You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personaliti...
"The Polymers" is a bold and brilliant new work from one of our most ambitious poetic minds. Structured as an imaginary science project, the varied pieces in this collection investigate the intersection of poetry and chemicals, specifically plastics, attempting to understand their essential role in culture. Through various procedures, constraints, and formal mutations, the poems express the repeating structures fundamental to plastic molecules as they appear in cultural and linguistic behaviours such as arguments, anxieties, and trends. Adam Dickinson's poems challenge our understanding of the world around us while simultaneously demonstrating the plasticity at work in the very words we use to describe this world. A wildly experimental and chemically reactive work, "The Polymers" thrills and provokes. You'll never look at the world of a poem -- or the world itself -- in the same way again.
Without you, I have taken to drawing maps on the backs of photographs. On the coast in a raincoat your smile has been dented by a lake, the fluting arms of rivers have made your shoulders look like the bark of birches. from "Cartographer" In Cartography and Walking, Adam Dickinson charts his own listening -- an acute listening of eye and ear, a listening with both body and mind. "Cartography" is more than a metaphor for him, it's a way of being. It is how we dwell in the world, and how intimacy enriches such dwelling. Yet "cartography" is the presiding metaphor, the structure of this book; in giving it such a place, Dickinson reminds the reader of that very human impulse to plot, to imagine....
"Bath County, in western Virginia, was formed from Augusta, Botetourt, and Greenbrier counties in 1791. It is itself the parent county for part of Alleghany County, Virginia, and Pocahontas County, West Virginia. This work consists of genealogical abstracts of the oldest surviving wills and inventories for Bath County--but that's not all. Interspersed with the inheritance records are abstracts of bonds, powers of attorney, estate settlements, articles of agreement, and other records of genealogical import. In general the will abstracts furnish the name of the testator, his county of residence, the names of witnesses and executors, the date of probate, and the names and relationships to the testator of the heirs to the will. All told, nearly 15,000 early residents of Bath County appear in these pages"--Publisher website (August 2007).
Shortlisted for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for PoetryThe poems in Kingdom, Phylum push the boundaries of thought and language. Bringing lyrical and unsystematic modes of understanding into play, and keeping his ear tuned to the many disruptions involved in taxonomical arrangement, Dickinson shows how poetry both participates in, and unsettles, the provisional orders which develop between word and world.
In this sparkling debut, a young critic offers an original, passionate, and erudite account of what it means to feel Jewish—even when you’re not. Self-hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. Overbearing Mother-Love. In this witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated with modern Jews. Reflecting on why Jews have so often been depicted, both by others and by themselves, as prone to “negative” feelings, she queries how negative these feelings really are. And as the pace of globalization leaves countless people feeling more marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened, she argues that such “Jewish” feelings are becoming increasingly common to us all. Ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Sarah Bernhardt to Woody Allen, Anne Frank to Nathan Englander, Feeling Jewish bridges the usual fault lines between left and right, insider and outsider, Jew and Gentile, and even Semite and anti-Semite, to offer an indispensable guide for our divisive times.
The fields of comparative and world literature tend to have a unidirectional, Eurocentric focus, with attention to concepts of “origin” and “arrival.” DisOrientations challenges this viewpoint. Kristin Dickinson employs a unique multilingual archive of German and Turkish translated texts from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. In this analysis, she reveals the omnidirectional and transtemporal movements of translations, which, she argues, harbor the disorienting potential to reconfigure the relationships of original to translation, past to present, and West to East. Through the work of three key figures—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schrader, and Sabaha...
In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist “science of imaginary solutions,” a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry “made the gesture of dying,” Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously. ’Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural bo...
In all latitudes, writers hold out a mirror, leading the reader to awareness by telling real or imaginary stories about people of good will who try to save what can be saved, and about animals showing humans the way to follow. Such tales argue that, in spite of all destructions and tragedies, if we are just aware of, and connected to, the real world around us, to the blade of grass at our feet and the star above our heads, there is hope in a reconciliation with the Earth. This may start with the emergence, or, rather, the return, of a nonverbal language, restoring the connection between human beings and the nonhuman world, through a form of communication beyond verbalization. Through a journ...
In every walk of Canadian life--from business to education to the everyday--the reality is that increasingly you will be in contact with Anishnaabe World. Knowing something about Aboriginal people and their reality not only gives you an advantage over those who don't, it's just plain polite in this country now called Canada. In the spirit of Thomas King, Drew Hayden Taylor and Tomson Highway, Roger Spielmann's Anishnaabe World is an irreverent, teasing, hilarious, yet cross-culturally astute "Survival Guide" for Canadians increasingly aware of our country's chequered past relations between Natives and non-Natives. Chief Ovide Mercredi says "I challenge the reader to really listen to what Roger Spielmann's saying."