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Rated RX
Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan
Yetta Howard
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
“The thing that people don’t understand is that Bob was my invention,” says Sheree Rose, the oft-overlooked partner of the late “supermasochist” performance artist Bob Flanagan. Unpacking this statement is at the heart of this important collection, which seeks to recuperate and showcase Rose’s contributions as performer, photographer, writer, and cultural innovator. While Rose is mostly known for blurring the boundaries between art and lived experience in the context of her full-time, mistress-slave relationship with Flanagan, Rated RX shifts focus from Flanagan to Rose, presenting a feminist project that critically reassesses the artistic legacies of Sheree Rose.
 
Curated with attention to queer-crip subjectivities and transgressive feminisms, Rated RX includes essays by and interviews with scholars, artists, and Rose’s collaborators that address gender politics, archival practices, minority embodiment, and disability in Rose’s work as well as more than eighty photographs and rare archival materials reflecting Rose’s recent and past performances. Offering a necessary corrective, Rated RX is the first collection to underscore Sheree Rose as a legendary figure in performance art and BDSM subcultural history, reflecting her lifetime of involvement in documenting the underground and the transformative role her work plays in sexual, subcultural, and art exhibitionism.
 
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Reading Etty Hillesum in Context
Writings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary Author
Edited by Klaas Smelik, Gerrit van Oord, and Jurjen Wiersma
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum (1914—1943) have a special place among the Jewish-Dutch testimonies of the Shoah, somuch so that Etty Hillesum studies has become its own field. This book offers the most important contributions from the pastfifteen years of international research into Hillesum’s work and life, studying her ethical, philosophical, spiritual, and literary existential search.
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Real Life
An Installation
Julie Carr
Omnidawn, 2018
In a book rich with formal variety and lyric intensity, Carr takes up economic inequality, gendered violence, losses both personal and national, and the crisis of the body within all of these forces. Real Life: An Installation is a terrifying book, but one that keeps us close as it moves through the disruptions and eruptions of the real.
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Rebel Poet
More Stories from a 21st Century Indian
Louis V. Clark (Two Shoes)
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019
This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother's alcoholism and his young sister's death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash he faced as an Indian on the job, and celebrates the hard-fought sense of home he and his wife have created. Rebel Poet continues the author's tradition of seamlessly mixing poetry and prose, and is at turns darker and more nuanced than its predecessor.
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Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus
Arum Park
University of Michigan Press, 2023
In Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus, author Arum Park explores two notoriously difficult ancient Greek poets and seeks to articulate the complex relationship between them. Although Pindar and Aeschylus were contemporaries, previous scholarship has often treated them as representatives of contrasting worldviews. Park’s comparative study offers the alternative perspective of understanding them as complements instead. By examining these poets together through the concepts of reciprocity, truth, and gender, this book establishes a relationship between Pindar and Aeschylus that challenges previous conceptions of their dissimilarity. The book accomplishes three aims: first, it shows that Pindar and Aeschylus frame their poetry using similar principles of reciprocity; second, it demonstrates that each poet depicts truth in a way that is specific to those reciprocity principles; and finally, it illustrates how their depictions of gender are shaped by this intertwining of truth and reciprocity. By demonstrating their complementarity, the book situates Pindar and Aeschylus in the same poetic ecosystem, which has implications for how we understand ancient Greek poetry more broadly: using Pindar and Aeschylus as case studies, the book provides a window into their dynamic and interactive poetic world, a world in which ostensibly dissimilar poets and genres actually have much more in common than we might think.
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Re-Collecting Black Hawk
Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest
Nicholas A. Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015

The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to “Black Hawk,” surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre.
Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include  tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others including George Thurman, the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation and a direct descendant of Black Hawk. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. As we witness, the evocation of Black Hawk serves as a painful reminder, a forced deference, and a veiled attempt to wipe away the guilt of past atrocities. Re-Collecting Black Hawk also points toward the future. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the midwestern landscape, it envisions new modes of peaceful and just coexistence and suggests alternative ways of inhabiting the landscape.

