Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisThis selection of poetry and prose by Ghalib provides an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the preeminent Urdu poet of the nineteenth century. Ghalib’s poems, especially his ghazals, remain beloved throughout South Asia for their arresting intelligence and lively witTrade ReviewGhalib is the first ample and compact introduction to the Urdu oeuvre of the last great 'Mughal' poet of India. It fills a long-felt lacuna, and does so admirably well. The translators have provided all that a reader might need to get closer to the poet and the man, including Ghalib's own comments on many of his 'difficult' verses. -- C. M. Naim, University of ChicagoGhalib once described himself as "A nightingale of a yet to be created garden, singing with the white heat of an ecstatic imagination." Gifted with the vision of a seer, he could well be describing how this elegant and dazzling translation makes his poetry come alive in English, a world apart from his nineteenth century Delhi. This is a superb introduction to this marvelous poet, resonant with his subtle nuances and exquisite meanings. -- Asif Farrukhi, editor of An Evening of Caged Beasts: Seven Postmodernist Urdu PoetsGhalib: Selected Poems and Letters is a tour de force, an offering of love by one of our most prominent contemporary scholars of Urdu poetry. Pritchett brings to this anthology a lifetime of scholarly devotion to Ghalib, while Cornwall demonstrates his promise as an emerging scholar. This volume offers new insight to fellow devotees of Ghalib's poetry through extraordinary translations, all contextualized by a rich body of historical, cultural, biographical and secondary literary materials. To the interested novice who takes this book up, a door will open revealing a beguiling and wondrous world. -- Carla Petievich, The University of Texas at AustinThe engaging tone of this rigorous volume will make Ghalib accessible to a wide-ranging audience that does not speak Persian or Urdu. It successfully brings into focus the reigning tropes and motifs of Perso-Urdu poetry and Islam. Yet the real importance of the work lies in its profound approach to translation; Pritchett and Cornwall extract beauty from a close reading of the texts without venturing into a discourse that does not accord closely with the original Perso-Urdu words and idioms. -- Syed Akbar Hyder, The University of Texas at AustinTranslation is a labor of love; it is the breaking of silence between languages. It poses unique challenges. Ghalib’s multivalent, convoluted poetry is loaded with delicate metaphors and word play. Much of it is not even translatable. Frances Pritchett and Owen Cornwall have carefully chosen some of the best ghazals that are most translatable, and done a marvelous job of rendering them into idiomatic English. An indispensable part of the book are the endnotes that explicate nuances that were either impossible to capture or require cultural knowledge to understand. Valuable information about possible readings and further discussion is also provided. -- Mehr Farooqi, University of VirginiaThe book is reliable, reader-friendly, and translated with enthusiasm and relish. Recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Ghalib's Life and TimesPart One: GhazalsPart Two: Ghazal VersesPart Three: Other Genres1. Poems2. Letters3. ProseNotesAppendix 1. Ghalib's Comments on His Own VersesAppendix 2. Ghalib Concordance, with Standard Divan NumbersGlossary of Technical Terms and Proper NamesBibliographyIndexUrdu Text

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Book SynopsisHow to Read Chinese Poetry in Context is an introduction to the golden age of Chinese poetry, spanning the earliest times through the Tang dynasty. Presenting poems in Chinese along with English translations and commentary, it is a pioneering and versatile text for the study of Chinese language, literature, history, and culture.Trade ReviewDevoted exclusively to the rich, fantastical, labyrinthine matrix of poetry-making in ancient China. . . . [How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context] is both a gem of fresh scholarship and a compendium of luminous insights. . . . This book – in fact, the entire series – will be a game changer. -- Yunte Huang * Los Angeles Review of Books, China Channel *Zong-qi Cai is one of the finest scholars of Chinese poetry writing today. -- Jonathan Chaves, The George Washington UniversityTruly a landmark publication in the field of Chinese literary scholarship. -- Shuen-fu Lin, University of MichiganIn this magnificent volume on Chinese poetry, nineteen scholars demonstrate the importance of cultural reading. From questions of authorship to ideology, from the poetry of wars, heroes, women, and knights-errant to that of Daoism and Buddhism, this book offers a surprising and enlightening rereading of Chinese poetry and its context. -- Kang-i Sun Chang, Yale UniversityA splendid achievement! Intellectually rigorous and reader-friendly at once, this collection of essays lets both novice and specialist readers experience the beauty and poignancy of classical Chinese poetry one well-chosen topic at a time. -- Patricia Sieber, Ohio State UniversityThis volume joins others in editor Zong-qi Cai’s How to Read Chinese literature series as an important pedagogic and scholarly resource. Leading authorities set seminal poetic texts, across genres and periods, in their larger historical literary and intellectual contexts. A great contribution to a broader understanding of Chinese poetry. -- Ronald Egan, Stanford UniversityTable of ContentsThematic ContentsPreface to the How to Read Chinese Literature SeriesPreface to the VolumeChronology of Historical EventsSymbols and AbbreviationsIntroduction: The Cultural Role of Chinese Poetry, by Zong-qi CaiPart I: Pre-Han Times1. Poetry and Diplomacy in The Zuo Commentary(Zuozhuan), by Wai-yee Li2. Poetry and Authorship: The Songs of Chu (Chuci), by Stephen OwenPart II: The Han Dynasty3. Empire in Text: Sima Xiangru’s “Sir Vacuous/Imperial Park Rhapsody”(“Zixu/Shanglin fu”), by Yu-yu Cheng and Gregory Patterson4. Poetry and Ideology: The Canonization of the Book of Poetry (Shijing) During the Han, by Zong-qi Cai5. Love Beyond the Grave: A Tragic Tale of Love and Marriage in Han China, by Olga LomováPart III: The Six Dynasties6. Heroes from Chaotic Times: The Three Caos, by Xinda Lian7. The Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, by Nanxiu Qian8. The Poetry of Reclusion: Tao Qian, by Alan Berkowitz9. The Struggling Buddhist Mind: Shen Yue, by Meow Hui GohPart IV: The Tang Dynasty10. Knight-Errantry: Tang Frontier Poems, by Tsung-Cheng Lin11. Tang Civil Service Examinations, by Manling Luo12. Tang Women at the Public/Private Divide, by Maija Bell Samei13. Poetry and Buddhist Enlightenment: Wang Wei and Han Shan, by Chen Yinchi and Jing Chen14. Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon: Li Bai and the Poetics of Wine, by Paula Varsano15. Du Fu: The Poet as Historian, by Jack W. Chen16. Poetry and Literati Friendship: Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, by Ao Wang17. Li He: Poetry as Obsession, by Robert AshmoreAcknowledgmentsContributorsGlossary-Index

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Book SynopsisHow to Read Chinese Poetry in Context is an introduction to the golden age of Chinese poetry, spanning the earliest times through the Tang dynasty. Presenting poems in Chinese along with English translations and commentary, it is a pioneering and versatile text for the study of Chinese language, literature, history, and culture.Trade ReviewDevoted exclusively to the rich, fantastical, labyrinthine matrix of poetry-making in ancient China. . . . [How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context] is both a gem of fresh scholarship and a compendium of luminous insights. . . . This book – in fact, the entire series – will be a game changer. -- Yunte Huang * Los Angeles Review of Books, China Channel *Zong-qi Cai is one of the finest scholars of Chinese poetry writing today. -- Jonathan Chaves, The George Washington UniversityTruly a landmark publication in the field of Chinese literary scholarship. -- Shuen-fu Lin, University of MichiganIn this magnificent volume on Chinese poetry, nineteen scholars demonstrate the importance of cultural reading. From questions of authorship to ideology, from the poetry of wars, heroes, women, and knights-errant to that of Daoism and Buddhism, this book offers a surprising and enlightening rereading of Chinese poetry and its context. -- Kang-i Sun Chang, Yale UniversityA splendid achievement! Intellectually rigorous and reader-friendly at once, this collection of essays lets both novice and specialist readers experience the beauty and poignancy of classical Chinese poetry one well-chosen topic at a time. -- Patricia Sieber, Ohio State UniversityThis volume joins others in editor Zong-qi Cai’s How to Read Chinese literature series as an important pedagogic and scholarly resource. Leading authorities set seminal poetic texts, across genres and periods, in their larger historical literary and intellectual contexts. A great contribution to a broader understanding of Chinese poetry. -- Ronald Egan, Stanford UniversityThe translations are of high caliber, carefully done and polished. The book is user friendly. * China Review International *Table of ContentsThematic ContentsPreface to the How to Read Chinese Literature SeriesPreface to the VolumeChronology of Historical EventsSymbols and AbbreviationsIntroduction: The Cultural Role of Chinese Poetry, by Zong-qi CaiPart I: Pre-Han Times1. Poetry and Diplomacy in The Zuo Commentary(Zuozhuan), by Wai-yee Li2. Poetry and Authorship: The Songs of Chu (Chuci), by Stephen OwenPart II: The Han Dynasty3. Empire in Text: Sima Xiangru’s “Sir Vacuous/Imperial Park Rhapsody”(“Zixu/Shanglin fu”), by Yu-yu Cheng and Gregory Patterson4. Poetry and Ideology: The Canonization of the Book of Poetry (Shijing) During the Han, by Zong-qi Cai5. Love Beyond the Grave: A Tragic Tale of Love and Marriage in Han China, by Olga LomováPart III: The Six Dynasties6. Heroes from Chaotic Times: The Three Caos, by Xinda Lian7. The Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, by Nanxiu Qian8. The Poetry of Reclusion: Tao Qian, by Alan Berkowitz9. The Struggling Buddhist Mind: Shen Yue, by Meow Hui GohPart IV: The Tang Dynasty10. Knight-Errantry: Tang Frontier Poems, by Tsung-Cheng Lin11. Tang Civil Service Examinations, by Manling Luo12. Tang Women at the Public/Private Divide, by Maija Bell Samei13. Poetry and Buddhist Enlightenment: Wang Wei and Han Shan, by Chen Yinchi and Jing Chen14. Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon: Li Bai and the Poetics of Wine, by Paula Varsano15. Du Fu: The Poet as Historian, by Jack W. Chen16. Poetry and Literati Friendship: Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, by Ao Wang17. Li He: Poetry as Obsession, by Robert AshmoreAcknowledgmentsContributorsGlossary-Index

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Book SynopsisHow to Read a Japanese Poem offers a comprehensive approach to making sense of traditional Japanese poetry of all genres and periods. Steven D. Carter explains to Anglophone students the methods of composition and literary interpretation used by Japanese poets, scholars, and critics from ancient times to the present.Trade ReviewCarter’s book, no esoteric over-academic tome, is a lively exploration of Japanese poetic discourse, a guide to the formal delicacy and subtlety of Japanese verse, opening it up for the reader and showing, not telling, what’s inside. His book is accessible to all who enjoy Japanese poetry; he writes intelligently, sensitively and passionately about it, and the result is an indispensable book which will make Japanese poetry come alive and reveal its depth at the same time. -- John Butler * Asian Review of Books *In this thorough and wide-ranging book, Carter explores what to look for and what’s not obvious in each of Japan’s distinct genres of poetry. How to Read a Japanese Poem offers detailed analyses of specific poems in each era, exploring the textual and cultural context, social occasion, and the location and timing of composition. This book takes readers below the surface to understand the nuances of context. -- Michael Dylan Welch, founder and president, Tanka Society of AmericaThis fresh collection of poems, most of which have never appeared in translation before, illuminates the core and continuity of Japanese poetry. Carter’s commentary, based on a vast erudition worn as lightly as a feathered robe, opens up each poem, the world and the heart together. This book will enlighten and delight general readers and specialists alike. -- Sonja Arntzen, University of TorontoCarter’s colleagues and students have long waited to take this journey with him as guide to the formal subtleties and aesthetic principles that make Japanese poetry so rewarding and that he understands and explains so well. This is a most welcome volume. -- Edward Kamens, Yale UniversityFrom the songs of ancient Japan to haiku on World War II, through snow-flecked pines and into noisy streets, Carter guides us through more than a millennium of Japanese verse. Thanks to his contextual insights and masterful translations, the “clouds clear away” to reveal the beauty, power, wit, and utility of Japanese poetry. -- Christina Laffin, University of British ColumbiaThis book is a masterful tour of Japanese poetry from the earliest times to the late nineteenth century. The range of knowledge is astonishing, and there are very few people—perhaps no one—who could attempt this kind of book except for the author. -- Torquil Duthie, University of California, Los AngelesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Ancient Song and Poetry2. Long Poems and Short Poems3. Popular Songs4. Linked Verse5. Unorthodox Poems6. Comic Poems7. Poems in ChineseAppendix 1: Technical TermsAppendix 2: Aesthetic Ideals and DevicesNotesSources of Japanese TextsSelected BibliographyIndex of Japanese Names, Titles, and Terms

