A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
"The Courtesy is really an admirable book: it shows up the unreality of a lot of the other poetry one reads, dealing honestly and with that perversity which is a sign of thoughfulness, with the slight but heavy matter of our everyday defeats."—Michael Hoffman, Poetry Nation Review
"At forty-years-old and already the author of four superbly written books of poems, Shapiro has produced a work of such authority and originality that he has permanently enlarged my hopes and expectations for contemporary poetry. His risk-loving swiftness of perception and his affinity for stories that up-end convention and taboo have enabled him to reclaim, for poets of my generation, areas of feeling and linguistic virtuosity that originated with William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, J. V. Cunningham, and Ivor Winters. It is hard for me to see how an ideal anthologist of the future will be able to include their names without gratefully including his."—Tom Sleigh, Boston Phoenix
Richard Shelton was a young English professor in 1970 when a convict named Charles Schmid—a serial killer dubbed the “Pied Piper of Tucson” in national magazines—shared his brooding verse. But for Shelton, the novelty of meeting a death-row monster became a thirty-year commitment to helping prisoners express themselves. Shelton began organizing creative writing workshops behind bars, and in this gritty memoir he offers up a chronicle of reaching out to forgotten men and women—and of creativity blossoming in a repressive environment. He tells of published students such as Paul Ashley, Greg Forker, Ken Lamberton, and Jimmy Santiago Baca who have made names for themselves through their writing instead of their crimes. Shelton also recounts the bittersweet triumph of seeing work published by men who later met with agonizing deaths, and the despair of seeing the creative strides of inmates broken by politically motivated transfers to private prisons. And his memoir bristles with hard-edged experiences, ranging from inside knowledge of prison breaks to a workshop conducted while a riot raged outside a barricaded door. Reflecting on his decision to tutor Schmid, Shelton sees that the choice “has led me through bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments to a better understanding of what it means to be human.”
Crossing the Yard is a rare story of professional fulfillment—and a testament to the transformative power of writing.
In 1907, in a quiet English village, Theodora Bosanquet answered Henry James’s call for someone to transcribe his edits and additions to his formidable body of work. The aging James had agreed to revise his novels and tales into the twenty-four-volume New York Edition. Enter Bosanquet, a budding writer who would record the dictated revisions and the prefaces that would become a lynchpin of his legacy.
Embracing the role of amanuensis and creative counterpoint cautiously at first, Bosanquet kept a daily diary over the nine years that she worked with James, as their extraordinary partnership evolved. Bosanquet became the first audience for James’s compositions and his closest literary associate—and their relationship ultimately resulted in James’s famed “deathbed dictations.” At the same time, the homosexuality of each was an unspoken but important influence on their mutual support and companionship.
Susan Herron Sibbet’s posthumous novel gifts us with the voice of a young woman writer drawn into the intimate circle of an aging master, and is a moving addition to previous literary treatments of James and Bosanquet, even as it hews closer to fact than other works do. The Constant Listener is itself the work of an accomplished poet, and will speak to fans of James, historical fiction, and themes of art, love, sexuality, and identity.
"Tom Sleigh's precision marks him as the diamond cutter of poetry; his verse has a tense musicality, and his ability to convey exact emotions, even the state of consciousness itself, is unerring."—The New York Times Book Review, Notable Books of the Year, 1990-1991
In the frozen reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, fierce winter storms hit without warning. The white opacity of one such blizzard allows Norman Haas to walk away from his prison work detail. Dangerously close to freezing to death, Norman is given shelter by Liesl Tiomenen, a middle-aged woman who lives in a house she and her late husband built in the woods. Armed with a rifle, she tries to turn him in, but when they set out on snowshoes, she suffers a fall, allowing him to flee again. Thus begins Norman’s journey back to his past, back to the woman he loved who betrayed him, back to the brother who helped put him away, back to a dangerous web of family allegiances, deceptions, and intrigue.
After finding Liesl injured and abandoned in the woods, Yellow Dog Township’s sole full-time law enforcement officer Del Maki pursues Norman through a storm of mythic proportions.
In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics.
Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book's center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible.
Stewart's Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.
Including an exclusive interview with bestselling American novelist Elizabeth Strout, this groundbreaking study will engage literature scholars and general readers alike.
Written in accessible language, this book is the first to offer a sustained analysis of Elizabeth Strout’s work. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the O. Henry Award, among other accolades, Strout has achieved a vast popular following as well. Amy and Isabelle was made into a television movie; Olive Kitteridge, which sold more than one million copies, was adapted as a miniseries; The Burgess Boys has been optioned for HBO; and My Name Is Lucy Barton was reimagined for the stage in London and on Broadway. Oh William!, the sequel to My Name Is Lucy Barton, appeared in 2021, and Strout’s latest book, Lucy by the Sea, is slated for release in fall 2022.