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Reconceiving Nature
Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry
PATRICIA MURPHY
University of Missouri Press, 2019
Surprisingly, glimmerings of ecofeminist theory that would emerge a century later can be detected in women’s poetry of the late Victorian period. In Reconceiving Nature, Patricia Murphy examines the work of six ecofeminist poets—Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and L. S. Bevington—who contested the exploitation of the natural world. Challenging prevalent assumptions that nature is inferior, rightly subordinated, and deservedly manipulated, these poets instead “reconstructed” nature.
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Red Clay Suite
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
In her third book of poems, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers expresses her familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American South occupies in our cultural lexicon. Her two earlier books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues, use the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma. Now, in Red Clay Suite, Jeffersapproaches the southern landscape as utopia and dystopia—a crossroads of race, gender, and blood. These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and complete the last four “bars” of a blues song, resting on the final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation.
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Red Ocher
Jessica Poli
University of Arkansas Press, 2023

Finalist, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

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Rediscovering Black Portraiture
Peter Brathwaite
J. Paul Getty Trust, The
Join Peter Brathwaite on an extraordinary journey through representations of Black subjects in Western art, from medieval Europe through the present day.
 
“These mirror images with their uncanny resemblances traverse space and time, spotlighting the black lives that have been silenced by the canon of western art, while also inviting us to interrogate the present.” —Times (UK)
 
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Brathwaite has thoughtfully researched and reimagined more than one hundred artworks featuring portraits of Black sitters—all posted to social media with the caption “Rediscovering #blackportraiture through #gettymuseumchallenge.”
 
Rediscovering Black Portraiture collects more than fifty of Brathwaite’s most intriguing re-creations. Introduced by the author and framed by contributions from experts in art history and visual culture, this fascinating book offers a nuanced look at the complexities and challenges of building identity within the African diaspora and how such forces have informed Black portraits over time. Artworks featured include The Adoration of the Magi by Georges Trubert, Portrait of an Unknown Man by Jan Mostaert, Rice n Peas by Sonia Boyce, Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, and many more. This volume also invites readers behind the scenes, offering a glimpse of the elegant artifice of Brathwaite’s props, setup, and process.
 
An urgent and compelling exploration of embodiment, representation, and agency, Rediscovering Black Portraiture serves to remind us that Black subjects have been portrayed in art for nearly a millennium and that their stories demand to be told.

An exhibition of Brathwaite’s re-creations is on view at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in Bristol, UK from April 14 to September 3, 2023.
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Redreaming the Renaissance
Essays on History and Literature in Honor of Guido Ruggiero
Mary Lindemann
University of Delaware Press, 2024
Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.
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Refiguring Race and Risk
Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State
Roberta Wolfson
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.
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Refracted Visions
Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java
Karen Strassler
Duke University Press, 2010
A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals.
Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and “tradition,” desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography’s primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.
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Refugia
Poems
Kyce Bello
University of Nevada Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards 
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize


Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, “something other and unknown, growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.

Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
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Reimagining Environmental History
Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change
Christian Knoeller
University of Nevada Press, 2017
Christian Knoeller presents a radical reinterpretation of environmental history set in the heartland of America. In an excellent model of narrative-based scholarship, this book dynamically reimagines American environmentalism across generations of writers, artists, and scientists. Knoeller starts out with Audubon, and cites Thoreau’s journals in the 1850s as he assesses an early 17th century account of New England’s natural resources by William Wood, showing the epic decline in game and bird populations in Concord. This reading of environmental history is replicated throughout with a gallery of novelists, poets, essayists, and other commentators as they explore ecological memory and environmental destruction. In apt discussions of Matthiessen, Lopez, Wendell Berry, William Stafford and many others, Knoeller offers vibrant insights into literary history. He also cites his own memoir of perpetual development on his family’s farm in Indiana, enriching the scholarship and making an urgent plea for the healing aesthetics of the imagination.
 
Reading across centuries and genres, Knoeller gives us a vibrant new appraisal of Midwestern/North American interior literary traditions and makes clear how vital environmental writing is to this region. To date, no one has written such an eloquent and comprehensive cross-genre analysis of Midwestern environmental literature.
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Relics
Travels in Nature's Time Machine
Piotr Naskrecki
University of Chicago Press, 2011

On any night in early June, if you stand on the right beaches of America’s East Coast, you can travel back in time all the way to the Jurassic. For as you watch, thousands of horseshoe crabs will emerge from the foam and scuttle up the beach to their spawning grounds, as they’ve done, nearly unchanged, for more than 440 million years.

Horseshoe crabs are far from the only contemporary manifestation of Earth’s distant past, and in Relics, world-renowned zoologist and photographer Piotr Naskrecki leads readers on an unbelievable journey through those lingering traces of a lost world. With camera in hand, he travels the globe to create a words-and-pictures portrait of our planet like no other, a time-lapse tour that renders Earth’s colossal age comprehensible, visible in creatures and habitats that have persisted, nearly untouched, for hundreds of millions of years.

