"Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range—from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity—is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent. "—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"You see, some folks has albums to put folks' pictures in to remember them by, and some folks has a book and lorites down the things that happen every day so they won't forget them; but, honey, these quilts is my albums and my diaries."Aunt Jane is a fictional character well known for her gentle folk wisdom and her vivid descriptions of a picturesque and almost vanished way of life in the rural South of the last century. Her words recall lavish Sunday dinners, courtships, quilting bees, church meetings, and county fair competitions. Yet Aunt Jane of Kentucky is more than a collection of reminiscences about the region of Western Kentucky where Eliza Caroline Obenchain (who published under the name Eliza Calvert Hall) was born and raised. She writes about strong women and the ways in which they make their voices heard. Obenchain was a dedicated suffragist who worked to win rights for women in the areas of property ownership and divorce, and her interest in the social condition of women is evident throughout her fictional work. In one of the most popular stories in the collection, "Sally Ann's Experience," Sally Ann refuses to agree that women should be silent in church; she tells her male audience, "Now it's my time to talk and yours to listen."Aunt Jane of Kentucky, first published in 1907, is a delightful example of regional fiction that will also serve as a valuable document for those interested in the history of women's issues.

Joan Retallack offers a book of forms, like the medieval Book of Hours, intended to draw readers into a meditative experience of time, space, language, the many humors of chance and design, as they intersect and leave their traces on the page. All of civilization to date, all of history is after all aftermath, afterthought, afterimage. The language graphics of AFTERRIMAGES lay claim to the fragility-the gift, the terror, and the whimsy-of the remnant that all images are. Their playful nature is born of the conviction that the present tense-tense, tensile with immanent futurity-must extend itself toward the unintelligible and unknown. This is the frontier where the image hovers on the edge of its own transfiguration, the threshold where poetry can take place.

Expansive, lyrical, and groundbreaking poetry by Ruth Stone, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

A striking interplay of content and style makes this book-length narrative poem a wrenching, compelling tale. Mose is incarcerated in a Texas prison for a crime whose circumstances slowly unfold as he numbers the days of his sentence and fantasizes about a woman inexorably tied to his fate. As the harshness of prison life begins to close in and distort Mose's consciousness, he is increasingly obsessed with the truth of what happened. In the end, that inquiry reveals to him "another world underneath / this one" where everything "is backwards / to what we want." The journey to that world is a suspenseful and powerful study of a man's character and the trap it sets for him.

This first collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity. Many voices haunt these poems: black and white, male and female, the oppressor’s voice as well as the oppressed. The poet’s aim, finally, is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning.

Over the past two decades, sweeping political changes and burgeoning new technologies have resulted in communities being increasingly defined in global as well as regional and national terms. Although the intellectual terra nova of world cultures remains largely uncharted, this anthology of sixty-two stories from around the non-Euro-American world provides what Elisabeth Young-Bruehl calls "an introductory map to the great wealth of literary works now being produced in, at once, the particular settings of the writers' experiences and the global setting."Young-Bruehl finds that while the cultural diversity the stories exemplify is amazing, so too is the similarity in thematic terms of the concerns that this diversity presents. Thus she organized Global Cultures thematically to highlight and clarify how these worldwide cultures both converge and diverge. A comprehensive general introduction outlines forces behind the transnational approach to literary study and chapter introductions contextualize each story. Stories from India, Cuba, South Africa, and Uruguay are connected by the theme of exile and immigration; tales from Nigeria, Guatemala, Cameroon, and Egypt share a theme of political violence and civil uprisings; works from Taiwan, Chile, Jamaica, and Syria describe commonalities of women facing effects of modernization, prejudice, war, and immigration.Global Cultures contributes to the fast-growing body of contemporary short fictions newly available in English and is an invaluable resource to meet the need for multicultural literature.

The life of a human community rests on common experience. Yet in modem life there is an experience common to all that threatens the very basis of community -- the experience of exile. No one in the modem world has been spared the encounter with homelessness. Refugees and fugitives, the disillusioned and disenfranchised grow in number every day. Why does it happen? What does it mean? And how are we implicated?David Patterson responds to these and related questions by examining exile, a primary motif in Russian thought over the last century and a half. By "exile" he means not only a form of punishment but an existential condition.Drawing on texts by such familiar figures as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Brodsky, as well as less thoroughly examined figures, including Florensky, Shestov, Tertz, and Gendelev, Patterson moves beyond the political and geographical fact of exile to explore its spiritual, metaphysical, and linguistic aspects. Thus he pursues the connections between exile and identity, identity and meaning, meaning and language.Patterson shows that the problem of meaning in human life is a problem of homelessness, that the effort to return from exile is an effort to return meaning to the word, and that the exile of the word is an exile of the human being. By making heard voices from the Russian wilderness, Patterson makes visible the wilderness of the world.