At the height of her literary powers as a chronicler of American life and particularly the lives of American women, Strout is currently enjoying both commercial and critical success. Her sales and perennial presence on book club lists indicate a tremendous impact on the popular realm and the growing attention to her in academia charts her importance in American letters. This book will satisfy readers looking for a serious, in-depth introduction to Strout’s work, as well as those interested in women’s writing, contemporary fiction, ethics, and literature. It includes a new interview with Strout in which she discusses these issues.
Montwieler traces the evolution of Strout’s voice, themes, and characters, which uniquely address American twenty-first-century feminine perspectives and sensibilities. From classic domestic spats between a mother and daughter to hate crimes aimed at mosques, from sweeping forays into decades past to snapshots of contemporary life, Strout compassionately portrays humanity at its most brutal and its most intimate. Though her canvas is vast, her eye for detail is astute and her ear for nuance is keen. Looking across Strout’s work, Montwieler explores how she portrays the endurance of hope, the complexities of family, the effects of trauma on individuals and communities, the sustaining power of the natural world, and the effects of place on personal and collective character.
Strout’s creations cultivate empathy in her readers, teaching them to be attuned to the suffering of others and to the human need for connection. Across her work and in the new interview included within this book, Strout shows her readers that they are not alone in this impersonal, often violent world. The connection that acknowledges our limitations, our woundedness, our capability to do harm, our remorse, and our recognition of beauty and humor distinguishes Strout’s unique contribution to contemporary American letters.
Years of translating Zen poems and religious texts have helped give Stryk a special sense of the particular, a feel for those details which, because they are so much a part of our lives, seem to define us. Stryk’s poetry is neither an attempt to surpass these details nor an attempt to give them significance. It is an activity that exists among them, as ordinary — yet as important — as breath. Stryk’s poetic power rests in the sureness of plain speech and his insistence on a direct, sympathetic attention to the world we actually inhabit.
Collected Poems, a gathering of three decades of work, contains nearly all Stryk’s poems, including the best of his Zen translations and a book–length section of new poetry. This book is a revelation of the wonderful amid the familiar by a poet whose language and vision have found their maturity.
A key figure in the foundation of Chicano literature, Mario Suárez (1923–1998) was among the first writers to focus not only on Chicano characters but also on the multicultural space in which they live, whether a Tucson barbershop or a Manhattan boxing ring. Many of his stories have received wide acclaim through publication in periodicals and anthologies; this book presents those eleven previously published stories along with eight others from the archive of his unpublished work. It also includes a biographical introduction and a critical analysis of the stories that will broaden readers’ appreciation for his place in Chicano literature.
In most of his stories, Suárez sought to portray people he knew from Tucson’s El Hoyo barrio, a place usually thought of as urban wasteland when it is thought of at all. Suárez set out to fictionalize this place of ignored men and women because he believed their human stories were worth telling, and he hoped that through his depictions American literature would recognize their existence. By seeking to record the so-called underside of America, Suárez was inspired to pay close attention to people’s mannerisms, language, and aspirations. And by focusing on these barrio characters he also crafted a unique, mild-mannered realism overflowing with humor and pathos.
Along with Fray Angélico Chávez, Suárez stands as arguably the mid-twentieth century’s most important short story writer of Mexican descent. Chicano Sketches reclaims Suárez as a major figure of the genre and offers lovers of fine fiction a chance to rediscover this major talent.
A whimsical look at the pleasures and challenges of living in the far north-now in paperback!
A whimsical look at the pleasures and challenges of living in the far north-now in paperback!
"Sutter knows Duluth and the hinterlands to the North the way Garrison Keillor knows Lake Wobegon and the prairies. With a nimble wit and a roving eye for detail, Sutter goes beneath the veneer of the North Country to expose its attraction, its quirks, and its characters. There isn’t a clinker in the collection, and even if you’ve lived your entire life in Duluth or the North Country, you’ll see your home place with new insight after reading Cold Comfort." Duluth News-Tribune"Mostly whimsical, sometimes meditative, but most often warmhearted, these essays explore Lake Superior, its neighboring rivers and streams, duck hunting, cross-country skiing, bridges, cider-pressing parties, and camping out in the family car. Sutter’s prose is clean, straightforward, and sometimes mirthful." Chicago New City "An oddly brilliant and lovely little book. . . . Resonant, evocative, and splendidly written." Jim HarrisonTemperatures that dive to forty degrees below zero are only part of life in northern Minnesota, according to award-winning writer Barton Sutter. Cold Comfort is his temperamental tribute to the city of Duluth, Minnesota, where bears wander the streets and canoe racks are standard equipment. Winner of a 1998 Northeast Minnesota Book AwardWinner of a 1998 Minnesota Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
In his second novel, his first in twenty years, Robert H. Van Wagoner explores a family in extremis tottering at the edge of faith: in God and church, in family, and in marriage, in the institutions that promise safety and meaning. Both lyrical and explosive, The Contortionists unfolds as a page-turning mystery. Van Wagoner’s wrenching narrative propels the reader forward, toward the novel’s harrowing climax, while deftly unpacking its major themes—mental illness, sexuality, and substance abuse in a culture that would rather not confront them. Does the truth ever set anyone ultimately free? The stakes for Joshua and his family could not be greater.
