BiblioVault - Books about Subjects & Themes

Dancing in Odessa

Ilya Kaminsky

Tupelo Press, 2004

Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language. This magical, musical book of poems draws readers into its unforgettable heart, and Carolyn Forché wrties simply "I'm in awe of his gifts."

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Darling Nova

Melissa Cundieff

Autumn House Press, 2018

This collection is musical, haunting, and simmering with life. Cundieff’s poems deal with loss and change through images that are startling in their originality. These poems will stay with you; they will remind you what poems can do.

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Daughters of Decadence

Women Writers of the Fin de Siecle

Showalter, Elaine

Rutgers University Press, 1993

At the turn of the century, short stories by -- and often about -- "New Women" flooded the pages English and American magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and the Yellow Book. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form and courageous in its candid representations of female sexuality, marital discontent, and feminist protest, shocked Victorian critics, who denounced the authors as "literary degenerates" or "erotomaniacs." This collection brings together twenty of the most original and important stories from this period. The writers included in this highly readable volume are Kate Chopin, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, Julia Constance Fletcher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand, Vernon Lee, Ada Leverson, Charlotte Mew, Olive Schreiner, Edith Wharton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Mabel E. Wotton. As Elaine Showalter shows in her introduction, the short fiction of the Fin-de-Siecle is the missing link between the Golden Age of Victorian women writers and the new era of feminist modernism.

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The Day's Hard Edge

Poems

Jose A. Rodriguez

Northwestern University Press, 2024

A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity

In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.

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Days of Our Lives

Joan Aleshire

Four Way Books, 2019

Day of Our Lives is equal parts social history and memoir documenting the unraveling of a marriage against the backdrop of the shifting social mores of 1960s and ’70s America. Joan Aleshire’s speaker, a young wife, enters marriage gratefully, even eagerly, believing it to be “a long table / with friends crowding in, red wine / in tumblers.” Motherhood follows, but so do infidelities and reconciliation and ultimately divorce. With each hard knock, the speaker sheds a little more of her innocence as she gains awareness of her power as both a woman and a writer: “Coming home / late from a festival for women / where I’d said all the things / the audience liked, I slipped / into bed so flush with triumph / my husband recoiled from the heat.”

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Dealing with Disasters from Early Modern to Modern Times

Cultural Responses to Catastrophes

Hanneke van Asperen

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

Disasters are as much cultural as natural phenomena. For centuries, news about catastrophic events has been disseminated through media such as chronicles, pamphlets, newspapers, poems, drawings, and prints. Nowadays, we are overwhelmed with news about the cataclysmic effects of recent forest fires, floods, and storms. Due to the ongoing climate crisis, extreme weather events will likely have ever greater impacts on our lives. This volume addresses cultural representations of catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and earthquakes over the centuries. In the past as now, artists and authors try to make sense of disasters, grasp their impact, and communicate moral, religious, or political messages. These creations reflect and shape how people learn and think about disasters that occur nearby or far away, both in time and space. The parallels between past and present underline how this book contributes to modern debates about cultural and creative strategies in response to disasters.

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A Death of One's Own

Literature, Law, and the Right to Die

Jared Stark

Northwestern University Press, 2018

To be or not to be—who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One’s Own, the first sustained literary study of the right to die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rigorously interdisciplinary and lucidly argued, Stark’s wide-ranging discussion sheds critical light on the disquieting bioethical and biopolitical dilemmas raised by contemporary forms of medical technology and legal agency.

More than a survey or work of advocacy, A Death of One’s Own examines the consequences and limits of the three reasons most often cited for supporting a person’s right to die: that it is justified as an expression of personal autonomy or self-ownership; that it constitutes an act of self-authorship, of “choosing a final chapter” in one’s life; and that it enables what has come to be called “death with dignity.” Probing the intersections of law and literature, Stark interweaves close discussion of major legal, political, and philosophical arguments with revealing readings of literary and testimonial texts by writers including Balzac, Melville, Benjamin, and Améry.

A thought-provoking work that will be of interest to those concerned with law and humanities, biomedical ethics, cultural history, and human rights, A Death of One’s Own opens new and suggestive paths for thinking about the history of modern death as well as the unsettled future of the right to die.

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Deceptive Beauties

The World of Wild Orchids

Christian Ziegler

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Confucius called them the “king of fragrant plants,” and John Ruskin condemned them as “prurient apparitions.” Across the centuries, orchids have captivated us with their elaborate exoticism, their powerful perfumes, and their sublime seductiveness.