Visitors to Lima today may wonder what has happened to the native music of Peru. While the music of Brazil and Chile have spread across to other countries, Peru has been left behind. A notable exception to this statement is the immense popularity of the lambada . Today, Peru's record industry and radio are concerned almost exclusively with salsa and rock both of which have acquired uniquely Peruvian forms.

The Prussian School of History first predicted and advocated, then celebrated and defended, the unification of Germany by Prussia. Experts in German historiography and the history of German liberalism have often complained about the lack of a book, in any language, that traces the origins and explains the ideas of this school of history. Here is that book. Robert Southard finds that, for the Prussian School, history had an agenda. These historians generally expected history to complete its main tasks in their own time and country. The outcome of their politics was, really, an "end of history" -- not a cessation to historical occurrences, but a cessation of onward historical movement because the historical process had already achieved its long-term, beneficent purposes.Leading us through the intricacies of important but untranslated works of J. G. Droysen, Max Duncker, Rudolph Hayn, and Heinrich von Sybel, Southard demonstrates their belief that the historical sequence was a continual unfolding of God's plan. Indispensable for those interested in the history of German historical writing, this book also has major implications for understanding the history of political liberalism.

In choosing Cathy Song’s first book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Richard Hugo said that her poems are “bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most.”In this, Song’s third book, the poems are like the school figures an ice skater etches onto the ice - the pen moving silently and deliberately across a white expanse of paper and experience, bringing maximum pressure to bear upon the blade of language to unlock “the invisible fire beneath the ice.”

This is the story of Tara Cochrane, who had been Hod's captain during World War II. Tara had returned from Europe to study medicine and start a practice, only to collapse with a severe nervous breakdown. Hod finds him in the hospital, scarcely recognizable as the tough commander who had slogged it out beside his men through France, Germany, and Austria. When the time comes for Hod to leave the hospital, he persuades Tara to go with him in the hope that the peace of the hill country will effect a cure where medicine has failed.On Piney Ridge, Tara meets Jory, a minister of the Church of the Brethren of Christ, a sect popularly know as the White Caps because of the little caps worn by the women members. Jory's selfless love for humanity helps Tara to rise above his despair and even accept the hopelessness of his love for Mary Pierce. Tara accompanies the young lay preacher as he goes among the hill people, ministering to the sick and helping with simple neighborly chores. This work opens a path to a life of fulfillment and serenity. Healed himself, Tara can now go on to heal others.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 world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in Beautiful Shirt. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: "This is the world as I have known it. / It has a soft outline and is easily victimized."Juxtaposed within a trio of long, introspective poems are shorter lyrics that push the limits of poetic syntaxes and dictions. In all, Beautiful Shirt searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities.

" Explores the historical rise of the literary fairy tale as genre in the late seventeenth century. In his examinations of key classical fairy tales, Zipes traces their unique metamorphoses in history with stunning discoveries that reveal their ideological relationship to domination and oppression. Tales such as Beauty and the Beast, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Rumplestiltskin have become part of our everyday culture and shapers of our identities. In this lively work, Jack Zipes explores the historical rise of the literary fairy tale as genre in the late seventeenth century and examines the ideological relationship of classic fairy tales to domination and oppression in Western society. The fairy tale received its most "mythic" articulation in America. Consequently, Zipes sees Walt Disney's Snow White as an expression of American male individualism, film and literary interpretations of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz as critiques of American myths, and Robert Bly's Iron John as a misunderstanding of folklore and traditional fairy tales. This book will change forever the way we look at the fairy tales of our youth.

Late Empire, David Wojahn’s most wide-ranging collection of poetry, affirms his status as one of the most compelling and original voices of his generation. In these poems, private history and public history mingle and merge in a way that is by turns deeply personal and elegiac. Centered around tow masterful elegies for the writers parents, the poems also treat an array of subjects familiar to us from news events but rarely examined by contemporary poetry.

Miss Willie, first published in 1951, is part of Giles's Piney Ridge Trilogy. It tells the story of an earnest teacher who moves to the hills of Kentucky to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. Zealously, she tries to change the ways of the stubborn and proud Appalachian people, but to no avail. They listen to her ideas about sanitation and other foolishness because to argue would be rude. But in the end they quietly go about their accustomed ways.Ultimately, Miss Willie realizes that the hill customs have a beauty and dignity of their own and that some of her efforts to reform them were ill-conceived. Her warmth, generosity, and humor help her bridge the gap and find fulfillment in Piney Ridge. This is a story of reconciliation and the coming together of two different ways of life. Above all, it is a story of people and of the land to which they belong.