This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two earlier books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author’s personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver’s travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.
When attorney Lucinda Hayes reluctantly agrees to represent the mother of a brutally slain child, she must convince the court that the makers of a pornographic film are liable for the murder. As the case unfolds, Lucinda calls upon all her personal strength and legal talent, facing down her own ghosts as well as the powerful entertainment industry's star lawyers.
In Chilling Effect, Wesson affirms the power of free speech to inspire the best and the worst human behavior and explores the tension between freedom and accountability
After the bloodbath of Butcher’s Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed away, while readers waited.
But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker’s as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, “suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor”—and the resulting novel, Comeback, showed that neither Stark nor Parker had lost a single step. Knocking over a highly lucrative religious revival show, Parker reminds us that not all criminals don ski masks—some prefer to hide behind the wings of fallen angels.
A haunting story of the power of death, the pain of loss, and the possibility of hope.
"Gripping, damning, and transfixing."
---Entertainment Weekly
" . . . possesses a time-bending gravity. . . . [A] small classic of graceful language and earned emotion."
---San Francisco Chronicle
". . . a beautifully written novel of war and the wrenching grief and unanswerable questions it leaves in its wake. . . . A Century of November is full of precise, startling imagery and elegant, richly poetic description---Wetherell seems genuinely incapable of writing a lazy sentence---and this last section of the novel is as surreal, hypnotic and harrowing as any literature in recent memory. The whole thing, in fact, is a jewel, an unforgettable historical novel that Wetherell has carefully (and artfully) seeded with loads of contemporary resonance." ---Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)
"A poignant, probing story. . . . Wetherell's prose and character writing are unflinching . . . [and his] take on a parent's anguish is deeply moving."
---Publishers Weekly
"A timely reminder of the devastation of mortal combat. . . ."
---Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Honorable Mention of the 1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards
Two collections by an important Asian American writer -- Camp Notes and Other Poeems and Desert Run: Poems and Stories -- return to print in one volume.
Mitsuye Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan, and raised in Seattle, Washington, until the outbreak of World War II when her family was removed to a concentration camp in Idaho. Camp Notes and Other Writings recounts this experience.
Yamada's poetry yields a terse blend of emotions and imagery. Her twist of words creates a twist of vision that make her poetry come alive. The weight of her cultural experience-the pain of being perceived as an outsider all of her life-permeates her work.
Yamada's strength as a poet stems from the fact that she has managed to integrate both individual and collective aspects of her background, giving her poems a double impact. Her strong portrayal of individual and collective life experience stands out as a distinct thread in the fabric of contemporary literature by women.
"The core poems of Camp Notes and the title come from the notes I had taken when I was in camp, and it wasn’t published until thirty years after most of it was written. I was simply describing what was happening to me, and my thoughts. But, in retrospect, the collection takes on a kind of expanded meaning about that period in our history. As invariably happens, because Japanese American internment became such an issue in American history, I suppose I will be forever identified as the author of Camp Notes. Of course, I try to show that it’s not the only thing I ever did in my whole life; I did other things besides go to an internment camp during World War II. So, in some ways I keep producing to counteract that one image that gets set in the public mind. At the time that I was writing it, I wasn’t necessarily a political person. Now, when I reread it, even to myself, I think it probably has a greater warning about the dangers of being not aware, not aware of one’s own rights, not aware of helping other people who may be in trouble. I think that it does speak to our present age very acutely." -- Mitsuye Yamada, "You should not be invisible”: An Interview with Mitsuye Yamada, Contemporary Women's Writing, March 2014, Vol. 8 Issue 1
Read the whole interview at: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/8/1/1/414906/You-should-not-be-invisible-An-Interview-with
A first-generation immigrant to the United States, Aguasaco embraces his transborder/transnational/intercultural identity by building a bridge across time and distance to unite the great voices of the Renaissance with his lyrical poems. The collection offers bold and fascinating dialogue with Spanish authors such as Juan Boscán, Francisco de Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The poems examine the fundamental liberties inherent to humanity through stunning verse. In a quest for freedom, the poems openly criticize the treatment of immigrants in the United States, drawing poignant parallels with human rights abuses throughout history.
Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak brings potent voices of the past to life in poems that critically examine the present and future of the human experience.
In her new collection of poetry, Crossing the Ladder of Sun, Laura Apol explores the ordinary moments of life—watching her daughter, picking blueberries, sharing confidences with friends, arriving and leaving, and driving, always driving—and transforms them into the extraordinary. This book is rich with the lyrical found in what is considered the mundane as it portrays the multiple roles of a woman’s life—mother, daughter, lover, ex-wife, friend. Apol’s highly personal poems reflect a caring and compassion that transcends loneliness and heartache.
In the Midwest, a massive storm sends Lake Michigan surging over the Door County peninsula, and thousands of refugees flee inland. In the midst of this apocalypse, a resourceful band of Wisconsin sixty-somethings calling themselves the Oldsters lays secret plans to fight the ruling regime's propaganda and show people how to think for themselves.
The fourth novel in Jerry Apps’s Ames County series, Cranberry Red brings the story into the present, portraying the challenges of agriculture in the twenty-first century.
As the novel opens, Ben Wesley has lost his job as agricultural agent for Ames County. He is soon hired as a research application specialist for Osborne University, a for-profit institution that has developed “Cranberry Red,” a new chemical that promises not only to improve cranberry crop yields but also to endow the fruits with the power to prevent heart disease, reduce brain damage from strokes, and ward off Alzheimer’s disease. Ben must promote the new product to cranberry growers in Ames County and beyond, but he worries whether the promised results are credible. Was Cranberry Red rushed to market?
When the chemical does all that the university claims it will do, Ben is relieved . . . until disturbing side effects emerge. Can he criticize Cranberry Red and safeguard farmers and consumers without losing his job, or will Ben’s honesty get him fired while his community continues to get sicker?
Finalist, General Fiction, Midwest Book Awards
CEASE begins with the words, “to keep the peace/we need a wall/to fall to our knees before….” Framed by the long poem, “wall,” Beth Bachmann’s new collection of poetry wildly upturns the boundaries between bodies at peace and bodies at war, between the human territory of border walls and the effects of war on the environment and landscape, between the movements of soldiers and of refugees, between terror as an interior state and violences performed on the body, and between the words of politicians and the breath of a poem. Taking up Muriel Rukeyser’s call for women poets to respond to war, “Women and poets see the truth arrive,” the poems in CEASE are almost breathless in their speed and presence on the page. CEASE is both a plea and an awakening to peace as a process and a transient state.
Samantha Smith, Richard Nixon, the Shroud of Turin, Igor Stravinsky, the largo from Handel's Xerxes, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the groundbreaking 1984 Apple Computer Super Bowl commercial are among the many disparate people and objects Barry uses to explore the multifaceted nature of existence.
Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts, each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in language. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic—or more precisely, to borrow from Duke Ellington—the project is “blutopic.”
The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self.
Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the “aural truths.”
In Creekside, dedicated archaeologist Meg Harrington guides her students in a race against time to protect the legacy of the past before bulldozers rip it to shreds.
The setting is a Kentucky pasture slated for development—the construction of the new Creekside subdivision. Once, that same beautiful stretch of land was home to three generations who experienced love, loss, and tragedy in their log cabin beside the creek. It was here during the late 18th century that Estelle Mullins struggled to build her home on the dangerous frontier.
In Meg’s 21st-century world of archaeology we read about excavation techniques, daily experiences at a dig, tight construction deadlines, the use of heavy equipment, report writing, artifact analysis, damage from looters and collectors, and the reality of site destruction in the path of modern development. The depiction of Estelle’s frontier life includes Kentucky’s early Euro-American settlement of the Cumberland Gap, encounters with Shawnee defending their land, Protestant fragmentation, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the immigrant stampede down the Ohio River, and the persistent issue of class-based land ownership.
The two partially interwoven story lines link artifact and place, ancestors and descendants, the present and the past, and inspire us to explore the personal connections between them all in fresh and vital ways.
The City We Make Together looks at how we make art with communities, how we perform power and who gets to play which roles, and how we might use creativity and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of democracy anew.
Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Circle, the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T’ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.
The candlefish, enormous schools of which enter the Pacific Northwest’s rivers in the spring, is so rich with oil that when supplied with a wick it can be used as a candle. Thus creatures of the water become transformed into instruments of fire and spirit, ultimately transcending this world.
Written as the author begins to navigate the second half of life, Candlefish unfolds along multiple lines of narrative and reflection. Each poem is rendered from experience and made incandescent by the spark of the author’s intellect and insight.
Whether tending the flower beds, skinnydipping on her birthday, conversing with a grown daughter, or bringing inside the teacup her husband can no longer carry, Elizabeth Biller Chapman distills each moment to its most vital components and makes them luminous with the necessity and surprise of relation.
