What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment's debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis.

What actually happens within the revolution of the clock's hands? In The Writing of an Hour the poet considers the effort and the deliberateness that brings her to her desk each day. Despite domestic and day job demands and widespread lockdown, Coultas forges connections to the sublime and wonders what it means to be from the Americas. These poems verge on the surreal, transform the quotidian, and respond anew to the marvelous. The Writing of an Hour takes the reader on a journey in four sections; from a bedroom to an improvised desk over the North Sea, where she attempts to create an artwork inside an airplane cabin flying over Greenland's rivers of ice.

A memoir about disability and siblinghood that is honest and hilarious. Nothing Special is a disarming tale of two sisters growing up in the 1970s in suburban Connecticut. Older sister Chris, who has Down's Syndrome, is an extrovert with a knack for getting what she wants, while the author, her younger, typically developing "Irish twin" sister, shoulders the burdens and grief of her parents. Poet, performance artist, and special needs advocate Dianne Bilyak strikes a rare balance between heartwarming and hilarious as she paints a compassionate and critical real-world picture of life with a sibling with Down's Syndrome. Throughout Nothing Special, the sisters serve as one another's friends, witnesses, rivals, and mirrors. Bilyak details wrestling with their mixed emotions in vignettes that range from poignant to laugh-out-loud funny, including anecdotes about Chris's habit of faux smoking popsicle sticks or partying through the night with her invisible friends. Bilyak skillfully discards old, pitying "they're angels" narratives to lay bare the realness and heart that only exists in truthful storytelling. Throughout their lives the sisters wrestle with tension between dependence and independence, the complexities of giving versus receiving, the pressure to live as others expect, and in the end, the wonderful liberation of self-acceptance. Nothing Special adds to the small but growing literary canon of books, such as Rachel Simon's Riding the Bus with My Sister, that detail life with a disabled sibling.

Samuel R. Delany is one of literature's most iconic voices. An acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. his works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction through their formally consummate and materially grounded explorations of difference. This anthology of essays, talks, and interviews addresses topics such as sex and sexuality, race, power, literature and genre, as well as Herman Melville, John Ashbery, Willa Cather, Junot Diaz, and others. The second of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. This diverse collection displays the power of a towering literary intelligence. It is a rich trove of essays, as well as a map to the mind of one of the great writers of our time.

Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American master Be Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Most of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer's growing readership to savor and enjoy. "When your body brushed against me. . ." When your body brushed against me I rememberedHow we used to catch butterflies in our handsDown in the garden.We were such patient childrenFollowing them from flower to flowerWaiting and hoping.With our cupped hands we used to catch themAnd they answered us with a soft tickleFor they never stopped flying.In bed I remembered them and cried forThe touch of their fast wings, the impatienceOf their bright colorsI am too old for such gamesBut even tonight, now your body has reminded me of butterfliesI lie here awake, pretending.

An exploration of ethical dynamism in vocal life Ways of Voice is the first ethnomusicological monograph to delve deeply into the diverse, variegated techniques of voice production in North India. It explicitly thematizes the dynamic movement between vocal dispositions—singers who consciously retrain themselves in order to acquire a different voice, focusing on the ways in which singers not only "have" voice, but actively acquire, cultivate and contest particular vocal dispositions. The book deals extensively with the formation and contestation of particular, historically grounded ways of voice, from Bollywood film singers to modern raga vocality to pop Sufi song. Working from dozens of concrete examples, it fills an important gap both in South Asian ethnomusicology and in the emerging field of voice studies. Audio and video examples are provided on the online companion site.

An ethnography about local working musicians in Brazil's "most African" city Living from Music in Salvador examines the labor of musicians in Salvador da Bahia, widely regarded as Brazil's most African city. Drawing on fieldwork that spans over sixteen years, the book explores local musicians' lives as members of a flexible work force, emphasizing questions of race, social class, and cultural politics in relation to professional music making. From clubs and restaurants, to Carnaval parades and festival celebrations, to concert stages and recordings, the abiliy of musicians to earn a living wage is contingent on their navigating industry and societal conditions that are profoundly informed by the entrenched legacies of colonization and slavery.

How NEA funding policies have shaped the field of dance Funding Bodies is the first scholarly study of NEA to focus specifically on dance. It departs from a choreographic question: How have federal grant guidelines rewarded specific patterns of dance practice and production? Drawing upon archival documentation of NEA narratives, program eligibility guidelines, and standards of evaluation as well as testimony from past and present insiders, Wilbur's work theorizes endowment as an economic and practical struggle by people with differential power and competing investments in the production and professionalization of dance. With a wealth of detail and previously untold stories, this institutional history brings clarity to the complex processes that underlie the continuing struggle to achieve equitable resource distribution and parity of opportunity in American dance. An online teaching guide is available.

