration of Lady Danvers” Chapter 4: Kimberly Johnson, “Crossings: Sacramental Signs Across the Verse of Donne and Herbert” Chapter 5: Greg Miller, “Crucifying Craft: A Donne-Herbert Dialogue” Part III: Sin, Salvation, and Assurance Chapter 6: Robert W. Reeder, “‘Extreme Audacity of Penitential Humility’: Devotions 10 and the Donne-Herbert Dichotomy” Chapter 7: Kate Narveson, “Imagining Prayer in Donne’s Devotions and Herbert’s Poems of Complaint” Chapter 8: Danielle A. St. Hilaire, “Recuperating the Incapacities of the Fallen Self in Donne and Herbert: Possibility and Promise” Part IV: Appraisals Chapter 9: Christopher Hodgkins, “Donne’s ‘Comedy of Eros’ and Herbert’s ‘World of Mirth’” Chapter 10: Helen Wilcox, “‘The dot over the i’: How Donne and Herbert Close Their Poems” Appendix: Catherine R. Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller, trans., “Donne and Herbert’s Latin Poems on the Seal of Christ on the Anchor” About the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisBlack Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time. Table of ContentsIntroduction: Portraits of Black Fame, or The Past as Blueprint for the Present Chapter 1: “my black body / thrown free”: The Legacy of Jack Johnson in Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the Original Masters Chapter 2: “More of a man than you”: The Many Faces of Jack Johnson in Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke Chapter 3: “The Sting of Race and Sport”: Revivifying Isaac Burns Murphy in Frank X Walker’s Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride Chapter 4: “the overwhelming evidence of his artistry”: Wiping Away the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark Chapter 5: “Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age”: Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank Chapter 6: “Let this belting be our / unbinding”: Reconceptualizing Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio Bibliography Endnotes Index

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Book SynopsisBlack Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time. Table of ContentsIntroduction: Portraits of Black Fame, or The Past as Blueprint for the Present Chapter 1: “my black body / thrown free”: The Legacy of Jack Johnson in Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts: The Remix from the Original Masters Chapter 2: “More of a man than you”: The Many Faces of Jack Johnson in Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke Chapter 3: “The Sting of Race and Sport”: Revivifying Isaac Burns Murphy in Frank X Walker’s Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride Chapter 4: “the overwhelming evidence of his artistry”: Wiping Away the Minstrel Mask in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark Chapter 5: “Blind Tom, Musical Prodigy of the Age”: Unrecoverability in Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank Chapter 6: “Let this belting be our / unbinding”: Reconceptualizing Black Entertainment in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio Bibliography Endnotes Index

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Book SynopsisThis book introduces the evocative but largely unknown tradition of Samaritan religious poetry from late antiquity to a new audience. These verses provide a unique window into the Samaritan religious world during a formative period.Prepared by Laura Suzanne Lieber, this anthology presents annotated English translations of fifty-five Classical Samaritan poems. Lieber introduces each piece, placing it in context with Samaritan religious tradition, the geopolitical turmoil of Palestine in the fourth century CE, and the literary, liturgical, and performative conventions of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, shared by Jews, Christians, and polytheists. These hymns, composed by three generations of poets—the priest Amram Dara; his son, Marqah; and Marqah’s son, Ninna, the last poet to write in Samaritan Aramaic in the period prior to the Muslim conquest—for recitation during the Samaritan Sabbath and festival liturgies remain a core element of Samaritan religious ritual to the present day.Shedding important new light on the Samaritans’ history and on the complicated connections between early Judaism, Christianity, the Samaritan community, and nascent Islam, this volume makes an important contribution to the reception of the history of the Hebrew Bible. It will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, early Judaism and early Christianity, and other religions of late antiquity.