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Book SynopsisHow to Read a Japanese Poem offers a comprehensive approach to making sense of traditional Japanese poetry of all genres and periods. Steven D. Carter explains to Anglophone students the methods of composition and literary interpretation used by Japanese poets, scholars, and critics from ancient times to the present.Trade ReviewCarter’s book, no esoteric over-academic tome, is a lively exploration of Japanese poetic discourse, a guide to the formal delicacy and subtlety of Japanese verse, opening it up for the reader and showing, not telling, what’s inside. His book is accessible to all who enjoy Japanese poetry; he writes intelligently, sensitively and passionately about it, and the result is an indispensable book which will make Japanese poetry come alive and reveal its depth at the same time. -- John Butler * Asian Review of Books *In this thorough and wide-ranging book, Carter explores what to look for and what’s not obvious in each of Japan’s distinct genres of poetry. How to Read a Japanese Poem offers detailed analyses of specific poems in each era, exploring the textual and cultural context, social occasion, and the location and timing of composition. This book takes readers below the surface to understand the nuances of context. -- Michael Dylan Welch, founder and president, Tanka Society of AmericaThis fresh collection of poems, most of which have never appeared in translation before, illuminates the core and continuity of Japanese poetry. Carter’s commentary, based on a vast erudition worn as lightly as a feathered robe, opens up each poem, the world and the heart together. This book will enlighten and delight general readers and specialists alike. -- Sonja Arntzen, University of TorontoCarter’s colleagues and students have long waited to take this journey with him as guide to the formal subtleties and aesthetic principles that make Japanese poetry so rewarding and that he understands and explains so well. This is a most welcome volume. -- Edward Kamens, Yale UniversityFrom the songs of ancient Japan to haiku on World War II, through snow-flecked pines and into noisy streets, Carter guides us through more than a millennium of Japanese verse. Thanks to his contextual insights and masterful translations, the “clouds clear away” to reveal the beauty, power, wit, and utility of Japanese poetry. -- Christina Laffin, University of British ColumbiaThis book is a masterful tour of Japanese poetry from the earliest times to the late nineteenth century. The range of knowledge is astonishing, and there are very few people—perhaps no one—who could attempt this kind of book except for the author. -- Torquil Duthie, University of California, Los AngelesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Ancient Song and Poetry2. Long Poems and Short Poems3. Popular Songs4. Linked Verse5. Unorthodox Poems6. Comic Poems7. Poems in ChineseAppendix 1: Technical TermsAppendix 2: Aesthetic Ideals and DevicesNotesSources of Japanese TextsSelected BibliographyIndex of Japanese Names, Titles, and Terms

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Book SynopsisMike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, he follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats.Trade ReviewThis is a persuasive, thoroughly researched, memorable, and often delightful book. Mike Chasar has excelled in his ambitious coverage of primary sources. Moreover, this is a book that addresses questions that come up frequently in the poetry world about where and why and how "poetry matters," and about its place in the wider culture. -- Stephanie Burt, author of Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read PoemsPoetry is more than a creature of voice, hand, and press, as Chasar shows with verve, wit, insight, and sparkling detail. The public life of poetry in the twentieth-century United States is also a secret history of multimedia. Each medium remakes poetry. And poetry, in turn, remakes the media in which we live, move, and breathe. I love this book! -- John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental MediaBy disclosing what are at once poetry’s most inscrutable and its most public aspects, Chasar reorients our understanding of poetry’s relation to the media, throwing gasoline on the fire of a question we have dodged for too long: what is a poem? The old answers to that query won’t hold up in the wake of Chasar’s attention to the vulgar afterlives of bookish things. -- Daniel Tiffany, author of My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and KitschWith Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar secures his place as our foremost investigator of poetry as a popular practice—ordinary, ubiquitous, and, indeed, fundamental to American cultural life. Poetry is dead; long live poetry, untethered from the constraints of the printed page and in the wilds of new media. -- Rita Raley, author of Tactical MediaIn this timely and engaging study, Chasar examines the largely untold story of poetry as it has appeared in various forms of emerging media over the last century and a half . . .This well-written book will have a broad audience. * Choice *For those stuck in the dichotomy of print and screen, or the dichotomy of analog and digital, this book is for you. It is an argument that looks beyond these dichotomies, into what binds and frees, of what something is (unbound) when it is not limited to one type of inscription. * Instasociety *Chasar’s argument powerfully renovates how we imagine 'a literary form available to all.' * Genre *While poetry studies has in recent years increasingly considered the ways in which print . . . mediates the transmission of poetry, Chasar extends and complicates this exploration through his emphasis on non-print media and in doing so necessarily enlarges what should count as poetry and what strategies we might use to study it. * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Poetry Unbound1. Letters of Fire2. Receiving Millay3. “Overlook the Poem, but Look the Picture Over”4. Once More Into the Fray5. I Need a Phony Poet Tonight6. From Murder to milk and honeyAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisMike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, he follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats.Trade ReviewThis is a persuasive, thoroughly researched, memorable, and often delightful book. Mike Chasar has excelled in his ambitious coverage of primary sources. Moreover, this is a book that addresses questions that come up frequently in the poetry world about where and why and how "poetry matters," and about its place in the wider culture. -- Stephanie Burt, author of Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read PoemsPoetry is more than a creature of voice, hand, and press, as Chasar shows with verve, wit, insight, and sparkling detail. The public life of poetry in the twentieth-century United States is also a secret history of multimedia. Each medium remakes poetry. And poetry, in turn, remakes the media in which we live, move, and breathe. I love this book! -- John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental MediaBy disclosing what are at once poetry’s most inscrutable and its most public aspects, Chasar reorients our understanding of poetry’s relation to the media, throwing gasoline on the fire of a question we have dodged for too long: what is a poem? The old answers to that query won’t hold up in the wake of Chasar’s attention to the vulgar afterlives of bookish things. -- Daniel Tiffany, author of My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and KitschWith Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar secures his place as our foremost investigator of poetry as a popular practice—ordinary, ubiquitous, and, indeed, fundamental to American cultural life. Poetry is dead; long live poetry, untethered from the constraints of the printed page and in the wilds of new media. -- Rita Raley, author of Tactical MediaIn this timely and engaging study, Chasar examines the largely untold story of poetry as it has appeared in various forms of emerging media over the last century and a half . . .This well-written book will have a broad audience. * Choice *For those stuck in the dichotomy of print and screen, or the dichotomy of analog and digital, this book is for you. It is an argument that looks beyond these dichotomies, into what binds and frees, of what something is (unbound) when it is not limited to one type of inscription. * Instasociety *Chasar’s argument powerfully renovates how we imagine 'a literary form available to all.' * Genre *While poetry studies has in recent years increasingly considered the ways in which print . . . mediates the transmission of poetry, Chasar extends and complicates this exploration through his emphasis on non-print media and in doing so necessarily enlarges what should count as poetry and what strategies we might use to study it. * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Poetry Unbound1. Letters of Fire2. Receiving Millay3. “Overlook the Poem, but Look the Picture Over”4. Once More Into the Fray5. I Need a Phony Poet Tonight6. From Murder to milk and honeyAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisDrawing on many years of teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gareth Williams offers a brisk and lively reading of the poem that emphasizes why it speaks in compelling ways to a twenty-first-century audience. He shows how the Metamorphoses is not just a colorful collection of stories about change but an exploration of change itself.Trade ReviewSmart close readings abound, and Williams’s punchy analyses make the book fun to read, though they never obscure his mastery of the subject. * Publishers Weekly *The perfect sidekick to accompany readers on their journey through Ovid’s epic—whether approaching the Metamorphoses for the very first time or revisiting this ever-changing kaleidoscope of a poem. -- Genevieve Liveley, author of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A Reader’s GuideLucid, insightful, and lively, this book offers compelling new interpretations of Ovid that speak to current issues such as fake news, deceptive speech, sexual violence, gender inequity, and strategies of resistance within an autocracy. These are serious themes, but Williams adopts some of Ovid’s own wit and psychological nuance, providing an accessible and intellectually exciting approach to the Metamorphoses. -- Carole E. Newlands, author of Playing with Time: Ovid and the FastiThis is a wonderful book. It offers an introduction to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the life of the poet, guiding the reader through some of the epic’s most memorable moments. The primary pleasure of the book is to read about a great poem through the words of a sensitive and experienced teacher, who wears his erudition very lightly. The writing frequently sparkles, with contemporary allusions and wicked puns throughout. -- James Uden, Boston UniversityThe book is full of lively and provocative readings of Ovid’s greatest work, careening through its changing tales and tales about change to portray a work which, having endured throughout the two millennia since its composition, find a deep resonance even in—or especially in—the 2020s. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *A delightful volume....highly recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction1. Diversity, Idiosyncrasy, and Self-Discovery in the Metamorphoses2.The Liabilities of Language: Change and Instability in Ovid’s World of Words3. The Path of Deviance: Sexual Morality and the Incestuous Urge in the Metamorphoses4. Rough Justice: Victimization, Revenge, and Divine Punishment in the MetamorphosesEpilogueFurther ReadingIndex

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Book SynopsisDrawing on many years of teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gareth Williams offers a brisk and lively reading of the poem that emphasizes why it speaks in compelling ways to a twenty-first-century audience. He shows how the Metamorphoses is not just a colorful collection of stories about change but an exploration of change itself.Trade ReviewSmart close readings abound, and Williams’s punchy analyses make the book fun to read, though they never obscure his mastery of the subject. * Publishers Weekly *The perfect sidekick to accompany readers on their journey through Ovid’s epic—whether approaching the Metamorphoses for the very first time or revisiting this ever-changing kaleidoscope of a poem. -- Genevieve Liveley, author of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A Reader’s GuideLucid, insightful, and lively, this book offers compelling new interpretations of Ovid that speak to current issues such as fake news, deceptive speech, sexual violence, gender inequity, and strategies of resistance within an autocracy. These are serious themes, but Williams adopts some of Ovid’s own wit and psychological nuance, providing an accessible and intellectually exciting approach to the Metamorphoses. -- Carole E. Newlands, author of Playing with Time: Ovid and the FastiThis is a wonderful book. It offers an introduction to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the life of the poet, guiding the reader through some of the epic’s most memorable moments. The primary pleasure of the book is to read about a great poem through the words of a sensitive and experienced teacher, who wears his erudition very lightly. The writing frequently sparkles, with contemporary allusions and wicked puns throughout. -- James Uden, Boston UniversityThe book is full of lively and provocative readings of Ovid’s greatest work, careening through its changing tales and tales about change to portray a work which, having endured throughout the two millennia since its composition, find a deep resonance even in—or especially in—the 2020s. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *A delightful volume....highly recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction1. Diversity, Idiosyncrasy, and Self-Discovery in the Metamorphoses2.The Liabilities of Language: Change and Instability in Ovid’s World of Words3. The Path of Deviance: Sexual Morality and the Incestuous Urge in the Metamorphoses4. Rough Justice: Victimization, Revenge, and Divine Punishment in the MetamorphosesEpilogueFurther ReadingIndex