Naskrecki begins by defining the concept of a relic—a creature or habitat that, while acted upon by evolution, remains remarkably similar to its earliest manifestations in the fossil record. Then he pulls back the Cambrian curtain to reveal relic after eye-popping relic: katydids, ancient reptiles, horsetail ferns, majestic magnolias, and more, all depicted through stunning photographs and first-person accounts of Naskrecki’s time studying them and watching their interactions in their natural habitats. Then he turns to the habitats themselves, traveling to such remote locations as the Atewa Plateau of Africa, the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and the lush forests of the Guyana Shield of South America—a group of relatively untrammeled ecosystems that are the current end point of staggeringly long, uninterrupted histories that have made them our best entryway to understanding what the prehuman world looked, felt, sounded, and even smelled like.

The stories and images of Earth’s past assembled in Relics are beautiful, breathtaking, and unmooring, plunging the reader into the hitherto incomprehensible reaches of deep time. We emerge changed, astonished by the unbroken skein of life on Earth and attentive to the hidden heritage of our planet’s past that surrounds us. 

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Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World
Suzanna Ivanic
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.
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The Reliquary Effect
Enshrining the Sacred Object
Cynthia Hahn
Reaktion Books, 2017
From skeletons to strips of cloth to little pieces of dust, reliquaries can be found in many forms, and while sometimes they may seem grotesque on their surface, they are nonetheless invested with great spiritual and memorial value. In this book, Cynthia Hahn offers the first full survey in English of the societal value of reliquaries, showing how they commemorate religious and historical events and, more important, inspire awe, faith, and, for many, the miraculous.
            Hahn looks deeply into the Christian tradition, examining relics and reliquaries throughout history and around the world, going from the earliest years of the cult of saints through to the post-Reformation response. She looks at relic footprints, incorrupt bodies, the Crown of Thorns, the Shroud of Turin, and many other renowned relics, and she shows how the architectural creation of sacred space and the evocation of the biblical tradition of the temple is central to the reliquary’s numinous power. She also discusses relics from other traditions—especially from Buddhism and Islam—and she even looks at how reliquaries figure in contemporary art. Fascinatingly illustrated throughout, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the enduring power of sacred objects.
 
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Remote Access
Small Public Libraries in Arkansas
Sabine Schmidt
University of Arkansas Press, 2021

With their cameras and notebooks in hand, photographers Sabine Schmidt and Don House embarked on an ambitious project to document the libraries committed to serving Arkansas’s smallest communities. Remote Access is the culmination of this fascinating three-year effort, which took the artists to every region of their home state.

Schmidt’s carefully constructed color images of libraries and the communities they serve and House’s rich black-and-white portraits of library patrons and staff shine alongside the authors’ personal essays about their experiences. The pages here come alive with a deep connection to Arkansas’s history and culture as we accompany the authors on visits to a section of the Trail of Tears near Parkin, to the site of the tragic 1959 fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, and to Maya Angelou’s childhood home in Stamps, among many other significant destinations.

Through this testament to the essential role of libraries in the twenty-first century, Schmidt and House have created a clear-eyed portrait of contemporary rural life, delving into issues of race, politics, gender, and isolation as they document the remarkable hard work and generosity put forth in community efforts to sustain local libraries.

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The Rendering
Anthony Cody
Omnidawn, 2023
A poetry collection that considers climate change and the possibility of wholeness within the Anthropocene.
 
Through a series of experimental poems centered on ecology, Anthony Cody’s The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts on our current climate crisis, while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Cody encourages readers to participate in radical acts of refreshing and reimagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, and he invites us to reflect on what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current trajectory toward destruction.

These poems consider if wholeness, or a journey toward wholeness, can exist in the Anthropocene. And, if wholeness cannot exist in these times, we are invited to look at our lives and the world through and beyond annihilation.
 
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Representing Place
Landscape Painting And Maps
Edward S. Casey
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space—as well as our place in it—is the subject of Edward S. Casey’s ambitious study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places. 

Casey’s discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and photography, from prehistoric petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language—a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject.  

Representing Place is the third volume in Casey’s influential epic project of reinterpreting evolving conceptions of space in world thought. He combines history with philosophy, and cartography with art, to create a new understanding of how representation requires and thrives on space, ultimately renewing our appreciation of the power of place as it is set forth in paintings and maps. 

