Winner of the 2015 Donald Hall Prize for PoetryHour of the Ox received the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Crystal Ann Williams, who called it "a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender." Cancio-Bello examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.

The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many—cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces—a drag queen waitress whose "painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight," "strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds," Pink Floyd's "'On the Turning Away' sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead," black phoebes rattling "winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is . . . " Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) is known for its spices imported from the Moluccans. It is less well-known that apart from spices the VOC also imported many millions of calicoes from India during the 17th and 18th century. For a long time the Dutch were the most important foreign trader in India, using dozens of trading stations (‘ factories’) at which over 3000 Dutch company servants were deployed. To be allowed to trade in India, so-called firmans were necessary, official orders by the Great-Mogol, laying down the trade privileges. These firmans had to be renewed regularly. After Aurangzeb became Great-Mogol, Van Adrichem undertook a journey to the royal court. In 1711-1713, fifty years later, Ketelaar did the same after Bahadur Shah, the successor of Aurangzeb, took office. In this study both court journeys are analysed and compared. There are some similarities but the differences between both journeys are huge. In half a century India had changed quite dramatically, and so had the VOC. The central power of the Mogols was weakening and regional powers became more powerful. Many trade routes became too dangerous. At the same time India, and especially Bengal, became even more important within the overall trading system of the VOC. How did the VOC ambassadors, humble merchants by origin, behave at court? Contrary to what one would expect, they adapted themselves quite successfully to the Mogol diplomatic culture. Both ambassadors were quite experienced, having worked as merchants for decades already in India. They had an extensive social network and were well-versed in Hindustani and Persian, the court language. Ketelaar even wrote the first grammar of Hindustani. This study depicts in detail the interaction between VOC ambassadors and the royal court. Also the extremely long and dangerous journeys from the coast to the royal court in the interior are described. The journey of Ketelaar has become famous for its length (two years) and incredible costs (over one million guilders). It was the most expensive court journey by the VOC in Asia ever.

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Miriam Bird Greenberg's stunning first collection, which roves across a lush, haunting rural America both real and imagined, observed from railyards and roadsides, evokes the world of myth ("I'd spent my childhood / in a house made of bees; on hot days honey // dripped through cracks in the ceiling," she writes). Yet these capacious, exquisitely tensioned poems are rooted in Greenberg's experiences hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across North America, or draw from her informal interviews with contemporary nomads, hobos, and others living on society's edges. Beneath their surface runs a current of violence, whether at the hands of fate or men: she writes "Everyone knows // what happens to women // who hitchhike, constantly // trying a door to the other world made of lake / bottom or low forest, abandoned house // even wild animals / have rejected. " The result is a queering of On the Road, a feminist Frank Stanford at once vulnerable and canny. Richly textured, In the Volcano's Mouth is an extraordinary portrait of life on the enchanted margins.

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief? Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive. Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world. The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.

Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) is known for its spices imported from the Moluccans. It is less well-known that apart from spices the VOC also imported many millions of calicoes from India during the 17th and 18th century. For a long time the Dutch were the most important foreign trader in India, using dozens of trading stations (‘ factories’) at which over 3000 Dutch company servants were deployed. To be allowed to trade in India, so-called firmans were necessary, official orders by the Great-Mogol, laying down the trade privileges. These firmans had to be renewed regularly. After Aurangzeb became Great-Mogol, Van Adrichem undertook a journey to the royal court. In 1711-1713, fifty years later, Ketelaar did the same after Bahadur Shah, the successor of Aurangzeb, took office. In this study both court journeys are analysed and compared. There are some similarities but the differences between both journeys are huge. In half a century India had changed quite dramatically, and so had the VOC. The central power of the Mogols was weakening and regional powers became more powerful. Many trade routes became too dangerous. At the same time India, and especially Bengal, became even more important within the overall trading system of the VOC. How did the VOC ambassadors, humble merchants by origin, behave at court? Contrary to what one would expect, they adapted themselves quite successfully to the Mogol diplomatic culture. Both ambassadors were quite experienced, having worked as merchants for decades already in India. They had an extensive social network and were well-versed in Hindustani and Persian, the court language. Ketelaar even wrote the first grammar of Hindustani. This study depicts in detail the interaction between VOC ambassadors and the royal court. Also the extremely long and dangerous journeys from the coast to the royal court in the interior are described. The journey of Ketelaar has become famous for its length (two years) and incredible costs (over one million guilders). It was the most expensive court journey by the VOC in Asia ever.

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley's twenty previous collections, from 1980-2014.Past praise from Philip Levine: "The poems are modest, straight forward, intensely lyrical and totally accessible. .

