Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
The poems in See You Soon explore the limits of metaphor and language as their voices speak from the beauty and strangeness of daily experience, testing how we make sense of ourselves to ourselves and to one another. There is love in these poems, there is failure and absurdity. The characters, in their various situations and guises, find themselves outside of time, space, and identity—at sunset, in an airport, outside a hookah lounge, as a birthday party clown, after a flood. Its message is the invitation of the title. See You Soon is a statement of the complexity of our mutual direction in time, of camaraderie along the way.
Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), daughter of the Este dukes of Ferrara and wife of Marchese Francesco II Gonzaga of Mantua, co-regent of the Gonzaga state, art collector, musician, diplomat, dynastic mother, traveler, reader, gardener, fashion innovator, and consummate politician, was also, as this volume attests, a prolific letter writer with a highly developed epistolary network. Presented here for the first time in any language is a representative selection from over 16,000 letters sent by Isabella to addressees across a wide social spectrum. Together, they paint a nuanced and colorful portrait of a brilliant and influential female protagonist of early modern European society.
As scholars of epistolarity have recently argued, letters provide more than just a biographical narrative; they also should be understood as aesthetic performances themselves. The correspondence provides a sense of Stoddard as someone who understood letter writing as a distinct and important literary genre, making this collection particularly well suited for new conceptualizations of the epistolary genre.
Selected Poems is compiled from the best works in Jean Garrigue's eight published collections. Garrigue (1914-72) is recognized as a leading American poet of the fifties and sixties. Among her awards and honors were a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant.
Since the appearance in print of her early poems over seventy-five years ago, the poetry of Janet Lewis has grown in quiet acclaim and popularity. Although she is better known as a novelist of historical fiction, her first and last writings were poems. With the publication of her selected poems, Swallow Press celebrates the distinguished career of one of its most cherished authors.
Critics as disparate as Kenneth Rexroth, Timothy Steele, Theodore Roethke, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, and Dana Gioia have sung the praises of her work over the decades. Her career as a poet was remarkable not only for its longevity but also for the fact that even well into her tenth decade she wrote poems that stand with her very best work.
Characterized by the vigor and sharpness of her images and the understated lyricism that permeates her rhythmic lines, The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis is a survey of modern poetry unto itself.
The Shadow's Horse is a new collection of poems in which Glancy walks the margin between her white and Indian heritage. In poems that conjure the persistence of fallen leaves or juxtapose images of Christ and the stockyards, she powerfully evokes place and spirit to address with intelligence and beauty issues of family, work, and faith.
In some of these poems Glancy recalls growing up with her Cherokee father, who worked in a stockyard, radically applying Christian theology to the slaughter of non-human creatures: The cattle go up the ramp
dragging their crosses.
Their voices are Gregorian chants
rising to the blue sky,
the cold clouds.
In others she examines the walk of history through the ordinary details of life-history seen from two points of view, early Euro-American and contemporary Native American. She sees her Native heritage as shortlived and fragile, yet as enduring as leaves, and she asks, "If you line up all the leaves that fall / how many times will they go around the earth?"
Writing in a cross-boundaried, fragmented voice—a voice based on the memory of the way language sounded when it was stretched across the cultures or walked in both worlds—Glancy has fashioned a book about speaking oneself into existence. The Shadow's Horse is the story of one culture made to sing the song of another until the Native voice is so erased it is nearly an illusion. Yet as readers of these poems will discover, the shadow of the past is as real as the horse it rides.
The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother—with or without child. Francis challenges the ways in which Black women are often dismissed while expected to be nurturing. This raw assemblage of poetic narratives stares down the oppressors from within and writes a new language in the art of taking back the body and the memory. These poetic narratives are brutal in their lyrical blows but tender with the bruised history left behind. “You can’t stop this / song,” she writes. “More hands than yours have closed / around my throat.”
Francis’s lyric gifts are on full display as she probes self-discovery, history, intimacy, and violence. Her voice encompasses humor and gravity, enigma and revelation. What emerges is a realm of intertwined experiences. “The secret to knowing the secret is to speak,” she concludes, “but we too often tell / the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does matter. / In truth, we are bound by one story, so you’d think by now / we’d tell it, at least to each other.”