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionAmram Dare (Amram the Elder)1. “Since There Is No God but the One”2. “Unto You Do We Pray, O Our Master”3. “O Steadfast One, Toward Whom Everything Bows”4. “O Good One, Who Eternally Does Good”5. “The Almighty Is Powerfully Strong”6. “Great Is God, and None Like Him”7. “When You Rise Up at Daybreak”8. “You Are the Glory, O God Concealed from All”9. “Imposing and Fearsome Fences”10. “The King Who Is over All”11. “Exalted God, Hear Our Voice”12. “Lo, a Great Glory Is the Glory of the Sabbath Day”13. “We Have Arisen from Our Slumber”14. “Great Is the God Who So Desires”15. “O Faithful One, O Steadfast One”16. “Lo, a Holy and Hallowed Day”17. “Among All the Days, None Is So Great as the Sabbath Day”18. “God, Exalted and Honored”19. “To God, the Mighty and Triumphant”20. “Blessed is the House of Jacob”21. “Great Is God, Who Thus Commanded”22. “O Beneficent Rememberer Who Does Not Forget”23. “You are the One Who Created the World”24. “Who Can Reckon Your Greatness?”25. “May You Be Worshipped and Praised”26. “You Are the One to Whom Divinity Belongs”27. “You Who Were Our Creator”28. “O Merciful God, Rescue Us”Marqe ben Amram1. “Gaze upon Us, O Our Master”2. “God Who Shall Be Worshipped”3. “You Are Our God (1)”4. “You Are Our God (2)”5. “It Is Incumbent upon Us”6. “Render Praise unto Him”7. “You Are the Merciful One”8. “Happy Are We”9. “God Is the First”10. “O God, O Enduring One”11. “O God, O Singular One”12. “O God, ‘El Elyon’ ”13. “Lo, the Merciful King”14. “Lo, Our Souls Are Sated”15. “God, upon Mount Sinai”16. “This Is His Great Writing”17. “Come in Peace, O Day of Fasting”18. “O Good One, in Whom the One Who Hopes”19. “You Are the One Who Created the World”20. “You Are the Great Writing”21. “Lo, the Radiant and Holy Writing”22. “This Is the Great Writing”23. “Continue to Bless the Name”24. “Receive the Word of the Living One”25. “Germon, the Roman Official”Ninna ben Marqe1. “Go in Peace, O Sabbath Day”2. “Go Forth in Peace”BibliographySubject IndexAncient Source Index

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Book SynopsisIntended for poetry-translation scholars, teachers, students, and practitioners, this book provides an in-depth look at poetry translation as an act of creative recreation. Clearly written and amply illustrated, it is designed to help readers understand the nature of poetry, the key elements of its language, the various types of challenges frequently encountered in its translation, and the procedures, methods and strategies required to translate poems into poems. It provides important and penetrating answers to questions such as: What makes poetry translation a special case within literary translation? Is poetry translatable? Does poetry really get lost in translation? How should a poem be translated? What makes a “good” translation? Is it preferable to translate a poem literally, or should the translator endeavor to recreate the effect of the original poem as a poem in its own right in the target language? Is poetry translation a matter of reproduction or an act of recreation? Who translates poetry? Should a poem be looked at as a “renaissance painting”? Why is poetry translation referred to as “the art of compromise”?

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Book SynopsisYour Blue and the Quiet Lament records the textures of grief after a cousin's murder at the hands of the Syrian state reaches the poet through a long-distance phone call. The poems trace a narrative of arrest, imprisonment, and torture in Syria and interweave the difficulties a family experiences in the diaspora.Shifting between the death of poet Federico García Lorca and that of her cousin, Lubna's poetry contends with personal loss by distancing the meaning of one death through the proxy of another. Yet the distortion of distance is already there—in the language, in the geographic space, in time, in the grief itself—tinged with blue.As she recalls childhood memories and imagines conversations with her dead cousin, Lubna's poetry whispers, calls out, sings, laments, pens letters, photographs, sketches, paints, and prays in an attempt to exhaust grief.