Elizabeth Biller Chapman’s candlefish gracefully swim toward the pierced horizon all of us must face and are transformed by imaginative compassion as the book develops, season by season, from summer to spring.
"Marjorie Kowalski Cole's characters live, work, and struggle in interior Alaska, and she depicts life here with a keen eye and with compassion. We see the daughter of a Fairbanks junkyard owner struggling with her isolation. We meet a bartender at Circle Hot Springs who's also a certified nurse's assistant at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. . . . These are inner lives, revealed with care and with skill, the true material of good literature."—Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate
In Claim Tickets for Stolen People, Quintin Collins embraces a range of poetic forms and registers to show the resilience of Blackness in a colonized world. The tension between mortality and vitality is ever-present, whether Collins is charting his daughter’s emergence into being, cataloging the toll of white violence, or detailing the exuberance of community, family, and Chicago and Boston life. In Collins’s hands, the world is exquisitely physical and no element is without its own perspective, whether it is a truck sheared by a highway bridge or bees working through the knowledge that humans will kill them, burn their homes, and steal their honey. All goes toward honoring Black grief, Black anger, Black resistance, Black hope—and the persistence of Black love.
Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories spans four generations of a peasant family in the brutal poverty of post-Unification southern Italy and in an immigrant’s United States. The women in these tales dare to cross boundaries by discovering magical leaps inherent in the landscape, in themselves, and in the stories they tell and retell of family tragedy at a time of political unrest. Through an oral tradition embedded in the stone of memory and the flow of its reinvention, their passionate tale of resistance and transformation courses forward into new generations in a new world.
A woman threatens to join the land reform struggle in her Calabrian hill town, against her husband’s will, during a call for revolution in 1919. A brother and sister turn to the village sorceress in Fascist Italy to bring rain to their father’s drought-stricken farm. In Pittsburgh, new immigrants witness a miraculous rescue during the Great Flood of 1936. A young girl courageously dives into the Allegheny River to save her grandfather’s only memento of the old country. With only broken English to guide her, a widow hops a bus in search of live chickens to cook for Easter dinner in her husband’s memory. An aging woman in the title story is on a quest to cut the ankle-length hair as hard as the rocky soil of Calabria in a drought. A lonely woman who survived World War II bombings in her close-knit village, struggles to find community as a recent immigrant. A daughter visits her mother’s hill town to try and fulfill a wish for her to see the Fata Morgana. These haunting images permeate Corso’s linked stories of loss, hope, struggle, and freedom.
An official selection of The Sons of Italy® Book Club
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
Consolation Miracle is a book of visceral, image-driven poems that search for the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary. This collection fashions art out of artless objects as a consolation, or perhaps compensation, for their smallness. Yawns and pears, cockroaches and crows resonate against historically conflated backdrops, while our own hands seem suddenly strange as they hide themselves in our pockets, balance a burning cigarette between two fingers, or grip the gun that shot Lincoln. Other poems address the destruction of empire, the end of old Hollywood, and the hyperbolic fizzling out of entire centuries. Here, consolation miracles are rarely the ones sought after, yet they radiate in their neglect. Davidson’s poems help us understand the inner life of cows, imagine the plight of a banished Kama Sutra illustrator, speculate about Cleopatra’s lingerie. With a title borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez, Consolation Miracle contains a magical realism for the twenty-first century.
Community leadership development programs are designed to increase the capacity of citizens for civic engagement. These programs fill gaps in what people know about governance and the processes of governance, especially at the local level. The work of many in this field is a response to the recognition that in smaller, rural communities, disadvantaged neighborhoods, or disaster areas, the skills and aptitudes needed for citizens to be successful leaders are often missing or underdeveloped.
Community Effects of Leadership Development Education presents the results of a five-year study tracking community-level effects of community leadership development programs drawn from research conducted in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.
As the first book of its kind to seek answers to the question of whether or not the millions of dollars invested each year in community leadership development programs are valuable in the real world, this book challenges researchers, community organizers, and citizens to identify improved ways of demonstrating the link from program to implementation, as well as the way in which programs are conceived and designed.
This text also explores how leadership development programs relate to civic engagement, power and empowerment, and community change, and it demonstrates that community leadership development programs really do produce community change. At the same time, the findings of this study strongly support a relational view of community leadership, as opposed to other traditional leadership models used for program design.
To complement their findings, the authors have developed CENCE, a new model for community leadership development programs, which links leadership development efforts to community development by understanding how Civic Engagement, Networks, Commitment, and Empowerment work together to produce community viability.