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Book SynopsisThe critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives to the standard models of writing about poetry, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of authors. Discussing neglected writers and those well-known in the West, these essays are unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative.Trade ReviewWhat would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modeling for us ‘styles of attention.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate. -- Maureen N. McLane, author of My PoetsRavinthiran is a rare critic: one whose deep-diving, finely wrought readings across multiple poetic traditions are dexterous as well as authoritative. He brings a poet’s enthusiasm for craft and language to a reevaluation of critical culture, speaking with great clarity and personality in a voice so capacious that we are compelled to listen, to learn. -- Sandeep Parmar, author of Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern WomanVidyan Ravinthiran writes with readerly passion and intellectual commitment about poetry he loves, at once deeply expert and finely attuned to the pleasures of literary language. The range of authors he celebrates is as impressive as the critical imagination with which he celebrates them. His is a distinctive and memorable voice which speaks eloquently to readers both within and without the academy. -- Seamus Perry, editor of Essays in CriticismVidyan Ravinthiran’s beautifully written, richly insightful collection is extraordinary in its geographic and cultural breadth, its incisive attention to form, its fusion of the strengths of journalistic and scholarly writing, and its chameleonic openness to, and close tracking of, the twists and turns of poetry. An eye-opening delight for poets and poetry readers. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global AgeIncisive, reflective, illuminating. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod * Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year *Ravinthiran is a rare critical mind whose sovereignty lies in an inextinguishable curiosity and drive to read more deeply. His critical writing is also inexorably beautiful. -- Sandeep Parmar * The White Review, Books of the Year *Probing and provoking, far-ranging but astringent, Ravinthiran would appear a natural successor to Michael Hofmann as a doyen of the long-form essay […] a steely and eye-opening book. -- David Wheatley * The Review of English Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction“A slave and worshiper at love’s doorstep”: Mir Taqi MirCensorship and the Role of the Poet in the Work of Ana BlandianaAt Home or Nowhere: A. K. RamanujanYour Thorns Are the Best Part of You: Marianne Moore and Stevie SmithEunice de Souza and Indian Speech“Emmental freedom”: Czesław Miłosz“There must be something to say”: On Verse SoundElizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, Communication, and Other PeopleTed Hughes, Keith Sagar, and the Poetics of Letter ProseRae Armantrout’s Lonely DreamDreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary SentencesSrinivas Rayaprol and Gāmini SalgādoYou Can’t Close Your Eyes for a Sec: Arvind Krishna MehrotraThom Gunn’s Shadows Hard as BoardGalway Kinnell, Trying to Become WingedA. R. Ammons and “the political (read, human) world”Postlyric and the Already Known: Dawn Lundy Martin“I am not speaking of or as myself or for any/one”: Vahni (Anthony) CapildeoBibliographyPermissionsIndex

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Book SynopsisPulitzer Prize-winner and former poet laureate of the United States, Rita Dove has written prolifically since the early 1970s. This study traces the development of Dove's literary voice, looking at the ways she combines racial specificity with the perspective of the unraced universal, and demonstrates how Dove transcended racial protocols.Trade Review"The book's scope is not limited to Dove's poetry. . . . It also includes an unexpected but welcome appendix, a 1998 interview with Dove that covers such wide ranging subjects as her relationship to the Black Arts Movement, what it was like to be U.S. Poet Laureate, her debts to the American modernist poet H.D., how living in the South has affected her writing, and her thoughts about moving into the new millennium."--African American Review

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Book SynopsisAn elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and genderTrade ReviewReceived an Honorable Mention in the competition for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA), 2012. "An important addition to the growing literature about jazz poetry. Recommended."--Choice "An extraordinarily original and important book about the musicality of African American poetic performance. Meta DuEwa Jones offers insightful and sophisticated readings and analyses of the relationship between black poetry and jazz. This wide-ranging and ambitious book will make an immediate impact on African American literary and cultural studies as well as performance studies."--Farah Jasmine Griffin, coauthor of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever"Like Melba Liston stepping to the microphone, trombone in hand, to punctuate one of her own arrangements with a newly improvised statement, Meta DuEwa Jones takes up the changes in the interrelationship between jazz and poetry and turns them out. Even those few readers who have read everything in print on the subject of jazz and verse will find that Jones has both new chapters and new verses, well worth multiple hearings."--Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation"Highly original… Jones's authoritative knowledge and passion for jazz and for poetry infuse this book, and allow her to move with sweeping range through nearly a century of African American poetic production."--Wasafiri“Meta DeEwa Jones's recent tour de force of contemporary criticism, The Muse is Music, most certainly must take its place among classic and recent critical studies of African-American poetry and, as Jones describes her topic, ‘jazz resonant’ writing.”—The Black ScholarTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1Riff, Remembrance, and Revision 1. Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes on the (Jazz) Record 33 2. Jazz Prosody: The Gendered Contours of the Post-Soul Coltrane Poem 85New Traditions, New Translations 3. Opening the Canary's Cage: Sex, Gender, and the Jazz Body 129 4. A Cave Canem Continuum or a Dark Room Renaissance? From Jazz Improvisation to Hip-Hop Stylization in Contemporary Black Poetry 167 Epilogue. "When the Muse Is Music": Collaboration and Improvisation in Jazz Poetics 209 Notes 231 Works Cited 249 Index 273

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Book SynopsisA denser, richer view of the history that hundreds of poets made.Trade ReviewA Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2013. "An important study . . . of how poetry finds itself in the world and becomes an integral part of it. Highly recommended."--Choice "A pathbreaking study. No other book treats the 'new verse' of the 1910s and early 1920s with such care and with such a sense of contextual detail. Our sense of what modern poetry can achieve--and how poetry helped shape a modernist sensibility--will be subtly but surely changed by what Newcomb offers here."--Edward Brunner, author of Cold War Poetry"A bold and meticulously researched revision of the history of modern American poetry. Newcomb's brilliant close readings illuminate the social and political dimensions of modern poetry and poetics."--Suzanne W. Churchill, coeditor of Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Norman Shapiro, a flute, harp, and violoncello of cat song, tells the crafty musical tale of the cat from medieval France until today. Shapiro, at his artistic apogee, created an English masterpiece in his Selected Lyrics of Théophile Gautier. But now with his Fe-Lines, he has invented a new genre, as T. S. Eliot did with Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The world is his pen. Who knows where the next Everest awaits him?"--Willis Barnstone, author of Moonbook and Sunbook"What makes a cat poem appealing to the reader? One of the salient features that I took from Fe-Lines is the constant desire to finish a poem with a 'menschliche Weisheit' (human insight of wisdom) that activates the reader's imagination and keeps the reader inside the movement of the poem. A major contribution to the field of letters and world literature."--Rainer Schulte, author of The Geography of Translation and Interpretation: Traveling between Languages“With beautiful illustrations and poems of every age and form, this book will please everyone (except dog lovers).”--World Literature Today

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Trade Review"Recommended."--Choice "Lowney is at his best when he turns his attention to the specific forms of jazz and its literatures. He is a careful close reader with an expert eye for minute technical correspondence between literary and musical forms." --African American Review"Jazz Internationalism is thought provoking. . . certain to stimulate the intellectual interests of a wide array of scholars of black radicalism, Afro-modernism, and jazz." --The Journal of African American History"Indispensable to African American literary and cultural studies, jazz studies, and internationalist leftist studies. Its discussion of how jazz is called forth as a form of utopianism as well as social and political criticism in radical African American writing marks an important step in the contemporary critical reconsideration of how conventionally discrete areas of history and culture may be seen in intersectional terms."--Gary Edward Holcomb, author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"En esta magistral investigación, Pérez-Rosario le da vida a una de las artistas más sobresalientes y audaces de la diáspora puertorriqueña del siglo XX. Un libro indispensable que presenta a Julia de Burgos en su extraordinaria plenitud."--Junot DíazTable of ContentsIlustraciones viiAgradecimientos ixIntroducción 11. Escribiendo la nación: feminismo, antiimperialismo y la Generación del 30 152. Nadie es profeta en su tierra: exilio, migración e identidad hemisférica 413. Más allá del mar: el periodismo como práctica cultural y política transnacional en Puerto Rico 624. Legados múltiples: Julia de Burgos y los escritores de la diáspora caribeña 855. Recordando a Julia de Burgos: ícono cultural, comunidad, pertenencia 119Conclusión: crear latinidad 143Notas 149Bibliografía 165Índice 181

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Book SynopsisA unique approach to the work of H.D., attuned to the culture-generating processes of writing and readingTrade Review"Simply superb. Morris's style is almost as great a pleasure as the impact of her ideas. It is amazing how much she can bring into imaginative and intellectual play, holding and complicating one layer of thought with another, and building to a remarkable sense of intellectual density and expansiveness."--Eileen Gregory, author of H.D. and Hellinism: Classic Lines

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Book SynopsisA collection of critical texts exploring poetry's engagement with the socialTrade Review"Recommended."--Choice "A brilliant resource."--Rain Taxi"It is time for this book. Poetry is studied more and more frequently with a cultural studies approach, and Damon and Livingston provide the perfect balance in this collection."--Juliana Spahr, coeditor of Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary and author of several collections of poetry"A reader that brings together foundational essays on the conjunction of poetry and cultural studies is not just timely but more and more urgent as the canon of poetry taught in the academy opens beyond a small clutch of 'masterpieces' and cultural studies begins to engage popular poetry, newspaper poetry, rap, slam, and other ephemeral performance poetries. This book is an important intervention in the reconfiguration of these fields of study."--Adalaide Morris, author of How to Live/What to Do: H.D.'s Cultural PoeticsTable of ContentsACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION 1Maria Damon and Ira LivingstonPrecursors 1 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 21 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 2 Two Essays on Poetry and Society 25 THEODOR ADORNO 3 On Some Motifs in Baudelaire 37 WALTER BENJAMIN 4 What Is a Minor Literature? 56 GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI 5 Of the Sorrow Songs 61 W. E. B. DU BOIS 6 A Theory of Discourse 67 ANTONY EASTHOPEEthnography 7 Some Aspects of Folk Poetry 77 AMERICO PAREDES 8 The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning 90 HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. 9 Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry 116 LILA ABU-LAUGHOD 10 The Poetric Construction of Self 133 STEVEN C. CATON 11 Tell Them about Us: Some Poems from Southie 147 MARIA DAMONMass Culture/Cultural Politics 12 The Bride of the Assembly Line: Radical Poetics in Construction 163 BARRETT WATTEN 13 Assembly Poetics in the Global Economy: Nicaragua 177 BRUCE CAMPBELL 14 Black Texts/Black Contexts 195 TRICIA ROSE 15 Kickin' Eality, Kickin' Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los Angeles 199 ROBIN D. G. KELLEY 16 Poetry for the People 213 AMITAVA KUMAR 17 La Douceur de foyer: Lyric Poetry of the Year1857 as a Model for the Communication of Social Norms 226 HANS ROBERT JAUSSNational (De)Formations 18 Smoke Rings: Worker-Poets in the France of Louis-Philippe 237 JACQUES RANCIERE 19 Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space 248 KRISTIN ROSS 20 Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics 266 JOSEPH HARRINGTON 21 Nation and Imagination 285 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY 22 Angel Island and the Poetics of Error 301 YUNTE HUANG 23 "HOO, HOO, HOO": Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Male Whiteness 310 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSISSubject (De)Formations 24 A Poem Is Being Written 333 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK 25 A Musician Is Being Beaten 340 JOHN MOWITT 26 Poetry and Anthropology 347 TRINH T. MINH-HA 27 Poetry Is Not a Luxury 355 AUDRE LORDE 28 A Blow Is Like an Instrument 359 CHARLES BERNSTEIN 359Reinventing Tradition 29 Sappho Is Burning: Fragmentary Introduction 375 PAGE DUBOIS 30 Genocide, Modernism, and American Verse: Reading Diana Der-Hovanessian 390 WALTER KALAIDJIAN 31 The Forms of Things Unknown 406 STEPHEN HENDERSON 32 History of the Voice, 1979=1981 417 KAMAU BRATHWAITE 33 Of Poetry and Power: Maya Angelou on the Inaugural Stage 428 ZOFIA BURR 34 Nuyorican Language 437 MIGUEL ALGARIN INDEX 447

