Communication is a fundamental human activity, and as much as 90% of all communication is non-verbal. Yet awareness of embodied intelligence in communication is rare. This book is the fourth in a series by interdisciplinary educator Andrea Olsen focused on embodiment. Through the exercises and readings in this book, we can deepen our relationship to ourselves and others and improve our communication skills, moving between worlds: inner and outer; self and other; self and Earth. Each of the thirty-one chapters combines factual information, personal anecdotes, and somatic excursions, inviting the reader to explore multiple learning styles and lenses for finding balance in a more-than-human world. This guidebook is a valuable resource for anyone seeking practical tools for living and communicating with more ease and clarity.

Love and Rage is a deeply ethnographic account of punk in Mexico City as it is lived and practiced, connecting the sounds of punk music to different styles of political action. Through compelling first-person accounts, ethnographer Kelley Tatro shows that punk is more than music. It is a lifestyle choice that commits scene participants to experimentation with anarchist politics. Key to that process is the concept of autogestión ("self-management"), a term with deep history in local leftist politics. In detailed vignettes, grounded in historical, social, and political frames, the book shows how punk-scene sounds and practices foster autogestión through intensely affective experiences, understood as manifestations of love and rage. Drawing on the history of anarchism in Mexico City, as well as social movement scholarship, Love and Rage details the pleasures and problems of using music as a tool for creating an autonomous politics.

In Musical Resilience, Shalini Ayyagari shows how professional low-caste musicians from the Thar Desert borderland of Rajasthan, India have skillfully reinvented their cultural and economic value in postcolonial India. Before India's independence in 1947, the Manganiyar community of hereditary musicians were tied to traditional patrons over centuries and through hereditary ties. In postcolonial India, traditional patronage relations faded due to new political conditions, technological shifts, and cultural change. Ayyagari uses resilience, one of the most poignant keywords of our times, to understand how Manganiyar musicians sustain and enliven their cultural significance after the fading of traditional patronage.

Critical Brass tells the story of neofanfarrismo, an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil shifted from a country on the rise in the 2000s to one beset by various crises in the 2010s. Though predominantly middle-class, neofanfarristas have creatively adapted the critical theories of carnival to militate for a more democratic city. Illuminating the tangible obstacles to musical movement building, Andrew Snyder argues that festive activism with privileged origins can promote real alternatives to the neoliberal city, but meets many limits and contradictions in a society marked by diverse inequalities. Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Professor Emerita, NOVA University of Lisbon

In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the "current. "

"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." - Harvard ReviewAn iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one "doctrine of Non-linear Revelation."

Belly to the Brutal sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. This poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chora - humming, screaming, rhythm - transporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Jennifer Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of "motherfear," "where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound." This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive.

Devised by choreographer Liz Lerman in 1990, Critical Response Process® (CRP) is an internationally recognized method for giving and getting feedback on creative works in progress. In this first in-depth study of CRP, Lerman and her long-term collaborator John Borstel describe in detail the four-step process, its origins and principles. The book also includes essays on CRP from a wide range of contributors. With insight, ingenuity, and the occasional challenge, these practitioners shed light on the applications and variations of CRP in the contexts of art, education, and community life. Critique Is Creative examines the challenges we face in an era of reckoning and how CRP can aid in change-making of various kinds.

This book is an ethnographic study of sound archives and the processes of creative decolonization that form alternative modes of archiving and curating in the 21st century. It explores the histories and afterlives of sound collections and practices at the International Library of African Music. Sound Fragments follows what happens when a colonial sound archive is repurposed and reimagined by local artists in post-apartheid South Africa. The narrative speaks to larger issues in sound studies, curatorial practices, and the reciprocity and ethics of listening to and reclaiming culture. Sound Fragments interrogates how Xhosa arts activism contributes to an expanding notion of what a sound or cultural archive could be, and where it may resonate now and in future.

