Poetry that finds meaning and connection in the process of creating pottery from clay.
 
The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter’s wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk’s process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings of ceramic forms.

For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter’s hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.
 

Written at the convergence of imagination and memory, A Face Out of Clay delves deep into childhood experiences and cultural identity. Through eloquent verses and poignant imagery, alternating between narrative and lyric poems, the book paints a complicated portrait of a bi-national speaker. The poems navigate the interplay between Mexican roots and the American experience, seeking to reconcile both cultural identities. They present themes of social justice, family bonds, and the power of cultural traditions, highlighting both difficult truths and everyday beauty. The poems transport readers back in time, reliving childhood innocence, natural disasters, and political oppressors. They serve as a reminder of the power of nostalgia along with the challenges that come with recreating memories. A Face Out of Clay is a profound exploration of the human experience, inviting readers to reflect, celebrate, and connect with the transformative power of poetry.

A remarkable exploration of Chicago’s architectural history through the humble brick.
 
By the late 1920s, at its peak of brick making and consumption, Chicago was making over a billion bricks a year for its buildings and importing almost another billion nicer face bricks for their front facades. Throughout Chicago’s history, brick dramatically transformed from a simple fireproof building material into an integral piece of architectural design. And no one knows the hidden details and stories of this fascinating history like Chicago’s foremost brick aficionado, Will Quam.
 
In Fire and Clay, Quam takes us on journeys to experience the beauty and mystery of Chicago’s buildings. He also explores how developers, architects, and masons followed changing fashions as they designed and built the city, creating connections across disparate neighborhoods. The red bricks that make up Lincoln Park mansions, for example, are the same as those found on Pullman row homes and Pilsen workers’ cottages, just as Rogers Park’s colorful bricks can also be found far across the city in South Shore. Known for his popular walking tours, Quam has built his life around the appreciation, study, and evangelizing of this most humble building block’s many wonders. Here, he pours all his knowledge into the first book of its kind, beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred of his own full-color photographs.
 
More than just an investigation into brick, Fire and Clay gives readers a fresh lens through which to explore the city anew and find clear connections across its different neighborhoods. By the end of this lively tour through Chicago’s history, readers will never look at a brick building the same way again.

An interdisciplinary excavation of colonoware as a material archive of African, Indigenous, and colonial entanglements across the early American South.

In Materializing Colonial Identities in Clay, Jon Bernard Marcoux, Corey A. H. Sattes, and contributors examine colonoware to explore the active roles that African Americans and Indigenous people played in constructing southern colonial culture and part of their shared history with Europeans.

Colonoware was most likely produced by African and Indigenous potters and used by all colonial groups for cooking, serving, and storing food. It formed the foundation of colonial foodways in many settlements across the southeastern United States. Even so, compared with other ceramics from this period, less has been understood about its production and use because of the lack of documentation. This collection of essays fills this gap with valuable, recent archaeological data from which much may be surmised about the interaction among Europeans, Indigenous, and Africans, especially within the contexts of the African and Indigenous slave trade and plantation systems.

The chapters represent the full range of colonoware research: from the beginning to the end of its production, from urban to rural contexts, and from its intraregional variation in the Lowcountry to the broad patterns of colonialism across the early American Southeast. The book summarizes current approaches in colonoware research and how these may bridge the gaps between broader colonial American studies, Indigenous studies, and African Diaspora studies.

A concluding discussion contextualizes the chapters through the perspectives of intersectionality and Black feminist theory, drawing attention to the gendered and racialized meanings embodied in colonoware, and considering how colonialism and slavery have shaped these cultural dimensions and archaeologists’ study of them.