Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence.The haiku scenes in Favor of Crows are presented in chapters of the four seasons, the natural metaphors of human experience in the tradition of haiku in Japan. Vizenor honors the traditional practice and clever tease of haiku, and conveys his appreciation of Matsuo Basho and Yosa Buson in these two haiku scenes, "calm in the storm / master basho soaks his feet /water striders," and "cold rain / field mice rattle the dishes / buson's koto."Vizenor is inspired by the sway of concise poetic images, natural motion, and by the transient nature of the seasons in native dream songs and haiku. "The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and an original moment of perception," he declares in the introduction to Favor of Crows. "Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation and an ironic manner of creation. That sense of natural motion in a haiku scene is a wonder, the catch of impermanence in the seasons." Check for the online reader's companion at favorofcrows.site.wesleyan.edu.

William Black's debut short story collection looks closely at lives lived in the heart of coal country-now fracking country-in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Two miners battered by a cave-in try to wrestle down the river that altered the course of their lives. A suicide pact leaves a family and its town bewildered and struggling for words. A fracking crew confronts the vast mysteriousness of things hidden in the depths of the earth and the lives that take place on its surface.In these starkly beautiful, incandescent stories, characters struggle with the grip that their locale and its past have on them, and they are consumed by searching-for love, for escape, for brief moments of clarity that give them the courage to continue.William Black's stories have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, the Florida Review, and many other journals and magazines. He lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania and teaches at Johns Hopkins University. "Black is at his best as a social realist in a blue-collar milieu." - Kirkus Reviews Feb. 15, 2014

The acclaimed annual, The Best American Poetry, is the most prestigious showcase of new poetry in the United States and Canada. Each year since the series began in 1988, David Lehman has contributed a foreword, and this has evolved into a sort of state-of-the-art address that surveys new developments and explores various matters facing poets and their readers today. This book collects all twenty-nine forewords (including the two written for the retrospective "Best of the Best" volumes for the tenth and twenty-fifth anniversaries. ) Beginning with a new introduction by Lehman and a foreword by poet Denise Duhamel (guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013), the collection conveys a sense of American poetry in the making, year by year, over the course of a quarter of a century.

This collection of essays on transnational Chinese cinema explores the corporal, psychological, and affective aspects of experiencing bodies on screen; engages with the material and discursive elements of embodiment; and highlights the dynamics between the mind and body involved in bio-cultural practices of cinematic production, distribution, exhibition, and reception.

The present book is a collection of 9 essays, emerging from a long and intense research collaboration among scholars coming from different backgrounds and traditions. As the book subtitle suggests, these essays focus on the ethical, religious, and political aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought, which are illustrated and investigated with reference to their complex interaction with Wittgenstein’s philosophical method and his conception of philosophy, on the one hand, and with his conception of language and human agency on the other.

Powered by a fierce, compassionate intelligence, Brain Camp explores with clarity and vividness a wide spectrum of emotions—love to hate, tenderness to brutality—all from a perspective both universal yet distinctly Webb's. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a voice at once endearing and provocative, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as a mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. These poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, Brain Camp "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

"The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It's gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forché some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art."—Sapphire

This atlas is the definitive account in maps and words of the historic royal towns of Windsor and Eton. There has never been an account of the history of Eton town, and although Windsor Castle has been much studied, the last historical account of the town of Windsor was published as long ago as 1858.The atlas contains high-quality and original maps of the two towns at key periods between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the atlas lies a detailed and minutely researched map showing all the major medieval and post-medieval features in the context of a large-scale map of the towns around 1870, using Ordnance Survey maps as a source. The substantial introduction to the history of these distinctive towns charts their development over eight centuries. The atlas is presented as a large-format, high-quality A3 folder, with maps and illustrations printed at A2, allowing clear detail to be seen.All the buildings, historic sites and streets named on the maps are comprehensively documented in a detailed gazetteer, covering the history of the sites and the many sources used in compiling the maps. The value of the atlas is enhanced by the inclusion of numerous colour illustrations, including early maps and views of the towns, many of them previously unknown.For the first time, new research by historians, archaeologists and cartographers has been brought together to compile this unique and original portfolio.

An alternative, fallibilist model of moral reasoning rooted in the American Pragmatic tradition. Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions.

