Books

Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people’s lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Constructed in the 1930s in rugged high-altitude terrain, the road fundamentally altered the material and social fabric of this former Soviet outpost on the border with Afghanistan and China. The ...

From the late nineteenth century onwards religion gave way to science as the dominant force in society. This led to a questioning of the principle of free will—if the workings of the human mind could be reduced to purely physiological explanations, then what place was there for human ...

Bandits seem ubiquitous in Latin American culture. Even contemporary actors of violence are framed by narratives that harken back to old images of the rural bandit, either to legitimize or delegitimize violence, or to intervene in larger conflicts within or between nation-states. However, the bandit escapes a straightforward definition, since ...

Many cities across the globe are rediscovering their rivers. After decades or even centuries of environmental decline and cultural neglect, waterfronts have been vamped up and become focal points of urban life again; hidden and covered streams have been daylighted while restoration projects have returned urban rivers in many places ...

When her “smart” phone keeps asking her to autocorrect her name to Denise Richards, Denise Duhamel begins a journey that takes on celebrity, sex, reproduction, and religion with her characteristic wit and insight. The poems in Scald engage feminism in two ways—committing to and battling with—various ...

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the ...

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details – motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic – negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing ...

“One marvels at the force of seeing in Schwartz's No Way Out But Through and cannot help but feel a particular gratitude for her abundant humor. Go all in with these poems; you'll reap unknown rewards. She possesses a quick-witted imagination that sanctifies memories and makes room for ...

Past Praise for Mother Quiet: “The aim of poetry (and the higher kind of thriller) is to be unexpected and memorable. So a poem about death might treat it in a way that combines the bizarre and the banal: the Other Side as some kind of institution—a creepy ...

For the Scribe, the ninth collection by award-winning poet David Wojahn, continues his explorations of the interstices between the public and the private, the historical and the personal. Poems of recollection and elegy commingle and conjoin with poems which address larger matters of historical and ecological import. The subjects of ...

What is it like living today in the chaos of a city that is at once brutal and beautiful, heir to immigrant ancestors “who supposed their children's children would be rich and free?” What is it to live in the chaos of a world driven by “intolerable, unquenchable human ...

In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks. Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body—...

Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section. Cuban Studies 45 features two special dossiers: the first discusses the history and workings of the Cuban constitution and the need to revisit it along with ...

WINNER OF THE 2015 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Selected by Jill McCorkleThis Angel on My Chest is a collection of unconventionally linked stories, each about a different young woman whose husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Ranging from traditional stories to lists, a quiz, a YouTube link, and even a lecture about ...

Ellen Emerson may be the last living survivor of the Johnstown flood. She was only four years old on May 31, 1889, when twenty million tons of water decimated her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Thousands perished in what was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history at the time. As we ...