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Book SynopsisJazz emerged during the political and social upheaval of world war, communist revolution, Red Scares, and the Black Migration. The tumult bred disagreements about the cultural significance of jazz that concerned both its African American roots and its international appeal. The questions about what was new or even radical about the music initiated debates that writers recapitulated for decades. Jazz Internationalism offers a bold reconsideration of jazz''s influence in Afro-modernist literature. Ranging from the New Negro Renaissance through the social movements of the 1960s, John Lowney articulates nothing less than a new history of Afro-modernist jazz writing. Jazz added immeasurably to the vocabulary for discussing radical internationalism and black modernism in leftist African American literature. Lowney examines how Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and many other writers employed jazz as both a critical social discourse and mode of artistic expression to explore Trade Review"Recommended."--Choice "Lowney is at his best when he turns his attention to the specific forms of jazz and its literatures. He is a careful close reader with an expert eye for minute technical correspondence between literary and musical forms." --African American Review"Jazz Internationalism is thought provoking. . . certain to stimulate the intellectual interests of a wide array of scholars of black radicalism, Afro-modernism, and jazz." --The Journal of African American History"Indispensable to African American literary and cultural studies, jazz studies, and internationalist leftist studies. Its discussion of how jazz is called forth as a form of utopianism as well as social and political criticism in radical African American writing marks an important step in the contemporary critical reconsideration of how conventionally discrete areas of history and culture may be seen in intersectional terms."--Gary Edward Holcomb, author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"En esta magistral investigación, Pérez-Rosario le da vida a una de las artistas más sobresalientes y audaces de la diáspora puertorriqueña del siglo XX. Un libro indispensable que presenta a Julia de Burgos en su extraordinaria plenitud."--Junot DíazTable of ContentsIlustraciones viiAgradecimientos ixIntroducción 11. Escribiendo la nación: feminismo, antiimperialismo y la Generación del 30 152. Nadie es profeta en su tierra: exilio, migración e identidad hemisférica 413. Más allá del mar: el periodismo como práctica cultural y política transnacional en Puerto Rico 624. Legados múltiples: Julia de Burgos y los escritores de la diáspora caribeña 855. Recordando a Julia de Burgos: ícono cultural, comunidad, pertenencia 119Conclusión: crear latinidad 143Notas 149Bibliografía 165Índice 181

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Book SynopsisThis tenth, and final, volume in the series of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne presents newly edited critical texts of 32 love lyrics. Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscripts and printed editions in which these poems have appeared, Volume 4.3 details the genealogical history of each poem, accompanied by a thorough prose discussion. The volume also presents a comprehensive digest of the commentary on these Songs and Sonets from Donne's time through 1999. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material for each poem is organized under various headings that complement the volume's companions, Volume 4.1 and Volume 4.2.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsShort Forms of Reference for Donne's WorksAbbreviations Used in the CommmentarySigla for Textual SourcesManuscripts Listed by Traditional ClassificationSymbols and Abbreviations Used in the Textual ApparatusFiguresGeneral IntroductionIntroduction to Volume 4.3Texts and ApparatusesWorks CitedIndex of Authors Cited in the CommentaryIndex of Writers and Historical Figures Cited in the CommentaryIndex of Other Poerms and Works of Donne Cited in the CommentaryIndex of TitlesIndex of First LinesAbout the Edition

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Book SynopsisDemonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. By speaking about or even as the dead, this work tells what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation.Trade ReviewA sensitive and superb treatment of Holocaust literature; the author . . . treats Holocaust art with sensitivity, introspection, respect, and humanity in a clear, readable, and elegant prose. Gubar's book will prove to be a seminal work in Holocaust studies. * H-Holocaust *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsPrefaceList of Abbreviations for citations1. The Holocaust Is Dying2. Masters of Disaster3. Suckled by Panic4. About Pictures Out of Focus5. Documentary Verse Bears Witness6. The Dead Speak7. "Could You Have Made an Elegy for Every One?"8. Poetry and SurvivalNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisThis is the first English translation of Il Fiore, the late-thirteenth-century narrative poem in 232 sonnets based on the Old French Roman de la Rose, and the Detto d'Amore, a free-wheeling version of many Ovidian precepts of love in 240 rhymed couplets. The elaborate allegory of the Fiore presents the complex workings of love, understood primarily as carnal passion, in the human psyche through the use of personifications of a wide array of characters who engage in various social (and bellic) interactions. There are personifications of social stereotypes and attitudes, mythological figures, abstract qualities, psychological and physical states, and personality traits.The Detto d'Amore includes features of the perennial controversy between proponents of the pleasures of erotic passion and those who counsel pursuit of the sublime joys found solely in the exercise of reason. The incomplete poem also contains a conventionalizedand idealizeddescrTrade Review“Casciani and Kleinhenz perform a valuable service to the field of general medieval studies with this well-constructed volume. It could be used as a textbook in the classroom, yet the translation can also serve as a research guide. It gives scholars the pertinent information to compare the Fiore with the French original; it delineates the recent scholarship on the texts; and it provides a useful and thorough bibliography. This work should open up these two Italian poems to students and researchers in the English-speaking world.” —Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies“The importance of [this work] lies in part in [the] possible attribution to the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, but even if he is not the author, the Fiore is a valuable witness to the literary taste and cultural concerns of medieval Italy and to matters of poetic influence and reception among different literary traditions.” —Translation Review“[A] welcome contribution to the area of Dante Studies and to the study of Old French literature and its medieval reception. [T]he English translation will be a great boon in making these two interesting poems available to specialists in Old French literature – and to all those with an interest in the Roman de la Rose. . . . The translation . . . is idiomatic and very readable, while nontheless, adhering closely to the lineation of the Italian text. It is thus completely accessible to those with no knowledge of Italian, while readers wishing to use the translation as an aid to reading the original text will have no trouble in doing so.” —Reading Medieval Studies

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Book SynopsisDrawn from 15 years of work, this text presents a selection of the verse of Henry Weinfield.

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Book SynopsisWritten between 1292 and 1295, the Vita Nuova consists of 31 poems inspired by the historical but idealised and mythologised Lady Beatrice. This bi-lingual edition contains Michael Barbi's 1932 Italian edition plus an English translation.Trade Review“Cervigni and Vasta are to be complimented for their laborious and successful undertaking. This edition will be extremely useful, for it presents us with a version of the Vita nuova that will open up new interpretive and pedagogical avenues.” —Italica“Whatever reputation this translation will gain for its scholarly accomplishments, its excellent overall design, and general ease of use is sure to reclaim a large body of lay readers and experts alike to this lesser known of Dante’s major works.” —Crisis“An important contribution for Dante specialists.” —Library Journal“Students and scholars of Dante and medieval philology will find much to ponder in the material so painstakingly assembled here.” —Choice

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Book SynopsisConcentrating on the sacrament of the altar, poverty, and conflicting versions of sanctity, Sanctifying Signs presents a critical study of Christian literature, theology, and culture in late medieval England. In this notable book, David Aers considers the diverse ways in which certain late medieval Christians and their Church engaged the immense resources of the Christian tradition in their own historical moment. Using a wide range of texts, Aers explores the complex theological, institutional, and political processes that shape and preserve tradition during changing circumstances. He is particularly interested in why some texts were judged by the late medieval Church to be orthodox and others heretical, and the effect of these judgments on the conversations and debates of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sanctifying Signs begins with accounts of the sacrament of the altar that were deemed orthodox in the late medieval Church. Aers then shifts his focus tTrade Review"David Aers's latest book makes a significant contribution to the dialogue about the significance of alternative versions of Christian doctrine and practice in late medieval England. Aers's grasp of these issues is impressive, and his detailed reading of the seemingly contradictory treatment of poverty in the C-version of Piers Plowman not only serves as a valuable extended annotation but may be read (and assigned) separately. . . I highly recommend this chapter as well as the rest of Sanctifying Signs. His approach should succeed to the degree that the reader cares, as Aers obviously does, about the ongoing relevance of the institutions and practices intelligent people died (and killed) to define and defend six centuries ago." —Sixteenth Century Journal“. . . incisive examination of late medieval religious beliefs and practices and their representations in and development by late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century English textuality. In both scope and depth this well-written inquiry will interest many medievalists studying late medieval theology and social and religious history.” —The Catholic Historical Review"Aers's close readings of a variety of prominent and less-known medieval texts make this a valuable interdisciplinary study. Recommended." —Choice"David Aers' latest book makes a significant contribution to the dialogue about the significance of alternative versions of Christian doctrine and practice in late medieval England. . . Beyond its medieval subject matter, Aers's book questions the relationship of critical reading to theological assumptions." —The Sixteenth Century Journal"David Aers's latest volume of intricately argued polemical essays concerns the contribution of texts to 'processes of tradition formation, reformation, and preservation' in late medieval English Christianity. . . Sanctifying Signs, merciless towards the 'exorbitance' of doctrines enforced at the time by the ecclesiastical hierarchy but also alert for paradoxes and divergences in the reformist position, will certainly claim a place in the burgeoning investigation of late medieval constructions of the Church." —MLR"David Aers has written another rich and provocative book in his ongoing exploration of religion's socially and politically constitutive role in late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century England. . . . Aers takes care not to conflate Langlandian and Wycliffite perspectives but rather to show the aberrant singularity of what in Arundel's church passed for orthodoxy. Tacitly ranged against its version of the Body of Christ are other, more biblical understandings whose diversity, complexity, and wealth Aers continues to teach us." —Speculum"As the title suggests, Sanctifying Signs is a study of both the power of signs to awaken holiness-'sanctifying' as a participle-and the processes by which signs come to be revered within a faith community-'sanctifying' as a gerund. Specifically, the book deals with the Eucharist, poverty, and home, and how these signs became venues in the large struggle within English Catholicism in late medieval England." —Christianity and Literature"English and Latin texts by William Langland, Nicholas Love, John Wyclif, Walter Brut, William Thorpe, and others are thus read, not through modern literary and political theorists, but through the Gospels, Aquinas's Summa theologica, and several contemporary theologians, especially Rowan Williams. Aers seeks to explore how theological controversies around several important late-medieval signs (the Eucharist; the sign of poverty; the house) were conducted in a range of academic and vernacular texts and how all participants in these controversies viewed the relation between theological theory and sociopolitical practice.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology“ . . . this provocative study explores the converging and diverging currents of orthodox and heterodox, or authorized and dissenting, or institutional and lay religion in late medieval England. . . . Aers's impressive expertise in various aspects (institutional, political, theological) on late medieval religion, emerging in diverse contexts (monastic, mendicant, lay, Wycliffite), affords him a multifaceted perspective.” —Religious Studies Review“This book is a literary study of some important Middle English texts, treating them as theological statements emanating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. . . for those interested in the intersection between religion and literature, this book will provide a great stimulus to fresh thinking on a theme that continually resurfaces in European, as well as in English culture.” —Sobornost