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

“These poems erupted in the East Greenlanders heart–the human sea at the outer limit of the north–on Earth's most desolate and rugged shores. They were found in the living tradition of a small, recently discovered Eskimo people that I (Thalbitzer) had gone to study. For the first time I heard their language as it sounded on people's lips, as it must have sounded through many generations. I understood that this was part of the Inuit people’s ancient poetry, and these songs and poems deserved to be written down for greater humanity.” —from the introduction

Surrounded by potential adversaries, nineteenth-century Prussia and twentieth-century Germany faced the formidable prospect of multifront wars and wars of attrition. To counteract these threats, generations of general staff officers were educated in operational thinking, the main tenets of which were extremely influential on military planning across the globe and were adopted by American and Soviet armies. In the twentieth century, Germany's art of warfare dominated military theory and practice, creating a myth of German operational brilliance that lingers today, despite the nation's crushing defeats in two world wars. In this seminal study, Gerhard P. Gross provides a comprehensive examination of the development and failure of German operational thinking over a period of more than a century. He analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of five different armies, from the mid--nineteenth century through the early days of NATO. He also offers fresh interpretations of towering figures of German military history, including Moltke the Elder, Alfred von Schlieffen, and Erich Ludendorff. Essential reading for military historians and strategists, this innovative work dismantles cherished myths and offers new insights into Germany's failed attempts to become a global power through military means.

Sarah Fielding (1710-1768), the younger sister of Henry Fielding, and the close friend of his literary rival Samuel Richardson, was one of the very few English women to master ancient languages like Latin and Greek. With the help of Shaftesbury's nephew, James Harris, a distinguished writer, scholar and grammarian, she embarked on the ambitious project of translating Xenophon's Memorabilia and the Apology of Socrates from the Greek. This work, titled Memoirs of Socrates, with the Defence of Socrates before his Judges, was finally released in 1762. She proved a discreet editor and a talented Hellenist, whose elegant style garnered praise from Tobias Smollett in his Critical Review. This superb translation is re-published in its entirety for the first time since the 18th century.

Archeophonics is the first collection of new work from the poet Peter Gizzi in five years. Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one’s emotional memory. The book takes seriously the opening epigraph by the late great James Schuyler: “poetry, like music, is not just song. ” It recognizes that the poem is not a decorative art object but a means of organizing the world, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “into transient examples of shaped behavior.” Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes and nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns. An online reading companion is available at petergizzi.site.wesleyan.edu.

‘I never saw the man again, alive or dead. One will say that I saw him only for a moment, that it was misty at the time, and that even I did not recognise the features, covered as they were with grime and stubble. Yet I am sure that the taller of the two ragged civilians I saw in the chalk quarry that misty March morning of 1918 was that Lieutenant Peter Rawley, R. F.A., who the official records stated was killed near Arras the previous autumn.’ Behind the Lines is a thriller that follows on from the success of W. F. Morris’s first novel, Bretherton: Khaki or Field-Grey? Morris is again concerned with questions of identity, allegiance, chance, concealment and self-discovery. A subaltern is forced to flee when he accidentally kills an overbearing, taunting fellow officer: appearances are all against him and he does not trust to trench justice. He becomes a fugitive and has to join forces with other deserters, lost soldiers and outlaws in a hand-to-mouth existence in the no man’s land between opposing forces. A series of adventures and disasters ensue, including capture by the Germans and near death by firing squad. Only his own bravery and the devotion of his fiancé can rescue him from his plight. A contemporary commentator noted that ‘in spite of the flood of war books’, Morris was able to achieve ‘a quite different viewpoint from all the others’, and his book was ‘an outstanding success’.

A profound and very human account of the early years of the war, told from the perspective of a father rather than combatants, but no less revealing. Mr Britling lives in the quintessentially English town of Matching’s Easy in Essex. He is a great thinker, an essayist, but most of all an optimist. When war arrives he is forced to reassess many of the things he had been so sure of. The war brings great change - Belgian refugees come with dreadful stories and everywhere it seems there are young men dressed in khaki. The family’s young German tutor is forced to head back to Germany, and Mr Britling’s seventeen year old son enlists in the Territorials. Day by day and month by month, Wells chronicles the unfolding events and public reaction as witnessed by the inhabitants of one house in rural Essex. Each of the characters tries in a different way to keep their bearings in a world suddenly changed beyond recognition. Tragedy ensues, Mr Britling must wrestle with outrage, grief and attempts at rationalisation as he ‘sees it through’. Written in 1916, while the outcome of the war was still uncertain, this is both a fascinating portrait of Britain at war, and a chronicle of events seen from a contemporary perspective, and an insight into H G Wells himself, Mr Britling being a largely autobiographical character.

Set deep in the mountains of southern France, this charming short novel tells the story of a man from the Cèvennes Mountains called Roux, who refuses to join the army at the outbreak of war in 1914. Instead, he flees and hides in the hills, only returning occasionally to the farm where he left his mother and sisters. The people of the valley condemn his desertion and they hope the police will find his hideout. But as the months and the years go by, and the horrors of the trenches become known, the local people start to understand Roux’s actions. Roux begins to appear in the village more often, helping out and explaining that his decision was taken out of respect for the Bible. His arrest at the end of the War is therefore met with sadness and regret. Chamson explores questions of perception, morality and conscience with a lightness of touch coupled with an atmospheric picture of life in a WWI era rural community.