Roughly chronological, these essays explore Barnes’ early work in the New York newspaper world of the ‘teens, proceed through the 1954 publication of The Antiphon, and include several approaches to such works as Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and Nightwood. This judicious mix of essays—many of them illustrated by photographs and drawings—presents a comprehensive picture of the creative imagination of Djuna Barnes.
Essayists include Mary Lynn Broe, Nancy J. Levine, Ann Larabee, Joan Retallack, Carolyn Allen, Carolyn Burke, Sheryl Stevenson, Marie Ponsot, Frances M. Doughty, Susan Sniader Lanser, Frann Michel, Karla Jay, Jane Marcus, Judith Lee, Julie L. Abraham, Meryl Altman, Lynda Curry, Louise A. DeSalvo, and Catharine Stimpson. Individuals sharing personal recollections of Barnes are Ruth Ford, James B. Scott, Alex Gildzen, Hank O’Neal, Chester Page, Andrew Field, and Frances McCullough. Janice Thom and Kevin Engel provide an updated bibliography.
From The Book of Repulsive Women to The Antiphon, Barnes challenged old gender dichotomies as she shaped radical sociopolitical views. Her textual methods celebrated a multiplicity of voices, heterodox forms, and genres, transgressing those tenets of modernism that privilege the “high art” of a single, unified textual identity or a discrete discourse. These essays offer various critical approaches and sinuous readings of the full range of Barnes’ achievement. Interwoven through the essays and reminiscences is a lively commentary from Barnes’ friends and contemporaries as well as Barnes herself.
The texts available here in English for the first time open a window into the lives of three early modern Frenchwomen as they explore the common themes of family, memory, sin, and salvation. The Regrets of Marguerite d’Auge (1600), the Memoirs of Renée Burlamacchi (1623), and the Genealogy of Jeanne du Laurens (1631), taken from different genres of historical writings, raise important questions: Why and how did female authorship find its way into the historical record? How did these voices escape the censorship and prejudice against female publication? In a time of extreme religious conflict, how did these women convey their views on controversial issues such as primacy of grace, indulgences, and salvation without disrupting the gender expectations of the era?
In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this significant collection is the first definitive edition of Harlem Renaissance stories by women. The writers include Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Dorothy West.
Published originally in periodicals such as The Crisis, Fire!!, and Opportunity, these twenty-seven stories have until now been virtually unavailable to readers. These stories are as compelling today as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. In them, we find the themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race.
Marcy Knopf's introduction surveys the history of the Harlem Renaissance, the periodicals and books it generated, and describes the rise to prominence of these women writers and their later fall from fame. She also includes a brief biography of each of the writers. Nellie Y. McKay's foreword analyzes the themes and concerns of the stories.
In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this significant collection is the first definitive edition of Harlem Renaissance stories by women. The writers include Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Dorothy West.
Published originally in periodicals such as The Crisis, Fire!!, and Opportunity, these twenty-seven stories have until now been virtually unavailable to readers. These stories are as compelling today as they were in the 1920s and 1930s. In them, we find the themes of black and white racial tension and misunderstanding, economic deprivation, passing, love across and within racial lines, and the attempt to maintain community and uplift the race.
Marcy Knopf's introduction surveys the history of the Harlem Renaissance, the periodicals and books it generated, and describes the rise to prominence of these women writers and their later fall from fame. She also includes a brief biography of each of the writers. Nellie Y. McKay's foreword analyzes the themes and concerns of the stories.
PEN Oakland National Literary Award, 2008
Colleen J. McElroy's poetry shoots for the moon, and takes it in, too, in one way after another. The collection’s award-winning poems animate women’s experiences of sex, shopping, and dancing, while offering telling insight into the struggles and silver lining of lust, love, illness, and aging. Rich with vivid imagery and candid storytelling, Sleeping with the Moon takes readers on moonlit adventures under the night sky, through the barroom’s smoky haze, and under the covers....Beware: such delicate
sights have driven more than one woman to despair
instead she watched him breathe-- relishing
for a moment that secret space where night
grows soft and the moon’s detumescence forgives--
and where if this jeweled light holds they might
strip themselves of years if only for one night
--from “In Praise of Older Women”
Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt’s So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. “Soon,” she says, “we’ll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.” In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt’s speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling “in their sweat-resistant fabrics,” “so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time”; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers “no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.” It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title’s idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, “& look at how lucky I’ve been, for so long.”