Heather Christle's stunning fourth collection blends disarming honesty with keen leaps of the imagination. Like the boundary between our sun's sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in Heliopause locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking parallels between subjects as varied as the fate of Voyager 1, the uncertain conception of new life, the nature of elegy, and the decaying transmission of information across time. Nimbly engaging with current events and lyric past, Heliopause marks a bold shift and growing vision in Christle's work. An online reader's companion will be available.

Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities - to their portrayal in the media - and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

This issue of Cirpit Review, inaugurating a new “time” for the journal, features a collection of essays and contributions variously inspired by the thought of Raion Panikkar. Certainly, he is one of the protagonists of the “intercultural transformation” or turn that has affected philosophy and theology. Symbol, dialogue, Christianness and ecosophy are some of the key concepts informing his inclusive and relational thought, gravitating around pluralism as its core notion. His theoretical efforts aimed at abandoning the paradigm that posits an intimate correspondence between thought and being, that is, the very premise grounding the enterprise of Western philosophy.

This issue contains the proceedings of the Symposium on Dialogical Dialogue and Raimon Panikkar, held in Baltimore in November 2013. It consisted of two separate events, held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The first was the symposium, under the auspices of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, on the dialogical philosophy of Raimon Panikkar (22nd November). The other was the Roundtable Panel for the Comparative Studies in Religion Section of the AAR, presided by Gerald James Larson (UC Santa Barbara), on the legacy of Panikkar's comparative study of religion (24th November). This issue is dedicated to the enduring memory of Scott Thomas Eastham.

Dangerous Pity tells the story of Sebastian Clare, a well-known author living in the south of France, who is slowly coming to terms with the death of his mother. Onto the scene arrives the impish Ursula, a former student, who quickly insinuates herself into his life. Sebastian casts his mind back to the time when he and his wife, Claudia, had taken on a driver who became a menacing presence. Ursula continues her parasitic existence in Sebastian's life until events take a dramatic turn. Elizabeth Wassell superbly depicts a rich cast of characters, and captures the city of Nice in all its varied moods. Its central characters mix desire, regret, grief and obsession in a heady cocktail, and the descriptions of Nice and its cultural landscape are beautifully intriguing.

Mr Bawman Wants to Tango by Mogue Doyle is sure to reverberate given the current scandals in relation to the Catholic Church. It intertwines the pleasures of adolescence with the overly regulated and sometimes even menacing environment of a Catholic boarding school, which one can face either by showing Hank Chinaski-like indifference or keeping a stiff upper lip. Johnny and Martin are alcoholics living under a bridge in their home town. Their stories, and how they both ended up homeless, are intimately linked from the two years they spent together in a religious order's boarding school. Johnny tells the story of their initially innocent days in the school: their loneliness; their interactions with the other students and the canings they got from priests. He also describes their methods of dealing with the Mr Bawmans - the monks that prey on the naive young students for their own sexual gratification. However, the boys lives become more complicated once they meet two sisters working in the school kitchens. According to the societal rules of the students, liaisons with girls working in the school are not acceptable. When Martin impregnates his girlfriend, Billy - the school bully - in an episode with echoes of Lord of the Flies, holds a show trial to make an example of him to the rest of the students. With lyrical writing evoking comparisons to Pat McCabe and Flann O'Brien, Mogue Doyle delivers a darkly humorous coming-of-age tale with raw emotion dripping from the page.

Selected Stories gathers together some of the best examples of Benedict Kiely's work - a true and gifted man of letters. Edited by Ben Forkner, founder of The Journal of the Short Story. From 'Soldier, Red Soldier' and 'A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly' to 'A Letter to Peachtree', these stories sing in the unforgettable voice of an Irish master who inspired, and will continue to inspire, generations of readers and writers alike. These stories have a great deal taken from Ben's own experiences both abroad and at home in Ireland. Kiely captures various moments in Irish and American culture, many heavily influenced by his time as a lecturer in Georgia, writer-in-residence in Virginia, and as a reporter for the Irish Press. "Ben Kiely was - and therefore is - one of the great voices of 20th century literature, not just in Ireland but all over the world. That his stories survive, and indeed thrive, is a tribute to the power of literature. When it comes to storytelling there is really no such thing as an end, because the stories keep unfolding and influencing. Put him up there on the shelf alongside Joyce, Beckett, McGahern, O'Brien. With this version of Selected Stories, watch him develop a whole new readership." - Colum McCann.