"The days of anything static-form, content, state-are over," declares poet and translator Pierre Joris in A Nomad Poetics, his first collection of critical essays. Joris maps the success and limitations of contemporary avant-garde poetics, from Tristan Tzara to the most contemporary American experimental poetry, an investigation that leads him to envision a "nomadic poetics" as a strategy for new poetic work, for translation and, fundamentally, for an ethics of early 21st century life. Extending concepts and concerns voiced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Nomad Poetics is a daring first step in deploying the method of the rhizome, one grounded in Paul Celan's insight that "Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won." With articulate immediacy, Joris's essays announce a metamorphosis of language-based art, much needed if poetry is to be of essential use in shaping the world to come.

Don Bogen's latest volume, Luster, takes on everything from bullhorns to the cultivation of olive trees in poems that are sharp-edged and open to surprise. They capture not just things themselves but the essential contexts-history, power, the personal and the social-that give them meaning. The stylistic dexterity and range of approaches here make the book as rich as the world it engages. Luster includes evocations of place and memory, character studies of figures from Coleridge to Tarzan, a verse epistle, and an extended meditation on machines in our daily lives, all within an overarching vision. From racehorses to waterwheels to great cities, Bogen illuminates "things that go," in both their dynamism and their inevitable decay. Luster traces the sheen of human activity that clings to the world around us: imperfect, irrevocably marred by time, but always gleaming.

The double-dactyl, a poetic form never intended for the serious or high-minded', was invented in 1951. One of the form's rules is that the verse must contain a double-dactyl name, such as Higgledy-Piggledy . This collection, the result of an obsession of the authors, substitutes the doubl-dactyl rhyme with a Latin expression or tag, providing a witty poetic tour through Roman history. Beginning with Aeneas and ending with the last emperors, each brief poem is faced with an original drawing and accompanied by a short piece of text that sets the historical scene. Includes a glossary of Latin tags.

The characters in Speed-Walk and Other Stories often find themselves dislocated, living in places that do not resemble or feel like home. Their lives have somehow been turned on their axes, and often they cannot comprehend why. The stories in this stunning debut collection are united by their protagonists' common quest to make sense of the world, to bring it into focus, to set it right, to adapt. In selecting Suzanne Greenberg's fiction for the 2003 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Rick Moody wrote, "A charge sometimes leveled against contemporary fiction these days is that it has abrogated its responsibility to depict civilization as it actually exists. . . . Speed-Walk replies forcefully to this aesthetic error by locating its protagonists in completely recognizable environments. . . . [They] are ever engaged by the routines of American life: walking the dog, eating at the sushi bar, doing the laundry." Tightly written yet realistically spare, these stories provide a blueprint for survival when the unexpected is thrust into an ordinary life.

Ostinato Vamps is Wanda Coleman's first book of poetry since the demise of her longtime publisher, Black Sparrow Press. It continues and enlarges the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms. Racing between an earthy eroticism and fatalistic despair, filled with humor and tragedy, these poems are alive. They breathe. They challenge us even as they reward us for seeking the truth.

Peter Gizzi's poems move between bewilderment and understanding, anger and astonishment. His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

In this unique collection of fiction and essays, some of the best writers in the science fiction world explore our relationship to the future through the dual lens of science fiction and cultural studies, and provide a rich testament to the power of science fiction to help us re-imagine reality.Each contributor was asked to reflect on our anxiety about the new millennium and to write about how science fiction could help us envision the far future and future cultural spaces. The resulting array of speculative writings, both critical and fictional, is diverse and illuminating-from a personal essay by Marge Piercy on love, sex and the power of fiction; to a new story by Harlan Ellison in which consumerism is the opiate of the masses; to a fictional book review by Kim Stanley Robinson which imagines what future historians will say about science in the third millennium. CONTRIBUTORS: Marleen S. Barr, Rosi Braidotti, Harlan Ellison, James Gunn, Walter Mosley, Patrick Parrinder, Marge Peircy, Neil Postman, Eric S. Rabkin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Pamela Sargent, Darko Suvin, George Zebrowski.