But the disquieting beauty of orchids is an unplanned marvel of evolution, and the story of orchids is as captivating as any novel. As acclaimed writer Michael Pollan and National Geographic photographer Christian Ziegler spin tales of orchid conquest in Deceptive Beauties: The World of Wild Orchids, we learn how these flowers can survive and thrive in the harshest of environments, from tropical cloud forests to the Arctic, from semi-deserts to rocky mountainsides; how their shapes, colors, and scents are, as Darwin put it, “beautiful contrivances” meant to dupe pollinating male insects in the strangest ways. What other flowers, after all, can mimic the pheromones and even appearance of female insects, so much so that some male bees prefer sex with the orchids over sex with their own kind?

And insects aren’t the only ones to fall for the orchids’ charms. Since the “orchidelirium” of the Victorian era, humans have braved the wilds to search them out and devoted copious amounts of time and money propagating and hybridizing, nurturing and simply gazing at them. This astonishing book features over 150 unprecedented color photographs taken by Christian Ziegler himself as he trekked through wilderness on five continents to capture the diversity and magnificence of orchids in their natural habitats. His intimate and astonishing images allow us to appreciate up close nature’s most intoxicating and deceptive beauties.

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Democratic Criticism

Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred

Masood Raja

Lever Press, 2023

After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred by Masood Ashraf Raja urges a new mode of reading, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other.

Raja argues that the lack of understanding of Muslim responses to the poetics of incitement in the West is the result of a lack of cross-cultural knowledge. He claims metropolitan universities often do not teach the proper social, historical, and religious context required for effectively reading these texts with any form of cultural knowledge. To remedy this, Raja offers and theorizes “democratic reading practices” and new ways for students to engage with texts. A genealogy of the Muslim Sacred is included, thereby giving readers the history and specific knowledge that constitutes an average Muslim reader of these texts, a subject who should be imagined and empathized with when those in the West read works of the poetics of incitement.

Democratic Criticism encourages Western readers to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning-making processes of the Islamic world while at the same time encouraging the Muslim readers to read representations of the Islamic world with a more expansive understanding. It will be a helpful tool in creating reading practices that allow both teachers and students of literature to transcend their mode of reading as universal and to read from the perspective of the Other, and allow readers to engage meaningfully with these texts. Students and scholars of world literature, history, and religious studies will find this book insightful and valuable.

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Desert Jewels

Cactus Flowers of the Southwest and Mexico

John P. Schaefer

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Cactus flowers are jewels of the desert—they add brilliant pops of color to our arid surroundings. In this book, renowned Tucson photographer John P. Schaefer brings the exquisite and unexpected beauty of the cactus flower to the page. Hundreds of close-up photographs of cactus flowers native to the U.S. Southwest and Mexico offer a visual feast of color and texture, nuance and light.

These stunning photographs allow us to appreciate the spectacular range of color and form cactus flowers have to offer. For the cactus enthusiast, the book offers a comprehensive collection of high-quality flower photographs unlike any other. The photographs cover more than 250 cactus species organized by genus. The book starts with an introduction by the photographer that is both autobiographical and informative. It offers a glimpse into his process for capturing these elusive desert gems, resulting in photographs so beautiful they were featured as a book of stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

This collection of cactus flowers in bloom is a one-of-a-kind work by a master photographer.

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Detroit Is No Dry Bones

The Eternal City of the Industrial Age

Camilo José Vergara

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Over the past 25 years, award-winning ethnographer and photographer Camilo José Vergara has traveled annually to Detroit to document not only the city’s precipitous decline but also how its residents have survived. From the 1970s through the 1990s, changes in Detroit were almost all for the worse, as the fabric of the city was erased through neglect and abandonment. But over the last decade, Detroit has seen the beginnings of a positive transformation, and the photography in Detroit Is No Dry Bones provides unique documentation of the revival and its urbanistic possibilities. Beyond the fate of the city’s buildings themselves, Vergara’s camera has consistently sought to capture the distinct culture of this largely African American city. The photographs in this book, for example, are organized in part around the way people have re-used and re-purposed structures from the past. Vergara is unique in his documentation of local churches that have re-occupied old bank buildings and other impressive structures from the past and turned them into something unexpectedly powerful architecturally as well as spiritually.

