Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Césaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Césaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. André Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Césaire.Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.

In Lullaby for One Fist, Andrea Werblin explores the anatomy of destructive relationships and the now what? at their ends. Intimate, accessible, and sharply self-conscious, these musical poems trace the arc of such a relationship, conveying the speaker's struggle to invent freedom. They also reflect how often such inventions can reveal themselves to be trickery and self-deception, yet are at the same time very necessary practice runs and steps toward genuine independence.Werblin's poems also speak about the slow and painstaking work of self-recovery, of the self as a burden one carries, and of the self as a previously unoccupied and unfamiliar territory into which one slowly makes her way. Metallic and pointed, yet fluid, these poems course strongly through the emotional veins; they brace and jar melodically as steady, illuminating undercurrents rise from the syntax in a contrapuntal dance and shed sudden and intense beams of light on the confusing and intensely human experience of extricating ourselves from ties that damage.

With enormous wit and vitality, Harvey Shapiro's new collection of poems focuses on the approach of death, mingling canny observations of the city that never sleeps with homages to Hart Crane, George Oppen, the poet Rachel, and David Ignatow. Characterized by its focus on the urban world of New York, the Jewish tradition, and domesticity, Shapiro's poetry achieves a distinctive brilliance and true wisdom. These poems view life from the vantage of seventy-six years, deeply informed by the serious study of literature and language and always attuned to the present, as well as to the body, weather, and sex. With its passion, humor, and rich detail, this exquisite volume marks Harvey Shapiro's finest work to date.

The brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and activist Hubert Harrison (1883 - 1927) is one of the truly important, yet neglected, figures of early twentieth-century America. Known as "the father of Harlem radicalism,' and a leading Socialist party speaker who advocated that socialists champion the cause of the Negro as a revolutionary doctrine, Harrison had an important influence on a generation of race and class radicals, including Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph. Harrison envisioned a socialism that had special appeal to African-Americans, and he affirmed the duty of socialists to oppose race-based oppression. Despite high praise from his contemporaries, Harrison's legacy has largely been neglected. This reader redresses the imbalance; Harrison's essays, editorials, reviews, letters, and diary entries offer a profound, and often unique, analysis of issues, events and individuals of early twentieth-century America. His writings also provide critical insights and counterpoints to the thinking of W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey.The reader is organized thematically to highlight Harrison's contributions to the debates on race, class, culture, and politics of his time. The writings span Harrison's career and the evolution of his thought, and include extensive political writings, editorials, meditations, reviews of theater and poetry, and deeply evocative social commentary.

Each of Jill Dolan's three academic locations -- theatre and performance studies, lesbian/gay/queer studies (LGQ studies), and women's studies -- is both interdisciplinary and fraught with divisions between theory and practice. As teacher, administrator, author, and performer, Dolan places her professional labor in relation to issues of community, pedagogy, public culture, administration, university missions, and citizenship. She works from the assumption that the production and dissemination of knowledge can be forms of activism, extending conversations on radical politics in the academy by other writers, such as Cary Nelson, Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, and Richard Ohmann. The five interconnected essays in Geographies of Learning map the divisions and dissensions that stall the production of progressive knowledge in theatre and performance studies, LGQ studies, and women's studies, while at the same time exploring some of the theoretical and pedagogical tools these fields have to offer one another.

Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, published first in 1967 and then in an expanded edition in 1981, was a definitive set of critical statements by Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings of Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others.Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the "Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics.

Anni Albers (1899 - 1994) was one of the most influential textile designers of the 20th century. Born in Berlin, in 1922 she became a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she met her husband, Josef Albers. From 1933 to 1949 Albers taught at Black Mountain College. The fifteen essays gathered here illustrate Anni Albers's concept of design as the pursuit of wholeness -- "the coalition of form answering practical needs and form answering aesthetic needs." This beautifully illustrated book addresses the artistic and practical concerns of modern design and considers the ever-changing role of the designer.Albers's work is in private collections and in those of leading museums both here and abroad. Among them are the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum Neue Sammlung in Munich, the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. Her previous books include On Weaving (1965) and On Designing (1961), both published by Wesleyan

The practice of singing and songwriting in France during the Great War provides an intriguing tool for the exploration of the French cultural politics of the epoch. Responding to the dearth of cultural studies of the First World War, Regina Sweeney's unique cross-disciplinary study illuminates many of the hitherto unexplored corners of an era that many historians consider to exhibit a break with recognizable trends.In early twentieth century Europe, singing was considered a part of education integral to the formation of good citizens. Singing was especially important to the French, for whom it was historically associated with authenticity of feeling and purity of character, and thereby with the very roots of French democracy; it was particularly associated with the image of France as a victorious nation. But as Sweeney shows, different performances of the same patriotic song could carry vastly different meanings. By focusing on singing, Sweeney is able to provide a more nuanced reading of French Great War cultures than ever before, and to show that cultures previously held to be exclusive -- those of the home front and the Western front, for example -- existed in dialectical tension and were themselves far from homogenous.

Pierre Joris's poems are characterized by an arresting mix of passion and intellect, by what Pound called "language charged with meaning." For Joris, a language is always a second language, and his poetry takes as its main concern the question of marginality and exile. He is unique in being an American poet comfortable in three languages, and his work is filled with a dynamic language play, cross-linguistic puns, and themes of speculation on language, translation, and nomadism. Poasis, Joris's first major publication in the United States, highlights his work since the mid-1980s.