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Resisting Dialogue
Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent
Juan Meneses
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent


Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.

Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.  

Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics. 

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Reverse Colonization
Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-victimhood
David M. Higgins
University of Iowa Press, 2021
Reverse colonization narratives are stories like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which technologically superior Martians invade and colonize England. They ask Western audiences to imagine what it’s like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. David Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative, reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking in our current political culture. It has become popular among groups such as anti-feminists, white supremacists, and far-right reactionaries to appropriate a sense of righteous, anti-imperial victimhood—the sense that white men, in particular, are somehow colonized victims fighting an insurgent resistance against an oppressive establishment. Nothing could be timelier, as an armed far-right mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to stop the presidential election from being “stolen from them.”

Higgins shows that this reverse colonization stance depends upon a science fictional logic that achieved dominance within imperial fantasy during the 1960s and has continued to gain momentum ever since. By identifying with fantastic forms of victimhood, subjects who already enjoy social hegemony are able to justify economic inequality, expansions of police and military power, climatological devastation, new articulations of racism, and countless other forms of violence—all purportedly in the name of security, self-defense, and self-protection.
 
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Rewild
Meredith Stricker
Tupelo Press, 2022
Rewild is a collection of documentary lyric poetry that explores places that, having been ravaged by war and environmental plunder, have since been abandoned to regenerate and restore. At this moment where we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, the poems hover between ruin and restoration. They open ways we can ask transformative questions and turn ourselves into these questions that begin to tunnel through difficulty and despair into “another spreadsheet than human … chromosomal and intricate.” To begin to unbuy ourselves, to rewild our communal lives.
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Rewriting Islam
Decolonialism, Justice, and Contemporary Muslimah Literature
Hasnul Insani Djohar
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
In Rewriting Islam, Hasnul Insani Djohar examines how women writers of the Ummah, or Muslim religious community, portray Muslim women fighting for gender and social justice while living as minorities in prosperous countries. Focusing on the body of Muslimah writing that has emerged since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Djohar considers fiction such as Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. Djohar also examines poetry, memoirs, and short stories. Together, these works depict the diversity of Muslimah identities and cultures worldwide. Operating within postcolonial and Islamic studies frameworks, Djohar investigates how these writers contribute to larger debates around gender and globalization—including justice for immigrants and refugees, who are often blamed for social problems rather than recognized as victims of US imperialism and transnational capitalist globalization. By way of close readings and careful attention to historical, cultural, and religious contexts, Djohar illuminates how Muslimah American writers decolonize justice and white sovereignty by elevating interconnectedness, spirituality, and sisterhood across diverse communities.
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Richard Segalman Black & White
Muses, Magic & Monotypes
Susan Forrest Castle
The Artist Book Foundation, 2015
For many, the name Richard Segalman conjures up a vision of light-infused paintings of women gathered on a beach, gazing out the window of a New York City brownstone, or dressed in costumes from another era. But just as Edgar Degas, approaching his 60th year, surprised gallery goers with an exhibition not of ballerinas or race horses, but of highly atmospheric monotype landscapes, so too does Segalman surprise us with this exceptional collection of monotypes he began to produce in 1993, at nearly 60. “I reached a sort of a plateau and needed a new direction,” says the artist. “I came across a monotype… took a course… made one and I was hooked.” The significance of Segalman’s shift into this medium is most powerfully conveyed through his arresting black-and-white prints that range from anonymous crowds on Coney Island beaches or New York City streets to a solitary figure in private contemplation. This monochromatic focus makes perfect sense: Segalman’s first gallery appearance in New York—a sold-out show that gave him the courage to embrace the life of an artist—consisted entirely of black-and-white charcoal drawings, several stunning examples of which open this book. Currently, Segalman’s work can be found in many public and private collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Author Susan F. Castle’s essay about the artist and his muses—the people, places, and things for which Richard Segalman has an abiding love—illuminates the exceptional work collected for this monograph. She combines excerpts from interviews with the artist and the three master printmakers with whom he has worked in Woodstock and Brooklyn, New York, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition, Anthony Kirk’s insightful introduction provides an essential historical perspective on the artist and his printmaking process.
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Riddle Field
Poems
Derek Thomas Dew
University of Nevada Press, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Interim Test Site Poetry Series Prize

"Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry."
Publisher's Weekly
 
The beautifully crafted poems in Riddle Field explore two parallel themes, the impact of the impending destruction of a dam on a small town and the trauma of sexual abuse and eventual recovery from it. This work focuses on the environment, human and physical, in which the loss of nature and innocence is born and calls attention to the many ways we create both intimacy and distance when trauma is hidden or denied. Derek Thomas Dew’s language is harsh, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking. His poems capture the confusion and fatigue that must be navigated for a victim of abuse to piece himself back together and the internal strife that comes with carry-ing a traumatic secret that can no longer be ignored. 