An interdisciplinary study of Katherine Anne Porter’s troubled relationship to her Texas origins and southern roots, South by Southwest offers a fresh look at this ever-relevant author.
Today, more than thirty years after her death, Katherine Anne Porter remains a fascinating figure. Critics and biographers have portrayed her as a strikingly glamorous woman whose photographs appeared in society magazines. They have emphasized, of course, her writing— particularly the novel Ship of Fools, which was made into an award-winning film, and her collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which cemented her role as a significant and original literary modernist. They have highlighted her dramatic, sad, and fragmented personal life. Few, however, have addressed her uneasy relationship to her childhood in rural Texas.
Janis P. Stout argues that throughout Porter’s life she remained preoccupied with the twin conundrums of how she felt about being a woman and how she felt about her Texas origins. Her construction of herself as a beautiful but unhappy southerner sprung from a plantation aristocracy of reduced fortunes meant she construed Texas as the Old South. The Texas Porter knew and re-created in her fiction had been settled by southerners like her grandparents, who brought slaves with them. As she wrote of this Texas, she also enhanced and mythologized it, exaggerating its beauty, fertility, and gracious ways as much as the disaffection that drove her to leave. Her feelings toward Texas ran to both extremes, and she was never able to reconcile them.
Stout examines the author and her works within the historical and cultural context from which she emerged. In particular, Stout emphasizes four main themes in the history of Texas that she believes are of the greatest importance in understanding Porter: its geography and border location (expressed in Porter’s lifelong fascination with marginality, indeterminacy, and escape); its violence (the brutality of her first marriage as well as the lawlessness that pervaded her hometown); its racism (lynchings were prevalent throughout her upbringing); and its marginalization of women (Stout draws a connection between Porter’s references to the burning sun and oppressive heat of Texas and her life with her first husband).
Never before has a book examined Spanish women and their mastery of the essay. In the groundbreaking collection Spanish Women Writers and the Essay, Kathleen M. Glenn and Mercedes Mazquiarán de Rodríguez help to rediscover the neglected genre, which has long been considered a "masculine" form. Taking a feminist perspective, the editors examine why Spanish women have been so drawn to the essay through the decades, from Concepción Arenal's nineteenth-century writings to the modern works of Rosa Montero.
Spanish women, historically denied a public voice, have discovered an outlet for their expression via the essay. As essayists, they are granted the authority to address subjects they personally deem important, discuss historical and sociopolitical issues, and denounce female subordination. This genre, which attracts a different audience than does the novel or poem, allows Spanish women writers to engage in a direct dialogue with their readers.
Featuring twelve critical investigations of influential female essayists, Spanish Women Writers and the Essay illustrates Spanish women writers' command of the genre, their incorporation of both the ideological and the aesthetic into one concise form, and their skillful use of various strategies for influencing their readers. This fascinating study, which provides English translations for all quotations, will appeal to anyone interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature, comparative literature, feminist criticism, or women's studies.
In 1635, as directed by her confessor so that he might understand “the state of her soul,” Margaret Van Noort, a lay sister of the royal convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Brussels, composed her spiritual autobiography. This text was followed by two diaries in 1636 and 1637 recording the workings of her inner life and relation to God, and reflecting the cosmopolitan Catholic tradition of her homeland. Now gathered in this volume, these works illustrate Margaret’s development from a troubled young lay sister into a woman of spiritual experience and authority.
A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.
Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets—not just their work—appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks.
The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.
These poems give voice to the life of the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. While Jacqueline Cochran was alive, no man or woman in the world could match her records for speed, distance, and altitude flying. Founder and director of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, Cochran continued to fly competitively until she was sixty, owned and operated her own line of designer cosmetics for three decades, ran for Congress, and generally placed herself on the path of history. Having begun life as a foundling in the crushing poverty of a lumber company town of the Florida panhandle, she described her life as “a passage from sawdust to stardust.” Yet after her death she has barely been remembered.
