Search results for ""wesleyan university press""

Theorizing the experiences of black and brown bodies in hip hop danceBaring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop Dance, an Afro-diasporic dance form, which have generally reduced the style to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes that Hip Hop Dance is a collective and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. Roberts argues that the experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop Dance from the streets of urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

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A chapbook from Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout on climate change.Notice is the product of a life-long interest in natural sciences by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout. The collection draws poems from her previous books calling our attention to how language frames and shapes our relationships to climate and kin. The title is a call to take heed of the signs coming to us daily. Notice can be read as a noun or a verb. As a noun it might be thought of as a public warning. The author has selected poems that respond in various ways to the environmental crisis which we all see developing and about which we don''t seem to be able to take appropriate action. The poem Preparedness, for instance, hazards a wild guess about the cause of this failure to act. Some of the poems here address the problem directly. In others the focus is broader or the approach more subtle. There are even a few poems in which the author allows for something like hope.

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Intimate and illuminating conversations with one of America's foremost Native artists

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The first collection from this distinguished American movie critic

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Site-specific expressive ecologies sustain Korean folk culture in a globalizing world /> />The madang is a key space and concept for Korean drummers and dancers. Literally a village circle, the madang is also a metaphor for an expressive occasion or cultural space of embodied participation. Korean performers step in the madang as a means of bringing their bodies into purposeful contact with the particular time and place of performance. Kwon contends that the participatory way of being that is cultivated in the madang counteracts the fossilization of tradition by bringing folk practices more fully into the embodied present, even if in an idealized fashion. The madang draws attention to the body; it increases one''s awareness of space and place; and it creates open-ended performances that are conducive to a more dynamic range of social interactions. The book starts with a study of a Korean p''ungmul group that maintains a vibrant, expressive ecology in rapidly globalizing Korea. Kwon doc

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This selection of over five hundred letters gives us the life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important and groundbreaking composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham, and shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Cage's joie de vivre resounds in these letters - fully annotated throughout - in every phase of his career, and includes correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among others. Above all, they reveal his passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from his writings: singular, profound, irreverent, and funny. Not only will readers take pleasure in Cage's correspondence with and commentary about the people and events of a momentous and transformative time in the arts, they will also share in his meditations on the very nature of art. A deep pleasure to read, this volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.

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Belly to the Brutal sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. This poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chora—humming, screaming, rhythm—transporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Jennifer Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of "motherfear," "where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound." This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive.

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Joy Harjo's play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is the centerpiece of this collection that includes essays and interviews concerning the roots and the reaches of contemporary Native Theater. Harjo blends storytelling, music, movement, and poetic language in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light—a healing ceremony that chronicles the challenges young protagonist Redbird faces on her path to healing and self-determination. This text is accompanied by interviews with Native theater artists Rolland Meinholtz and Randy Reinholz, as well as an interview with Harjo, conducted by Page. The interviews highlight the lives and contributions of Meinholtz, a theater artist and educator who served as the drama instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1964–70 and a close mentor and friend to Harjo; and Reinholz, producing artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry, the nation's only Equity theater company dedicated exclusively to the development and production of new plays by Native American, First Nations, and Alaska Native playwrights. The new interview with Harjo focuses on her experiences working in theater. Essays on Harjo's work are provided by Mary Kathryn Nagle—an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee nation, playwright, and attorney who shares her insights on the legal and historical frameworks through which we can better understand the significance of Harjo's play; and Priscilla Page—writer, performer, and educator (of Wiyot heritage), who looks at indigenous feminism, jazz, and performance as influences on Harjo's theatrical work.

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Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Utilizing nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn uses this system to explore how fiction writers construct their fantastic worlds. Mendlesohn posits four categories of fantasy-portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal-that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to extensive coverage of some of the best books in the contemporary field. Offering a wide-ranging discussion and penetrating comparative analysis, Rhetorics of Fantasy will excite fans and provide a wealth of material for scholarly and classroom discussion.Includes discussion of works by over 100 authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams

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A collection of authentic, profound and beautiful poems.

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Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others-over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.

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Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain." Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects-love, and death, and the soul. Her images-strange, canny visions of the unknown self-clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.

