This exploration of rock ’n’ roll music and culture in Birmingham, Alabama, is based on the oral histories of musicians, their fans and professionals in the popular music industry. Collected over a twenty-year period, their stories describe the coming of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, the rise of the garage bands in the 1960s, of southern rock in the 1970s, and of alternative music in the 1980s and 1990s. Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Magic City Nights provides an insider’s view of the dramatic changes in the business and status of popular music from the era of the vacuum tube to twenty-first-century digital technology. These collective memories offer a unique perspective on the impact of a subversive and racially integrated music culture in one of the most conservative and racially divided cities in the country.

Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure gathers four decades of poetry from a celebrated Canadian poet and translator who has persistently reconfigured the linguistic and material relations of English. Moure’s poems and networked sequences are hybrid and often polylingual; they work with contradiction, paradox, and verbal detritus— linguistic hics and blips often too quickly dismissed as noise—to create new conditions for thought and pleasure. From postdramatic theatre to queer and feminist theory, from the politics of citizenship and genocide to the minutiae of digital poetics, from the clamor of love to the shadows of grief and memory, Moure has joyously toppled hierarchies of meaning and parasited dominant discourses to create poetry that crosses borders, embracing hope, not war. This volume, edited by poet and literary scholar Shannon Maguire, also features an extensive introduction to Moure’s poetry, a section of poetry by others translated by Moure, and an afterword on translation by the poet. An online reader’s companion is available at XXXX.site.wesleyan.edu.

In Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, John Rieder asks literary scholars to consider what shape literary history takes when based on a historical, rather than formalist, genre theory. Rieder starts from the premise that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction comprise a system of genres entirely distinct from the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. He proposes that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems that arise from their different modes of production, distribution, and reception. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of this study, the systemic approach offered by Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System provides a fundamental challenge to literary methodologies that foreground individual innovation.

The Mountains in Art History is the first English-language work to focus on the mountains as subject matter and source of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration for painters. This collection of original essays is written entirely by Wesleyan University students of art history. The essays examine how artistic representation of mountains has varied through the lens of specific depictions in English and American literature, and consider how images of mountains functioned in conjunction with religion, the sublime, and Romanticism. These essays by student authors adeptly ruminate on works by individuals such as William Wordsworth, John Frederick Kensett, Alexander van Humboldt, Emil Nolde, and Arnold Fanck. Includes an introduction by professor Peter Mark and a helpful appendix of the course syllabus and narrative description.

In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its opposite, Dungy writes in a single poem about a mother, a daughter, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, brittle stars, giant boulders, and a dead blue whale. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope.

BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing is the third volume of this annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year’s volume, guest-edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Sina Queyras, Tan Lin, Christian Bök, Myung Mi Kim, Juliana Spahr, Samuel R. Delany, and even Barack Obama—as well as emerging voices. Intended to provoke lively conversation and debate, Best American Experimental Writing is an ideal literary anthology for contemporary classroom settings.

Entanglements is the product of a years-long interest in science, particularly physics by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Rae Armantrout. The collection includes poems from her previous books, as well as four new poems. Armantrout delved into books intended to make science accessible for the average person, as well as engaged in conversations with physicists. The title is inspired by the way particles can become so entangled that any space between them becomes irrelevant, but also by the way in which the author’s daily life became entangled with the exploration of physics.

Challenging assumptions about science fiction’s Western origins, Nathaniel Isaacson traces the development of the genre in China, from the late Qing Dynasty through the New Culture Movement. Through careful examination of a wide range of visual and print media—including historical accounts of the institutionalization of science, pictorial representations of technological innovations, and a number of novels and short stories—Isaacson makes a case for understanding Chinese science fiction as a product of colonial modernity. By situating the genre’s emergence in the transnational traffic of ideas and material culture engendered by the presence of colonial powers in China’s economic and political centers, Celestial Empires explores the relationship between science fiction and Orientalist discourse. In doing so it offers an innovative approach to the study of both vernacular writing in twentieth-century China and science fiction in a global context.

For fifty years Samuel Delany has cultivated a special relationship with language in works of fiction, criticism, and memoir that have garnered critical praise and legions of fans. The present volume – the first in a series – reveals a new dimension of his genius. In Search of Silence presents over a decade’s worth of Delany’s private journals, commencing in 1957 when he was still a student at the Bronx High School of Science, and ending in 1969 when he was living in San Francisco and on the verge of reconceiving the novel that would become Dhalgren. In these pages, Delany muses on the writing of the stories that will establish him as a science fiction wunderkind, the early years of his marriage to the poet Marilyn Hacker, performances as a singer-songwriter during the heyday of the American folk revival, travels in Europe, experiences in a New York City commune, and much more – and crosses paths with artists working in many genres, including poets such as Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Marie Ponsot, and science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ. Delany scholar Kenneth R. James presents the journal entries alongside generous samplings of story outlines, poetry, fragments of novels and essays that have never seen publication, and more; James also provides biographical synopses and an extensive set of endnotes to supply contextual information and connect journal material to Delany’s published work.

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book’s three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader’s companion is available at XXXX.site.wesleyan.edu.