For artists, creativity plays a powerful role in understanding, confronting, and negotiating the crises of the present. Seeding the Tradition explores conflicting creativities in traditional music in Hõ Chí Minh City, the Mekong Delta, and the Vietnamese diaspora, and how they influence contemporary southern Vietnamese culture. The book centers on the ways in which musicians of đón ca tài tù, a "music for diversion," practice creativity or sáng tạo in early 21st-century southern Vietnam. These musicians draw from long-standing theories of primarily Daoist creation while adopting strategically from and also reacting to a western neo-liberal model of creativity focused primarily - although not exclusively - on the individual genius. They play with metaphors of growth, development, and ruin to not only maintain their tradition but keep it vibrant in the rapidly-shifting context of modern Vietnam. With ethnographic descriptions of zither lessons in Hõ Chi Minh City, outdoor music cafes in Cãn Thơ, and television programs in Đõng Tháp, Seeding the Tradition offers a rich description of southern Vietnamese sáng tạo and suggests revised approaches to studying creativity in contemporary ethnomusicology.

An Empty Room is a transformative journey through butoh, an avant-garde form of performance art that originated in Japan in the late 1950's and is now a global phenomenon. This is the first book about butoh authored by a scholar-practitioner who combines personal experience with ethnographic and historical accounts alongside over twenty photos. Author Michael Sakamoto traverses butoh dance history from its roots in post-World War II Japan to its diaspora in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. An Empty Room delves into the archive of butoh dance, gathering testimony from multiple generations of artists active in Japan, the US, and Europe. The book also creatively highlights seminal visual and written texts, especially Hosoe Eikoh's photo essay, "Kamaitachi," and Hijikata Tatsumi's early essays. Sakamoto ultimately fashions an original view of what butoh has been, is and, more importantly, can be through the lens of literary criticism, photo studies, folklore, political theory, and his experience performing, photographing, teaching, and lecturing in 15 countries worldwide.

Sylvie Kandé's neo-epic in three cantos is a double narrative combining today's tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé's language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the globe. Dazzling in its scope, the poem swings between epic stylization, griot storytelling, and colloquial banter, capturing an astonishing range of human experience. Kandé makes of the migrant a new hero, a future hero whose destiny has not yet taken shape, whose stories are still waiting to be told in their fullness and grandeur: the neverending quest has only just begun.

What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment's debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis.

What actually happens within the revolution of the clock's hands? In The Writing of an Hour the poet considers the effort and the deliberateness that brings her to her desk each day. Despite domestic and day job demands and widespread lockdown, Coultas forges connections to the sublime and wonders what it means to be from the Americas. These poems verge on the surreal, transform the quotidian, and respond anew to the marvelous. The Writing of an Hour takes the reader on a journey in four sections; from a bedroom to an improvised desk over the North Sea, where she attempts to create an artwork inside an airplane cabin flying over Greenland's rivers of ice.

A memoir about disability and siblinghood that is honest and hilarious. Nothing Special is a disarming tale of two sisters growing up in the 1970s in suburban Connecticut. Older sister Chris, who has Down's Syndrome, is an extrovert with a knack for getting what she wants, while the author, her younger, typically developing "Irish twin" sister, shoulders the burdens and grief of her parents. Poet, performance artist, and special needs advocate Dianne Bilyak strikes a rare balance between heartwarming and hilarious as she paints a compassionate and critical real-world picture of life with a sibling with Down's Syndrome. Throughout Nothing Special, the sisters serve as one another's friends, witnesses, rivals, and mirrors. Bilyak details wrestling with their mixed emotions in vignettes that range from poignant to laugh-out-loud funny, including anecdotes about Chris's habit of faux smoking popsicle sticks or partying through the night with her invisible friends. Bilyak skillfully discards old, pitying "they're angels" narratives to lay bare the realness and heart that only exists in truthful storytelling. Throughout their lives the sisters wrestle with tension between dependence and independence, the complexities of giving versus receiving, the pressure to live as others expect, and in the end, the wonderful liberation of self-acceptance. Nothing Special adds to the small but growing literary canon of books, such as Rachel Simon's Riding the Bus with My Sister, that detail life with a disabled sibling.