The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence is a brilliant consideration of the strategies of poetry, and the similarities between early Zen thought and some American avant-garde writings that counter the "language of determinateness," or conventions of perception. The theme of the essays is poetic language which critiques itself, recognizing its own conceptual formations of private and social, the form or syntax of the language being "syntactically impermanence."Whether writing reflexively on her own poetry or looking closely at the writing of her peers, Leslie Scalapino makes us aware of the split between commentary (discourse and interpretation) and interior experience. The "poetry" in the collection is both commentary and interior experience at once. She argues that poetry is perhaps most deeply political when it is an expression that is not recognized or readily comprehensible as discourse.

Seven for the Apocalypse brings together Kit Reed's powerful 1994 novella with seven short stories about love and isolation. A work of metaphysical science fiction and a finalist for the Tiptree award, Little Sisters of the Apocalypse interweaves two stories. The first follows a motorcycle gang of radical nuns on their mission to save an island of women, abandoned by the men who have gone to war, from a band of outlaws. Of course, not all of the women need, or want, to be saved. The second narrative traces the long-term illness and eventual death of the author's mother, herself a World War II widow. The accompanying short stories, never before collected, include the highly acclaimed "River," "The Singing Marine," and "Voyager." These intense, intelligent tales take a hard and often humorous look at the myths we create in order to comfort ourselves, myths whose danger lies in their very perfection.

This vivid ethnography of the musical lives of heavy metal, rock, and jazz musicians in Cleveland and Akron, Ohio shows how musicians engage with the world of sound to forge meaningful experiences of music. Unlike most popular music studies, which only provide a scholar's view, this book is based on intensive fieldwork and hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews. Rich descriptions of the musical life of metal bars and jazz clubs get readers close to the people who make and listen to the music. Of special interest are Harris M. Berger's interviews with Timmy "The Ripper" Owens, now famous as lead singer for the pioneering heavy metal band, Judas Priest. Owens and other performers share their own experiences of the music, thereby challenging traditional notions of harmony and musical structure. Using ideas from practice theory and phenomenology, Berger shows that musical perception is a kind of practice, both creatively achieved by the listener and profoundly informed by social context.

Beginning in the late 1970's Frida Kahlo achieved cult heroine status less for her richly surrealist self-portraits than by the popularization of the events of her tumultuous life. Her images were splashed across billboards magazine ads, and postcards; fashion designers copied the so-called "Frida" look in hairstyles and dress; and "Fridamania" even extended to T-shirts, jewelry, and nail polish. Margaret A. Lindauer argues that this mass market assimilation of Kahlo's identity has consistently detracted from appreciation of her work, leading instead to narrow interpretations based on "an entrenched narrative of suffering." While she agrees that Kahlo's political and feminist activism, her stormy marriage to fellow artist Diego Reviera, and the tragic reality of a progressively debilitated body did represent a biography colored by emotional and physical upheaval, she questions an "author-equals-the-work" critical tradition that assumes a :one-to-one association of life events to the meaning of a painting." In kahlo's case, Lindauer says, such assumptions created a devouring mythology, an iconization that separates us from rather than leads us to the real significance of the oeuvre. Accompanied by 26 illustrations and deep analysis of Kahlo's central themes, this provocative, semiotic study recontextualizes an important figure in art history at the same time it addresses key questions about the language of interpretation, the nature of veneration, and the truths within self-representation.

At the height of the Cold War in 1954, President Eisenhower inaugurated a program of cultural exchange that sent American dancers and other artists to political "hot spots" overseas. This peacetime gambit by a warrior hero was a resounding success.Among the artists chosen for international duty were José Limón, who led his company on the first government-sponsored tour of South America; Martha Graham, whose famed ensemble crisscrossed southeast Asia; Alvin Ailey, whose company brought audiences to their feet throughout the South Pacific; and George Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet crowned its triumphant visits to Western Europe and Japan with an epoch-making tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. The success of Eisenhower's program of cultural export led directly to the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and Washington's Kennedy Center.Naima Prevots draws on an array of previously unexamined sources, including formerly classified State Department documents, congressional committee hearings, and the minutes of the Dance Panel, to reveal the inner workings of "Eisenhower's Program," the complex set of political, fiscal, and artistic interests that shaped it, and the ever-uneasy relationship between government and the arts in the US.CONTRIBUTORS: Eric Foner.

In clear and elegant prose, Music of the Common Tongue, first published in 1987, argues that by any reasonable reckoning of the function of music in human life the African American tradition, that which stems from the collision between African and European ways of doing music which occurred in the Americas and the Caribbean during and after slavery, is the major western music of the twentieth century. In showing why this is so, the author presents not only an account of African American music from its origins but also a more general consideration of the nature of the music act and of its function in human life. The two streams of discussion occupy alternate chapters so that each casts light on the other. The author offers also an answer to what the Musical Times called the "seldom posed though glaringly obtrusive" question: "why is it that the music of an alienated, oppressed, often persecuted black minority should have made so powerful an impact on the entire industrialized world, whatever the color of its skin or economic status?"