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Rockwell Kent is one of America's most famous graphic artists. He was also an avid traveler. Kent was especially fascinated by remote Arctic lands and often stayed for extended periods of time to paint, write, and become acquainted with the local inhabitants. Between 1918 and 1935, he wrote and illustrated several popular books about his travels. Voyaging, originally published in 1924, is the engaging story of Kent's sailing voyage to Tierra del Fuego. Kent is a charming writer and keen observer of both the land and its people. The book is beautifully and generously illustrated with Kent's distinctive woodcuts. The first edition was published to great critical acclaim. New Republic wrote, "the land lives. A land where roses are as big as sun-flowers, where gales gnaw against bleak cliffs . . . At the end of the earth, there is the paradox of the dwarf and the giant." The Nation said, "Kent has caught the wild beauty of this ominous region -- iron crags ringed with the froth of blown surf, wind-tortured trees, distant peaks incrusted with dazzling snow; but out of the very heart of this bewildering beauty emanates a sense of unseen presences appallingly, implacably hostile to man."

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A Black poet performs a shamanic soul retrieval of the seven-hundred-year-old diasporic Black arts traditionContinuing her search for a neotropical mythos in this brilliant second collection, poet fahima ife articulates various scenes of subduction. Spoken in quiet recognition and grounded in desire, Septet for the Luminous Ones imagines a lush soundscape textured in oblique spiritual fusion of the Taíno and Yoruba. Or, what it sounded like coming together for the first time, and what it sounds like ever after, breathless, diaspora calling. Similar to the incidents in Maroon Choreography, what resounds in these poems is an ecstatic love song of the Caribbean Americas, of the main lands and islands, shaped and reshaped as breathwork, ritual, communion, and fantasy. In essence, the collection speaks to raise the vibrational frequencies of all beings on Earth through a pulse of Black English.[sample poem]preface to a twenty-volume spiritual ascentneoromanticismthe seven players, and our c

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Keen, pithy meditations on a world that continues to surprise us/>/>The poems in Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout's new book are concerned with this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world in a time of escalating disasters. From the bird who check-marks morning/once more//like someone who gets up/to make sure// the door is locked to bat-faced orchids, raising petals like light sails as if about to take flight, these poems make keen visual and psychological observations. The title Go Figure speaks to the book's focus on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible so that: We name things/ to know where we are. Moving with the deliberate precision that is a hallmark of Armantrout's work, they limn and refract, questioning how we make sense of the world, and ultimately showing how our experience of reality is exquisitely enfolded in words. It's true things fall apart. Armantrout writes. 'Still, by thinking/we heat ourselves up./>/>Sample Text/>/>HYPER-VIGILANCE/>/>Hilarious

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Ethnography on the politics of land and belonging in post apartheid Zulu performancesWhat does it mean to belong? In The Land is Sung, musicologist Thomas Pooley shows how performances of song, dance, and praise poetry connect Zulu communities to their ancestral homes and genealogies. For those without land tenure in the province of KwaZulu-Nata, performances articulate a sense of place. Migrants express their allegiances through performance and spiritual relationships to land are embodied in rituals that invoke ancestral connection while advancing well-being through intergenerational communication. Engaging with justice and environmental ethics, education and indigenous knowledge systems, musical and linguistic analysis, and the ethics of recording practice, Pooley's analysis draws on genres of music and dance recorded in the midlands and borderlands of South Africa, and in Johannesburg's inner city. His detailed sound writing captures the visceral experiences of performances in everyday life. The book is richly illustrated and there is a companion website featuring both video and audio examples.

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James Dickey: The Selected Poems is the first book to collect James Dickey's very best poems. Like many visionary poets of the ecstatic imagination, Dickey experimented in a wide variety of literary styles. This volume brings together the finest work from each of the periods in Dickey's extremely controversial career. For over three decades, until his death in 1997, Dickey was one of the nation's most important poets; these are the poems that brought him a popular readership and critical acclaim.