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Book SynopsisThe title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is reappropriated from a government document establishing the beginning of a refugee family’s time in the United States. At every coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides affidavits, letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech those in power to grant them “family reunification” visas for those they had to leave behind in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. Nothing Follows draws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written from a young girl’s perspective, the center of this world is a military father, an absent mother, sisters who come and go, broken brothers, and friends she meets in San José. With each place the book travels through—from Butler, Pennsylvania, to San José, California—we see that racism, objectification, and sexual violence permeate the realities of the narrator and those close to her. In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of the girl’s friends and family and maps out refugee girlhoods. Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing, these refuges are questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who have grown up during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.Trade Review"If there is a book that profoundly puts together a recording of one’s life through poetry, it would be Lan P. Duong‘s debut collection Nothing Follows. Duong transports us into her childhood and adulthood, investigating what it means to be a refugee trying to recover their family, loss, and the gaps that exist when one is forced to find a home in another’s land." —Emily Velasquez, Soapberry Review

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Book SynopsisThe Global Wordsworth charts the travels of William Wordsworth’s poetry around the English-speaking world. But, as Katherine Bergren shows, Wordsworth’s afterlives reveal more than his influence on other writers; his appearances in novels and essays from the antebellum U.S. to post-Apartheid South Africa change how we understand a poet we think we know. Bergren analyzes writers like Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, and Lydia Maria Child who plant Wordsworth in their own writing and bring him to life in places and times far from his own—and then record what happens. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Bergren highlights a more complex dynamic of international response, in which later writers engage Wordsworth in conversations about slavery and gardening, education and daffodils, landscapes and national belonging. His global reception—critical, appreciative, and ambivalent—inspires us to see that Wordsworth was concerned not just with local, English landscapes and people, but also with their changing place in a rapidly globalizing world. This study demonstrates that Wordsworth is not tangential but rather crucial to our understanding of Global Romanticism. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"One aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry that has survived generations of revisionary scholarship is its sense of place. Katherine Bergren’s mildly shocking case for Wordsworth 'sense of planet' operates through patient and innovative readings of three writers 'repurposing' Wordsworth’s writings—a repurposing that in its turn reveals an entirely more worldly and global Wordsworth. Meticulously situating these intertextual encounters in the context of discussions of postcoloniality, transatlantic mobility, and ecocritical belonging, The Global Wordsworth updates a romantic worldliness we have only just begun to read." -- Pieter Vermeulen * author of Romanticism after the Holocaust *"A model of academic excellence, this literary study of William Wordsworth upon various cultures around the world is an extraordinarily informative and thought-provoking read." * Midwest Book Review *"Recommended." * Choice *"Beautifully written, equally attentive to Romanticism and its afterlives, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Romanticism and its legacies, whether scholarly or general readers. It offers a genuinely original perspective on Wordsworth and his works, without insisting on the privilege of canonicity." * Review 19 *"The methodology of the Global Wordsworth is exciting and innovative and will have much to offer readers interested in understanding better the ways in which Romanticism might be deployed in a colonial or settler context....[T]he vision of Romanticism, and of Wordsworth, that emerges in Bergren’s book is more nuanced and indeed more 'worldly' than the one to which we have become accustomed." * European Romantic Review *"One aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry that has survived generations of revisionary scholarship is its sense of place. Katherine Bergren’s mildly shocking case for Wordsworth 'sense of planet' operates through patient and innovative readings of three writers 'repurposing' Wordsworth’s writings—a repurposing that in its turn reveals an entirely more worldly and global Wordsworth. Meticulously situating these intertextual encounters in the context of discussions of postcoloniality, transatlantic mobility, and ecocritical belonging, The Global Wordsworth updates a romantic worldliness we have only just begun to read." -- Pieter Vermeulen * author of Romanticism after the Holocaust *"A model of academic excellence, this literary study of William Wordsworth upon various cultures around the world is an extraordinarily informative and thought-provoking read." * Midwest Book Review *"Recommended." * Choice *"Beautifully written, equally attentive to Romanticism and its afterlives, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Romanticism and its legacies, whether scholarly or general readers. It offers a genuinely original perspective on Wordsworth and his works, without insisting on the privilege of canonicity." * Review 19 *"The methodology of the Global Wordsworth is exciting and innovative and will have much to offer readers interested in understanding better the ways in which Romanticism might be deployed in a colonial or settler context....