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Detroit Resurgent

Howard Bossen

Michigan State University Press, 2014

Detroit is frequently viewed as a city where hope has been lost, government is totally dysfunctional, and the infrastructure is beyond repair. For far too many people around the world, the Motor City is perceived as a city whose greatness is in distant memory. Detroit Resurgent, while not ignoring the problems facing the city, explores Detroit in a new way that reveals a culturally rich, very alive, and undeniably present side of the city. Through photographic portraits, interviews, essays, and poetry, it demonstrates the vitality and humanity of Detroit’s people, providing a powerful counternarrative to the vision of Detroit as a Rust Belt wasteland. Giving voice to people with hopes for a brighter future and aspirations to create a new city out of the old required recording their own words and engaging a portrait photographer grounded in humanism whose approach is based upon the traditions of social documentary photography. Detroit Resurgent explores the city through the voices of those working in a multitude of ways to reshape it into a twenty-first-century urban space, through the auto industry, urban agriculture and food production, entrepreneurial action and small business, visual and performing arts, activism, and visionary leadership.

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Developing Animals

Wildlife and Early American Photography

Matthew Brower

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Pictures of animals are now ubiquitous, but the ability to capture animals on film was a significant challenge in the early era of photography. In Developing Animals, Matthew Brower takes us back to the time when Americans started taking pictures of the animal kingdom, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the moment when photography became a mass medium and wildlife photography an increasingly popular genre.

Developing Animals compellingly investigates the way photography changed our perception of animals. Brower analyzes how photographers created new ideas about animals as they moved from taking pictures of taxidermic specimens in so-called natural settings to the emergence of practices such as camera hunting, which made it possible to capture images of creatures in the wild.

By combining approaches in visual cultural studies and the history of photography, Developing Animals goes further to argue that photography has been essential not only to the understanding of wildlife but also to the conceptual separation of humans and animals.

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Devonte Travels the Sorry Route

T.J. Anderson III

Omnidawn, 2019

Devonte, the eponymous subject of the poems in Devonte Travels the Sorry Route, has a gift: he can travel across space and time. This extraordinary quality brings Devonte into contact with a broad array of events and phenomena from black history and culture. Unlike most of us, who perceive of history as a sequence of fleeting events, Devonte is able to experience all of his diverse travels to varied historical epochs and places simultaneously, and in doing so is able to become a “stalker of history,” chasing down the elusive narratives that have been erased or ignored by the building of empires and the destruction of ecosystems.
As fantastical as this account seems, in these poems, T.J. Anderson III captures a critical aspect of the ways identity is formed through community and collective memory, particularly among the peoples of the African diaspora. The way the words expand across the page enacts this polyvocal coalescing, and the blank space in between evokes the vast oceans that first separated and continue to resonate in the collective imagination of the Black community. At the same time that he relates the difficulty of crossing vast expanses of time and space to connect with our history, in these gripping poems Anderson proposes that the past is never far off—in fact, like Devonte, it lives in our own personalities and experiences today.

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Devotion

Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination

Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Three scholars of religion explore literature and the literary as sites of critical transformation.

We are living in a time of radical uncertainty, faced with serious political, ecological, economic, epidemiological, and social problems. Scholars of religion Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood come together in this volume with a shared conviction that what and how we read opens new ways of imagining our political futures and our lives.

Each essay in this book suggests different ways to characterize the object of devotion and the stance of the devout subject before it. Furey writes about devotion in terms of vivification, energy, and artifice; Hammerschlag in terms of commentary, mimicry, and fetishism; and Hollywood in terms of anarchy, antinomianism, and atopia. They are interested in literature not as providing models for ethical, political, or religious life, but as creating the site in which the possible—and the impossible—transport the reader, enabling new forms of thought, habits of mind, and ways of life. Ranging from German theologian Martin Luther to French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman to American poet Susan Howe, this volume is not just a reflection on forms of devotion and their critical and creative import but also a powerful enactment of devotion itself.

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Diary of Our Fatal Illness

Charles Bardes

University of Chicago Press, 2017

This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man’s son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.

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Dickey Chapelle Under Fire

Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action

John Garofolo

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015

"It was dawn before I fell asleep, and later in the morning I was only half-awake as I fed a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter and began to copy the notes from the previous day out of my book. But I wasn't too weary to type the date line firmly as if I'd been writing date lines all my life:
from the front at iwo jima march 5--
Then I remembered and added two words.
under fire--
They looked great."
In 1965, Wisconsin native Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle became the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action. Now, "Dickey Chapelle Under Fire" shares her remarkable story and offers readers the chance to experience Dickey's wide-ranging photography, including several photographs taken during her final patrol in Vietnam.
Dickey Chapelle fought to be taken seriously as a war correspondent and broke down gender barriers for future generations of female journalists. She embedded herself with military units on front lines around the globe, including Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. Dickey sometimes risked her life to tell the story--after smuggling aid to refugees fleeing Hungary, she spent almost two months in a Hungarian prison. For twenty-five years, Dickey's photographs graced the pages of "National Geographic," the "National Observer," "Life," and others. Her tenacity, courage, and compassion shine through in her work, highlighting the human impact of war while telling the bigger story beyond the battlefield.
In "Dickey Chapelle Under Fire," the American public can see the world through Dickey's lens for the first time in almost fifty years, with a foreword by Jackie Spinner, former war correspondent for "The Washington Post."

