Acclaimed poet George Ella Lyon returns with a brilliant new collection that traces the course of a woman's life from girlhood to mature female wisdom. From the introductory poem, "Little Girl Who Knows Too Much," readers embark on a journey from youth, with its darker moments and denials of voice and story, to a place of strength and power with the poems themselves as a guide.The collection follows the narrator as she reconnects with her body and recovers memories of violence from early childhood as well as the wilderness of adolescence and of young wife- and motherhood. Gradually, a wider vision appears to her, and she turns to the Great Mother in all her manifestations -- writers, teachers, singers, Earth Herself--to reach new regions of self-knowledge and inner strength. In so doing, the narrator reaches beyond her personal experience and begins a healing process that situates her story within the larger human story.Alternately witty, charming, tender, thought-provoking, and bracing, Back to the Light expresses a vision of breathtaking breadth and depth. Following the arc of a woman's life, the collection traces the cycles of growth and change the narrator experiences in becoming more herself and finding the spirit to persevere while lyrically demonstrating the power of poetry to help and heal.

Elwick explores how the concept of "compound individuality" brought together life scientists working in pre-Darwinian London. Scientists conducting research in comparative anatomy, physiology, cellular microscopy, embryology and the neurosciences repeatedly stated that plants and animals were compounds of smaller independent units. Discussion of a "bodily economy" was widespread. But by 1860, the most flamboyant discussions of compound individuality had come to an end in Britain. Elwick relates the growth and decline of questions about compound individuality to wider nineteenth-century debates about research standards and causality. He uses specific technical case studies to address overarching themes of reason and scientific method.

In the first part of this book, I summarize the development of the standard account of counterfactuals, i.e. conditionals of the form ‘If A had been the case, then B would have been the case’. In the standard account, a counterfactual is true if the then-sentence is true in all closest worlds in which the if-sentence is tru

Furusato (home, hometown, and/or place of origin) is a revered and idealized concept in Japan. On an individual level, it plays a central role in personal identity; in a broader social and cultural milieu, it is constitutive of a sense of nostalgia for a romanticized and impossible past; and in the political and legal realms, it connects with ideas of Japaneseness and the construction of foreign others. While the specific forms it takes in context provide a Japanese veneer to the idea of furusato, it in fact finds close analogues in ideas of ‘home’ and ‘origin’ around the world. This volume collects essays exploring furusato and its cognates in other languages and regions. 14 scholars from Japan and Europe employ a diverse array of disciplinary tools, drawing from history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, religious studies, and art history, to map out the contours of home and elucidate the meanings contained within it.

The current study takes on the task of focussing on Habermas’ long and productive first phase in the 1960s and 1970s. The book begins with Habermas’ analyses of students’ political consciousness and of public opinion, before examining his close dialogue with Marcuse and the vanguard of the student movement. The study then focuses on Habermas’ works on the reality and contradictions of the late capitalist system: Knowledge and Human Interests, Legitimation Crisis and Theory and Practice. In doing so, the volume revisits important moments in the first three decades of Habermas’ research and teaching in order to reconstruct a theory that contributes to a praxis of fundamental, grass-roots change.

Winner of PEN America Jean Stein Award Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Be Holding connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

In Earnest, Earnest?, the speaker, Eleanor, writes postcards to her on-again-off-again lover, Earnest. The fact that her lover’s name is Earnest and that their relationship is fraught, raises questions of sincerity and irony, and whether both can be present at the same time. While Earnest can be read literally as Eleanor’s lover, he is best understood as another side of the poet’s self. The ambiguity at play in Earnest, Earnest? is embodied in the form of the “Earnest Postcards” that structure the book - these postcards are experimental in their use of images and formal in their dialogue with the sonnet. Thus, Earnest, Earnest? is a question of tone, address, and form.

Eight years before Sylvia Plath published Ariel, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño released Poemas del Amor, a collection of confessional, passionate poetry dedicated to the novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Both of her own merit and as part of the Uruguayan writers group the Generation of ’45—which included Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and Ida Vitale - Vilariño is an essential South American poet, and part of a long tradition of Uruguayan women poets. Vilariño and Onetti’s love affair is one of the most famous in South American literature. Poemas del Amor is an intense book, full of poems about sexuality and what it means to be a woman, and stands as a testament to both the necessity and the impossibility of love. This translation brings these highly personal poems to English speaking audiences for the first time side-by-side with the original Spanish language versions.

In music, crossover means that a song has moved beyond its original genre and audience into the general social consciousness. Rhetorical Crossover uses the same concept to theorize how the black rhetorical presence has moved in mainstream spaces in an era where African Americans were becoming more visible in white culture. Cedric Burrows argues that when black rhetoric moves into the dominant culture, white audiences appear welcoming to African Americans as long as they present an acceptable form of blackness for white tastes. The predominant culture has always constructed coded narratives on how the black rhetorical presence should appear and behave when in majority spaces. In response, African Americans developed their own narratives that revise and reinvent mainstream narratives while also reaffirming their humanity. Using an interdisciplinary model built from music, education, film, and social movement studies, Rhetorical Crossover details the dueling narratives about African Americans that percolate throughout the United States.

What would it take to be home in one’s body, to walk around the world as oneself, knowing the pain within and without us? Jan Beatty boldly answers that question by making a fire map of the body. These roiling poems smack into walls of meditation, only to slide down the smooth concrete into the flatline of joy. These are vital poems of dimension, of both psychic and literal travel, of the elasticity of truth and struggle, of the daily nature of desire that brings us to our knees - then shotguns us back to the heart’s center.

In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives of two sisters and the people who come and go in their lives, much like the tides. Dominated by the tragic loss of a third sister at a young age, their family spirals out of control. We witness three stages of the sisters’ lives, each taking place on an island - in southwest Ireland, southern England, and the Bay of Naples. Beautifully and sparsely written, the stories deeply evoke landscape and character, and are suffused with a keen eye for detail and metaphor.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry. From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth… crack in her mind,” from brilliant evocations of art and music to mother-daughter wrestlings, Ostriker’s poetry rings with insistence on beauty and truth. Drawing from six of her previous books, and highlighting a sequence of bold new poems exploring the challenges and absurdities of aging, The Volcano and After is a masterpiece for our time.

The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the nineteenth century understood their world. This monograph is the first scholarly history of eccentricity. Carroll explores how discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organized social and economic order. She focuses on the self-taught natural philosopher William Martin, the fossilist Thomas Hawkins and the taxidermist Charles Waterton.

Am Beispiel der Initiationssakramente (Taufe, Firmung, Eucharistiefeier) und der Priesterweihe wird einerseits die Konsekration der Materie (Wasser, Myronöl, Brot und Wein) und des Empfängers dargestellt, anderseits das Konsekrationsgeschehen der einzelnen liturgischen Vollzüge nach der syrisch antiochenischen Liturgie miteinander verglichen, analysiert und kommentiert.

Black ecopoet observes the changing world from a high-rise window. Award-winning poet Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain. Departing from the traditional nature poem, Roberson's work reclaims a much older tradition, drawing into poetry's orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems entail the evolution of the traditional "nature poem,' each realizing its failure at an answer to our crisis, and even calling into question poetic form. Reflections on the natural world and moments of personal interiority are interwoven with images of urbanscapes, environmental crises, and political issues. These poems speak life and truth to modernity in all its complexity. Throughout, Roberson takes up the ancient spiritual concern—the ephemerality of life—and gives us a new language to process the feeling of living in a century on the brink.

Once a blue moon, a love like this comes along. This collection of love poems draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death.