[T]he vision of Romanticism, and of Wordsworth, that emerges in Bergren’s book is more nuanced and indeed more 'worldly' than the one to which we have become accustomed." * European Romantic Review *Table of ContentsIllustrations ... ivAbbreviations ... vii Introduction ... 1 One The Global Routes of Daffodils ... 37 Two Landscape Pedagogy in J. M. Coetzee, The Prelude, and the Lucy Poems ... 74 Three Globalizing England: Lydia Maria Child and The Excursion ... 147 Four Localism Unrooted: Jamaica Kincaid and the Guide to the Lakes ... 221 Conclusion ... 282Acknowledgments ... 291Bibliography ... 293Index ... 321About the Author ... 322

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Book SynopsisDuring the decades following the English civil wars, British poets seeking to make sense of lingering political instabilities turned to Virgil’s Georgics. This ancient poem betrays deep ambivalences about war, political power, and empire, and such poets as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Anne Finch found in these attitudes valuable ways of responding to the uncertainties of their own time. Composed during a period of brutal conflict in Rome, Virgil’s agricultural poem distrusts easy stability, urging its readers to understand that lasting peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Like the ancient poet, who famously depicted a farmer’s scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"Cultivating Peace is an extremely smart examination of what might be called 'the georgic mode' in English verse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, starting with Virgil … It is a significant piece of scholarship that should be of interest both to classicists and to scholars of English poetry in the long eighteenth century. The writing is clear and jargon free, the readings perceptive; we not only get a much richer, more complex, sense of how the georgic mode worked than we had before, but we also see it in historical context." -- Cedric D. Reverand II * University of Wyoming *"Melissa Schoenberger's important, compelling study provides an innovative re-evaluation of English georgic's development in the early modern period and its relationship to the laborious art of peace-making. Schoenberger identifies how poets from Marvell to Smart respond to the political aspects of Virgil's Georgics, particularly with regard to the farmer/statesman's ceaseless toil against disorder and chaos and his failure to secure a stable future. In doing so, this study convincingly presents peace-making as a fundamentally georgic act and advances our understanding not only of Virgil himself but also his wider cultural legacy." -- Ian Calvert * University of Bristol *"A well written and cogently argued book that should be welcomed for its refreshingly new reading of the Virgilian georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century. Its strengths are many, not least, its juxtaposition of close reading with a keen sensitivity to social and political contexts." * The Review of English Studies *"The narrative voice will often alight delicately on its objects only for them to morph into new ones almost as soon as they are observed. This, too, is a lovely imitative echo of Virgil’s light didactic touch....Rich and evocative." * Marvell Studies *"Cultivating Peace is a fascinating book about Virgil's didactic agricultural poem The Georgics and the poetry and political thinking that it inspired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Melissa Schoenberger recovers, from Virgil's poem, a distinctively georgic understanding of peace as mutable and contingent." * Eighteenth Century Studies *"Cultivating Peace is an extremely smart examination of what might be called 'the georgic mode' in English verse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, starting with Virgil … It is a significant piece of scholarship that should be of interest both to classicists and to scholars of English poetry in the long eighteenth century. The writing is clear and jargon free, the readings perceptive; we not only get a much richer, more complex, sense of how the georgic mode worked than we had before, but we also see it in historical context." -- Cedric D. Reverand II * University of Wyoming *"Melissa Schoenberger's important, compelling study provides an innovative re-evaluation of English georgic's development in the early modern period and its relationship to the laborious art of peace-making. Schoenberger identifies how poets from Marvell to Smart respond to the political aspects of Virgil's Georgics, particularly with regard to the farmer/statesman's ceaseless toil against disorder and chaos and his failure to secure a stable future. In doing so, this study convincingly presents peace-making as a fundamentally georgic act and advances our understanding not only of Virgil himself but also his wider cultural legacy." -- Ian Calvert * University of Bristol *"A well written and cogently argued