Poet Enid Shomer brings back this mercurial, dazzling, powerful woman. These poems speak in her voice and in the voices of her mother, teachers, husband, confidants, and political opponents, shaped by Shomer’s consummate formal control and stunning lyricism.
Adapts Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, as well as the latest in gender and psychoanalytic theory, to the major works of acclaimed southern writer Carson McCullers.
This innovative reconsideration of the themes of Carson McCullers's fiction argues that her work has heretofore suffered under the pall of narrow gothic interpretations, obscuring a more subversive agenda. By examining McCullers’s major novels—The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Café—Gleeson-White locates a radical and specific form of the grotesque in the author's fiction: the liberating and redemptive possibilities of errant gender roles and shifting sexuality. She does this by employing Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, which is both affirming and revolutionary, and thereby moves McCullers's texts beyond the 'gloom and doom' with which they have been charged for over fifty years.
The first chapter explores female adolescence by focusing on McCullers's tomboys in the context of oppressive southern womanhood. The second chapter analyzes McCullers's fascinating struggle to depict homosexual desire outside of traditional stereotypes. Gleeson-White then examines McCullers's portrayals of feminine and masculine gender through the tropes of cross-dressing, transvestism, and masquerade. The final chapter takes issue with earlier readings of androgyny in the texts to suggest a more useful concept McCullers herself called "the hybrid." Underpinning the whole study is the idea of a provocative, dynamic form of the grotesque that challenges traditional categories of normal and abnormal.
Because the characters and themes of McCullers's fiction were created in the 1940s and 1950s, a time of tension between the changing status of women and the southern ideal of womanhood, they are particularly fertile ground for a modern reexamination of this nature. Gleeson-White's study will be valued by scholars of American literature and gender and queer studies, by students of psychology, by academic libraries, and by readers of Carson McCullers. Strange Bodies is a thoughtful, highly credible analysis that adds dimension to the study of southern literature.
Connecting Cather's work to the southern literary tradition and the South of her youth
A diverse and experimental writer who lived most of her life in New York City, Willa Cather is best known for her depiction of pioneer life on the Nebraska plains. Despite Cather's association with Nebraska, however, the novelist's Virginia childhood and her southern family were deeply influential in shaping her literary imagination.
Joyce McDonald shows evidence, for example, of Cather's southern sensibility in the class consciousness and aesthetic values of her characters and in their sense of place and desire for historical continuity, a sensibility also evident in her narrative technique of weaving stories within stories and in her use of folklore. For McDonald, however, what most links Cather and her work to the South and to the southern literary tradition is her use of pastoral modes.
Beginning with an examination of Cather's Virginia childhood and the southern influences that continued to mold her during the Nebraska years, McDonald traces the effects of those influences in Cather's novels. The patterns that emerge reveal not only Cather's strong ideological connection to the pastoral but also the political position implicit in her choice of that particular mode. Further analysis of Cather's work reveals her preoccupation with hierarchical constructs and with the use and abuse of power and her interest in order, control, and possession. The Willa Cather who emerges from the pages of The Stuff of Our Forebears is not the Cather who claimed to eschew politics but a far more political novelist than has heretofore been perceived.
In the spring of 1916, as the workers for woman suffrage were laying plans for another attack on the bastions of male supremacy, the idea for The Sturdy Oak was born. Based on the rules of an old parlor game, wherein one person begins a narrative, another continues it, and another follows, this collaborative effort by the leading writers of the day, such as Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield, and Kathleen Norris, is a satiric look at the gender roles of the time.
There is much in The Sturdy Oak that reflects the New York campaign for suffrage of 1916–1917. The setting is the fictional city of Whitewater in upstate New York. Idealistic reformers are pitted against a ruthless political machine, and the traditional picture of man as “the sturdy oak” supporting woman, “the clinging vine,” is ridiculed in the portrayal of an engaging couple, George and Genevieve Remington. Nonetheless, the purpose of the book is not primarily ridicule but reform, and the reader is taken through the steps by which a confirmed anti-suffragist is gradually transformed into a supporter of the suffrage cause.