Today, movie theaters are packed with audiences of all ages marveling to exciting science fiction blockbusters, many of which are also critically acclaimed. However, when the science fiction film genre first emerged in the 1950s, it was represented largely by exploitation horror films—lurid, culturally disreputable, and appealing to a niche audience of children and sci-fi buffs. How did the genre evolve from B-movie to blockbuster? Escape Velocity charts the historical trajectory of American science fiction cinema, explaining how the genre transitioned from eerie low-budget horror like It Came from Outer Space to art films like Slaughterhouse-Five, and finally to the extraordinary popularity of hits like E.T. Bradley Schauer draws on primary sources such as internal studio documents, promotional materials, and film reviews to explain the process of cultural, aesthetic, and economic legitimation that occurred between the 1950s and 1980s, as pulp science fiction tropes were adapted to suit the tastes of mainstream audiences. Considering the inescapable dominance of today’s effects-driven blockbusters, Escape Velocity not only charts the history of science fiction film, but also gives an account of the origins of contemporary Hollywood.

Stunning photography and fact-filled text reveal new perspectives on southern New England's most unique natural region. A picturesque journey through the traprock highlands from New Haven, Connecticut to Amherst, Massachusetts, this book captures the majesty of wild windswept cliffs, panoramic summit vistas, and intimate details of the natural world through the eyes of an artist and the mind of a scientist. By tracing the influence of natural history on cultural development in the Connecticut Valley, the authors present a compelling argument that the rocky highlands are landscapes of national significance, where the particular combination of geology, geography, water resources, climate, and human settlement fostered vital developments in Early American science, education, agriculture, manufacturing, technology, and the creative arts. Through vibrant color photographs of high alpine crags and lush forests, thundering waterfalls and splashing cascades, and close-up views of the rocks, flowers, and birds, The Traprock Landscapes of New England presents the incomparable beauty of the region as never before. Overflowing with information, long-time fans, first-time visitors, nature lovers, rock climbers, history buffs, land use managers, and many others will find plenty to satisfy in the detailed text and captions, crisp photos, historical images, informative maps, and more. Showcasing popular locales, and revealing “secret spots,” this must-have resource will encourage old friends and newcomers alike to visit the rugged crags once called “the boldest and most beautiful” landscapes in New England.

The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice looks at the role the Connecticut Prison Association played in the formation of the state’s criminal justice system. Now organized under the name Community Partners in Action (CPA), the Connecticut Prison Association was formed to ameliorate the conditions of criminal defendants and people in prison, improve the discipline and administration of local jails and state prisons, and furnish assistance and encouragement to people returning to their communities after incarceration. The organization took a leading role in prison reform in the state and was instrumental in a number of criminal justice innovations. Gordon S. Bates, former Connecticut Prison Association volunteer and executive director (1980–1998), offers a detailed history of this and similar voluntary associations and their role in fostering a rehabilitative, rather than a retributive, approach to criminal justice. First convened in 1875 as the Friends of Partners of Prisoners Society, then evolving into the Connecticut Prison Association and CPA, the organization has consistently advocated for a humane, rehabilitative approach to prisoner treatment.

The Work-Shy documents a secret network of overlooked communities that work in ways that defy work as we know it. Its poetic assemblages offer direct testimony from the first youth prison in California (the Whittier State School) and from asylums for the chronically insane (preserved in the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York City). Activating what poet Susan Howe calls “the telepathy of the archive,” these poems occupy identities rooted in the demimonde and in places of confinement; they build portraits of individuals at once denied work and subjected to its punishing routine. As “translations” of apparently unredeemable texts, the poems convert the dubious paradigms of degeneracy, solipsism, and madness into a mutable archive of infidel culture. Published under the collective, anonymous signature of the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, this work nevertheless harbors the proper name of every voice it records. By converting the procedures of appropriation and sampling into a poetics of close listening, The Work-Shy operates at the crossroads of lyric and documentary poetries, of singularity and collectivism. An online readers companion will be available at bluntresearchgroup.site.wesleyan.edu.

Trisha Brown re-shaped the landscape of modern dance with her game-changing and boundary-defying choreography and visual art. Art historian Susan Rosenberg draws on Brown’s archives, as well as interviews with Brown and her colleagues, to track Brown’s deliberate evolutionary trajectory through the first half of her decades-long career. Brown has created over 100 dances, six operas, one ballet, and a significant body of graphic works. This book discusses the formation of Brown’s systemic artistic principles, and provides close readings of the works that Brown created for non-traditional and art world settings in relation to the first body of works she created for the proscenium stage. Highlighting the cognitive-kinesthetic complexity that defines the making, performing and watching of these dances, Rosenberg uncovers the importance of composer John Cage’s ideas and methods to understand Brown’s contributions. One of the most important and influential artists of our time, Brown was the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius Award.”

This ground-breaking case study examines record production as ethnographic work. Since its founding in 2003, Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies has produced world music recordings that have been received as radical, sometimes problematic critiques of the practices of sound ethnography. Founded by punk rocker brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, along with filmmaker Hisham Mayet, the label’s releases encompass collagist sound travelogues; individual artist compilations; national, regional and genre surveys, and DVDs—all designed in a distinctive graphic style recalling the DIY aesthetic of punk and indie rock. Sublime Frequencies’ producers position themselves as heirs to canonical ethnographic labels such as Folkways, Nonesuch, and Musique du Monde, but their aesthetic and philosophical roots in punk, indie rock, and experimental music effectively distinguish their work from more conventional ethnographic norms. Situated at the intersection of ethnomusicology, sound studies, cultural anthropology, and popular music studies, the essays in this volume explore the issues surrounding the label—including appropriation and intellectual property—while providing critical commentary and charting the impact of the label through listener interviews.