book that should be welcomed for its refreshingly new reading of the Virgilian georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century. Its strengths are many, not least, its juxtaposition of close reading with a keen sensitivity to social and political contexts." * The Review of English Studies *"The narrative voice will often alight delicately on its objects only for them to morph into new ones almost as soon as they are observed. This, too, is a lovely imitative echo of Virgil’s light didactic touch....Rich and evocative." * Marvell Studies *"Cultivating Peace is a fascinating book about Virgil's didactic agricultural poem The Georgics and the poetry and political thinking that it inspired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Melissa Schoenberger recovers, from Virgil's poem, a distinctively georgic understanding of peace as mutable and contingent." * Eighteenth Century Studies *Table of Contents Introduction: The Arts of Peace Chapter 1: Mutability: Cycles of War and Peace On Mutability: Virgil’s First Lesson Before Marvell: Georgic Mutability in England The Trap of War and The Map of Paradise: Marvell’s Vision of Peace Chapter 2: Translation: Virgil and Dryden in 1697 The English Virgil Dryden’s Georgics: “Nor When the War is Over, Is it Peace” From Peace to War: The Aeneis Chapter 3: Contingency: The Georgic Poetry of Anne Finch A Virgilian Retreat Finch and the Force of Fable Chapter 4: Imitation: The Georgics before and after 1713 John Philips and the Inmate Orchat From Didactic to Descriptive After Thomson: Christopher Smart, The Hop-Garden, and the End of Georgic Peace Conclusion: “At Their Hours of Preparation” Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisDuring the decades following the English civil wars, British poets seeking to make sense of lingering political instabilities turned to Virgil’s Georgics. This ancient poem betrays deep ambivalences about war, political power, and empire, and such poets as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Anne Finch found in these attitudes valuable ways of responding to the uncertainties of their own time. Composed during a period of brutal conflict in Rome, Virgil’s agricultural poem distrusts easy stability, urging its readers to understand that lasting peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Like the ancient poet, who famously depicted a farmer’s scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"Cultivating Peace is an extremely smart examination of what might be called 'the georgic mode' in English verse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, starting with Virgil … It is a significant piece of scholarship that should be of interest both to classicists and to scholars of English poetry in the long eighteenth century. The writing is clear and jargon free, the readings perceptive; we not only get a much richer, more complex, sense of how the georgic mode worked than we had before, but we also see it in historical context." -- Cedric D. Reverand II * University of Wyoming *"Melissa Schoenberger's important, compelling study provides an innovative re-evaluation of English georgic's development in the early modern period and its relationship to the laborious art of peace-making. Schoenberger identifies how poets from Marvell to Smart respond to the political aspects of Virgil's Georgics, particularly with regard to the farmer/statesman's ceaseless toil against disorder and chaos and his failure to secure a stable future. In doing so, this study convincingly presents peace-making as a fundamentally georgic act and advances our understanding not only of Virgil himself but also his wider cultural legacy." -- Ian Calvert * University of Bristol *"A well written and cogently argued book that should be welcomed for its refreshingly new reading of the Virgilian georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century. Its strengths are many, not least, its juxtaposition of close reading with a keen sensitivity to social and political contexts." * The Review of English Studies *"The narrative voice will often alight delicately on its objects only for them to morph into new ones almost as soon as they are observed. This, too, is a lovely imitative echo of Virgil’s light didactic touch....Rich and evocative." * Marvell Studies *"Cultivating Peace is a fascinating book about Virgil's didactic agricultural poem The Georgics and the poetry and political thinking that it inspired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Melissa Schoenberger recovers, from Virgil's poem, a distinctively georgic understanding of peace as mutable and contingent." * Eighteenth Century Studies *"Cultivating Peace is an extremely smart examination of what might be called 'the georgic mode' in English verse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, starting with Virgil … It is a significant piece of scholarship that should be of interest both to classicists and to scholars of English poetry in the long eighteenth century. The writing is clear and jargon free, the readings perceptive; we not only get a much richer, more complex, sense of how the georgic mode worked than we had before, but we also see it in historical context." -- Cedric D. Reverand II * University of Wyoming *"Melissa Schoenberger's important, compelling study provides an innovative re-evaluation of English georgic's development in the early modern period and its relationship to the laborious art of peace-making. Schoenberger identifies how poets from Marvell to Smart respond to the political aspects of Virgil's Georgics, particularly