Beyond its historical interest, The Sturdy Oak is imbued with a political and social currency that makes it applicable even today. And because of the skill of the writers of this composite novel, even eight decades after its initial publication The Sturdy Oak is still, as the New York Times said in 1917, “irresistibly readable.”
This book gives light to the multiple artistic expressions of Great Gatsby-writer’s wife as modernist vanguard.
Known as an icon of the Jazz Age, a flamboyant socialite, and the mad wife of F. Scott, Zelda Fitzgerald has inspired studies of her life and work which focus on her earlier years, and on the myth of the glorious-but-doomed woman. As an unprecedented study of the totality Zelda Fitzgerald’s creative work, this book makes an important contribution to the history of women’s art with new perspectives on women and modernity, plagiarism, creative partnership, and the nature of mental illness.
Zelda Fitzgerald’s creative output was astonishing, considering the conditions under which she lived, and the brevity of her life: she wrote dozens of short stories, several journalistic pieces, a play, two novels, hundreds of letters, kept diaries and produced hundreds of artworks. Employing a new mode of literary analysis that draws upon critics, theorists, and historians to situate her work in its context, The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald rehabilitates the literary and artistic status of Zelda Fitzgerald by reassessing her life and writings in the light of archival sources. Such materials include medical and psychiatric documents; her unpublished novel; an artistic and spiritual diary; and over one hundred letters written from asylums.
While much of her writing can be read as a tactical response to her husband’s injunctions against her creativity, it can also be read as brilliant work in its own right. Far from imitating Scott’s style, Zelda Fitzgerald’s artistic output is vibrantly alive and utterly her own.
Beginning in Paris in the 1920s, women poets, essayists, painters, and artists in other media have actively collaborated in defining and refining surrealism's basic project—achieving a higher, open, and dynamic consciousness, from which no aspect of the real or the imaginary is rejected. Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants—perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown.
This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.
Now frequently anthologized, Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat" was first published in Firell, a legendary literary magazine of the Harlem Renaissance, whose sole issue appeared in November 1926. Among contributions by Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, "Sweat" stood out both for its artistic accomplishment and its exploration of rural Southern black life. In "Sweat" Hurston claimed the voice that animates her mature fiction, notably the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; the themes of marital conflict and the development of spiritual consciousness were introduced as well. "Sweat" exemplifies Hurston's lifelong concern with women's relation to language and the literary possibilities of black vernacular.
This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of "Sweat," and a second story, "The Gilded Six-Bits." Published in 1932, this second story was written after Hurston had spent years conducting fieldwork in the Southern United States. The volume also includes Hurston's groundbreaking 1934 essay, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," and excerpts from her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. An article by folklorist Roger Abrahams provides additional cultural contexts for the story, as do selected blues and spirituals. Critical commentary comes from Alice Walker, who led the recovery of Hurston's work in the 1970s, Robert Hemenway, Henry Louis Gates, Gayl Jones, John Lowe, Kathryn Seidel, and Mary Helen Washington.
Laura Redden Searing (1839-1923) defied critics of the time by establishing herself as a successful poet, a poet who was deaf. She began writing verse at the Missouri School for the Deaf in 1858, and, under the pseudonym Howard Glyndon, soon found herself catapulted into national prominence by her patriotic Civil War poems. Abraham Lincoln himself bought her books, the most critically acclaimed being Idylls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion, published in 1864. Her poem “Belle Missouri” became the song of the Missouri Volunteers, and she was sent by the St. Louis Republican newspaper to Washington as a war correspondent.
Despite her success, detractors decried her poetry simply because she was deaf, asking how she could know anything of rhyme, rhythm, or musical composition. She quieted them with the simple elegance of her words and the sophistication of her allegorical themes. Readers can enjoy her work again in this volume, which features more than 70 of her finest poems. They also will learn her feelings about the constraints imposed on 19th-century women in her epic narrative of misunderstanding and lost love “Sweet Bells Jangled:”
Out of sight of the heated land
Over the breezy sea;
Into the reach of the solemn mist
Quietly drifted we.
Her restoration will be an event welcomed by poetry aficionados everywhere.
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