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.

Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland AuthorsQuan Barry’s stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by The Matrix.Asylum is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced—both real and fictional. In "some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked" the piano player from Casablanca is fleshed out in ways the film didn’t allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems.Barry engages with the world—the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war—but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual’s existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, "Where is it written that we should want to be saved?" Ultimately, Asylum finds a haven by not looking away.

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.

“I say that even later someone will remember us.”—Sappho, Fragment 147, sixth century, BCSappho’s prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the twenty-first century. But not without peril. Sappho’s writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women’s voices. Sappho’s hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion—across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations—in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them.Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do so in the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women’s rhetoric. Women whose voices are central to such scholarship are included here, such as Aspasia (a contemporary of Plato’s), Margery Kempe, Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells. Added are influential works on what it means to write as a woman—by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Alice Walker, and Hélène Cixous. Public “manifestos” on the rights of women by Hortensia, Mary Astell, Maria Stewart, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, and Audre Lorde also join the discourse.But Available Means searches for rhetorical tradition in less obvious places, too. Letters, journals, speeches, newspaper columns, diaries, meditations, and a fable (Rachel Carson’s introduction to Silent Spring) also find places in this room. Such unconventional documents challenge traditional notions of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery, and blur the boundaries between public and private discourse. Included, too, are writers whose voices have not been heard in any tradition. Ritchie and Ronald seek to “unsettle” as they expand the women’s rhetorical canon.Arranged chronologically, Available Means is designed as a classroom text that will allow students to hear women speaking to each other across centuries, and to see how women have added new places from which arguments can be made. Each selection is accompanied by an extensive headnote, which sets the reading in context. The breadth of material will allow students to ask such questions as “How might we define women’s rhetoric? How have women used and subverted traditional rhetoric?”A topical index at the end of the book provides teachers a guide through the rhetorical riches. Available Means will be an invaluable text for rhetoric courses of all levels, as well as for women’s studies courses.

The humor of the Old South -- tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters -- flourished between 1830 and 1860. The genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South.This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, and George Washington Harris, all of whom have long been recognized as key figures in Southwestern humor.Other chapters examine the origins of this early humor, in particular selected poems of William Henry Timrod and Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which anticipate the subject matter, character types, structural elements, and motifs that would become part of the Southwestern tradition. Renditions of "Sleepy Hollow" were later echoed in sketches by William Tappan Thompson, Joseph Beckman Cobb, Orlando Benedict Mayer, Francis James Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms.Several essays also explore antebellum southern humor in the context of race and gender. This literary legacy left an indelible mark on the works of later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose works in a comic vein reflect affinities and connections to the rich lode of materials initially popularized by the Southwestern humorists.

William Motherwell (1797-1835), journalist, poet, man-of-letters, wit, civil servant, and outspoken conservative, published his anthology of ballads, Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern, in 1827. His views on authenticity, editorial practice, the nature of oral transmission, and the importance of sung performance--acquired through field collecting--anticipate much later scholarly discourse.Published after the death of Burns and the publication of Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ballads such as those Motherwell collected were one focus of a loose-knit movement that might be designated, cultural nationalism. This interest in preserving relics that suggested a distinctly Scottish culture and nation was one response to the union of the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707. Mary Ellen Brown's study provides a model for historical ethnography, focusing on an individual and illustrating the multiple ways he was richly embedded in his time and place.

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.

This collection spans twenty-five years in the career of this highly regarded poet. It features poems from the books Stars, Calling the Dead,When There Are No Secrets, and Against Dreaming, along with seventeen new poems.

Kathleen Norris has touched readers throughout America with her thoughtful and provocative memoirs of faith: Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. She is equally admired for her poetry of engagement with the spiritual world and its landscapes. Journey includes poems from three previous books spanning thirty years, along with a generous selection of new work that continues her radically individual celebration of the sacredness of life.

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.

There’s no predicting a Denise Duhamel poem, except that it might be about something you’ve never seen in a poem before: Mr. Donut, Rodney King, or nude beaches; Gertrude Stein, phone sex, or the Girl Scouts. Poems from The Woman with Two Vaginas, a book that was censored when it first appeared, are based on Inuit folklore. How the Sky Fell offers revisionist fairy tales, and the poems from Kinky are inspired by Barbie dolls. In her new work, Duhamel suffers postmodern angst when using the “therapeutic I.” Denise Duhamel has startled readers of American poetry with work that pirouettes on a tightrope above the personal and the political, the spoken word and the page, the irreverent and the sacred. Queen for a Day showcases poems from her five previous collections, along with new work.

This is the first book in the Pitt Poetry Series by this popular and enigmatic poet, considered the foremost writer of prose poetry in America. In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems.

Set against a fantastic backdrop of religious imagery, myth and dreams, science fiction, and the stark realities of a northern factory town, Voisine's poems carefully detail the life of a common hero and his family.

The 1887 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica contained an extensive article on Syriac Literature by the late Professor W. Wright. The article was later reprinted in this book, with additional notes.

Process Philosophy surveys the basic issues and controversies surrounding the philosophical approach known as "process philosophy." Process philosophy views temporality, activity, and change as the cardinal factors for our understanding of the real—process has priority over product, both ontologically and epistemically. Rescher examines the movement’s historical origins, reflecting a major line of thought in the work of such philosophers as Heracleitus, Leibniz, Bergson, Peirce, William James, and especially A. N. Whitehead. Reacting against the tendency to associate process philosophy too closely with this last-named thinker, Rescher writes, “Indeed, one cardinal task for the partisans of process at this particular juncture of philosophical history is to prevent the idea of 'process philosophy' from being marginalized through a limitation of its bearing to the work and influence of any one single individual or group.” This book will appeal to both students and professors of philosophy. Those teachers who have not been trained in process philosophy will welcome this new text by one one of North America’s foremost philosophers as a perspicuous and informative introduction.

Jukungs are boats that are constructed over hollowed out and expanded tree trunks, before being crafted by boatbuilders into a variety of sizes, from simple small baots to large passenger-ferries. Erik Pedersen, an architect, became interested in these boats while living in Borneo, and has here collected a unique body of material on these fascinating vessels.