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Deeply cross cultural, humanitarian, political and global poems about how humans deal with suffering across the world. These are poems about cultures rubbing up against each other, war, refugees, child soldiers, spiritual refugees trying to find a home, and a mother who is witnessing these firsthand. Rare ethnographic poetry by a world traveling cultural anthropologist and human rights activist.
You are invited to join a fascinating journey of discovery, as Marcia Birken and Anne C. Coon explore the intersecting patterns of mathematics and poetry — bringing the two fields together in a new way. Setting the tone with humor and illustrating each chapter with countless examples, Birken and Coon begin with patterns we can see, hear, and feel and then move to more complex patterns. Number systems and nursery rhymes lead to the Golden Mean and sestinas. Simple patterns of shape introduce tessellations and concrete poetry. Fractal geometry makes fractal poetry possible. Ultimately, patterns for the mind lead to questions: How do mathematicians and poets conceive of proof, paradox, and in...
Why God Is a Woman is a collection of poems written about a magical island where women rule and men are the second sex. It is also the story of a boy who, exiled from the island because he could not abide by its sexist laws, looks back with both nostalgia and bitterness and wonders: Why does God have to be a woman? Celebrated prose poet Nin Andrews creates a world both fantastic and familiar where all the myths, logic, and institutions support the dominance of women. Nin Andrews's books include The Book of Orgasms and Sleeping with Houdini.
This debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family. Some nights I hear my father's long romance with drugs echoed in the skeletal choir of crickets. Geffrey Davis teaches at Penn State University.
Over the years the bra has been stereotyped as an object of seduction, glamour, and even oppression. In Uplift: A History of the Bra in America Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau use this item of clothing to gauge the social history of women and to understand the business history of fashion. Viewing fashion as a means to entertainment, self-creation, and everyday art, the authors illuminate the effect the brassiere has had on women's lives—their style, health, and economic opportunity. Rich in examples from advertising, movies, and other areas of popular culture, Uplift moves beyond featherbones and fiberfill to provide a sense of the dynamic relationship of the bra to wider issues in society.
The Keys to the Jail asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires. Keetje Kuipers is a poet of daring leaps and unflinching observations, whose richly textured lyrics travel from Montana’s great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that’s lost its way. Dolores Park In the flattening California dusk, women gather under palms with their bags of bottles and cans. The grass is feathered with the trash of the day, paper napkins blowing across the legs of those who still drown on a patchwork of blankets. Shirt...
Looking in detail at words that “treat people as things, and things as people, and do so at that strange space where joking, ridiculing, demeaning, oppressing, resisting, and regretting converge,” Household Words is a study of how certain words act as indices of political and social change, perpetuating anxieties and prejudices even as those ways of thinking have been seemingly resolved or overcome by history. Specifically, Stephanie A. Smith examines six words—bloomer, sucker, bombshell, scab, nigger, and cyber—and explores how these words with their contemporary “universal” meaning appeal to a dangerous idea about what it means to be human, an idea that denies our history of co...
"It has true spiritual importance for contemporary American literature."—Edward Hirsch Upon its initial publication, acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In lyrical prose, Lee's extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being tran...
Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner. In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy ‘take stock’ of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by ‘comparative’? Or by ‘world’? What constitute ‘transgressions’ or ‘refractions’? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.
Set within the resilient Great Plains, these stories are marked by the region's people, landscape, and the distinctive way it is both regressive in its politics yet also stumbling toward something better. While not all stories are explicitly set in Oklahoma, the state is almost a character—neither protagonist nor antagonist—but instead the weird next-door-neighbor you're perhaps too ashamed of to take anywhere. Who is the embarrassing one—you or Oklahoma? Dinah Cox lives in her hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she teaches in the English department at Oklahoma State University and is an associate editor at Cimarron Review.