When most Americans think of contemporary British poetry, they think of such mainstream poets as Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. Yet there is a vibrant, diverse alternative poetry movement in the UK, inspired in large measure by the work of such significant mentors as Basil Bunting and J. H. Prynne. There is growing interest in this work in the United States - as alternative American poetries express increasingly transnational concerns - and yet almost none of it is available here.OTHER is a highly focused anthology bringing together several important strands of English-language poetry that are not otherwise so readily accessible. It includes work by 55 poets, among them Cris Cheek, Brian Coffey, Fred d'Aguiar, Allen Fisher, Ulli Freer, Randolph Healy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Wendy Mulford, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Catherine Walsh; a critical introduction addressing such topics as the interaction of British and American poetic traditions; and brief biographical and bibliographical notes on each poet.

While Philip Glass's operas, film scores, symphonies, and popular works have made him America's best-known classical composer, almost no analysis of his compositional techniques grounded in current cultural theory has yet been published. John Richardson's in-depth examination shows how the third opera of Glass's famous trilogy, the story of an adrogynous monarch who authored radical social and religious reforms, encapsulates Glass's ideational orientation at the time, both in terms of his unique conception of music theater and with regard to broader social questions. Glass's nontraditional musical syntax, his experimental, minimalist approach, and his highly ambiguous tonality have resisted interpretation, but Richardson overcomes those difficulties by developing new theoretical models through which to analyze both the work and its genesis. In Akhnaten, Richardson says, the composer's concepts of sound and dramatic context, cultural theory, and gender construction intersect, providing perhaps the best demonstration of "the very nature of Glass's aesthetic, which places a strong emphasis on implicit levels of signification and steers clear of conventional 'story telling' narrative strategies." Careful explanations of theory and compositional strategies, close readings of the work itself, consideration of the collaborative aspects of the opera's evolution, and incorporation of previously unpublished interviews with Glass himself combine to illuminate both a landmark work of contemporary musical theater and a dominant figure on the American musical landscape.

A lively narrative connecting Wesleyan University's early history to economic, religious, urban, and educational developments in 19th-century America.

The Machine Age, roughly delineated by the two decades between World Wars, was a watershed period during which modern society entered into an ambiguous embrace with technology that continues today. J. P. Telotte carefully blends film, technology, cultural, and genre studies to illuminate this nearly forgotten era in our cinematic history and to show, through analysis of classics like The Invisible Ray, Metropolis, and Things to Come, how technology played a major role as motif, "actor," and producer.What he also discovers as he ranges among the American, British, Russian, French, and German science fiction cinema -- as well as mainstream films, figures, and cultural products such as the New York World's Fair -- is a fundamental ambivalence, embedded in the films themselves, about the very machine-age ethos they promoted. Even as advances in the technical apparatus of filmmaking elevated it from mere entertainment to a medium of general communication and genuine artistic expression, Machine Age science fiction films remained curiously distant from and often skeptical of the very machines on which their narratives focus.The resulting tensions, Telotte writes, "thus seem to intersect with those implicit in a Western world that was struggling with its own transition into the modern," rendering the films' task inevitably paradoxical and difficult

First published in 1941, A Northern Christmas is Rockwell Kent's uplifting account of the 1918 Christmas he spent with his 9-year old son in a one-room, moss-caulked log cabin on a remote Alaskan Island. Published here in its original format, with Kent's striking illustrations, this charming keepsake edition is sure to delight a new generation of readers.

"Outside of her remarkable poems, we know next to nothing about Yu Xuanji," David Young writes. "She was born in 844 and died in 868, at the age of twenty-four, condemned to death for the murder of her maid..

For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. "With spare commentary, Smith... and Hart... let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters' genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page." Renee Tursi, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

James Dickey: The Selected Poems is the first book to collect James Dickey's very best poems. Like many visionary poets of the ecstatic imagination, Dickey experimented in a wide variety of literary styles. This volume brings together the finest work from each of the periods in Dickey's extremely controversial career. For over three decades, until his death in 1997, Dickey was one of the nation's most important poets; these are the poems that brought him a popular readership and critical acclaim.

Rachel Hadas brings an acute perception and a rich education to her exquisitely crafted poetry. As James Merrill wrote, Hadas's "honeyed words and bracing forms . .

Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. "Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul. " These spare and elegant poems speak of a conversion in which a new city is founded in the heart of silence, and grace is a refinement of grammar.