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The role of performing art in one of the world''s most diverse and complex societies/>/>This book is the first comprehensive overview of Javanese performing arts from their origins to their dynamic present. Renowned scholar and musician Sumarsam draws from a lifetime of immersion in both wayang and gamelan to guide readers through the concept of the in-between, revealing how the interplay of dualismsmyth and history, sacred and secular, personal and culturalforms the bedrock of Javanese performance. Rigorously researched historical case studies reveal the intricate relationship between histories and mythologies in Java. Wayang, accompanied by gamelan, is a multimedia performance imbued with rich historical, aesthetic, religious, and emotional associations. Sumarsam delves into this intricate, profound, and ever-evolving art form, exploring its diverse manifestations and venues, from courtly village entertainment-cum-ritual to palace-based aesthetic expressions of cultural proficiency;

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CAMINO IMAGINADO Blue leaves, hojas rotas in the shape of stars. Ni un "no" en tu vocabulario but for others; blue in place of green in the shape of Spain. Ojos the color of dirt, chocolate, coffee, time, azules las horas, hojas de horas van y se van, ni una palabra, ni una queja, nor broken bit a tu lado beside me andamos walking, sí walking caminamos caminos like these, such streets, what city. 7/15/95 Paris Xicancuicatl collects the poetry of leading avant-garde Chicanx poet Alfred Arteaga (1950–2008), whom French philosopher Gilles Deleuze regarded as "among those rare poets who are able to raise or shape a new language within their language." In his five published collections, Arteaga made crucial breakthroughs in the language of poetry, basing his linguistic experiments on the multilingual Xicanx culture of the US Southwest. His formal resources and finely tuned ear for sound patterns and language play remain astonishing. His poetical work, presented as a whole here for the first time, speaks more than ever to a moment in which border-crossing, cultural diversity, language-mixing and a multi-cultural vision of America are critical issues.

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mahogany is about the passing of time and unimaginable loss, strength, humor, and love/>/>mahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross' solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time it models the daily search for joy, and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times./>/>[sample poem]/>/>i'm like a woman who once knew splendor*/>/>/>sometimes i feel like the pink panther/>all naked and pink/>lost in the morass of/>do the best you can today/>and nigga heal thy self/>our end of winter/>spirits break/>like old tibetan snow/>i remember/>you was conflicted/>and i found myself alone/>here on my ancient hurt/>the disquieting hum/>of living history/>dear god, please/>put my head above my heart/>we can only be together/>if the stories are told/>plain face/>same instrument/>just a couple of coke bottles/>full of gasoline/>like god and rain/>is a waste of time/>my mother used to clean houses/>as a child/>some days i can barely/>get out of bed/>in my mind/>she's like diana ross/>scrubbing the white lady's stairs/>in lady sings the blues/>except prettier/>and with green eyes/>i've just been living/>off of cough drops/>and water and anger/>just sitting in the whole foods/>parking lot eating pineapple/>i am literally/>the definition of "hot mess"/>pain changes everything/>somebody come/>and pick up/>my limp body/>off the ground/>i am dying/>a slow ohio death/>we miss you starman/>it's our first sunrise of the burn

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Documentary filmmakers have been making films about music for a half-century. American Music Documentary looks at five key films to begin to imagine how we might produce, edit, and watch films from an ethnomusicological point of view. Reconsidering Albert and David Maysles’s Gimme Shelter, Jill Godmilow’s Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America, D.A. Pennebaker’s and Chris Hegedus’s Depeche Mode: 101, and Jem Cohen’s and Fugazi’s Instrument, Harbert lays the foundations for the study and practice of “ciné-ethnomusicology.” Interviews with directors and rich analysis from the disciplinary perspectives of film studies and ethnomusicology make this book a critical companion to some of the most celebrated music documentaries of the twentieth century.

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Evocative photographs and essay illuminate early American gravestones. Gravestones are colonial America's earliest sculpture and they provide a unique physical link to the European people who settled here. Carved in Stone book is an elegant collection of over 80 fine duotone photographs, each a personal meditation on an old stone carving, and on New England's past, where these stones tell stories about death at sea, epidemics such as small pox, the loss of children, and a grim view of the afterlife. The essay is a graceful narrative that explores a long personal involvement with the stones and their placement in New England landscape, and attempts to trace the curious and imperfectly documented story of carvers. Brief quotes from early New England writers accompany the images, and captions provide basic information about each stone. These meditative portraits present an intimate view of figures from New England graveyards and will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in early Americana and fine art photography.