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Book SynopsisMark Amodio's book focuses on the influence of the oral tradition on written vernacular verse produced in England from the fifth to the fifteenth century. His primary aim is to explore how a living tradition articulated only through the public, performance voices of pre-literate singers came to find expression through the pens of private, literate authors. Amodio argues that the expressive economy of oral poetics survives in written texts because, throughout the Middle Ages, literacy and orality were interdependent, not competing, cultural forces.After delving into the background of the medieval oral-literate matrix, Writing the Oral Tradition develops a model of non-performative oral poetics that is a central, perhaps defining, component of Old English vernacular verse. Following the Norman Conquest, oral poetics lost its central position and became one of many ways to articulate poetry. Contrary to many scholars, Amodio argues that oral poetics did not disappear but Trade Review"In this exceptionally fine book, Amodio examines the process by which oral poetic performance interacted with written vernacular poetry in the English medieval tradition. . . . This closely argued and very detailed book examines a wide variety of texts—some well known to students of medieval literature, others less familiar—and considers technical issues of metrics and lexemes and broader issues of theme and imagery. This book makes a significant contribution to the study of the relationship between oral and written poetry in the medieval period. Essential." —Choice"Mark Amodio's book stands as an important addition to the growing body of work that insists upon at least some important continuities between Old and Middle English poetry, despite the obvious disjunctions. Amodio's method is to read Old and Middle English literature through the lens of 'oral poetics,' leading him to discern a tradition of such poetics extending from the beginnings of Old English verse through the Middle English period, although with generally diminishing affective force as the effects of literacy became more dominant." —Speculum"Amodio has made an important contribution to oral theory, to research methodology in this difficult area, and to our understanding of the actual workings of oral poetics-not only in the earliest period of English literature, but even more significantly in the progress of oral poetics through the later Middle Ages." —The Journal of Folklore Research "Mark C. Amodio's study of the early English vernacular poetic tradition is detailed and wide ranging. Proceeding chronologically, he discusses what he calls the 'oral poetics' of Anglo-Saxon England, before moving on to an exploration of what happened to this tradition after the Norman Conquest. His discussion of the transformation of form, lexis, and theme of the inherited 'oral poetics' by post-Conquest poets sheds fascinating new light on a little studied period of English poetry." —Medium Ævum“Mark Amodio uses the framework of the study of oral-traditional poetics to examine the continuities between Old and Middle English poetry; his particular focus lies with the complex shift from oral to written composition . . . Historians of early medieval orality and literacy will find in this book a useful access point into the oral-traditional study of poetics.” —Early Medieval Europe“ … an innovative, convincing, and thoroughly engaging 'study of the oral tradition's influence on the vernacular verse produced in England from the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon period in the fifth century C.E. through the close of the Middle Ages in the early fifteenth.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology“This valuable contribution addresses an item currently on the agenda of oral-formulaic theory—namely, coming to terms with written texts. Taken together, the different parts of Amodio's argument show that the freighted vocabulary, thematics, and story patterns of an oral poetics remain or can remain accessible to poets who compose in writing and create texts rather than performances. This is indeed a major revision of oral theory, and it is cogently set out.” —Journal of American Folklore“This is a well-conceived, well-structured, and well-written book that fills a significant gap in current scholarly discourse. Amodio is extremely well-informed about current oral theory, and presents a beautifully integrated thesis. This clear-sighted and provocative book both promises and delivers much.” —Andy Orchard, University of Toronto“This is a splendid, rewarding book destined to reshape critical thinking about medieval poetry in English. Amodio combines groundbreaking theory with a deep, wide-ranging command of relevant scholarship to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on an enormous and disparate collection of Old and Middle English poetry.” —John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia“Mark Amodio charts fascinating continuities and fragmentations between Anglo-Saxon oral poetics and those of the 12th and 13th centuries. Beginning with an overview of the expressive economy central to Anglo-Saxon oral poetics—for example, how a simplex such as belgan + mod functions in terms of conventional expectations and within an affective dynamics that can override some conventional details—Amodio shows in small ways and in large how an oral poetics influences the stylistic character of Old English verse no matter what the source texts might be. However, that only generates the beginning of this remarkable foray into continuities between Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest poetics. The study's heart is its exploration of manuscript appearance (as with pointing) and poetical texts exhibiting Anglo-Saxon kinds of practices, thematics, metrical arrangements and lexical collocations. One of the key texts here is Layamon's Brut and some of the thematics and collocations involve words for rage, boasting, ritual behavior in the hall, leadership and anger. The continuities Amodio explicates are compelling, as are the eventual departures he documents. More than a major contribution, Writing the Oral Tradition is an exciting renovation within the burgeoning field of English 12th and 13th-century studies.” —John M. Hill, U.S. Naval Academy

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Book SynopsisRobert Archambeau examines the influence of the poet and critic Yvor Winters on his final generation of graduate students at Stanford in the early 1960s: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck. Archambeau divides the poets into two groups, laureates and heretics. Hass and Pinsky, each of whom served multiple terms as United Sates Poet Laureate, achieved both popular recognition and institutional renown. In contrast, the poetic accomplishments of Matthias, McMichael, and Peck (and to some extent Winters himself), the heretics, have not resulted in wide readership or institutional canonization. Archambeau begins with the context of the modernist poetics Winters first espoused and then rejected. The story that follows--of how his five most prominent students accepted, rejected, or transformed Winters''s poetics, and how these poets went on to greater or lesser degrees of success in the field of late twentieth-century lettersilluminates the cultTrade Review"I know of no other study of twentieth-century American poetry that so carefully and interestingly treats the works and careers of a single figure (Yvor Winters) and five of his students. The varying critical and public fates of Winters and the poets who worked under him make a fascinating study, even gesturing toward a global history of postwar American poetry." —Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University“This book is about the complexities of the relation between Yvor Winters and five former students as those complexities emerge in the poems themselves. Within these terms, it is exemplary because, unlike most critics and reviewers, Archambeau is not out to polemically endorse any specific position Winters himself took; he is as interested in departures from Winters’ orthodoxy as in adherence; he is an extraordinarily sensitive reader of a considerable range of poetry.” —Evan Watkins, University of California, Davis“Archambeau’s unique study will please—perhaps fascinate—those with a serious interest in US poetry. . . . Archambeau taps deep into the traditions of poetry in English, revealing his knowledge of the many schools and tendencies that developed in Winters’s lifetime and about previous critical work. The chapters on Winters’s literary offspring provide worthy introductions, but his book is ultimately a meditation on taste and the vicissitudes of literary fame.” —Choice". . . a compelling meditation on the mechanics of canonization. Building on the work of David Kellogg, Alan Golding, and Jed Rasula, the study focuses on the institutional and social dynamics that produce different levels of popular and critical success among authors active during the same time period. . . . The field needs more books like Laureates and Heretics." —Contemporary Literature

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Book SynopsisPresents a sustained close reading of the final version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian poem of the Middle Ages in English.Trade Review“As a biblical scholar and historian of ancient Christianity, I knew next to nothing about Piers Plowman before reading David Aers’s completely accessible book, but I feel I have learned a huge amount from it. This magisterial and powerful exposition is certainly informative about a period of pre-Reformation English religious and political history not well known to many of us. But it is also timely for today. The book demonstrates how relevant Piers Plowman is, at least in Aers’s interpretation, for current epistemology, ecclesiology, politics, and religion.” —Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University“David Aers, as a master interpreter, shows us how he reads Langland and, while doing so, instructs us in how to read. His brilliant essay models for us how it is possible, and indeed desirable, to open the usually well-policed border between theological reflection and literary analysis and thereby aim at a fuller reading of what a life of faith encompasses. Along the way, we gain an appreciation of William Langland’s formidable Middle English epic masterpiece, Piers Plowman, and the riches it repays our careful attention." —James Wetzel, Augustinian Endowed Chair in the Thought of St. Augustine and Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University"Beyond Reformation? is a remarkable book by a master who has creatively invented a form to match and elucidate its complex and compelling object of attention. The book is designed for all readers interested in late medieval English and early modern literary and theological culture. Many scholars will read it, especially scholars of Middle English literature. It is less an introduction than a re-introduction of an extraordinary and very readable kind. I expect it to be received with lively acclaim within that large field." —James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University"Beyond Reformation? is a singular and immensely rewarding book, a theological meditation on the nature of the Church and the Christian life by means of a close engagement with the Middle-English poem Piers Plowman. Difficult to summarize, the book reads as something of a marvelous fugue, with themes and authors appearing, disappearing, and reappearing transformed into new guises as author David Aers imitates the dialectical processes of his poetic subject." —Reading Religion“For those of us who have committed ourselves to the life-long study of the poem, Aers’ book offers a refreshingly clean and straightforward take on it—one that focuses on . . . a strong and consistent through-line that has consequences not only for us as readers of the poem, but also for us as sometimes unwilling participants in massive and coercive hierarchies of power.” —The Medieval Review “Aers’s book is provocative, challenging, memorable, and rewarding.” —Modern Philology“There is much to admire in this book . . . [it] has the advantage of Aers’s style of writing, which is very pleasant to read and often provides a poetic touch that reflects its source material.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Even those most likely to disagree with Aers will find his ‘idiosyncratic little book’ very well worth reading. It is passionately sincere, richly informative, and always stimulating.” —Medium Aevum“Overall, the work is an incredible display of scholarship, and few give the same level of details found in Aers’s writing. Aers has written a book that takes an incredibly complex discussion and made it surprisingly accessible to scholars from multiple disciplines.” —Sixteenth Century Journal

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Book SynopsisThese three poem sequences read like novellas, with each poem/tale set in a real time and place, and each documented with original photographs from scrapbooks and archives.

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Book SynopsisIn The Extravagant Robert Baker explores the interplay between poetry and philosophy in the modern period, engaging a broad range of writers: Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard in a chapter on the sublime; Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille in a chapter on visionary quest; and Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida in a chapter on apocalyptic negativity. His guiding concern is to illuminate adventures of extravagant or wandering language that, from the romantic period on, both poets and philosophers have undertaken in opposition to the dominant social and discursive frames of a pervasively instrumentalized world. The larger interpretative narrative shaping the book is that a dialectic of instrumental reason and creative negativity has been at work throughout modern culture. Baker argues that adventures of exploratory wandering emerge in the romantic period as displaced articulations of older religious discourses. Given the dominant trends of the modern world, however, Trade Review". . . Baker sees modernity as a dialectical struggle between increasingly organized instrumental societies and constructive, energetic, and creative negativity." —Religious Studies Review ". . . Baker is surely right to see a kind of displaced religious longing behind many of these writers. . . Scholars looking for common themes uniting Romanticism and now-fading postmodernity will find a support here. . . " —Choice"The Extravagant is a fascinating and ambitious study of the interplay between philosophy and poetry in the modern period." —The Virginia Quarterly Review". . . The Extravagant is an engaging book that will have many admirers among the ever-widening circle of 'religionists without religion.' It makes a good case for the continuity of romantic and modernist poetics despite the clear break between expressivism and constructivism in twentieth-century theory and practice." —Christianity and Literature“ . . . his richly erudite, lucidly intelligent, and beautifully written book is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand and reflect on the trajectory of modern culture.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Review“Baker locates the origin of this 'extravagant' wandering not in the Homeric plot of return to a lost household, but rather in the Biblical theme of 'crossing' over or through to a new heaven or a new earth, and in the desire to make all things new . . . Baker further argues that the major 20th-century philosophers in the Continental tradition have been inspired by these 'extravagant' poets; as a result there has been a remarkable 'interanimation' between poetry and philosophy in our time.” —The Heythrop Journal “In conclusion, and in good extravagant fashion, I'll say this: Baker's book is absolutely fascinating, interesting, and compelling, in spite of its forcing the reader to wander almost to exhaustion-but then such is the nature of both the extravagant and the negative.” —Hyperion"Robert Baker's The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy deals boldly and brilliantly with its titular subjects as ways of exploring perhaps arbitrating lofty, even ultimate issues. . . . This structure is intriguing, but even more impressive is Baker's command of his voluminous and difficult subject matter." —The Georgia Review“Baker’s great strengths—apart from the scale and urgency of his wonderfully conceived topic—are his prodigious learning, his luminous intelligence, and his probing diagnostic vision. He has a truly remarkable capacity to move scrupulously and profoundly between poetry and philosophical thought.” —Peter Sacks, Harvard University"This is an outstanding book about the inter-relations between poetry and philosophy. It's splendidly written, impressively argued and genuinely original. I read it with great admiration." —Mark W. Edmundson, University of Virginia

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Book SynopsisRobert Baker explores the interplay between poetry and philosophy in the modern period, engaging a broad range of writers.Trade Review". . . Baker sees modernity as a dialectical struggle between increasingly organized instrumental societies and constructive, energetic, and creative negativity." —Religious Studies Review ". . . Baker is surely right to see a kind of displaced religious longing behind many of these writers. . . Scholars looking for common themes uniting Romanticism and now-fading postmodernity will find a support here. . . " —Choice"The Extravagant is a fascinating and ambitious study of the interplay between philosophy and poetry in the modern period." —The Virginia Quarterly Review". . . The Extravagant is an engaging book that will have many admirers among the ever-widening circle of 'religionists without religion.' It makes a good case for the continuity of romantic and modernist poetics despite the clear break between expressivism and constructivism in twentieth-century theory and practice." —Christianity and Literature“ . . . his richly erudite, lucidly intelligent, and beautifully written book is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand and reflect on the trajectory of modern culture.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Review“Baker locates the origin of this 'extravagant' wandering not in the Homeric plot of return to a lost household, but rather in the Biblical theme of 'crossing' over or through to a new heaven or a new earth, and in the desire to make all things new . . . Baker further argues that the major 20th-century philosophers in the Continental tradition have been inspired by these 'extravagant' poets; as a result there has been a remarkable 'interanimation' between poetry and philosophy in our time.” —The Heythrop Journal “In conclusion, and in good extravagant fashion, I'll say this: Baker's book is absolutely fascinating, interesting, and compelling, in spite of its forcing the reader to wander almost to exhaustion-but then such is the nature of both the extravagant and the negative.” —Hyperion"Robert Baker's The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy deals boldly and brilliantly with its titular subjects as ways of exploring perhaps arbitrating lofty, even ultimate issues. . . . This structure is intriguing, but even more impressive is Baker's command of his voluminous and difficult subject matter." —The Georgia Review“Baker’s great strengths—apart from the scale and urgency of his wonderfully conceived topic—are his prodigious learning, his luminous intelligence, and his probing diagnostic vision. He has a truly remarkable capacity to move scrupulously and profoundly between poetry and philosophical thought.” —Peter Sacks, Harvard University"This is an outstanding book about the inter-relations between poetry and philosophy. It's splendidly written, impressively argued and genuinely original. I read it with great admiration." —Mark W. Edmundson, University of Virginia