Rich with unforgettable images and the quiet strength of hard-won survival, Riddle Field tackles the complex process of achieving self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound trauma.
 
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Risalo
Shah Abdul Latif
Harvard University Press, 2018

The greatest classic of Sindhi literature presented here in an authoritative and vivid modern English translation.

Shah Abdul Latif’s Risalo is acknowledged across Pakistan and the wider diaspora as the greatest classic of Sindhi literature. In this collection of short Sufi verses, originally composed for musical performance, the poet creates a vast imaginative world of interlocking references to traditional Islamic themes of mystical and divine love and the scenery, society, and legends of the Sindh region.

Latif (1689–1752), a contemporary of the Panjabi poet Bullhe Shah, belonged to the class of Sufi saints whose shrines remain prominent features of the Sindhi landscape. The Risalo reflects Latif’s profound engagement with the fundamental literature of Islam as well as his openness to varied local traditions, including notable poems praising the spiritual devotion of local Hindu yogis.

This edition presents, alongside the original text in the Sindhi Naskh script, the first translation of the Risalo into modern English prose, offering a new readership access to the writings of one of the masters of Sufi poetry.

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rivers of the driftless region
Mark Conway
Four Way Books, 2019
Conway’s spare, imagistic poems concern the implications of eternity: which offers no past or future but rather an ever-present now.
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Rogues in the Postcolony
Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India
Stacey Balkan
West Virginia University Press, 2022

An environmental humanists study of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation in Indian fiction.

Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. In this materialist history of development on the subcontinent, Stacey Balkan considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga that critique violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of corporate entities like the English East India Company and its many legatees. By foregrounding the intersections among landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression, Rogues in the Postcolony also attends to the complicity of popular aesthetic forms with political and economic policy, as well as the colonial and extractivist logics that often frame discussions around the so-called Anthropocene epoch.

Bringing together questions about settler-colonial practices and environmental injustice, Rogues in the Postcolony concludes with an investigation of new extractivist frontiers, including solar capitalism, and considers the possibility of imagining life after extraction on the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

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Romantic Comedy
James Allen Hall
Four Way Books, 2023

James Allen Hall returns to poetry with Romantic Comedy, a sophomore collection sounding the parameters of genre to subvert cultural notions of literary value and artistic legitimacy. What realities do stories authorize, and which remain untold? “This story,” they profess in “Biography,” “is mine: there was / a wound, then a world.” Rather than playing into the attention economy’s appetite for sensationalism, Hall’s poems resist the formulaic while paying homage to the oeuvre, a formal balancing act that celebrates queer life.The poems create liberatory narratives that break constraints or speak through them. Hall parses music from the blizzard — as when “one year / [they] watched the snow / pile to [their] door / all December, all / January,” “the year [they] wanted / to die,” and, faced with winter’s architecture, “learned / another song. Sang / another way.” Whether grieving the death of their father, documenting the survival of sexual assault, interrogating the scripts of addiction, or revisiting an ’80s crime thriller, Hall’s second collection constantly affirms the ingenuity of self-definition as a technology of survival.

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The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction
Donald David Stone
Harvard University Press, 1980

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The Roots of Cane
Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism
John K. Young
University of Iowa Press, 2024
The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer’s Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual “organism,” John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies to avant-garde arts journals to regional magazines with transnational aspirations.

Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer’s uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer’s portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.
 
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Rose
Catherine Horwood
Reaktion Books, 2018
Could a book by any other name smell as sweet? Absolutely not. The rose is the world’s favorite flower—and always has been. It is our greatest floral symbol of love and romance, and it is a bloom that touches our hearts as the flower most often chosen to celebrate significant milestones—weddings, anniversaries, births, and indeed, deaths. In this book, Catherine Horwood traces the botanical, religious, literary, and artistic journeys of the rose across the centuries, from battles to bridal bouquets.