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Dissonant Voices

Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury America

Joseph Pizza

University of Iowa Press, 2023

Dissonant Voices uncovers the interracial collaboration at the heart of the postwar avant-garde. While previous studies have explored the writings of individual authors and groups, this work is among the first to trace the cross-cultural debate that inspired and energized midcentury literature in America and beyond. By reading a range of poets in the full context of the friendships and romantic relationships that animated their writing, this study offers new perspectives on key textual moments in the foundation and development of postmodern literature in the U.S. Ultimately, these readings aim to integrate our understanding of New American Poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and the various contemporary approaches to poetry and poetics that have been inspired by their examples.

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Ditch Memory

New and Selected Poems

Todd Davis

Michigan State University Press, 2024

In an age when many find themselves disconnected from the natural world, celebrated poet Todd Davis offers the possibilities of reconnection, of listening to the earth’s labored breathing, to the thoughts of other-than-human animals and the languages trees speak. In thirty new poems, and with ample selections from his previous seven books, Davis’s roots run deep in Rust-Belt Appalachia, attending to the harmed but healing landscape, the people whose lives are too often neglected, and the looming threat of climate collapse and extinction. Orion Magazine likens Davis’s work to Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, as he continues to demonstrate what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.” Known for both narrative and lyrical impulses, Davis asks readers to acknowledge their kinship with all living beings, which demands some grieving for past sins but also suggests a way toward restoration. With a Foreword by David James Duncan.

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The Division of the World

On Archives, Empires and the Vanity of Borders

Martin Zimmermann and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

Haus Publishing, 2021

A photographer and a historian explore a vast archive of Spanish colonial history.

At a time when Western nations are being urged to confront their colonial past, this book examines a major archive, revealing the scale of the Spanish colonial enterprise in South and Central America.

Established in 1785, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville holds roughly three hundred years of Spanish colonial history in the Americas. It houses 8,000 charts and around ninety million documents—among them Christopher Columbus’s logbook and the famous Treaty of Tordesillas which, mediated by the Pope and signed in 1494, entitled the Spanish and Portuguese kings to divide the world between them. With this treaty as a starting point, the historian Martin Zimmermann journeys into the age of discovery and recounts stories of dangerous passages, encounters with the unknown, colonial brutality, and the power of cartographers, illustrating the insatiable lust of colonialists to conquer, exploit, and own the world. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s photographs show the archive before its redevelopment in 2002, offering a unique view into one of Europe’s most significant archives.

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Dogs

History, Myth, Art

Catherine Johns

Harvard University Press, 2008

Archaeological evidence of truly domestic dogs dates back to the Stone Age, when humans lived as bands of hunter-gatherers. The long association that followed, with dogs living alongside people as hunters and companions, guardians and guides, has a treasured place in history and myth—and in a wealth of art and artifacts that document and celebrate this ancient relationship.

Dogs: History, Myth, Art explores these cultural expressions and reflections of our deep and long-standing interest in dogs. Here, in exquisite reproductions, are life-size sculptures and tiny engraved gems, ceramic floor tiles and stone wall-reliefs, gold ornaments and ceramic vessels, pocketknife handles and miniature paintings, all depicting dogs from prehistory to the present. Through these illustrations—drawn from the collections of the British Museum—author Catherine Johns considers the evolution of the species, its earliest interactions with human communities, its importance in history and culture, and its role in symbolism, mythology, and legend. Dogs’ wild cousins, wolves, jackals, and foxes, also play a role in this story, and so appear alongside their domestic counterparts in this book’s engaging tour of cultural perceptions and depictions of dogs.

The juxtaposition and explanation of images as diverse as Greek pottery, Victorian jewelry, Assyrian sculpture, and Japanese netsuke, as well as drawings and paintings from 1850 bc to the twentieth century, illuminates our understanding of the place of dogs in human society around the world.