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Book SynopsisFor years, I''ve wondered in amazement how Walt McDonald does what he does, poem after poem, book after book. He sings like no one else. In Climbing the Divide, McDonald has made his strongest collection of poems yet. David Citino, author of The News and Other Poems Climbing the Divide must have been written with a pen Walt McDonald dipped into his heart. Crisscrossing generations, poems detail watching a grandfather with knuckles the size of walnuts carve a grizzly bear out of oak, taking car keys away from a father ''who drove tanks for Patton'' and thinking about nights in the jungle of Vietnam while pushing a granddaughter in a swing because her father is training overseas for Desert Storm. Binding us to his Texas world in sensual detail about men with big-boned fists who inhabit a land where the moon pockmarks the sky, Walt McDonald refuses to let moments of communion be swallowed by ''war on every channel.'' His poems stay lodged in the heart to remTrade Review"Like feathers, [McDonald’s] poems have both lightness and strength; he understands the poetic virtue of understatement and the human virtue of humility. These are not experimental poems; they are deeply, originally traditional, and just as deeply accomplished."—ForeWord

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Book SynopsisFor years, I''ve wondered in amazement how Walt McDonald does what he does, poem after poem, book after book. He sings like no one else. In Climbing the Divide, McDonald has made his strongest collection of poems yet. David Citino, author of The News and Other Poems Climbing the Divide must have been written with a pen Walt McDonald dipped into his heart. Crisscrossing generations, poems detail watching a grandfather with knuckles the size of walnuts carve a grizzly bear out of oak, taking car keys away from a father ''who drove tanks for Patton'' and thinking about nights in the jungle of Vietnam while pushing a granddaughter in a swing because her father is training overseas for Desert Storm. Binding us to his Texas world in sensual detail about men with big-boned fists who inhabit a land where the moon pockmarks the sky, Walt McDonald refuses to let moments of communion be swallowed by ''war on every channel.'' His poems stay lodged in the heart to remTrade Review"Like feathers, [McDonald’s] poems have both lightness and strength; he understands the poetic virtue of understatement and the human virtue of humility. These are not experimental poems; they are deeply, originally traditional, and just as deeply accomplished."—ForeWord

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Book SynopsisThe poems in this work examine a variety of cultural, natural and personal damages in a lyrical voice ironically marked by intense beauty. This disjunction is what makes the volume so disturbing and yet so tantalizing.

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Book SynopsisIn Deep-Rooted Things, Rob Doggett examines Yeats''s shifting relationship with the warring discourses of British cultural imperialism and Irish nationalism during Ireland''s transition from colony to partially independent nation. By focusing on key historical events that Yeats witnessed and on the nationalist movements he both embraced and resisted, Doggett identifies the core features of Yeats''s aesthetic program through new readings of central poems and plays in the Yeats canon.Doggett presents Yeatsian nationalism as a fluid category, a series of masks that Yeats adopted, rejected, and re-created throughout his life. He casts Yeats''s continual artistic reinventionhis privileging of contradiction over resolutionas repeated attempts to provide in art some foundations for national unity. He reveals Yeats''s deep and often conflicted response to issues of identity, history, and nationhoodissues always central to discourses of colonization, colonial resistance, and poTrade Review“According to Doggett, Yeats' nationalism reflects an imagined nation in which all 'accept a common design' without demanding a specific vision. Focusing on the first decade of the 20th century and on 1919-28, Doggett reads drama and poetry as dialectical, moving between unity and disunity, reinventing the present in light of the past. . . Doggett shows Yeats' movement from imagined exile to poems of engagement to poems informed by his visionary system. This cycle provides a space where the Irish nation can be contemplated and imagined anew." —Choice"Rob Doggett's Deep-Rooted Things is a wonderfully nuanced, deeply thoughtful study which should have a lasting place in Yeats studies. Richly responsive to the twists and turns of Yeats's thinking, profoundly revealing of the currents and crosscurrents in his magnificent oeuvre, this is a major contribution." —Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia"Doggett defines Yeats's nationalism in a particularly effective, original, and compelling way. Yeats's nationalism is not a new topic, but many scholars have tended to see it as something that is intellectually simple, divorced from the complexities of Yeats's thought. Of those who acknowledge its complexity, few actually demonstrate this complexity at length, which is what Doggett has done." —Marjorie Howes, Associate Professor of English, Boston College and author of Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness

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Book SynopsisFocusing on particular characters, situations, or emotionsusually with little or no explicit plotlyric song poses interpretive challenges to the listening audience. Without an overt plot, how does one understand what a song is about? Are there rules or norms for how to interpret them? Do these rules remain the same from culture to culture, or do they vary?By looking at the ways in which cultures in Northern Europe interpret lyric songs, Thomas A. DuBois illuminates both commonalities of interpretive practice and unique features of their musical traditions. DuBois draws on sets of lyric songs from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to explore the question of meaning in folklore, especially the role of traditional audiences in appraising and understanding nonnarrative songs.DuBois''s examples range from the medieval and early modern periods to the late twentieth century. His nuanced study explicates folk practices of interpretationa native herTrade Review“Having so much comparative material under one cover is no small merit, and from this point of view the book will be of use to students of oral literature and its offshoots. In his ability to read and enjoy texts in so many extremely difficult languages DuBois may have no rivals.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology“. . . this book studies lyric song in the literature of northern European countries from Iceland to Finland. DuBois presents theory in the introduction; the six subsequent chapters take up subjects ranging from medieval religious lyric and lyric within the medieval epic tradition of Iceland, England, Ireland, and Wales to song in Shakespeare and songs of a living Irish singer from County Meath. This is a deep, penetrating exploration, and the range is extraordinary . . . Scholars and musicians alike will find this book a treasure trove.” —Choice“. . . DuBois provides an interesting approach to the interpretation of folk songs from Northern Europe by establishing various axes that enable the reader to analyze the meaning and significance of these songs through various frames.” —Western Folklore"Thomas DuBois's new book demonstrates an extraordinary range of languages and cultural traditions and should appeal to a correspondingly broad readership. He writes, too, for Everyman—a skillful elucidator of lyric in the clothing of a theory-oriented folklorist. DuBois's schema for tracking the various forms of reception and how they govern 'meaning,' especially in performed literature, is comprehensive, but the lover of individual poems will not find that they have been sacrificed to theory." —Joseph Harris, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and Professor of Folklore, Harvard University"In his ground-breaking book, Thomas DuBois draws on studies in oral tradition and on literary approaches to make the case for a European lyric mode of wide-ranging breath. Students of medieval studies, literary studies, and folklore all will benefit from his work." —John Miles Foley, Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, University of Missouri

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Book SynopsisStudents of English literature now rarely receive instruction in versification (theory or practice) at either the undergraduate or the graduate level. The Long and the Short of It is a clear, straightforward account of versification that also functions as an argument for a renewed attention to the formal qualities of verse and for a renewed awareness of the forms and traditions that have shaped the way we think about English verse. After an introduction and discussion of basic principles, Joseph A. Dane devotes a chapter to quantitative verse (Latin), syllabic or isosyllabic verse (French), and accentual verse (Old English/Germanic). In addition to basic versification systems, the book includes a chapter on musical forms, since verse was originally sung. Most serious studies of these systems in English have been designed for language students, and are not accessible to students of English literature or general readers. This book will enable the reader to scan verse in Trade Review“Joseph Dane’s The Long and the Short of It is simply the clearest, most concise, and also the most elegant book about versification that I have ever read. What a relief to have this extraordinary tool for the classroom and to be able to pass it along to friends who are poetry readers as well. Dane's section on “The Power of Music” is a revelation in its discussion of the practical distinctions between systems of literary and musical notation. This is a long overdue and remarkably precise guide to those practices that have too often remained mysterious to many readers of poetry, both old and new.” —David St. John, University of Southern California“This book makes an original contribution in its approach, which demonstrates how English prosody depends on and derives from the metrical systems of earlier poetic forms. But it does more than that: it brings into one place a succinct description of Latin prosody—surprisingly hard to find—that is then linked to other forms students might have heard of in other classes.” —Sarah Spence, University of Georgia"This is a remarkably clear, succinct, and at times witty handbook to literary versification. Its primary goal is to explain the basic forms of prosody in Latin, French, English, and the older Germanic languages. Students of literature, and of creative writing, need to understand that verbal expression is not the unmediated release of sensibility but the crafted and highly nuanced organization of that sensibility in forms." —Seth Lerer, University of California, San Diego“ . . . Dane has ‘made a career’ publishing books that challenge consensus on common myths in the field: ‘the critical mythology of irony,’ ‘the myth of a “textualized” Chaucer,’ and ‘the myth of print culture.’ In this latest book, Dane challenges the ubiquitous notion of iambic pentameter as a purely English form, arguing instead for the simpler practice of counting syllables. A helpful glossary of terms is included. Studious undergraduates may find explanations and models of forms (which appear in the original language as well as in translation) helpful.” —Choice

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Book SynopsisWhat You Hear in the Dark gathers the best of Sonia Gernes'' three previous books of poetry and builds on their themes with three sections of new poems that give lyric voice to the thoughts and questions that surface in the midnight hours: the value of the lives we''ve chosen, time and mortality, the struggles with belief. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Gernes is convinced that we find the universal by going deeply and authentically into the personal, and these poems detail the small human dramas that reveal us to ourselves.Both the new and the selected poems distill Gernes'' impulse to give voice to the voiceless and to nudge her lyrics toward narrative. She writes of survival and longing on a flat and fertile earth in poems from Brief Lives, of the resiliency and beauty of mid-life women in poems from Women at Forty, of a young woman thrust into teaching at a Minnesota Indian School in 1930, and a pioneer woman undone by Australia''s forbidding terrain in Trade Review“Gernes' love of language is evident in every poem in this collection, including powerful narrative poems from A Breeze Called the Freemantle Doctor (1997) and insightful meditative lyrics on aging and poignant memory-driven poems from other earlier, now out-of-print collections. This volume begins, however, with 25 new poems that display Gernes' best poetic gifts: thoughtful economy of words, measured reflections, lyrically fluid language, and gently pulsing rhythms. Several of the more heartrending current poems tackle a mother's Alzheimer's, a father's death, and a newfound voice of loneliness that cries but also sings of ‘the force that propels / even the lonely soul / to seek and gain the sky.’ Gernes is a highly accessible and engaging poet who will surely appeal to many types of reader.” —Booklist“What You Hear in the Dark is a masterful collection of songs, of singing words, of pictures, of ideas, of poetry. It will lead you to wondrous places.” —Midwest Book Review"This collection of poems by Sonia Gernes develops a striking voice and powerful drive, displays astonishing branchings of the imagination and manifests the proper double vision of the poet: an outer eye for the personal and immediate and an inner for the most closely-held truths of the community." —John Engels, author of Recounting the Seasons"What You Hear in the Dark is one of those rare, loving, heartbreaking books that has come together as all the necessary parts of a life come together, in order to help us connect anew. I am grateful for Sonia Gernes' generosity." —Gary Gildner, author of Somewhere Geese Are Flying