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The definitive guide to a major African American poet/>/>This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton's unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing's Kingsley Hall, and the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students. He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton's previously published poems, from classics like the often anthologized "The Distant Drum" to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio University, a new critical introduction, and detailed notes, chronology, and bibliography./>/>[sample poem]/>/>The Distant Drum/>/>I am not a metaphor or symbol./>This you hear is not the wind in the trees./>Nor a cat being maimed in the street./>I am being maimed in the street/>It is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy./>Speak this because I exist./>This is my voice/>These words are my words, my mouth/>Speaks them, my hand writes./>I am a poet./>It is my fist you hear beating/>Against your ear.

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Lost in the woods with a horse, a mouse, and the ghost of a dead bird, you will discover if you're meant to live.In Sarah Blake's epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they're not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all—just the strangeness of the woods.7.If only the night held one dream instead of many.In the next dream you dig up the bird.In the next dream you dig in the same place and find a gun. You've shot someone. You weren't supposed to return to this place where you hid the gun.You're an idiot in your dream.In the next dream the horse returns. The horse startles you awake. But you are still asleep. Dreams are some wicked things.In the next dream you are in a desert. That's different.You forget what grass is. What it smells like. What the shadows of trees look like across your legs.You laugh your head off at the sight of a cactus.In the next dream you can see the spirit of the bird that will haunt you for weeks. Her tongue makes you think all of her words will come out garbled.Then you remember all she does is sing.

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The first comprehensive biography of the director behind Godzilla and other Japanese sci-fi classics.Ishiro Honda was arguably the most internationally successful Japanese director of his generation, with an unmatched succession of science fiction films that were commercial hits worldwide. From the atomic allegory of Godzilla and the beguiling charms of Mothra to the tragic mystery of Matango and the disaster and spectacle of Rodan, The Mysterians, King Kong vs. Godzilla, and many others, Honda's films reflected postwar Japan's real-life anxieties and incorporated fantastical special effects, a formula that appealed to audiences around the globe and created a popular culture phenomenon that spans generations. Now, in the first full account of this long overlooked director's life and career, authors Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski shed new light on Honda's work and the experiences that shaped it—including his days as a reluctant Japanese soldier, witnessing the aftermath of Hiroshima, and his lifelong friendship with Akira Kurosawa. Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa features close analysis of Honda's films (including, for the first time, his rarely seen dramas, comedies, and war films) and draws on previously untapped documents and interviews to explore how creative, economic, and industrial factors impacted his career. Fans of Honda, Godzilla, and tokusatsu (special effects) film, and of Japanese film in general, will welcome this in-depth study of a highly influential director who occupies a uniquely important position in science fiction and fantasy cinema, as well as in world cinema.Together, the authors have provided audio commentary tracks and produced supplemental material for numerous home video releases, including Ishiro Honda's Godzilla for the British Film Institute. They co-produced the documentary feature Bringing Godzilla Down to Size (2008).

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In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America's premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their 7-month odyssey describes what Kent called "an adventure of the spirit." He soon discovers how deeply he is "stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world" as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent's drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space -- both external and internal -- at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.

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Kay Dickinson is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Canada. She is the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won't Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008); the editor of Movie Music (Routledge, 2002), Teen TV (British Film Institute Publishing, 2003), and The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics and Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). In addition, she has worked as an education officer on the Ramallah International Film Festival and as an advisor on the Shashat Women's Film Festival (Bethlehem, Nablus and Ramallah). In the academic year of 2010-11, she was awarded a Fellowship in Global Aesthetics at Cornell University.

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Gathered here are versions of Hinge Picture (1974), Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975), Cabbage Gardens (1979), and Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) that differ in some respects from their original small-press editions. In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word. Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

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Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman’s acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive. Jena Osman’s (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

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"Best-known for his gritty and uproarious prose poetry collection Letters to Wendy's, Wenderoth began his career with two books of gimlet-eyed, world-weary, hard-hitting poetry. Now he returns to verse, favoring (as before) relatively short poems, often twelve lines or fewer, most of which crackle with a bleakness that's part gallows humor, part outrage, and part despair."--Publishers Weekly, starred review of No Real Light "A perverse, sometimes pretty, obscene, and confounding collection of one page meditative missives ...trimmed with lunatic fringe."--Rolling Stone review of Letters to Wendy's Whether it's addressing the grotesque in daily scenes or upsetting the norms of professional culture, Joe Wenderoth's fifth collection resonates with his signature intellect and disturbing humor. He is at once an aesthete and an iconoclast who brings inventive force to American poetry. Early Capitalism they are perfecting the pillow with which you are being suffocated now it sings to you and shows you pictures Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of No Real Light, The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self, and Letters to Wendy's. Wesleyan University Press published his first two books of poems: Disfortune and It Is If I Speak. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