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Don’t Make Me Go to Town

Ranchwomen of the Texas Hill Country

By Rhonda Lashley Lopez

University of Texas Press, 2011

Many people dream of "someday buying a small quaint place in the country, to own two cows and watch the birds," in the words of Texas ranchwoman Amanda Spenrath Geistweidt. But only a few are cut out for the unrelenting work that makes a family ranching operation successful. Don't Make Me Go to Town presents an eloquent photo-documentary of eight women who have chosen to make ranching in the Texas Hill Country their way of life. Ranging from young mothers to elderly grandmothers, these women offer vivid accounts of raising livestock in a rugged land, cut off from amenities and amusements that most people take for granted, and loving the hard lives they've chosen.

Rhonda Lashley Lopez began making photographic portraits of Texas Hill Country ranchwomen in 1993 and has followed their lives through the intervening years. She presents their stories through her images and the women's own words, listening in as the ranchwomen describe the pleasures and difficulties of raising sheep, Angora goats, and cattle on the Edwards Plateau west of Austin and north of San Antonio. Their stories record the struggles that all ranchers face—vagaries of weather and livestock markets, among them—as well as the extra challenges of being women raising families and keeping things going on the home front while also riding the range. Yet, to a woman, they all passionately embrace family ranching as a way of life and describe their efforts to pass it on to future generations.

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The Douce Apocalypse

Picturing the End of the World in the Middle Ages

Nigel Morgan

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2006

One of the finest of all medieval apocalypse manuscripts, the Douce Apocalypse was part of a series of illuminated texts that brought St. John’s apocalyptic visions to life.

Now the manuscript—created sometime between 1250 and 1275—reaches an entirely new audience at the hands of noted scholar Nigel Morgan. The Douce Apocalypse explores the manuscript’s royal patronage, looks at its fascinating imagery, and examines its significance in light of contemporary prophecy. The commentary is accompanied by lush, full-color illustrations.

As Morgan relates, the Douce Apocalypse is especially enlightening because of its unfinished nature. A few of its images remain incomplete—and such absences give insight into the artist’s painstaking techniques of drawing, gilding, and painting. The second volume in the Treasures from the Bodleian Library series, The Douce Apocalypse will convey both the beauty of the original and the enduring fascination of its contents.

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The Drake Relays

America's Athletic Classic

David Peterson

University of Iowa Press, 2014

The Drake Relays are one of the iconic events of track and field in the United States. World and Olympic champions test their speed and stamina on the famed Blue Oval in Des Moines, Iowa, every April, and by spring 2013 they had set fourteen world records and fifty-one American records. But unlike most other top meets, this one also features college athletes from all over the country and high school athletes from across Iowa, giving them the experience of a lifetime—competing on the same track with the elite in their sport. This mix brings many enthusiastic spectators to the stadium and makes for an unusually close bond between fans and athletes—it’s as if everyone’s family is there cheering.

Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Peterson has been covering the Drake Relays for nearly forty years, but his love affair with the meet started earlier, when he ran on three winning relay teams there for Kansas State University. Now, drawing upon an unmatched personal archive, he offers the pictures of a lifetime spent on the Blue Oval. He captures on camera athletes of all levels in triumph and defeat, in mid-stride or leap, embracing their fans, their moms and dads, and their kids. In addition to the stars of the past, such as Carl Lewis, Suzy Favor Hamilton, and Herschel Walker, and those of the ’00s, like Lolo Jones and Jeremy Wariner, we see teenagers who may be the stars of the future, as well as the many athletes who will never be famous but nonetheless show themselves—and their sport—at their best.

A beautiful celebration of the Drake Relays and the diverse sports that make up “track and field,” this book will evoke memories and inspire runners, throwers, and jumpers everywhere.

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Drawn to the Word

The Bible and Graphic Design

Amanda Dillon

SBL Press, 2021

A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception

How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs. Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.

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Dream Shot

The Journey to a Wheelchair Basketball National Championship

Josh Birnbaum

University of Illinois Press, 2017

In 2008, the men's wheelchair basketball team at the University of Illinois set out to achieve their sport's pinnacle: a college national championship. That lofty goal represented another stage of a journey begun in 1948 when Tim Nugent established the Gizz Kids wheelchair squad. Embedded with the team, Josh Birnbaum took photos that captured the life experiences of people in the Illinois wheelchair basketball program from 2005 through the 2008 championship season. Dream Shot follows the unique lives of the players and coaches on the court and the road, and in quiet moments at home and the classroom. Along the way, Birnbaum provides the definitive story of the 2008 team and the challenges it overcame to capture one of Illinois's record fifteen men's titles. Featuring more than 100 color photographs, Dream Shot memorializes a legendary team alongside the story of the university's dedication to the progress of disability rights.