Theorizing the experiences of black and brown bodies in hip hop dance Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop Dance, an Afro-diasporic dance form, which have generally reduced the style to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes that Hip Hop Dance is a collective and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. Roberts argues that the experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop Dance from the streets of urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

Elegiac and searching, poems written in the long shadow of immigration The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in "traditional" Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of "Tian'anmen Square sonnets" (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession. "Tian'anmen Sonnet" (dead air in air ... ) Dead air in airThe anniversary of languageholds you back againstbucolic dreaming, down streamfrom here is runninga miraculous color, elegy bursts like a ribbon in airThinking again of the Square todayBold sky, passing episodes of cloudVegetation mutters in the Far West A column of ghostsgoing violet over timeFamiliar song looping overheadLines pressed in air

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. The institution of town meeting, the beauty of the landscape, and the enduring qualities of the architecture all give the New England town the power to shape the identity of its inhabitants - in a good way. This premise is put on trial - and to a vote - in Whisper My Name, the third novel in Hebert's Darby Chronicles. The story unfolds as seen through the eyes of three men: the reporter Roland LaChance, the farmer Avalon Hillary, and the founder of a land trust, Raphael "Reggie" Salmon. Magnus Mall, a national corporation, wants to buy the Hillary farm and transform the property into a mall to serve western New Hampshire and eastern Vermont. The aging Hillary is torn between the traditions of his family and "the thought of the money." LaChance is not only chasing down leads in his reportage on the mall - he's chasing down the story behind his own origins. Along the way he falls in love with Sheila "Soapy" Rayno, an aphasic girl from Darby whose origins are equally mysterious. As usual, the Jordan clan plays a pivotal role in this rousing tale of greed, power, and lust. This third novel in the Darby Chronicles will appeal to anyone interested in the clash of cultures in small-town America.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. A major character in earlier Darby novels, Estelle takes center stage in The Passion of Estelle Jordan. Presently she is sliding into late middle age, drawn to two lovers who could not be more different: the widowed farmer Avalon Hillary and a mysterious young punk Estelle calls Trans Am in honor of the car he drives. And there's a threat, not to Estelle - she can take care of herself - but to Noreen Cook, a younger woman Estelle sees as a version of her own secret, vulnerable self. Putting herself in Noreen's shoes to save her, Estelle may be in for way more than she bargained for. The Passion of Estelle Jordan, like that of Christ, is rife with sin, suffering, sacrifice, and perhaps redemption. The Passion of Estelle Jordan is for anyone going through a change of life.

An innovative suite of poems for the drone age The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war.' With its sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality, this book offers a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution. Excerpt from "Opened" This is the box, frozen against hierarchyat a value of some $10m, simply a form of being; surgeon's box, patient's wound,an idea of enclosure that can fit any medium. The gaze is on the side of things. The angel of evil could not have done that. A child is in heaven. The box is empty, saying nothing but "construction." It really islike swatting flies; we can do it forevereasily and you feel nothing.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. The second novel of the Darby Chronicles follows Ollie Jordan, a man with no education, no mentors, and a serious Freudian hang-up. A family history of poverty, stubborn pride, and a culture that runs contrary to mainstream society have robbed Ollie and his people of opportunity, even hope. They live by a culture of "succor and ascendancy." When Ollie is evicted from his shack, he breaks his drinking rules and heads out into the wilderness with his disabled son, Willow, literally chained to him. Father and son are doomed. How that doom plays itself out, as experienced by the disturbed but insightful Ollie Jordan, is what makes A Little More Than Kin unique in contemporary American literature. Hebert gives his rural underclass protagonist the depths of a tragic hero. Though A Little More Than Kin is action-packed and its prose is clean, hard, lyrical, and sometimes very funny, the book is at its heart an exploration into a brilliant mind that has laid waste to itself. This novel will appeal to readers who enjoy prose that explores the human psyche at its most perverse.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. After almost fifteen years, Hebert has returned to this rich literary landscape for a new novel of the changing economic and social character of New England. Hebert's previous Darby book, Live Free or Die, recounted the ill-fated love between Freddie Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, child of Upper Darby gentility. At its conclusion, Lilith died giving birth to their son. As Spoonwood opens, Freddie, consumed by grief and anger and struggling with alcoholism, is not prepared to be a father to Birch. But as both his family and Lilith's begin to maneuver for custody of the child, Freddie embarks on a course of action that satisfies none of them. Once again, Hebert masterfully conveys the natural and social landscape of contemporary rural New England. Grounded in complex, fully realized characters, Spoonwood offers Hebert's most optimistic vision yet of acceptance and accommodation across class lines.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. The struggle between the rural working class and the upper crust intensifies in this turning-point novel of the Darby Chronicles as Freddy Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, daughter of a prestigious family, embark on their ill-fated love affair. Seeing Darby through new eyes, Freddy comes to realize that "the kind of people who hunkered down among these tree-infested, rock-strewn hills" is "dying out, replaced by people with money, education, culture, people 'wise in the ways of the world. '" As that world increasingly intervenes, the lovers' attempt to bridge the chasm that divides their class-alienated families inevitably collapses in Hebert's tragic tale that echoes Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. This is a book for anyone interested in local politics, privilege, and poverty, all embedded in a story of love and death in the woods and on the ledges of the Granite State.