In Country Songs for Alice, a nonbinary, queer narrator passes through the crucible of love, romance, and heartbreak against the backdrop of rural America—a landscape which offers luminous belonging, even as the hazards of homophobia, loneliness, and isolation loom large. Part roadtrip, part mixtape, these poems are explorations of love, music, romance, pageantry, loneliness, and belonging in the rural places and small towns that seem to preclude queer culture. Country Songs for Alice not only tells the story of a relationship and its dissolution but reclaims country western imagery and aesthetics for a queer audience, dousing the narrator’s experience in the language of cowboys, horses, rodeos, trucks, and desert skies.
Winner, 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2015 National Book Award, poetry category
Finalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards, poetry category
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Guardado crafted the poems in Cenizas over a ten-year period, often traveling to El Salvador for research and to conduct interviews. The Salvadoran Civil War haunts the pages of this collection as it unflinchingly explores war, its aftermath, and the bittersweet legacies that are passed down from one generation to the next. The poems mourn those who were lost and honor the strength of the speaker’s ancestors. “All my people have been born from the ashes of volcanoes,” she writes, invoking a family lineage that has endured the atrocities committed against them. Even so, El Salvador keeps pulling the speaker back—and despite warnings of danger, she still manages to find beauty among the ruins.
graduation traveling the country, hoping to make it
all the way to San Francisco before returning home
to Illinois. However, a broken motorcycle leaves him
stuck in Idaho, where he surprises himself by falling
in love with the mountains and the local culture.
He converts to Mormonism and marries Charlene
Simmons—a perfect Mormon girl deeply dedicated
to her church.
After a fifteen-year hiatus in Arizona, Kail moves
his family back to Idaho to solve some unresolved
issues between his wife and God. What he and Charlene
find are shocking surprises beneath the surface
of every beautiful thing, from the Idaho mountains to
Charlene’s deceptively devout family.
Acclaimed author Jack Harrell creates a world
of complex and troubled characters, each seeking
happiness from a God simultaneously familiar and
mysterious, each wrestling with the doubts and eternal
optimism integral to their faith.
On Thursday nights, the players assemble in the back of Readmore Comix and Games. Celeste is the dungeon master; Valerie, who works at the store, was roped in by default; Mooneyham, the banker, likes to argue; and Ben, sensitive, unemployed, and living at home, is still recovering from an unrequited love. In the real world they go about their days falling in love, coming out at work, and dealing with their family lives all with varying degrees of success. But in the world of their fantasy game, they are heroes and wizards fighting to stop an evil cult from waking a sleeping god.
But then a sexy new guy, Albert, joins the club, Ben’s character is killed, and Mooneyham’s boyfriend is accosted on the street. The connections and parallels between the real world and the fantasy one become stronger and more important than ever as Ben struggles to bring his character back to life and win Albert’s affection, and the group unites to organize a protest at a neighborhood bar. All the while the slighted and competing vampire role playing club, working secretly in the shadows, begins to make its move.
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
Out of the contradiction, paradox, loss, and strange beauty of contemporary warfare, Brock Jones brings us Cenotaph, a collection of poems that have as their genesis Jones’s deployments to Iraq in 2002 and 2005, when he was in the US Army.
These are war poems, but also love poems and hate poems, poems about dying and living, poems about hope and hopelessness. These are poems that beautifully reflect Jones’s resignation to and rejection of the impossibility of saying anything definitive or honest about war.
These are poems that strive to do what poet Bruce Weigl described as the poet’s job: to find “some kind of miraculous way th at if you work hard enough to get the words right, that which you call horrific and wrong is defeated.”
Cenotaph is a poet doing the poet’s work: trying, hoping to get the words right.
Stephen Kampa’s poems are witty and restless in their pursuit of an intelligent modern faith. They range from a four-line satire of office inspirational posters to a lengthy meditation on the silence of God. The poems also revel in the prosodic possibilities of English’shigh and low registers: a twenty–one line homageto Lord Byron that turns on three rhymes (one of which is “eisegesis”); a sestina whose end words include “sentimental,” “Marseilles,” and “Martian;” sapphics on the death of Ray Charles; and intricately modulated stanzas on the 1931 Spanish–language movie version of Dracula.
Despite the metaphysical seriousness, there is alwaysan undercurrent of stylistic levity — a panoply of puns, comic rhymes, and loving misquotations of canonical literature — that suggests comedy and tragedy are inextricably bound in human experience.
Born from the fertile volcanic soil and the sea and mists surrounding the Azorean islands, the characters who inhabit these stories blend realism with magic. Like the nine Muses, each island has its own special attributes. Whether searching for love, power, or meaning, these characters are subject to the whims of Fate and Fortune. Here the commonplace present confronts forces both natural and supernatural. In the Azorean microcosm, they come to represent a far larger sphere, embodying the foibles and idiosyncrasies of humanity the world over.
