Talking Pillow celebrates love as amazement, sustenance, and the progenitor of scarce-believable loss. The book centers around the sudden death of the author’s long-time partner and travels outward to events in the world at large. Imagining themselves into multiple times, places, and lives, the poems comically explore the possibilities of attachment between people and the absurdity of death’s sudden intrusion. Antic and often funny, these poems converse with all that we care about, fear, and fail to understand.

As the papers in this volume testify, digital scholarly editing is a vibrant practice. Scholarly editing has a long-standing tradition in the humanities. It is of crucial importance within disciplines such as literary studies, philology, history, philosophy, library and information science, and bibliography. In fact, digital scholarly editing represents one of the longest traditions in the field of Digital Humanities — and the theories, concepts, and practices that were designed for editing in a digital environment have in turn deeply influenced the development of Digital Humanities as a discipline. By bringing together the extended abstracts from three conferences organised within the DiXiT project (2013-2017), this volume shows how digital scholarly editing is still developing and constantly redefining itself. DiXiT (Digital Scholarly Editing Initial Training) is one of the most innovative training networks for a new generation of scholars in the field of digital scholarly editing, established by ten European leading institutions from academia, in close collaboration with the private sector and cultural heritage institutions, and funded under the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The partners together represent a wide variety of technologies and approaches to European digital scholarly editing. The extended abstracts of the convention contributions assembled in this volume showcase the multiplicity of subjects dealt with in and around the topics of digital editing: from issues of sustainability to changes in publications cultures, from the integrity of research and intellectual rights to mixed methods applied to digital editing—to name only a few.

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is one of the most important writers and thinkers to emerge from North Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Though not widely known beyond the Francophone world, Khatibi’s critical and creative works speak to the central concerns of postcolonial and postmodern life. Offered here in English for the first time, his long poem from 1976, Le lutteur de classe à la manière taoïste is a wildly inventive, transgressive, and important text. Class Warrior delivers a kind of free-verse Marxist handbook, written with the energy, movement, and style of a highly idiosyncratic Taoism. Matt Reeck’s compelling translation captures the stylistic and thematic beats of Khatibi’s verse, rendering the deceptively simple language of the original without losing its extraordinary layers and complexities. The introduction provides biographical context and an overview of Khatibi’s poetics of the orphan, a subject position that seeks to avoid authenticating notions of origins and that is also constantly restless and forever questing. This is a rich text for contemporary readers of poetry, as well as scholars of postcolonial theory.

Haunting and candid, A Girl's A Gun introduces a poet whose bold voice merges heightened lyricism with compelling narrative. Steeped in storytelling traditions, the poems in Rachel Danielle Peterson's debut collection exhibit linguistic dexterity and mastery of form as the poet mixes lyrical paragraphs, sonnets, and interview-style poems with free verse.Hey Yvonne! The memoree of some strangerhis shoulder's shadow plunges inta our place: thunk, thunk. Run! Mother's vowels pierce haze.Mother, can we distil the pink threads, fabric, black ball cap, the odor of Bud Light, fills the door she walks through, dust, Mamma. Dust is all we isTaken together, the poems present the coming-of-age story of a girl born in the mountains of rural eastern Kentucky, tracing her journey into a wider world of experience. While the early poems are steeped in Appalachian speech and culture -- a hybrid of a child's diction and regional dialect -- the language shifts as the collection progresses, becoming more standard. The speaker engages with hard issues surrounding gender and violence in contemporary life and explores what it means to be an artist in a culture that favors a literal interpretation of reality. Exploring issues of identity, place, and the call to create, this collection tackles subjects that will shock, touch, and bewilder readers while giving voice to an underrepresented and perhaps even unprecedented perspective in poetry.

Alex Rossino’s Six Days in September is a gripping, fast-paced account of Robert E. Lee’s 1862 campaign to win Southern independence by carrying the war north into Maryland. The thrust across the Potomac River triggered a determined Federal response when Gen. George McClellan led the reorganized and often defeated Army of the Potomac out of Washington’s defenses in pursuit of a victory on Union soil. The resulting battles of South Mountain and Sharpsburg (Antietam) wreaked havoc on both armies, witnessed the bloodiest day in American history, and changed the course of the entire Civil War. Deeply researched and written with close attention to the actual events, Rossino’s seamless weaving of history and fiction transports readers into the minds of the Southern generals, the torn hearts of beleaguered civilians, and the ranks of Lee’s long-suffering soldiers who endured the agonizing horrors of Civil War combat. Six Days in September is a panoramic, sweeping account of the complex and decisive Maryland Campaign that altered the destiny of our nation.

Before Jane Austen's novels explored heroines in English society, writers Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier dared to provide commentary on gender and education through self-conscious narratives. Published in 1754 in five parts and divided into three volumes, The Cry stands as one of the most distinctive and intriguing works by women during the florescence of their writing in eighteenth-century England.Strikingly experimental -- mixing fiction and philosophy, drama and exposition, satire and irony, and singular and choral voices -- The Cry revolves around a main character, Portia, who tells a series of stories to an audience that includes Una, the allegorical representation of truth, and "The Cry" itself, a collection of characters who serve as a kind of Greek chorus. A story about the story-making female subject, the novel serves as a catalyst to convey that women are capable of doing all of the things that men can do -- discuss ethics, learn, and think rationally -- and should be allowed to do these things publically. Throughout, editor Carolyn Woodward offers essential historical and editorial context to the work, demonstrating that this novel continues to facilitate discussions about women and public life.