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Book SynopsisThe poetry in Humanophone, the third volume from award-winning poet Janet Holmes, celebrates composers and creators such as Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, Leon Theremin, and George Ives, who had to invent new instruments to capture the music heard in their mind's ear. Taking its title from a George Ives inventionan instrument made from a group of humans, each of whom sings a single note, arrayed like a xylophoneHumanophone appears on its surface to be about music. But its real subject is the artist's creative dilemmahow to deliver a new idea, whether it be a song or a poem, through existing media.Holmes works language into a variety of forms both familiarsyllabics, couplets, villanelles, sonnetsand engagingly new. With everything from kumquats to abandoned wedding pictures, Clara Bow to Bill Robinson, Keats's belle dame to Dante's Francesca, feng shui to a recipe for octopus, Humanophone celebrates how the body shapes art from the world it isTrade Review“. . . these poems surprise, they are carefully crafted, intelligent first-person lyrics—the line-breaks alone are a lesson in poetic craft—but often untraditional, despite the appearance of some recognizable forms. . . . Having come to respect how words are made new in this book, I went back to my dictionary to find "ferment" is not only a cause of agitation or intense activity, but also a living organism. Humanophone has forever changed the word for me.” —Women’s Review of Books“Holmes’... pursuit of new methodology invigorates and vibrates throughout the book.... Throughout Humanophone, Holmes continues to develop her always musical sense of the multiple voices within the writer, and proves herself to be, as Partch said of himself, ‘a profound traditionalist, but of an unusual sort.’” —Boston Review"I was immediately taken by the true originality of conception, the inventive audacity, the subtlety of phrasing and vocabulary of Janet Holmes’s poems. Music in these pieces becomes a metaphor, a true metaphor that cannot be paraphrased but sends out its illuminating beams over the singularity of our lives, our life. The delicacy and subtlety of her work have grown with each reading." —W. S. Merwin"Holmes makes moving and amusing poems . . . a most memorable concert." —Booklist“These are not poems built to thunder-nor is the book itself constructed this way, but rather to create a space for us to hear those slight, nearly invisible sounds and moments that all but get lost-not a flute, but 'the echo of a flute,' that sound 'the unborn listen . . . to . . . conducted through bone, through fluid and dark' before, in the face of unfiltered reality, 'it's different now-harsher-—'” —Poetry International"Humanophone creates an extended meditation on sound as it is shaped by a body, received by the human ear, and woven by the brain into musical compositions. . . .The musical subjects of Humanophone are not only well-researched and explored in varied forms and tones, but also woven beautifully into a brilliant and cohesive design. . . .With Humanophone, Janet Holmes enters and extends the dialogue on poetics in the twenty-first century." —Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature and A Fish to Feed All Hunger“The book is full of various delights.” —Beloit Poetry Journal, Fall 2002“Witty, learned, bedazzling, bold: the poems of Janet Holmes’s new book veer before our eyes from clarity and good humor into aesthetic mystery and a darker irony. This poet is beautifully unpredictable as to subject and mode, the variety of her purposes winningly enlivening the forms they invent. For her, music is more than metaphor. It is the characteristic shape of her breath, a way of beholding. As Humanophone testifies, the idea of a human-voice instrument is enacted, again and again, in the notation and perfect pitch of these poems.” —James Applewhite“...Holmes borrows her project from history, mining lives to find a single tone to convey the creative experience, its daily trials, its processes, its awe. Holmes masters the broad metaphor, sampling stories ranging from a man beating an octopus against a counter, to the reinvention of sounds by Raymond Scott.... The result is a book unified by a central conceit: how to catch life, with its beautiful, funny, and regrettable sounds, and replicate the experience for readers and listeners. Perhaps what is most intriguing about this collection is the sheer eclectic nature of its subjects and the varied mind that connects them. Sirenic.... Holmes parallels the protagonist of her poems, leaving readers with the certainty that this compulsion is toward something brave.” —ForeWord Magazine“Holmes is a wonderful poet—one of the best of her generation now at work in America.” —John Matthias

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Book SynopsisThe poetry in Humanophone, the third volume from award-winning poet Janet Holmes, celebrates composers and creators such as Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, Leon Theremin, and George Ives, who had to invent new instruments to capture the music heard in their mind's ear. Taking its title from a George Ives inventionan instrument made from a group of humans, each of whom sings a single note, arrayed like a xylophoneHumanophone appears on its surface to be about music. But its real subject is the artist's creative dilemmahow to deliver a new idea, whether it be a song or a poem, through existing media.Holmes works language into a variety of forms both familiarsyllabics, couplets, villanelles, sonnetsand engagingly new. With everything from kumquats to abandoned wedding pictures, Clara Bow to Bill Robinson, Keats's belle dame to Dante's Francesca, feng shui to a recipe for octopus, Humanophone celebrates how the body shapes art from the world it isTrade Review“. . . these poems surprise, they are carefully crafted, intelligent first-person lyrics—the line-breaks alone are a lesson in poetic craft—but often untraditional, despite the appearance of some recognizable forms. . . . Having come to respect how words are made new in this book, I went back to my dictionary to find "ferment" is not only a cause of agitation or intense activity, but also a living organism. Humanophone has forever changed the word for me.” —Women’s Review of Books“Holmes’... pursuit of new methodology invigorates and vibrates throughout the book.... Throughout Humanophone, Holmes continues to develop her always musical sense of the multiple voices within the writer, and proves herself to be, as Partch said of himself, ‘a profound traditionalist, but of an unusual sort.’” —Boston Review"I was immediately taken by the true originality of conception, the inventive audacity, the subtlety of phrasing and vocabulary of Janet Holmes’s poems. Music in these pieces becomes a metaphor, a true metaphor that cannot be paraphrased but sends out its illuminating beams over the singularity of our lives, our life. The delicacy and subtlety of her work have grown with each reading." —W. S. Merwin"Holmes makes moving and amusing poems . . . a most memorable concert." —Booklist“These are not poems built to thunder-nor is the book itself constructed this way, but rather to create a space for us to hear those slight, nearly invisible sounds and moments that all but get lost-not a flute, but 'the echo of a flute,' that sound 'the unborn listen . . . to . . . conducted through bone, through fluid and dark' before, in the face of unfiltered reality, 'it's different now-harsher-—'” —Poetry International"Humanophone creates an extended meditation on sound as it is shaped by a body, received by the human ear, and woven by the brain into musical compositions. . . .The musical subjects of Humanophone are not only well-researched and explored in varied forms and tones, but also woven beautifully into a brilliant and cohesive design. . . .With Humanophone, Janet Holmes enters and extends the dialogue on poetics in the twenty-first century." —Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature and A Fish to Feed All Hunger“The book is full of various delights.” —Beloit Poetry Journal, Fall 2002“Witty, learned, bedazzling, bold: the poems of Janet Holmes’s new book veer before our eyes from clarity and good humor into aesthetic mystery and a darker irony. This poet is beautifully unpredictable as to subject and mode, the variety of her purposes winningly enlivening the forms they invent. For her, music is more than metaphor. It is the characteristic shape of her breath, a way of beholding. As Humanophone testifies, the idea of a human-voice instrument is enacted, again and again, in the notation and perfect pitch of these poems.” —James Applewhite“...Holmes borrows her project from history, mining lives to find a single tone to convey the creative experience, its daily trials, its processes, its awe. Holmes masters the broad metaphor, sampling stories ranging from a man beating an octopus against a counter, to the reinvention of sounds by Raymond Scott.... The result is a book unified by a central conceit: how to catch life, with its beautiful, funny, and regrettable sounds, and replicate the experience for readers and listeners. Perhaps what is most intriguing about this collection is the sheer eclectic nature of its subjects and the varied mind that connects them. Sirenic.... Holmes parallels the protagonist of her poems, leaving readers with the certainty that this compulsion is toward something brave.” —ForeWord Magazine“Holmes is a wonderful poet—one of the best of her generation now at work in America.” —John Matthias

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Book Synopsisf2f: Shorthand for face-to-face, as in meeting someone in real life, flesh-to-flesh, as opposed to in the electronic world of cyberspace. Used in chat rooms and while instant messaging on the Internet. At the core of this challenging new collection from Janet Holmes is the conceit of the sense of sight and the complex role it plays in women''s self-identities and relationships. Emily Dickinson is introduced as the iconic female writer who, unread in her time, is frequently misinterpreted and unheard. Holmes relates Dickinson''s self-isolation to the writer''s isolation from the reader and the intimacy of the act of reading. Echo, Eurydice, and Erosother E figures, these mythological, their stories relying on seeing and being seenare related by Holmes to twentieth-century counterparts manifesting as an anorexic, a flamboyant dresser, and a love god, respectively. Holmes intersperses her meditation with the language of online text-messaging, employing it asTrade Review"Holmes's attention to sound ("write with light / durable words indelible") is familiar poetic territory, but here it takes on new meaning because it so exceeds, or opposes, the text-messaging medium from which the language is drawn. This is like William Carlos Williams's experiments—or Bob Creeley's—in the excerpting and reframing of casual speech; the perception that a general method could be applied to a new, apparently unpromising and impoverished linguistic realm is one of the book's most forward brilliances." —Charles O. Hartman, Connecticut College"E, Echo, Eurydice, Emily and Eros—legacy resonance meets current disturbance f2f in Janet Holmes's melancholy music; reader, she addresses you, as she gently probes, pings, love life on the network." —Stephanie Strickland, author of V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una"In F2F, the word-wall between author and reader becomes a projection screen for a shadow-play of sad couplings—Echo and Narcissus, Eurydice and Orpheus, a pair of instant-messaging lovers. Be warned: the witty, techy feel of Holmes' writing is the flashy surface of a bruising vision of human interaction in which self-exposure is impossible and invisibility is punishingly lonely." —Catherine Wagner, author of Macular Hole and Miss America“Drawing heavily from the compact linguistic style of modern text messaging, F2F (shorthand for 'face to face,' that is, meeting someone in real life rather than in cyberspace) draws both upon modern experience and upon classic dichotomies of myth as it represents the technological communications of love.” —The Midwest Book Review"Janet Holmes' fourth poetry collection, F2F, explores how people communicate and how the loss of sight results in isolation. Holmes, who once worked in software development, bridges the language of technology with the language of poetry.” —BookPleasures.com

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Book SynopsisIn Falling Through the Music, his fifth major book of poetry, Mark Halperin gives us consolation, guidance, and companionship while delivering an accomplished meditation on the first real glimpses of the limits on a life. Displaying an agility of formal inventionhe moves easily from a Whitmanesque and witty litany to rhymed quatrainsHalperin deftly melds technique to theme. As in Someone Pausing, he is able to place us in the mind of someoneany one of uswho has stood on an island in the street, fully attentive and present, knowing nothing stays, not even the observer. Trade Review“Falling Through the Music is a book about high middle age when entropy, mortality, and overall decline cease to be rumor and feel more or less like the beginning of something that, for all its fear and sadness, promises to be fundamentally interesting. The poems range from the personal and familial across cultures and across other boundaries into the affirmations of art. This is the place where the artistic impulse does not save one from falling through music into death and nothingness, but somehow the companionship of art seems to be the best counterbalance to the terrors. Halperin deftly conjoins the mortal fears of advancing age with fears that one inherits through family and history, with the fear that there is really nothing stable or salvific in the world unless it is what we create. And therein resides the greater pleasure of this book—the sense that what is created is all we have and must be treasured for that. In short, this is a book of considerable emotional sophistication and impact.” —Frederick Marchant, Suffolk University, BostonThe mood of Mark Halperin's new poems is autumnal and elegiac, yet the effect of his book is surprisingly bracing. This is due in no small measure to Halperin's persona—he is trustworthy, unflappable, and a wryly unjudgmental observer of human folly. And, as readers of his work have come to know, his command of technique, whether of received form or of the prose poem, is considerable. This makes both his tender poems of family history and his poems drawn from his travels in Russia acts of wonderment.” —David Wojahn“Mark Halperin’s wry poems are easy to love: what’s “The Trouble with Spring”? It ends. ”Valentine” begins, “Say the heart’s principal industry is worry . . . .” The poet generously believes the great poets of the past no matter their flaws of character and behavior (which he notes); his poems ironically defend lying and the shedding of sincerity (they do, or seem to), and they also notice “for the aristocracy, friend / and servant are so close they seem to blend.” Halperin’s observations, like his syntax, are little surprises, eloquent and fair. “the guilt / without reason of survivors who react / much later, the slide and blank after impact.” (“After the Crash”) The music here—form, rhyme, language and meaning, geometry and identity—is gorgeous: “All I can’t hear gives me trouble now, as the dead do, falling through the music” (“At the Concert”). Here are poems that adhere by sound—of family, memory, loss, and love—all captured by a brilliant poet who teaches as he goes. Lucky readers.” —Hilda Raz, author of Trans and Divine Honors“Falling Through the Music concerns itself with the mind’s accommodation of ‘gaps’ in time. Both personal and historical memory limit the past’s liabilities. . . . First-time readers of Halperin . . . will return to his work again and again . . . for the benefits of a disciplined imagination, a mature and rigorous skepticism, a breadth of experience that by making modest claims for itself, yields much.” —Notre Dame Review

