Books

Winner of the 2011 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Selected by Dorianne Laux

This collection examines how the loss of a parent at a young age can color the way that child looks at the world even when the child is no longer a child.

A critical history of experimental writing theory, its aesthetic foundations, and their application to current multimodal writing. Patricia Sullivan sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. She further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn’t changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

A fascinating glimpse at the collision of art and politics during the first fifty years of the Soviet period. Ezrahi shows how the producers and performers of Russia’s two major ballet troupes quietly but effectively resisted Soviet cultural hegemony during this period.

Winner of the 2107 Best Book on Dance published in France (French Edition)

This title is distributed in the U.K. by Dance Books, Ltd.

Dore Kiesselbach’s poems reveal the particularity and/or strangeness of the commonplace—but many good poems do that. What strikes me about his, though, are the ways that visual imagery, diction, and cadence are modulated to fit his subjects. Thus in ‘Rake’ the inanimate object speaks (as in an Anglo-Saxon kenning) to describe the way it touches ‘death / that life may be revealed / in green stupidity . . . fluent / as underwater hair.’ In ‘Hickey,’ a diver swimming among stingrays asks, ‘How long does it take us / in water sunlight permeates / to forget needing ever to be told?’; the unusual diction suggests both the speaker’s suspension in water as well as his apprehension of joy. The reader may hear faint echoes of Hopkins or the early Dylan Thomas, but the language is Kiesselbach’s own.

Appetite is a book of poetry that explores identity, particularly masculinity, through the lenses of popular culture, relationships, and place.

A broad survey of the psychological, biological, and philosophical basis of fear in historical and contemporary contexts. Leading figures in clinical psychology, neuroscience, the social sciences, and the humanities consider categories of intentionality, temporality, admixture, spectacle, and politics in evaluating conceptions of fear. The book opens a dialogue between science and the humanities to afford a more complete view of an emotion that has shaped human behavior since time immemorial.

This volume assembles leading experts in policy, history, and activism to address Israel’s continuing environmental transformation from the biblical era through its future aspirations, with a particular focus on the past one hundred and fifty years.

This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood—including sexual abuse—using a “cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism.” Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.

Winner of the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Blowout is both a celebration and mourning of romantic love—the blowout of a party, as well as the sudden rupture of a front tire.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

The weekly magazine Garden and Forest existed for only nine years (1888-1897). Yet, in that brief span, it brought to light many of the issues that would influence the future of American environmentalism. In The City Natural, Shen Hou presents the first “biography” of this important but largely overlooked vehicle for individuals with the common goal of preserving nature in American civilization. As Hou reveals, Garden and Forest was instrumental in redefining the fields of botany and horticulture, while also helping to shape the fledgling professions of landscape architecture and forestry.

In Translations from the Flesh, Elton Glaser’s poems are driven by the powerful engines of love and desire, giving voice to those deep pressures that most move us, body and soul: “I put my native tongue / To work, open to / The dark instincts of ecstasy.”

The Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movement’s use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society. Yeomans chronicles the foundations of the movement, its key actors and ideologies, and reveals the unique conditions present in interwar Croatia that led to the rise of fascism.

Daisy Fried’s third poetry collection is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, whether watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, or trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, or yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender . . . She tells their stories with savage energy, wit, humor and political engagement.

The Switching/Yard deals with the horizontal worlds of the birth table, the continuum of gender roles, and the head-on landscape of power and home as seen through the train yards of the West.

Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres examines the possibilities, challenges, and realities of mutimodal composition as an effective means of communication. The chapters view the ways that writing instructors and their students are exploring the spaces where communication occurs, while also asking “what else is possible.”