with regard to the farmer/statesman's ceaseless toil against disorder and chaos and his failure to secure a stable future. In doing so, this study convincingly presents peace-making as a fundamentally georgic act and advances our understanding not only of Virgil himself but also his wider cultural legacy." -- Ian Calvert * University of Bristol *"A well written and cogently argued book that should be welcomed for its refreshingly new reading of the Virgilian georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century. Its strengths are many, not least, its juxtaposition of close reading with a keen sensitivity to social and political contexts." * The Review of English Studies *"The narrative voice will often alight delicately on its objects only for them to morph into new ones almost as soon as they are observed. This, too, is a lovely imitative echo of Virgil’s light didactic touch....Rich and evocative." * Marvell Studies *"Cultivating Peace is a fascinating book about Virgil's didactic agricultural poem The Georgics and the poetry and political thinking that it inspired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Melissa Schoenberger recovers, from Virgil's poem, a distinctively georgic understanding of peace as mutable and contingent." * Eighteenth Century Studies *Table of Contents Introduction: The Arts of Peace Chapter 1: Mutability: Cycles of War and Peace On Mutability: Virgil’s First Lesson Before Marvell: Georgic Mutability in England The Trap of War and The Map of Paradise: Marvell’s Vision of Peace Chapter 2: Translation: Virgil and Dryden in 1697 The English Virgil Dryden’s Georgics: “Nor When the War is Over, Is it Peace” From Peace to War: The Aeneis Chapter 3: Contingency: The Georgic Poetry of Anne Finch A Virgilian Retreat Finch and the Force of Fable Chapter 4: Imitation: The Georgics before and after 1713 John Philips and the Inmate Orchat From Didactic to Descriptive After Thomson: Christopher Smart, The Hop-Garden, and the End of Georgic Peace Conclusion: “At Their Hours of Preparation” Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisDrawing on the poetry of four major voices in the Spanish lyric of today, Judith Nantell explores the epistemic works of Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas, arguing that, for them, the poem is the fundamental means of exploring the nature of both knowledge and poetry. In this first interpretive analysis of the epistemic nature of their poetry, Nantell innovatively engages these poets, each of whom has contributed one of their own poems along with a previously unpublished explication of their chosen poem. Each also provides an original biographical sketch to support Nantell’s development of a poetics of epiphany. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Trade Review"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ... vi Note on Translations ... vii Introduction ... 1 1 Luis Muñoz: The Instant ... 26 Complete Poems by Muñoz ... 75 2 Abraham Gragera: The Word ... 93 Complete Poems by Gragera ... 148 3 Josep M. Rodríguez: The Images ... 184 Complete Poems by Rodríguez ... 262 4 Ada Salas: Poetry and Poetics ... 302 Complete Poems by Salas ... 368 Afterword ... 389 Acknowledgments ... 395 Notes ... 398 Works Cited ... 399 Index ... 415

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Book SynopsisDrawing on the poetry of four major voices in the Spanish lyric of today, Judith Nantell explores the epistemic works of Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas, arguing that, for them, the poem is the fundamental means of exploring the nature of both knowledge and poetry. In this first interpretive analysis of the epistemic nature of their poetry, Nantell innovatively engages these poets, each of whom has contributed one of their own poems along with a previously unpublished explication of their chosen poem. Each also provides an original biographical sketch to support Nantell’s development of a poetics of epiphany. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Trade Review"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *"Judith Nantell's The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a fantastic addition to scholarship on Spanish contemporary poetry. This is an incredibly original and multifaceted work, and the combination of scholarly analyses with contributions from the authors themselves and their poetry makes this a highly original and perceptive piece of work." -- Diana Cullell * editor, Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology *“Judith Nantell’s The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today is a significant work of criticism that brings to light current lyric innovations in Spain, with particular attention to the epistemic strain in the work of four very recent poets: Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas. Nantell’s primary argument is that these four share a vision of their art as a process and a movement towards a state of acute realization and insight into their chosen art and, indeed, into the nature of reality. Nantell shows the four to be authors of a “universalist” lyric poetry, written in Spanish across and beyond borders, and fueled – but not limited by -- literary canon, tradition, and artistic influence. This study exhibits a wealth of insights and original observations, bolstered and fortified by the critical armature reflective of the depth and extension of Judith Nantell’s research.” -- Sylvia Sherno * co-editor, Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World *"The book is a major contribution to an understanding