WINNER OF THE 2016 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Winner of the 2017 California Book Awards, first fiction categoryMany of these richly layered stories juxtapose the miracles of modern medicine against the inescapable frustrations of everyday life: awkward first dates, the indignities of air travel, and overwhelming megastore cereal aisles. In "Go Forth," an aging couple attends a kidney transplant reunion, where donors and recipients collide with unexpected results; in "Hounds," a woman who runs a facial reconstruction program for veterans nurses her dying dog while recounting the ways she has used sex as both a weapon and a salve; and in "Consider this Case," a lonely fetal surgeon caring for his aesthete father must reconsider sexuality and the lengths people will go to have children. Melissa Yancy's personal experience in the milieus of hospitals, medicine, and family services infuse her narratives with a rare texture and gravity. Keenly observed, offering both sharp humor and humanity, these stories explore the ties that bind—both genetic and otherwise—and the fine line between the mundane and the maudlin. Whether the men or women that populate these pages are contending with illness, death, or parenthood, the real focus is on time and our inability to slow its progression, and to revel in those moments we can control.

The poems in Let’s All Die Happy explore apostasy, concerned with what happens after the beliefs and institutions which promised fulfillment leave us empty instead. Through a darkly humorous lens, it also examines a patriarchal culture in which women are defined through their relationship to others and how this inheritance weighs heavily not only on the lives we lead but shapes what life it is possible to even imagine having. Ultimately, the poems push against these containers, burning through the stages of a woman's life until there's nothing left but to invent what's next, finding both loneliness and liberation in this reclamation.

In Darwin's Mother, curious beasts are excavated in archeological digs, Charles Darwin's daughter describes the challenges of breeding pigeons, and a forest of trees shift and sigh in their sleep. With a keen sense of irony that rejects an anthropocentric worldview and an imagination both philosophical and playful, the poems in this collection are marked by a tireless curiosity about the intricate workings of life, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe.

Rae Armantrout’s poetry comprises one of the most refined and visionary bodies of work written over the last forty years. These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal her observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout’s mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books Up To Speed, Next Life, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winning volume Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, and Itself. Including some of her most brilliant pieces, Partly affirms Armantrout’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most innovative writers.

This volume examines the historical end of the Platonic tradition in relation to creation theories of the natural world through Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (412-485) elaboration of an investigation of Plato’s theory of metaphysical archetypal Forms.

This new book by the great Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange, exhibiting ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the ‘sycorax video style’ he’s been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: that of the afterlife. Brathwaite performs a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in his poetry and is is a poet of undeniable stature, writing the final poems of his career. Central to the book is a series of poems outlining the speaker’s (the poet’s) experiences with what he calls “Cultural Lynching.” These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies the racial politics and ageism underlying the events described. The speaker’s pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word.

It is winter, just before Christmas. On the cliffs above the transit town of Port Hiver stands a decommissioned lighthouse. Inside, Peter Boniface, a psychotherapist, ponders the falling snow, and his imminent retirement. The arrival of an unexpected visitor plucks him out of his reverie and throws him into the most hazardous case of his career. Boniface's visitor is Bones, a former paramilitary, seeking, he says, "to make a good death". The Lighthouse Keeper is an account of this encounter, the outcome of which will determine everything about what remains of the lives of them both. Nothing less than an examination of the conflicting values underpinning Irish culture, The Lighthouse Keeper traces the intersecting worlds of its two protagonists, from Boniface’s consulting room to the wider world.

The three essays that comprise this volume explore literary representations of the ‘True Womanhood’ ideology, a narrative through which nineteenth-century women could invest their existence and their role in the world with meaning and purpose. In Victorian America, middle-to-upper-middle-class women were not admitted to centers of public power. Being relegated to the private sphere, i. e., the domestic milieu, they had only one socially respectable function – that of a wife and mother – while the masculine sphere of action was the public one, the realm of business and politics. This rigid role differentiation, which affirmed the social supremacy of men over women, was allegedly sanctioned by God and by nature as well. Being divinely ordained, it would tolerate no refutation: as Barbara Welter perceptively noted, "If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex virtues, which made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization and of the Republic".

The starting point of Joseph Margolis’ last philosophical effort is represented by the problem of the human “gap” in animal continuity: “There appear to be no comparable variants of animal evolution [..

"Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn." -- Irvin S. CobbBorn and raised in Paducah, Kentucky, humorist Irvin S. Cobb (1876--1944) rose from humble beginnings to become one of the early twentieth century's most celebrated writers. As a staff reporter for the New York World and Saturday Evening Post, he became one of the highest-paid journalists in the United States. He also wrote short stories for noted magazines, published books, and penned scripts for the stage and screen.In Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of a Southern Humorist, historian William E. Ellis examines the life of this significant writer. Though a consummate wordsmith and a talented observer of the comical in everyday life, Cobb was a product of the Reconstruction era and the Jim Crow South. As a party to the endemic racism of his time, he often bemoaned the North's harsh treatment of the South and stereotyped African Americans in his writings. Marred by racist undertones, Cobb's work has largely slipped into obscurity.Nevertheless, Ellis argues that Cobb's life and works are worthy of more detailed study, citing his wide-ranging contributions to media culture and his coverage of some of the biggest stories of his day, including on-the-ground reporting during World War I. A valuable resource for students of journalism, American humor, and popular culture, this illuminating biography explores Cobb's life and his influence on early twentieth-century letters.