Cage of Lit Glass follows multiple individuals and points of view, all haunted by various states of unease and struggle that follow them like specters as they navigate their world. Kell’s poems form blurred narratives and playful experiments from our attempts to build lives from despair. A tense and insightful collection, these works will follow the reader long after the book is finished.
traditional and contemporary, the stories each highlight an essential aspect of living a meaningful Jewish life. Appropriate for all ages, the many tales include “Time Palace,”
a legend of how the Jewish people created Shabbat; “Yofiel,” the story of an angel who keeps revealing the secrets of Torah; “Shalom Bayit,” imagining the chuppah as
a metaphor for powerful social change; and “Candle, Feather, Wooden Spoon,” which reframes these traditional Passover objects as tools for intergenerational healing.
Whether you’re a rabbi, cantor, or educator—the storytellers of our community—or just a lover of stories, this book is sure to stir your heart and inspire your spirit.
"I use the camera to block my view," says Lisette. This is the start of her double vision—trying to forget and trying to recall—and her struggle to come to terms with the human capacity for cruelty. But the grim reality in Peru is so overpowering that she carries it with her back to New York and through the rest of her life. Having abandoned a lover along with the fight, she desperately tries to find meaning beyond that of mere survival.
“A girl has two choices: / to be a tree or / to be the forest.” Catechesis combines Grimm fairy tales with horror movies and the Book of Revelation to construct a vision of the dangers and apocalyptic transformations inherent in girlhood. This lyric lore, which includes curious diagrams and collages of the botanical and the anatomical, contains hidden instructions to prepare girls for the hazards ahead.
In retelling lore alongside other Grimm-style stories, the poet turns horror classics The Silence of the Lambs and Alien into macabre fairy tales in their own right. Herein lurks violence and decay, but also a wild, overgrown beauty. Mothers and fathers are as much a part of this treacherous landscape as the carnivorous flora and shape-shifting fauna—and their effects are just as devastating. Framing all of this within biblical language and motifs gives these fabulist poems an ominous sense of urgency. Catechesis is a hybrid collection of textual and visual poems that examine belief and obsession. It explores how beauty leads to danger and danger births another kind of beauty, in a cycle of creation and destruction.
These are fishing stories, told as such stories are meant to be: simple, often coarse, and tinged with the elemental beauty of the sea. They reflect rugged lives lived on the edge of the ocean’s borders, where grief and grace ride the same waves. Rosemary McGuire, a fisherman herself, captures the essential humanity at the heart of each tale. No one comes through unscathed, but all retain a sense of hope and belief in earthly miracles, however humble.
A dazzling debut, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea will leave readers with a sense of the fragility and beauty inherent in eroded lives spent in proximity to danger.
McMullin seamlessly flows between exposing the ironies of Tiki kitsch–inspired cultural appropriation and intimate snapshots of Samoan people and place. In doing so, he disrupts popular notions of a beautiful Polynesia available for the taking, and carves out new avenues of meaning for Pacific Islanders of Oceania. Throughout the collection, McMullin illustrates various manifestations of geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and sexual colonialism. His work illuminates the ongoing resistance to colonialism and the remarkable resilience of Pacific Islanders and queer-identified peoples.
McMullin’s Fa’a Fafine identity—the ability to walk between and embody both the masculine and feminine—creates a grounded and dynamic voice throughout the collection. It also fosters a creative dialogue between Fa’a Fafine people and trans-Indigenous movements. Through a uniquely Samoan practice of storytelling, McMullin contributes to the growing and vibrant body of queer Indigenous literature.
A young physician, Dr. Abby Wilmore, attempts to escape her past by starting over at the Grand Canyon Clinic. Silently battling her own health issues, Abby struggles with adjusting to the demands of this unique rural location. She encounters everything from squirrel bites to suicides to an office plagued by strong personalities. While tending to unprepared tourists, underserved locals, and her own mental trials, Abby finds herself entangled in an unexpected romance and trapped amidst a danger even more treacherous than the foreboding desert landscape.
Sandra Cavallo Miller’s debut novel transports readers to the beautiful depths of Arizona and weaves an adventurous and heartwarming tale of the courage and strength it takes to overcome personal demons and to find love.
Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.
At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Pushing back on capitalist messages of individuality, CHORUS instead seeks the multifaceted self that engages with the radical diversity that characterizes any healthy ecosystem or society. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the author asks, “Whose afterimage am I?”
The sprawling, celebratory, mourning chorus of this book is the sum of many voices; the words of other writers, poets, and artists are interwoven with the author’s words. This is a celebration of language’s capacity to supersede bodily limits, mortality, and existential loneliness. Daniela Naomi Molnar’s chorus encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief. Rather than seeking resolution, these poems look through the lens of a fragmented self, dwelling in plurality, discord, and harmony.