of the contemporary Spanish lyric, apt for a general audience, specialists in contemporary Spanish literature, and as a model for introducing new poets in graduate classes. In a sense, the study is itself epiphanic. One reads the delimited analyses of just four poets and then somewhat surprisingly realizes that the study offers a clearly defined road map leading into the core of the contemporary Spanish lyric." * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *"The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today offers an enthusiastic celebration of the work of four contemporary Spanish poets....Those in search of an introduction to the work of four poets that highlights each poet’s voice through the inclusion and discussion of biographical statements, poetics, poems, and auto-analyses, though, will undoubtedly find this book to be a valuable resource and point of entry into the work of these four poets." * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ... vi Note on Translations ... vii Introduction ... 1 1 Luis Muñoz: The Instant ... 26 Complete Poems by Muñoz ... 75 2 Abraham Gragera: The Word ... 93 Complete Poems by Gragera ... 148 3 Josep M. Rodríguez: The Images ... 184 Complete Poems by Rodríguez ... 262 4 Ada Salas: Poetry and Poetics ... 302 Complete Poems by Salas ... 368 Afterword ... 389 Acknowledgments ... 395 Notes ... 398 Works Cited ... 399 Index ... 415

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Book SynopsisWhite Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco examines the interplay of complementary images and concepts in the award-winning Mexican writer's cycle of poems from 1979 to 2018. Blanco’s poetic trilogy A la luz de siempre is characterized by its broad range of form and subject and by the poet's own eclectic background as a chemist, maker of collages, and musician. Blanco speaks the language of the visual arts, science, mathematics, music, and philosophy, and creates work with deep interdisciplinary roots. This book explores how polarities such as space and place, reading and writing, sound and silence, visual and verbal representation, and faith and doubt are woven through A la luz de siempre. These complements reveal how Blanco’s poetry, like the phenomenon of white light, embraces paradox and transforms into something more than the sum of its disparate and polychromatic parts.Trade Review"The breadth and depth of interdisciplinary experience and influence in Alberto Blanco’s work could make approaching his poetry a daunting proposition. An accomplished artist and musician, trained chemist, and experienced translator, Blanco draws on a wide range of sources among which he rejects rigid boundaries. Ronald Friis provides not only an insightful tracing of influences, themes, and dynamics in Blanco’s poetry but also a well developed and integrated reading of critics and theory to accompany his analysis. The result is an intelligent, insightful, and accessible consideration of the work of one of Mexico’s most accomplished contemporary intellectuals, artists, and poets." -- Cecelia J. Cavanaugh * author of Lorca's Drawings and Poems: Forming the Eye of the Reader *"A thoughtfully organized, deep engagement that illuminates and contextualizes correspondences among Blanco’s works, as well as with his impressive constellation of literary, musical, artistic, scientific, and philosophical interlocutors, White Light serves in part as an introduction to Blanco’s decades-spanning oeuvre and as a compendium of references to secondary sources." -- Bruce Willis * author of Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations *"The breadth and depth of interdisciplinary experience and influence in Alberto Blanco’s work could make approaching his poetry a daunting proposition. An accomplished artist and musician, trained chemist, and experienced translator, Blanco draws on a wide range of sources among which he rejects rigid boundaries. Ronald Friis provides not only an insightful tracing of influences, themes, and dynamics in Blanco’s poetry but also a well developed and integrated reading of critics and theory to accompany his analysis. The result is an intelligent, insightful, and accessible consideration of the work of one of Mexico’s most accomplished contemporary intellectuals, artists, and poets." -- Cecelia J. Cavanaugh * author of Lorca's Drawings and Poems: Forming the Eye of the Reader *"A thoughtfully organized, deep engagement that illuminates and contextualizes correspondences among Blanco’s works, as well as with his impressive constellation of literary, musical, artistic, scientific, and philosophical interlocutors, White Light serves in part as an introduction to Blanco’s decades-spanning oeuvre and as a compendium of references to secondary sources." -- Bruce Willis * author of Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Chronology Introduction: Light Is Both Wave and Particle Alberto Blanco The Poems Cycles Polarities White Light 1 Image Collage Absence and NegationPoesía visual “Donner à voir” Ekphrasis The Constellation of the Rose 2 Space The Exergue Effect Time and Place Stamps Travel “Mapas” Montage and Movie Stars Three Spatial Strategies for Cuenta de los guías 3 Sound Sister Arts and Synesthesia Tempo, Rhythm, and Rhyme Musical Paratexts Silence 4 Texture Reading and Writing Writers Writing Readers Writing Writing HemispheresTaijitu The Third Half 5 Metaphysics Scientific Methods Observer Effects Crisis Lessons in Geometry Aura Genesis Faith Coda: Flight Notes Bibliography Index

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