About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken. Check for the online reader's companion at http://thresholdsongs.site.wesleyan.edu.

Dancer Janet Collins, born in New Orleans in 1917 and raised in Los Angeles, soared high over the color line as the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. Night's Dancer chronicles the life of this extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a black trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet. During her career, Collins endured an era in which racial bias prevailed, and subsequently prevented her from appearing in the South. Nonetheless, her brilliant performances transformed the way black dancers were viewed in ballet. The book begins with an unfinished memoir written by Collins in which she gives a captivating account of her childhood and young adult years, including her rejection by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Dance scholar Yaël Tamar Lewin then picks up the thread of Collins's story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with Collins and her family, friends, and colleagues to explore Collins's development as a dancer, choreographer, and painter, Lewin gives us a profoundly moving portrait of an artist of indomitable spirit.

Paul Mazursky's nearly twenty films as writer/director represent Hollywood's most sustained comic expression of the 1970s and 1980s. But they have not been given their due, perhaps because Mazursky's films-both sincere and ridiculous, realistic and romantic-are pure emotion. This makes films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman, and Enemies, A Love Story difficult to classify, but that's what makes a human comedy human. In the first ever book-length examination of one of America's most important and least appreciated filmmakers, Sam Wasson sits down with Mazursky himself to talk about his movies and how he makes them. Going over Mazursky's oeuvre one film at a time, interviewer and interviewee delve into the director's life in and out of Hollywood, laughing, talking, and above all else, feeling-like Mazursky's people always do. The book includes a filmography and never-before-seen photos.

Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of hydrology from which we draw our being-and the stilled water in a glass in a Senate chamber. Not since Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon has American poetry seen the likes of the hallucinatory wit and moral clarity that Hillman brings to Washington in her poems about Congressional Hearings on the Iraq War. Here also-because it is about many kinds of power-is a sequence of twinned lyrics for the moon, governess of tides and night vision, for visible and invisible faces. Violence and the common world, fact and dream, science and magic, intuition and perception are reconfigured as the poet explores matters of spirit in political life and earthly fate. If it is time to weep by the waters of Babylon, it is also time to touch water's living currents. No one is reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry with more inventiveness; this is masterful work by one of our finest poets.

In the Sex and Race series, first published in the 1940s, historian Joel Augustus Rogers questioned the concept of race, the origins of racial differentiation, and the root of the "color problem." Rogers surmised that a large percentage of ethnic differences are the result of sociological factors and in these volumes he gathered what he called "the bran of history"—the uncollected, unexamined history of black people—in the hope that these neglected parts of history would become part of the mainstream body of Western history. Drawing on a vast amount of research, Rogers was attempting to point out the absurdity of racial divisions. Indeed his belief in one race—humanity—precluded the idea of several different ethnic races. The series marshals the data he had collected as evidence to prove his underlying humanistic thesis: that people were one large family without racial boundaries. Self-trained and self-published, Rogers and his work were immensely popular and influential during his day, even cited by Malcolm X. The books are presented here in their original editions.

Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed) is Aimé Césaire's most explosive collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text-eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupé. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

Early science fiction has often been associated almost exclusively with Northern industrialized nations. In this groundbreaking exploration of the science fiction written in Latin America prior to 1920, Rachel Haywood Ferreira argues that science fiction has always been a global genre. She traces how and why the genre quickly reached Latin America and analyzes how writers in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico adapted science fiction to reflect their own realities. Among the texts discussed are one of the first defenses of Darwinism in Latin America, a tale of a time-traveling history book, and a Latin American Frankenstein. Latin American science fiction writers have long been active participants in the sf literary tradition, expanding the limits of the genre and deepening our perception of the role of science and technology in the Latin American imagination. The book includes a chronological bibliography of science fiction published from 1775 to 1920 in all Latin American countries.

The beauty and difficulty of Jack Spicer's poetry continues to resonate with contemporary audiences nearly fifty years after his death. After Spicer brings together work by ten eminent literary scholars to provide a long overdue exploration of Spicer's legacy even as it continues to unfold. As editor John Emil Vincent notes, it is Spicer's "boundary crashing"-in his poetry, poetics, and politics-that makes his work so powerful and relevant today. After Spicer extends the conversation between poet and reader that Spicer considered essential to the composition and survival of poems. Incisive essays by Maria Damon, Norman Finkelstein, Kelly Holt, Catherine Imbriglio, Kevin Killian, Michael Snediker, Anita Sokolsky, and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, provide an overview of Spicer's oeuvre-his poetry, letters, plays, and his only novel-and explore his work in relation to queer theory, audience, religion, the lyric, and seriality. These essays give us crucial insights into Spicer's transition from a regional cult figure to a canonical postmodern poet.

The state of Connecticut boasts an extensive and active community of fife and drum groups. This musical tradition has its origins in the small military bands maintained by standing armies in Britain and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-the drum was especially important as it helped officers train soldiers how to march, and was also used to communicate with troops across battlefields. Today fifers and drummers gather at conventions called "musters," which may include a parade and concerts featuring the various participating corps. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest muster ever was held in Deep River, Connecticut, in 1976. Musician and historian James Clark is the first to detail the colorful history of this unique music. This engaging book leads the reader through the history of the individual instruments and tells the story of this classic folk tradition through anecdotes, biographies, photographs, and musical examples.