CHORUS is the winner of Omnidawn’s 1st /2nd Book Prize, judged by Kazim Ali.
No matter how smattered my insides,
One less ugly sight.
I always wanted to die clean & pretty
while my dreams made music in the night.
A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.
A self-proclaimed “vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial,” poet dg nanouk okpik seamlessly melds both traditional and contemporary narrative, setting her apart from her peers. The result is a collection of poems that are steeped in the perspective of an Inuit of the twenty-first century—a perspective that is fresh, vibrant, and rarely seen in contemporary poetics.
Fearless in her craft, okpik brings an experimental, yet poignant, hybrid aesthetic to her first book, making it truly one of a kind. “It takes all of us seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling to be one,” she says, embodying these words in her work. Every sense is amplified as the poems, carefully arranged, pull the reader into their worlds. While each poem stands on its own, they flow together throughout the collection into a single cohesive body.
The book quickly sets up its own rhythms, moving the reader through interior and exterior landscapes, dark and light, and other spaces both ecological and spiritual. These narrative, and often visionary, poems let the lives of animal species and the power of natural processes weave into the human psyche, and vice versa.
Okpik’s descriptive rhythms ground the reader in movement and music that transcend everyday logic and open up our hearts to the richness of meaning available in the interior and exterior worlds.
In Control Bird Alt Delete, the reader is invited to explore strange landscapes: some based on the ruins of New England and others following the architectural prints of the unconscious. The reader walks through woods filled with cellar holes, rock walls, and lilac bushes, and is made to think of people gone missing. Robert Frost meets Times Square. Nature intrudes in unexpected ways on domestic settings—and vice versa—domestic and industrial settings appear in bits inside the pastoral. Birds, one-dimensional but strangely wise, flit back and forth and rebelliously tape up their songs. The senses are thoroughly blended, leading to strange combinations and sensory experiences, to states of mindfulness and blizzard distraction.
All the while, the unconscious threatens to intrude, with its underlined places, its trap doors inside ordinary conversations, the mazes it hangs up like “welcome home” banners next to people’s mouths while they speak. The reader follows the first-person I through mazes, office spaces, and coils of highway traffic, hoping for some redemption, some sort of answer to all the deletion.
Winner of the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
From the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America and the National Book Award finalist Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, here is the first collection from award-winning poet Patrick Phillips.
A river runs through Patrick Phillips’s collection Chattahoochee, and through a family saga as powerful and poignant as the landscape in which it unfolds. Here are tales of a vanished South, elegies for the lost, and glimpses of what Flannery O’Connor called the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” In language delicate and muscular, tender and raw-boned, Phillips writes of family, place, and that mythic conjunction of the two we call home.
Puican’s focus on the city, its people and underbellied spaces, pays homage in the tradition of the great Chicago masters: Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Campbell McGrath. This contemporary Chicago son finds his own place with lyrical integrity.
Chamber after Chamber is about what fractures, fixes, and refills the hearts of two girls as they grow into women. A loose narrative in three sections, the poems follow a speaker and her cousin through their hardscrabble, backwoods childhood to their separation—both physical and emotional—as adults. From the make-believe apocalypses and cut-and-paste valentines of elementary school to the stadium-seating classrooms and multiplexes of southern China, our speaker tries to leave the shame and dysfunction of her family behind. In China, she begins to see America—and herself—clearly for the first time, and in doing so discovers that both her cousin and her country are inextricably woven into
[her body] part that never sleeps the blood
and chambered meat that’s like a rock squeezed
in a fist rapping its knuckles
on the sweet door of the body.
The poems of Compass and Clock take their inspiration from the intersection of the natural world and the human, exploring the landscapes in which those intersections occur. Those landscapes range from David Sanders’s native midwestern countryside to the caves of Lascaux and an enchanted lake where relics of lost lives are washed ashore. Yet, the true source of the poems’ vitality is Sanders’s attention to the missed or misread moments, those times when the act fails, and the perceived clashes with the actual.
Here, the satisfying pairing of elegance and vulnerability invites the reader to tour those uncanny landscapes from which one returns irrevocably changed—refreshed, but wistful. In a review of his earlier limited-edition work, Time in Transit, the Hudson Review called David Sanders “a poet to watch.” With the Swallow Press publication of Compass and Clock, we have the realization of that promise.
The seventh book from award-winning Chamoru author Craig Santos Perez, Call This Mutiny brings together poems that were originally published in journals and anthologies from 2008 to 2023. Throughout these selected poems, Perez offers critical explorations of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam, his current home of Hawaiʻi, and the larger Pacific region in relation to the Global South and the Indigenous Fourth World. Perez’s poetry draws on the power of storytelling to share Indigenous history and culture and to offer healing from the trauma of colonialism and injustice. As he writes, “If we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced.”
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press