Banda music has been performed by traditional brass bands in rural northwestern Mexico for more than a century, while technobanda, a newer style that has replaced the brass instruments with synthesizers and electric instruments, has become part of a lifestyle for tens of thousands of young people in the US, particularly in Los Angeles. The young people who flock to technobanda concerts also insist on the use of the Spanish language, a particular etiquette on the dance floor and above all, a specific style of dress: cowboy/cowgirl apparel and belt buckles emblazoned with the name of their home Mexican state. In this engaging and insightful ethnography, Helena Simonett brings us inside the music and its culture. Her discussions of narco-trafficking and narco-corridos ballads reveal the interconnected roles of musical, commercial and criminal networks, and illuminate how and why musical and social issues become so interconnected for banda artists and audiences. In this richly contextualized analysis of a singularly important contemporary musical style, Simonett sheds new light on how expressive culture both generates and reflects intersecting social identities.

Frances Chung's poetry stands alone as the most perceptive, aesthetically accomplished, and compassionate depiction of a supposedly impenetrable community during the late 1960s and 70s. Written "For the Chinatown People" and imprinted with Chung's own ink seal, Crazy Melon is collects brief poems and prose vignettes set in New York's Chinatown and Lower East Side. Chung incorporates Spanish and Chinese into her English in deft evocations of these neighborhoods' streets, fantasies, commerce, and toil. The title of her second collection, Chinese Apple, translates the Chinese word for pomegranate: there she offers "small crimson bites" of new themes and cityscapes -- delightfully understated eroticism, tributes to other poets, impressions of other Chinese diasporic communities during her travels in Central America and Asia. Its new formal experiments show that Chung's poetic prowess continued to deepen before her early death.Publication of these two works will finally allow Chung's growing circle of admirers to experience the full range of her skills and sensibility, and will draw many others into that circle. Her poems are an inimitable synthesis of American urban vernacular and imagery, various East Asian and Spanish-language poetics, and a concern for ethnic and feminist cultural and political survival-in-writing that was so vital to American poets around the time that Chung first began to compose. Her always fresh perspective on the worlds around her smoothly shifts through multiple lenses, making wonderful use of her "power to dream in four languages."

The Y located at 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City is the largest and oldest continuously operating YM-YWHA in the US. Many of the most important figures in modern dance premiered on its stage, but until now no one has thought to ask why this should have been so. As Naomi Jackson shows in Converging Movements, the Y's particular conception of Jewishness laid the groundwork for the establishment of a center for dance in the 1930s. William Kolodney, who served as the Y's education director from 1934 until 1969, expanded its educational and arts programming to include a great deal of nonsectarian material, and as Jackson shows, modern dance epitomized Kolodney's humanistic ideals regarding the uplifting role of the arts.Together with his dance advisors, most notably Doris Humphrey, John Martin, and Louis Horst, Kolodney oversaw a program characterized by a broad mix of Jewish and non-Jewish performers from Alvin Ailey, Katherine Dunham, and Ruth St. Denis to Anna Sokolow, José Limón, Erick Hawkins, Hanya Holm, Pearl Primus, and national and folk companies from Israel, the Philippines, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere. Drawing on the Y's extensive archives and illustrated with rare photographs, Jackson's book locates modern dance at the heart of the Jewish encounter with America.

Signs and Abominations is a radical tour de force that interrogates the relationship between religion and art at the end of the 20th century in penetrating and sensuous prosody. It can be read as a series of damaged likenesses: humans as the damaged image and likeness of God, poems and other works of art as necessarily incomplete attempts to approach and represent the numinous and the ineffable.The reader is guided through its five interconnected sections by diverse voices: Michelangelo, Andres Serrano, Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Soren Kierkegaard, Augustine, to name a few. All of the book's figures -- the child-Crusaders stumbling toward Jerusalem, the man who wants to preserve for posterity his body entirely covered with tattoos, Andres Serrano submerging a crucifix in his own urine -- set out on a deformed search for signs of the divine among the abominations of the profane. These poems are brilliance cast back at the hypocritical religiosity of those who refuse to admit that the spiritual and the profane inextricably encompass each other, and that art and religion have more in common than not.

Is equitable global cultural exchange possible? Who determines this exchange and at whose expense? Can community and place survive the anonymity of the market and the patriarchy of the state? How can global practice provoke new modes of resistance in an age of globalization? The Politics of Cultural Practice defies the homogenizing and antidemocratic forces of globalization.Refuting the notion that the West is everywhere, Rustom Bharucha draws on the emergent cultures of secular struggle in contemporary India to engage with the volatile global issues of intellectual property rights, cultural tourism, and the marking of minorities on the basis of religion, caste, language, gender, and sexuality. A dazzling analysis of life, politics, and art in our globalizing world, his book demonstrates the power of the intercultural imaginary to radically shape the 21st century.

In recent years, the ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle"), a traditional Arabic form of poetry, has become popular among contemporary English language poets. But like the haiku before it, the ghazal has been widely misunderstood and thus most English ghazals have been far from the mark in both letter and spirit. This anthology brings together ghazals by a rich gathering of 107 poets including Diane Ackerman, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and many others. As this dazzling collection shows, the intricate and self-reflexive ghazal brings the writer a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Agha Shahid Ali's lively introduction gives a brief history of the ghazal and instructions on how to compose one in English. An elegant afterword by Sarah Suleri Goodyear elucidates the larger issues of cultural translation and authenticity inherent in writing in a "borrowed" form.