The sixties were a tremendously important time of transition for both civil rights activism and the U.S. film industry. Soul Searching examines a subject that, despite its significance to African American film history, has gone largely unexplored until now. By revisiting films produced between the march on Washington in 1963 and the dawn of the "blaxploitation" movie cycle in 1970, Christopher Sieving reveals how race relations influenced black-themed cinema before it was recognized as commercially viable by the major studios. The films that are central to this book-Gone Are the Days (1963), The Cool World (1964), The Confessions of Nat Turner (never produced), Uptight (1968), and The Landlord (1970)-are all ripe for reevaluation and newfound appreciation. Soul Searching is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and cultural movements of the 1960s, cinematic trends like blaxploitation and the American "indie film" explosion, or black experience and its many facets.

Connecticut in the American Civil War offers readers a remarkable window into the state's involvement in a conflict that challenged and defined the unity of a nation. The arc of the war is traced through the many facets and stories of battlefield, home front, and factory. Matthew Warshauer masterfully reveals the varied attitudes toward slavery and race before, during, and after the war; Connecticut's reaction to the firing on Fort Sumter; the dissent in the state over whether or not the sword and musket should be raised against the South; the raising of troops; the sacrifice of those who served on the front and at home; and the need for closure after the war. This book is a concise, amazing account of a complex and troubling war. No one interested in this period of American history can afford to miss reading this important contribution to our national and local stories.The paperback edition includes a reading guide, which is also available at http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/e-books/materials/warshauer_reading_guide.pdf

The unique career of choreographer Liz Lerman has taken her from theater stages to shipyards, and from synagogues to science labs. In this wide-ranging collection of essays and articles, she reflects on her life-long exploration of dance as a vehicle for human insight and understanding of the world around us. Lerman has been described by the Washington Post as "the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art. " Here, she combines broad outlooks on culture and society with practical applications and accessible stories. Her expansive scope encompasses the craft, structure, and inspiration that bring theatrical works to life as well as the applications of art in fields as diverse as faith, aging, particle physics, and human rights law. Offering readers a gentle manifesto describing methods that bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world, this is the perfect book for anyone curious about the possible role for art in politics, science, community, motherhood, and the media.To explore Lerman's dances about science and tools for embodied learning please visit her Science Choreography website: http://sciencechoreography.wesleyan.edu/. The site is a valuable resource for teachers from middle school through the university level.

Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet's mother's illness and death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public tragedies-showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting "amneoir" (a blend of "memoir" and "amnesia") explores a time for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary evidence-not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between individual experience and history. A reader's companion is available at http://thingscomeonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

In the Sex and Race series, first published in the 1940s, historian Joel Augustus Rogers questioned the concept of race, the origins of racial differentiation, and the root of the "color problem." Rogers surmised that a large percentage of ethnic differences are the result of sociological factors and in these volumes he gathered what he called "the bran of history"—the uncollected, unexamined history of black people—in the hope that these neglected parts of history would become part of the mainstream body of Western history. Drawing on a vast amount of research, Rogers was attempting to point out the absurdity of racial divisions. Indeed his belief in one race—humanity—precluded the idea of several different ethnic races. The series marshals the data he had collected as evidence to prove his underlying humanistic thesis: that people were one large family without racial boundaries. Self-trained and self-published, Rogers and his work were immensely popular and influential during his day, even cited by Malcolm X. The books are presented here in their original editions.

In Nature Knows No Color-Line, originally published in 1952, historian Joel Augustus Rogers examined the origins of racial hierarchy and the color problem. Rogers was a humanist who believed that there were no scientifically evident racial divisions—all humans belong to one "race." He believed that color prejudice generally evolved from issues of domination and power between two physiologically different groups. According to Rogers, color prejudice was then used a rationale for domination, subjugation and warfare. Societies developed myths and prejudices in order to pursue their own interests at the expense of other groups. This book argues that many instances of the contributions of black people had been left out of the history books, and gives many examples.

Brutal Intimacy is the first book to explore the fascinating films of contemporary France, ranging from mainstream genre spectaculars to arthouse experiments, and from wildly popular hits to films that deliberately alienate the viewer. Twenty-first-century France is a major source of international cinema-diverse and dynamic, embattled yet prosperous-a national cinema offering something for everyone. Tim Palmer investigates France's growing population of women filmmakers, its buoyant vanguard of first-time filmmakers, the rise of the controversial cinema du corps, and France's cinema icons: auteurs like Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, and stars such as Vincent Cassel and Jean Dujardin. Analyzing dozens of breakthrough films, Brutal Intimacy situates infamous titles alongside many yet to be studied in the English language. Drawing on interviews and the testimony of leading film artists, Brutal Intimacy promises to be an influential treatment of French cinema today, its evolving rivalry with Hollywood, and its ambitious pursuits of audiences in Europe, North America, and around the world.