Search results for ""author juliana spahr""

Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace - from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again - touching everything in between. The book's focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.

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In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” Taking seriously Du Bois’s allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible?Du Bois’s Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts.Spahr does not deny the exhilarations of politically engaged art. But her study affirms a sobering reality: aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.

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"Will was pretty much the perfect role model." -- Beth Ditto, The Gossip In the spring of 2010, Toronto lost one of its most important queer civic heroes when local artist, DJ, activist, impresario, promoter, party-thrower, cafe operator, community-builder and lover Will Munro died of brain cancer at the unfathomably young age of 35. Famed for his subversive, irreverent visual art, which co-opted rock 'n' roll imagery and raunchy gay iconography, and his legendary Vazaleen dance parties, which singlehandedly reinvented Toronto's queer nightlife culture, Will did more to revolutionize both his community and his city in a decade than most folks do in a lifetime. Weaving together a collage of stories from and about the people who knew and loved him, Army of Lovers is both a biography of Will Munro and a document of a galvanizing period in the history of Toronto, a moment when the city's various subcultures -- the queer community, the art scene, the independent music universe, the grassroots activist enclaves -- came of age and collided with one another. Selected by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) for the 2014 Over the Rainbow Project book list

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This is the best and most authoritative edition of Tender Buttons, a major fixture in the modernist canon, featuring facsimiles of Stein's corrections, in her own handwriting. Our edition comes out on the centennial of its original publication, and will relate to the worldwide celebrations next year. Every previous edition has contained dozens of errors — from minor punctuation problems to entire phrases omitted. None has included the corrections and additions Stein personally made after the book appeared. This edition resolves over 100 variances among archival materials and previous versions of the book, providing the first reliable text of Tender Buttons in a compact format that is as approachable for casual readers as it is reliable for more serious scholars. A Note on the Text describes the methods behind this edition and lists all variances resolved. An Afterword by Juliana Spahr discusses the enduring significance of Tender Buttons at its centennial anniversary.

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