From Cleopatra’s rose petal–filled bed to Nijinsky’s Spectre de la Rose, from the highly prized Attar of Rose oil so beloved by the ancient Persians to the rosy scents of top perfume labels today, from Shakespearean myths about the War of the Roses to the significance of roses in Queen Elizabeth I’s embroidered dresses, and even to blockade-running during the Napoleonic Wars to satisfy Empress Josephine’s passion for collecting her favorite flower, Rose  blossoms with the many stories of our ardor for this botanical family. Featuring a bower of illustrations and drawing on an array of sources as rich and many-hued as roses themselves, Horwood’s tale opens our eyes and noses to the world’s major rose-growing nations. With operatic tales of medieval bestsellers, nurserymen’s rivalries, and changing tastes in our personal flower beds, Rose is certain to woo both gardeners and non-gardeners alike.
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Roshara Journal
Chronicling Four Seasons, Fifty Years, and 120 Acres
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

A photographic diary of a small Midwestern farm and the family who’ve made it their home

In Roshara Journal, father-and-son team Jerry and Steve Apps share the monthly happenings at their family’s farm in central Wisconsin. Featuring Steve’s stunning photos and fifty years of Jerry’s journal entries, Roshara Journal captures the changes—both from month to month and over the decades—on the landscape and farmstead.

The Apps family has owned Roshara since 1966. There they nurture a prairie restoration and pine plantation, maintain a large garden that feeds three generations, observe wildlife species by the dozens, and support a population of endangered butterflies. In documenting life on this piece of land, Jerry and Steve remind us how, despite the pace and challenges of modern life, the seasons continue to influence our lives in ways large and small. Jerry explains that his journal entries become much more than mere observations: "It seems that when I write about something—a bur oak tree, for example—that old tree becomes a part of me. . . . Writing takes me to a place that goes beyond observation and understanding, a place filled with feeling and meaning."

In the tradition of Bernd Heinrich in Maine, Barry Lopez in the Canadian Arctic, and Aldo Leopold just an hour down the road in Baraboo, Jerry and Steve Apps combine observation, experience, and reflection to tell a profound story about one place in the world.

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Roze & Blud
a poem
Jayson Iwen
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
Winner, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Winner, 2020-2021 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award



In this long poem—almost a novel-in-verse—Jayson Iwen examines the intimate thoughts and feelings of two would-be poets: Roze Mertha, a teenage girl growing up in a trailer park, and William Blud, a veteran navigating age and loneliness in an apartment he shares with an Afghan refugee. Deftly crafting distinct voices for these characters in the upper midwestern terrain they inhabit, Iwen explores the quiet heartbreak and tenderly treasured experiences of two apparently unremarkable people using poetry to understand a world that doesn’t make much space for them.
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Running to Stand Still
Kimberly Reyes
Omnidawn, 2019
Histories, stories, lyrics, aspirations, dreams, pressures, and images are spun into a musical tale through a site of convergence: the Black female body. Swarmed by external gazes and narratives, the inhabitant of this body uses her power to turn down this cacophony of noise and compose a symphonic space for herself. By breaching boundaries of racism, sexism, sizeism, colorism, and colonialism, these poems investigate the memories and realities of existing as Black in America. Building from poetic, journalistic, and musical histories, poet and essayist Kimberly Reyes constructs a complex and fantastic narrative in which she negotiates a path to claim her own power.

These poems teem with life, a life rich with many selves and many histories that populate in the voice of Reyes’s poetic narrator. They sway between negotiations of hypervisibility and erasure, the inevitable and the chosen, and the perceived and the constructed. Reyes’s poems offer sharp observations and lyrical movement to guide us in a ballad of reconciliation and becoming.
 
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Rutgers Then and Now
Two Centuries of Campus Development, A Historical and Photographic Odyssey
James W. Hughes
Rutgers University Press
Rutgers University has come a long way since it was granted a royal charter in 1766. As it grew to become New Jersey’s flagship university, attracting thousands of students from across the world, its physical size had to increase accordingly. But unlike land-grant flagship universities in other states, Rutgers was constrained by the urban development around it, so the University’s expansion was a slow process that required collaboration and improvisation.
Rutgers, Then and Now tells the story of how the university grew from a humble six-acre campus on the banks of the Raritan River to a sprawling set of campuses extending beyond the New Brunswick city limits. Each chapter covers one of ten different development phases that helped to reshape Rutgers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing photographic and pictorial documentation of the university's stunning growth, the book also considers the Rutgers campuses that might have been, examining plans that were changed or abandoned. Shedding light on the sacrifices and gifts that transformed a small college into a vital hub for research and beloved home for students, it explores how Rutgers grew to become a world-class university.
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