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Book SynopsisFrancis Ingledew''s book makes the case that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the canonical works of medieval English literature, should be recognized as a response to King Edward III''s foundation in 1349 of the chivalric Order of the Garter. As well as providing the basis for a thorough reinterpretation of the poem''s purposes and meanings, this argument dates to the mid-fourteenth-century reign of Edward III (132777) a poem conventionally ascribed to the reign of Richard II (137799). Through close readings of the poem and of an array of overlooked historical sources, Ingledew presents Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a critique of Edward III''s sexual and military behavior. Ingledew''s argument takes him deep into chivalric practice in Edward''s court of the 1340s, much of it connected with the early years of war with France. Ingledew pursues the significance of sexual scandal associated with Edward, especially the rape of the Countess of Salisbury cTrade Review"Francis Ingledew, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Order of the Garter, proposes a radical, and in many ways plausible, new reading of the poem, which relates it much more closely to the foundation of the Order of the Garter. . . . [Ingledew argues] that the poem fits much better into the heyday of Edward III, perhaps dating from the 1350s, when Edward was regarded as a model of chivalry by English and Continental historians. . . . [Ingledew positions] the poem . . . [as] a contemporary response to, and critique of, chivalry and sexual morality at Edward's court. . . . Whether they are totally, or partially, convinced by its arguments, medieval literary scholars and historians will need to take account of this book." —Times Literary Supplement"Disputes the chivalric poem's traditional dating to the reign of Richard II (1377-99) and argues that the text should be seen as a response to the reign of his grandfather Edward III and the founding of the Orders of the Garter in 1349, as well as a sexual scandal involving a reputed rape by the king." —The Chronicle of Higher Education"Many critics situate the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the alliterative revival of the late 14th century, the reign of Richard II. Ingledew offers here an elaborate mode of correcting the date and associating the poem with the military events, chivalric aspirations, and sexual rumors of the reign of Edward III (1327-77). . . . Ambitious, detailed, and certainly directed at experts in the fields of medieval language, literature, and history." —Choice"Francis Ingledew's thesis in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Order of the Garter is not only that the Garter motto is authorial, but that SGGK itself is a cloaked rebuke of sexual wrongdoing in Edward's court in the 1340s. . . . a provocative and important book; it cannot be ignored." —Arthuriana“ . . . after the indignities to which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is sometimes subjected, Francis Ingledew's close attention to its relationship with medieval chronicle (notably those of Froissart and Jean le Bel) and the conflicting accounts of Edward III's alleged crime make for a very compelling and fascinating argument. There is much of value here.” —Medium Aevum“While a number of studies have explored the importance of the inscription to a reading of the poem – including even whether it was the work of the poem’s original scribe – Francis Ingledew’s “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and the Order of the Garter is by far the most meticulously researched and the most ambitious.” —Speculum“What Ingledew does very successfully is to connect the story of Sir Gawain and its vision of history with contemporary historiography and chronicle accounts of Edward and his affair with the Countess of Salisbury. . . . Ingledew’s exploration of the connections between the story of the founding of the Order of the Garter and the plot of Sir Gawain is also rewarding.” —Modern Philology"Exhaustively researched and insightfully theorized, Ingledew's study proposes historical, cultural, and discursive contexts for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight more comprehensive, and more persuasive, than any hitherto attempted. It sets an exalted critical and scholarly standard against which to judge future interpretations of this complex and elegant poem." —Robert Hanning, Columbia University"This is a daring and provocative book about the great but still mysterious Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ingledew boldly —and, for this reader convincingly—locates Sir Gawain in the triumphal years of Richard's grandfather Edward III, a period when chivalric aspiration supported a series of Enlgish military triumphs and Edward was the beau ideal of both insular and continental historians, who often align him with King Arthur. He argues for a significant and quite precise connection between the poem and the chivalric ideology ritualized in the Order of the Garter and other international knightly orders. Ingledew links Gawain's sexual temptation to a disruptive sexual scandal at the core of Edward's court, in the king's rumored rape of the Countess of Salisbury. More importantly, in a massively informed but supple opening chapter, Ingledew shows how this scandal figures in the romance historiography of Jean le Bel and Jean Froissart, who respectively narrate and deny the scandal. This leads in turn to the book's claim that we should read Sir Gawain as much through the canons of its contemporary historiography (both Trojan and Arthurian) as we do in the context of twelfth and thirteenth-century romance. And behind this, even more ambitiously, is Ingledew's often eloquent call to read both historiography and romance as closely linked manifestations of an erotics of history. No one has explored these issues with the force and focused learning Ingledew brings to them, particularly his subtle readings of Arthurian-inflected historiography from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the fifteenth century." —Christopher Baswell, UCLA

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Book SynopsisFreedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy is a literary-historical study of the many surprising ways in which Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy have assumed a position of importance in African American culture. Dennis Looney examines how African American authors have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work from the late 1820s to the present.In many ways, the African American reception of Dante follows a recognizable narrative of reception: the Romantic rehabilitation of the author; the late-nineteenth-century glorification of Dante as a radical writer of reform; the twentieth-century modernist rewriting; and the adaptation of the Divine Comedy into the prose of the contemporary novel. But surely it is unique to African American rewritings of Dante to suggest that the Divine Comedy is itself a kind of slave narrative. Only African American translations of Dante use the medievaTrade Review“[Dennis Looney’s] subject of Dante’s African American reception has been somewhat neglected up to now, but offers some striking evidence of his relevance to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looney’s major focus is on the novels Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The System of Dante’s Hell by LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), both at various levels autobiographical; he also covers a wide range of writing, and some film, from the 1860s to Toni Morrison and contemporary rap music.” —Times Literary Supplement“Both for the scholarship it offers and for the work it urges others to do, Dennis Looney’s Freedom Readers is a crucial contribution to African American studies, to American studies more broadly, and to the continuing saga of Dante’s reception. . . . Freedom Readers will . . . have a powerful influence in American literary studies for some years to come.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Dennis Looney examines the influence and reception of Dante’s Commedia in African American literature and film from the late 1920s to the present. . . . This is primarily a study of black American literature, but it does offer a fascinating insight into the importance of Dante as a lens through which to read these texts, and a figure in the African American cultural imagination.” —Medium Aevum“Looney’s trailblazing book opens a new and important page in Dante Studies and African American Studies, as well as American Studies at large. Thanks to this solid research, scholars of these fields will now look at each other’s works with a growing sense of commonality.” —Symposium

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Manuel Paul López''s The Yearning Feed, winner of the 2013 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, are embedded in the San Diego/Imperial Valley regions, communities located along the U.S.-Mexico border. López, an Imperial Valley native, considers La Frontera, or the border, as magical, worthy of Macondo-like comparisons, where contradictions are firmly rooted and ironies play out on a daily basis. These poems synthesize López's knowledge of modern and contemporary literature with a border-child vernacular sensibility to produce a work that illustrates the ongoing geographical and literary historical clash of cultures. With humor and lyrical intensity, López addresses familial relationships, immigration, substance abuse, violence, and, most importantly, the affirmation of life. In the poem titled Psalm, the speaker experiences a deep yearning to relearn his family''s Spanish tongue, a language lost somewhere in the twelve-mile stretch between his family''s Trade Review"In this eclectic collection, López brings readers to the edge of their convictions then redraws the borders, leaving us to find our own way back home. He has an uncanny ability to drop dynamic characters into situations where they face universal moral dilemmas. These pieces are inundated with haunting landscapes of dialogue, poignant juxtapositions, deliberate capriciousness, and spontaneous humor that will immigrate into your consciousness." —Rebecca Schumejda, author of Cadillac Men"Manuel Paul López's The Yearning Feed evokes the rich, beautiful, and bizarre geocultural (and psychological) tapestry that is the California Imperial Valley. Like some enchanted reincarnation of Dante Alighieri (or Virgil), he guides his reader through the hot, sandy expanses right at the heart of the Americas. The frontier dividing and defining the United States and Mexico reaches new heights in the diverse poetic and prose portraits found in this remarkable new collection." —William Anthony Nericcio, author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America"It is enthralling and frightening to live in this book of poems: wisdom is so often derived from experience, and Manuel Paul López ladles out wisdom as if from a bottomless well. . . . Spanning forty-five pages, the poems [in 'The Desert Series'] are undoubtedly López’s most profound artistic statement on the need for human-to-human relations among all the peoples on the continent of the Americas." —World Literature Today

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Book SynopsisLa Fontaine was a great French lyric poet of the 17th century. This study is almost as much about Louis XIV as about La Fontaine. It provides analysis of the absolutist politics and attempts by the King to enforce an official cultural style, and the plight of the artist under such a ruler.Trade Review" . . . a fascinating account. . . The Poet and the King, written by a brilliant scholar who can see the grand designs behind the events he describes, should prove rewarding both for readers interested in life under Louis XIV, and for lovers of French culture in general." —The Times Literary Supplement“One comes away from a reading of The Poet and the King with a new appreciation of the meaning and value of La Fontaine’s poetry and of its place in the cultural history of his times.” —H-France Reviews“Fumaroli... has produced a biographical reading that is singularly rich and illuminating.” —American Historical Review"The Poet and the King not only offers a history of one of France’s greatest poets but also carries the message that great literature and art can be created in spite of repressive cultural and political regimes.” —Translation Review“Fumaroli ... is a gifted writer who deftly weaves La Fontaine’s personal history with the broader cultural and political events in France. Readers ... will appreciate this engrossing account of the struggles of a creative man against a smothering tyranny.” —Booklist“Fumaroli’s readings of La Fontaine’s poetry are both probing and brilliant. For those accustomed to the idea of La Fontaine as a schoolboy’s poet, these fresh readings will come as nothing less than a revelation.” —Journal of Modern History"Fumaroli lucidly and thoroughly studies the role of the poet in speaking to the sycophants of power and fashion . . . Neither a biography nor a literary critique but a study of power, this work is highly recommended for anyone interested in the bridge between aesthetics before and after the French Revolution and particularly how the 17th century remains intensely alive in contemporary thought." —Library Journal“Even for readers uninterested in La Fontaine and his career, this book is invaluable as a fully researched and masterfully constructed case study of literary politics and survival in an increasingly authoritarian state. Should that not be enough, there are the undeniable pleasures of Fumaroli’s dense, resonant, and allusive prose, which alone would justify his eminence on the French literary (as well as academic) scene.” —Virginia Quarterly Review“... an original and largely persuasive presentation of the reign of Louis XIV as the end of the Renaissance, and as the inauguration of the modern insistence on mobilization of the intellectual resources of the state for its political ends.” —Renaissance Quarterly“... detailed, erudite account of the conflict between one of France’s greatest lyric poets, La Fontaine, and its grandest monarch, the Sun King. Jane Marie Todd’s translation of the 1997 Le Poète et le Roi (Paris: Èditions de Fallois) was a finalist for the French-American Foundation’s 2002 Translation Prize. It was a well-deserved honor both for her graceful rendering of Fumaroli’s text, as well as the translations of the many citations from La Fontaine and other writers.” —Seventeenth-Century News

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