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Say This Prayer into the Past reckons with cadavers in the family closet, a house lost to a wildfire, and the heartbreaking beauty of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Along the way, Paul Willis rekindles the delights of children, the kindness of students, and the solace of the many writers of the past who have accompanied us. These poems speak into the trials and joys the years have rendered. Their purpose is to bless those of us who mourn and to bring some measure of comfort.
"In The Alpine Tales, that promise is kept. The Three Queens Wilderness is only the swing of an ice ax away from the mountains you may think you know. It is a world inhabited by three strange sisters at mortal odds--and by marmots and ouzels and pocket gophers ready to help you find your way. The dangers you'll face are ever present. For this alpine world was a place of perfection until, by the bane of the Lava Beast, it crumbled into something sadder. Join the quest to repair the ruins of glistening peaks and endless forests, and discover a lang you will dearly love." -- Back cover
From California coastal redwoods to giant sequoias in the Sierra, from practical jokes of adolescence to unexpected epiphanies marking an academic career, the many poems in Somewhere to Follow range through the life of a poet on the lookout for what comes next. In this his seventh volume of poetry, Paul Willis ascends the switchbacks of ordinary experience to cross paths with song-leading rangers, exhausted mothers, dirt-loving children, terrified immigrants, Arctic climbers, face-masked students, beatified counselors, rejected suitors, honest morticians, talking ferns, mourning crows, stinking fungi, vengeful rivers, raging fires, faithful brothers, the world's largest pinecones, and an inn...
This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour – shows how China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers but also of a mental and ideological kind to new cultural landscapes of meaning, which include worship of the glorified city, devotion to consumerism, and fixation upon the smartphone and the internet. Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive economic growth and technical development, but at the same time the school provides a cultural stage for personal and collective experience. In its clo...
From the details of hikes in the mountains, conversations with children, observations in the college classroom or the church sanctuary, and forays into family history, Paul Willis weaves poems that "[push you] beyond the mundane to an unusual angle of vision." (Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Christian Century).
Getting to Gardisky Lake switchbacks from roadside maples to backcountry sequoia groves, from the lost curves of a high school track to the shining calves of Olympic hopefuls, from grade school crushes to married affection, from Jefferson's slaves to Sherman's march, from dumpster diving to shopping the mall. These poems contain American multitudes, some whispering in sincerity and others bragging with thumbs hooked in their belt loops. In this rich collection, Paul J. Willis invites you in and ushers you out to meet your neighbors and yourself.
Sometimes you just need to get off - with none of the messy side effects. Now there's a collection of scorching true stories all about guys who want sex with no strings - and know how to get it!
Second in a planned four-book series set in the Oregon wilderness that began with No Clock in the Forest. Ronald and Jennifer spend the summer working with a group of scientists on a glacier project. When faced with adversity, Ronald and Jennifer discover a true understanding of the world.
A landmark work in sociology, cultural studies, and ethnography since its publication in 1977, Paul Willis's Learning to Labor is a provocative and troubling account of how education links culture and class in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Willis observed a working-class friendship group in an English industrial town in the West Midlands in their final years at school. These "lads" rebelled against the rules and values of the school, creating their own culture of opposition. Yet this resistance to official norms, Willis argues, prepared these students for working-class employment. Rebelling against authority made the lads experience the constraints that held them in subordinate class...