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"Photographs appear courtesy of the Cleveland State University Archives and the Cleveland State University Library Special Collections Area"--T.p. verso.
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "'behold / this litmus of longing,' Shelley Feller begins in the linguistic triumph that is their foray into extending the conversation that Hart Crane began in the last century. With DREAM BOAT, Feller anatomizes, churns, palpitates, then spews onto the page a powerful exorcism of self-loathing that non-cishet, non-binary souls like them have been forced to imbibe and digest all their lives. Feller does what others have not dared. They literally turn upside down, inside out, even metaphorically flip off the gaze of those who come to the page for easy catharsis. Don't expect the sense-making that anesthetizes the pain and suffering you've come to want to see. That Fe...
Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity explores the meaning of Jewish involvement in the world of American jazz. It focuses on the ways prominent jazz musicians like Stan Getz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Lee Konitz, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, and Red Rodney have engaged with jazz in order to explore and construct ethnic identities. The author looks at Jewish identity through jazz in the context of the surrounding American culture, believing that American Jews have used jazz to construct three kinds of identities: to become more American, to emphasize their minority outsider status, and to become more Jewish. From the beginning, Jewish musicians have used jazz for all three of these purpose...
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition, Selected by Wayne Koestenbaum. "Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang's A BESTIARY. This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments, but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole, my hat came off. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake."--Maggie Nelson "A BESTIARY is a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything I've read and that it makes me want to change my o...
Poetry. In Samuel Amadon's intense, second collection, a sequence of meditative and darkly comic postmodern narratives about what it is like to be from Hartford, Connecticut, we stagger with the speaker down the streets of his still-present past, together with a motley cast of crackheads, liars, scoundrels, and unlikely heroes. "The speaker is on the rack and only timidly aware of the torture he cannot help wreaking. Our poetry will never be the same now Amadon has spoken, our language can be entirely different. Happily for us." Richard Howard "These poems are street-smart, buoyantly lyrical, and they possess something beautiful and permanent at their core. Samuel Amadon does for Hartford what Koch, Schuyler, and O'Hara have done for New York City." Tracy K. Smith"
Poetry. 2015 CSU Poetry Center First Book Competition, Editor's Choice. "Martin Rock's RESIDUUM spins language into twinned helices of what is said and what is taken back, layering micro- and macroscopic images of bodies in love and space and history. It might make you a little dizzy. It might be contagious or reproducing. It might ask you to glimpse at the moments when you try to speak truly and find your words coming out all infected and in debt. It is a love poem as Williams' Asphodel is a love poem. It is spectacular and leaves me with a head encircled by stars." Heather Christle "In RESIDUUM, Martin Rock creates the illusion of an enormous mind always in motion. 'Meditating on the peak ...
Poetry. If you—your charismatic, beautifully erotic self—had died young, your ghost would count itself fortunate to have lived, loved, and flamed-out in the company of the wildly imaginative author of VOW. But it's not just ghosts who find themselves envisioned, en-fabled, sometimes horrifically, in these poems: An ex-husband, ex-lovers, and dear friends also populate these questioning, often darkly humorous lyrics. Like them, the future unsettles you because you have taken vows, too, and broken them. Take heart, you hold in your hands the poetic manual for how to proceed.
Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by Matthea Harvey. The poems in S. E. Smith's debut collection are caffeinated, wildly comic, assured maximalist performances introducing such characters as three slutty bears, a horse thief named Dirk, Becky Home-ecky, and a pony of darkness. Divided into sections appropriately titled "Parties," "Beauty," and "Devastation," Smith's book is at once free-spirited, metaphysically inquisitive, and romantically exuberant: "If god wanted us to be strangers, why would he place us / next to each other in the movie theater and make us think / our knees are touching when they're really a few inches / apart? Looking at Anita Ekberg's breasts, we can see / the future. It is soft, pink, and frolics in a fountain / where the sea gods bathe their weary feet."