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Dream Street

W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project

W. Eugene Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2023

New edition of poignant selected images from famed Life photographer W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh project.

In 1955, having just resigned from his high-profile but stormy career with Life Magazine, W. Eugene Smith was commissioned to spend three weeks in Pittsburgh and produce one hundred photographs for noted journalist and author Stefan Lorant’s book commemorating the city’s bicentennial. Smith ended up staying a year, compiling twenty thousand images for what would be the most ambitious photographic essay of his life. But only a fragment of this work was ever seen, despite Smith's lifelong conviction that it was his greatest collection of photographs.

In 2001, Sam Stephenson published for the first time an assemblage of the core images from this project, selections that Smith asserted were the “synthesis of the whole,” presenting not only a portrayal of Pittsburgh but of postwar America. This new edition, updated with a foreword by the poet Ross Gay, offers a fresh vision of Smith's masterpiece.

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The Dream Women Called

Lori Wilson

Autumn House Press, 2021

Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded how many lives one woman can live.

This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.

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The Dream Women Called

Lori Wilson

Autumn House Press, 2021

Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded how many lives one woman can live.

This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.

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The Dreamer and the Dream

Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought

Roger A. Sneed

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Finalist for the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflexive Studies

In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought, Roger A. Sneed illuminates the interplay of Black religious thought with science fiction narratives to present a bold case for Afrofuturism as an important channel for Black spirituality. In the process, he challenges the assumed primacy of the Black church as the arbiter of Black religious life. Incorporating analyses of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturistic saga, Star Trek’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, Marvel’s Black Panther, and Sun Ra and the Nation of Islam, Sneed demonstrates how Afrofuturism has contributed to Black visions of the future. He also investigates how Afrofuturism has influenced religious scholarship that looks to Black cultural production as a means of reimagining Blackness in the light of the sacred. The result is an expansive new look at the power of science fiction and Afrofuturism to center the diversity of Black spirituality.

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Dreams of Archives Unfolded

Absence and Caribbean Life Writing

Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

Rutgers University Press, 2021

The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the “memoir boom” in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research. Dreams of Archives makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.

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Dulce

Poems

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Northwestern University Press, 2018

The poems in Dulce are at once confession and elegy that admit the speaker’s attempt and possible failure to reconcile intimacy toward another and toward the self. The collection asks: what’s the point in any of this?—meaning, what’s the use of longing beyond pleasure; what’s the use of looking for an origin if we already know the ending?

Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions. He allows for the possibility of an and in a world of either/or.

These poems enact a prescient anxiety of what is to come, “I want to say all of this is true / but we both know it isn’t. . . . We already know what’s at the other end of this.” Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet.

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Dwelling in American

Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

John Muthyala

Dartmouth College Press, 2012

Globalization is not the Americanization of the world, argues John Muthyala. Rather, it is an uneven social, cultural, economic, and political process in which the policies and aspirations of powerful nation-states are entangled with the interests of other empires, nation-states, and communities. Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization takes up a bold challenge, critiquing scholarship on American empire that views the United States as either an exceptional threat to the world or the only hope for the future. It does so in order to provincialize America, to understand it from outside the borders of nation and location, and from inside the global networks of trade, power, and culture. Using comparative frames of reference, the book makes its arguments by examining the work of a diverse range of writers including Arundhati Roy (War Talk, Power Politics), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), and Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat). This is an original, complex, and often bracingly counterintuitive critique of the idea of American empire that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of globalization.

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Dystopias of Infamy

Insult and Collective Identity in Early Modern Spain

Javier Irigoyen-García

Bucknell University Press, 2022

Insults, scorn, and verbal abuse—frequently deployed to affirm the social identity of the insulter—are destined to fail when that language is appropriated and embraced by the maligned group. In such circumstances, slander may instead empower and reinforce the collective identity of those perceived to be a threat to an idealized society. In this innovative study, Irigoyen-Garcia examines how the discourse and practices of insult and infamy shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Spain. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary works, archival research, religious and political literature, and iconographic documents, Dystopias of Infamy traces how the production of insults haunts the imaginary of power, provoking latent anxieties about individual and collective resistance to subjectification. Of particular note is Cervantes’s tendency to parody regulatory fantasies about infamy throughout his work, lampooning repressive law for its paradoxical potential to instigate the very defiance it fears.

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