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"Sharon Bryan's third collection reveals a clever, ironically detached curiosity about how human beings mediate experience through language. Whatever personal emotions underlie these witty, deftly-crafted poems are transcended by Byran's rationalism and her focus on how we have 'invented words to keep the world / just out of reach.'--Poetry "Reading [the poems of Flying Blind] is like watching a trapeze artist suspended between one flying bar and another, framed by the essential element of air. I found myself laughing, delighting in Sharon Bryan's original turn of mind, spinning on her surface wit. And I found myself saddened by a generalized sense of loss that incorporates my own. At the deepest level, Sharon Bryan's terrain resides in each of us."-The Georgia Review "The finely crafted, intelligent poems in Bryan's third collection concern the relationships or perceived relationships between life and death, the living and the dead, and, more urgently, our struggles to communicate on the subject. . . . These poems require bravery, compassion, and patience, for they are difficult, painful, and not always self-disclosing. Their deeply personal literary and spiritual drama is at times prayerful, at times macabre, and at times almost celebratory."-poetry calendar Flying Blind is Sharon Bryan's third collection of poems. The first two, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, were published by Wesleyan University Press. She is also the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton, 1993). Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Award from The Nation, and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Prisons constitute one of the most controversial and contested sites in a democratic society. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, with over 2 million people in jails, prisons, and detention centers; with over three thousand on death row, it is also one of the few developed countries that continues to deploy the death penalty. International Human Rights Organizations such as Amnesty International have also noted the scores of political prisoners in U.S. detention. This anthology examines a class of intellectuals whose analyses of U.S. society, politics, culture, and social justice are rarely referenced in conventional political speech or academic discourse. Yet this body of outlawed "public intellectuals" offers some of the most incisive analyses of our society and shared humanity. Here former and current U.S. political prisoners and activists-writers from the civil rights/black power, women's, gay/lesbian, American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence and anti-war movements share varying progressive critiques and theories on radical democracy and revolutionary struggle. This rarely-referenced "resistance literature" reflects the growing public interest in incarceration sites, intellectual and political dissent for social justice, and the possibilities of democratic transformations. Such anthologies also spark new discussions and debates about "reading"; for as Barbara Harlow notes: "Reading prison writing must. . . demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of literature."—Barbara Harlow [1] 1. Barbara Harlow, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (New England: Wesleyan University Press, 1992). Royalties are reserved for educational initiatives on human rights and U.S. incarceration.

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"Discipline, humility, kindness. These qualities cohere in the best mentors, bundled into an overarching approach to the art of writing. It is not, I think, coincidence that the writers in this collection remember these qualities best when speaking of their mentors as people, as fellow pilgrims who helped them on the way. In some sense, whether consciously or not, we seek out mentors who learn how to live—as an artist, and as a human being."—from the Introduction by Jeffrey Skinner Lee Martin is the author of a collection of stories, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande, 1996), a memoir From Our House (Dutton 2000), and a novel Just Enough Haughty, also forthcoming from Dutton. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas where he also edits the American Literary Review. Jeffrey Skinner is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. His published collections of poetry include The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), and A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Contributors include: Michael Collier on William Meredith Jay McInerney on Raymond Carver Tess Gallagher on Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz Reginald Shepherd on Alvin Feinman Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Bishop Maura Stanton on Vert Rutsala and John Berryman Elizabeth Graver on Annie Dillard, Angela Carter, Stanley Elkin, and others Sylvia Watanabe on Dorothy Vella David Huddle on Peter Taylor David Wojahn on James L. White Erin McGraw on John L’Heureux CONTENTS PREFACE by Lee Martin, vii INTRODUCTION: The Scrupulous Philanthropy of Expertise by Jeffrey Skinner, xi MICHAEL COLLIER An Exact Ratio, 3 The Farrier, 12 JAY MCINERNEY Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice, 15 Getting in Touch with Your Child, 24 TESS GALLAGHER Two Mentors: From Orphanhood to Spirit-Companion, 39 Behave, 45 DAVID HUDDLE What about Those Good People?, 51 Backstory, 57 REGINALD SHEPHERD T

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