Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds’ nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. Experimental and deeply grounded, its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.

Going Up the Country is part oral history, part nostalgia-tinged narrative, and part clear-eyed analysis of the multifaceted phenomena collectively referred to as the counterculture movement in Vermont. This is the story of how young migrants, largely from the cities and suburbs of New York and Massachusetts, turned their backs on the establishment of the 1950s and moved to the backwoods of rural Vermont, spawning a revolution in lifestyle, politics, sexuality, and business practices that would have a profound impact on both the state and the nation. The movement brought hippies, back-to-the-landers, political radicals, sexual libertines, and utopians to a previously conservative state and led us to today's farm to table way of life, environmental consciousness, and progressive politics as championed by Bernie Sanders.

For more than a century, Friedrich Hölderlin has been considered one of the key figures in modern European literature. The translations in Odes and Elegies, including poems never before available in English, render forcefully and directly the deep longing and heartbreak of Hölderlin's poetic world. A bilingual edition, this book is the first major translation of these poems since the 1960s. Odes and Elegies opens to the English reader the unique poetic voice that marks Hölderlin's achievement and continuing influence on poetry and philosophy today.

The University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music celebrates its centennial in this lavishly illustrated book. The Hartt School holds unique qualities that continue to distinguish it from other performing arts institutions. Through personal and official written communications, school newsletters, speeches, and the exquisite quality of artistic expression, a belief in the value of art is continually reinforced, often with great eloquence, sometimes with humor, and always from the heart.

Told through the words of those whose lives the meetinghouse shaped, Facing the Past uncovers a hidden past. It begins with the displacement of Indigenous people in the area before Europeans arrived, continues with disputes over worship and witchcraft in the early colonial settlement, and looks ahead to the use of Connecticut’s most iconic white church as a refuge and sanctuary. Relying on the resources of local archives, the contents of family attics, and the extensive records of the Congregational Church, this community portrait details the long ignored genocide and enslaved people and reshapes prevailing ideas about history’s makers.

Lorenzo Thomas (1944−2005) was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass his entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator.

Deborah Hay is an internationally renowned dance artist whose unique approach to bodily practice has had lasting impact on American choreography. Her commitment to dance as a process is as exquisite as it is provoking. Rooted in NYC’s 1960s experimental Judson Dance Theater in New York, Hay’s work has evolved through experimentation with a use of language that is unique to dance. This book is an exploration and articulation of Hay’s process, focusing on several of her most recent works.

Motivated by the inexorable rise of urban-industrial development and the subsequent deterioration of our planet, artists confront the contemporary vulnerability of our natural world, and illustrate the continued relevance of ecology and nature conservation to contemporary artistic practice, and global climate change. In Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art, leading artists Jennifer Angus, Mark Dion, Courtney Mattison, and James Prosek make natural elements their medium conceptually and literally. From prints created with eel bodies and moth wings, to ceramic sculpture mimicking coral bleaching, cabinets filled with colorful plastic collected from oceans and rivers, and walls covered with shockingly beautiful, preserved insects, the artwork reflects an artist’s perspective to natural science, these essays and written conversations showcase the persuasive role artists can play in advocating for the preservation of earth.

What are the uses of musical exoticism? In Wild Music, Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857−1907), baker’s daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at the Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, taught at Smith College for nearly two decades, but sadly ended up almost totally obscure. In 2012, her confessional letters and hundreds of her paintings and sketches turned up in storage at a Connecticut family’s home. Her first biography reveals her as feisty, funny, self-deprecating, caustically critical of mainstream art, and observant of everything from soldiers’ epaulettes to colorful produce layered on delivery trucks. She was determined to paint portraits and landscapes in her distinctive style. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks.

Tallahassee.

Playing It Dangerously questions what happens when feelings attached to popular music conflict with expressions of the dominant socio-cultural order, and how this tension enters into the politics of popular culture at various levels of human interaction. Tambura is a genre-crossing performance practice centered on an eponymous stringed instrument, part of the mandolin family, that Roma, Croats, and Serbs adopted from Ottoman forces. The acclamation that one is a “dangerous player” connotes exceptional virtuosic improvisation and rapid finger technique and, as the highest praise that a musician can receive from his peers. Tambura has served as a site of both contestation and reconciliation since its propagation as Croatia’s national instrument during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. This study combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and music analysis to expound affective block: a theory of the dialectical dynamics between affective and discursive responses to differences in playing styles.

Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanatyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the “classical” forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanatyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.

This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli−Palestinian conflict. Yonatan Berg is a poet from Israel and the youngest person ever awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize. This collection brings together the best poems from his three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider’s perspective on life in Israel today.

Soloing on the page, choreographer Annie-B Parson rethinks choreography as dance on paper. Parson draws her dances into new graphic structures calling attention to the visual facts of the materiality of each dance work she has made. These drawings serve as both maps of her pieces in the aftermath of performance, and a consideration of the elements of dance itself. This book explores the meanings that form itself holds, and Parson’s visual maps of choreographic ideas inspire new thinking around the shared elements underneath all art making.

In this micro-book, acclaimed “Poetry-Witch” Annie Finch harvests her Spells, spun at the intersection of magic, word, and world. These ritual poems invite readers to experience words not just in the mind, but also in the body and spirit. Celebrated for her extraordinary love and knowledge of poetic craft and commitment to female, earth-centered spirituality, Finch has created a haunting innovative voice and radically traditional aesthetic.