The rich history of river life in Kentucky permeates Janice Holt Giles's novel Run Me a River. Set in 1861, at the beginning of Kentucky's reluctant entry into the Civil War, the novel tells the story of a five-day adventure on the Green River. Aboard the Rambler, a ramshackle steamboat, Captain Bohannon Cartwright and his crew journey 184 miles and pick up two extra passengers along the way. The boatmenrescue "Sir Henry" Cole, a former Shakespearean actor, and his granddaughter Phoebe from their skiff when it overruns in a squall. As romance blossoms between Phoebe and Captain Bo, a conflict escalates between Confederate and Union forces fighting for control of the river.Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

The third issue of the now-celebrated interdisciplinary annual journal from the Chipstone Foundation http://www.chipstone.org/ that examines the role of historical ceramics in the American context, intended for collectors, historical archaeologists, curators, decorative arts students, social historians and contemporary potters. In addition to heavily-illustrated articles by noted American and British ceramic scholars and a private American collector profile, this issue contains New Discoveries edited by Merry A. Outlaw, Book Reviews and a Checklist of Articles and Books edited by Amy C. Earls, and an Index.

A necessary tool for any student of classics or Homer. A novel feature of the work is the introduction into the text of nearly one hundred and fifty small wood-cut images of various topics.

Contains in English translation over one hundred quatrains derived from the works of the medieval Arab poet Abu'l-Ala of Ma'arri. The quatrains are a joy to read, and serve as quotations for various religious and secular topics.

This charming collection of short stories is packed with humor, suspense, and shock, but is essentially serious. Through an array of interesting characters, Al-Khoury illuminates an extraordinary range of issues.

First published in 1927, Deluge is one of the most famous of the English catastrophe novels. Beautifully written and action packed-RKO Radio Pictures even filmed this story-the novel depicts a flood so severe that it destroys modern civilization, leaving the few survivors to adapt to the rigors of the natural world. Like other English writers responding to the trauma of World War I, Sydney Fowler Wright expresses a loathing of the worst aspects of industrialization. The flood, in his view, becomes an opportunity for the remaking of society. The protagonists soon realize that civilization and technology have divorced them from the knowledge and skills necessary for survival. Released from their over-reliance on social regulation, they struggle to overcome their own brutality to develop a new sense of community. For over 75 years readers have praised this book for its style and wisdom, and debated the meaning of its controversial ending. This Wesleyan edition is graced with an excellent introduction and annotations by leading science fiction scholar Brian Stableford.

What is courage? What is the good of being courageous and is it always morally desirable? Bauhn defines courage as the ability to confront certain basic fears and argues that courage is indeed valuable as it contributes to personal achievement as well as to the common good of a civic community. Philosophical interest in the recent past has returned to the vitally important issue of the moral virtues. Per Bauhn's book is an eminent contribution to this revival of interest. It is an exceptionally sophisticated analysis of the main aspects of courage that figure in both moral theory and practice. Professor Bauhn combines his depth of analysis with strikingly apt examples of the role that courage plays in the life of human beings. It is a major contribution to moral philosophy.

Opening a window onto a fascinating new world for English-speaking readers, this anthology offers popular and influential stories from over ten countries, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the present. Latin American and Spanish science fiction shares many thematic and stylistic elements with anglophone science fiction, but there are important differences: many downplay scientific plausibility, and others show the influence of the region's celebrated literary fantastic. In the 27 stories included in this anthology, a 16th-century conquistador is re-envisioned as a cosmonaut, Mexican factory workers receive pleasure-giving bio-implants, and warring bands of terrorists travel through time attempting to reverse the outcome of historical events. The introduction examines the ways the genre has developed in Latin America and Spain since the 1700s and studies science fiction as a means of defamiliarizing, and then critiquing, regional culture, history and politics-especially in times of censorship and political repression. The volume also includes a brief introduction to each story and its author, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works. Cosmos Latinos is a critical contribution to Latin American, Spanish, popular culture and science fiction studies and will be stimulating reading for anyone who likes a good story.

Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative of the swamps and streets of the southern United States as it is of the emotional lives of those too often forced into the margins of society. Vivid, lush, and intensely honest, these poems capture the rough edges of the world and force us to pay attention.