Wesleyan University Press

Since its inception in 1957, Wesleyan University Press has published more than 250 titles within its internationally renowned poetry series, collecting four Pulitzer prizes, a Bollingen, and two National Book Awards in that one series alone. Wesleyan University Press also aspire to maintain and develop their rigorous and multifaceted publishing program that serves the academic and intellectual life of the University; an editorial program that focuses on the publication of poetry, music, dance, science fiction, film-TV, and Connecticut history and culture.

James Dickey

Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780819522603
Pub Date: 30 Sep 1998
Description:
James Dickey: The Selected Poems is the first book to collect James Dickey's very best poems. Like many visionary poets of the ecstatic imagination, Dickey experimented in a wide variety of literary styles. This volume brings together the finest work from each of the periods in Dickey's extremely controversial career.
Halfway Down the Hall Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 250
ISBN: 9780819522511
Pub Date: 25 Sep 1998
Description:
Rachel Hadas brings an acute perception and a rich education to her exquisitely crafted poetry. As James Merrill wrote, Hadas's "honeyed words and bracing forms . .
There Are Three Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 59
ISBN: 9780819522474
Pub Date: 25 Sep 1998
Description:
Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. "Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul.
Musicking Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 238
ISBN: 9780819522573
Pub Date: 31 Jul 1998
Description:
Extending the inquiry of his early groundbreaking books, Christopher Small strikes at the heart of traditional studies of Western music by asserting that music is not a thing, but rather an activity. In this new book, Small outlines a theory of what he terms "musicking," a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower. Using Gregory Bateson's philosophy of mind and a Geertzian thick description of a typical concert in a typical symphony hall, Small demonstrates how musicking forms a ritual through which all the participants explore and celebrate the relationships that constitute their social identity.
The House That Jack Built Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 290
ISBN: 9780819563408
Pub Date: 29 Jul 1998
Description:
The House That Jack Built collects for the first time the four historic talks given by controversial poet Jack Spicer just before his early death in 1965. These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This long-awaited document of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision, what Robin Blaser has called "the practice of outside," is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.
The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780819563330
Pub Date: 30 Apr 1998
Description:
While the poetry of Cavafy, Elytis, Ritsos, and Seferis is readily available to English speakers, Greek women's poetry remains virtually unknown to non-specialists. The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding, which includes collections by Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, and Maria Laina, fills a serious gap in contemporary poetry in translation, in general, and in Greek poetry, in particular.Drawing on the formative experience of writing under an authoritarian regime (1967-1974), women poets in the 1980s forged a poetics which unsettled and disrupted fixed meanings and gender roles.
Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 165
ISBN: 9780819563385
Pub Date: 24 Apr 1998
Illustrations: 40 cartoons
Description:
In addition to their entertainment value, comic books offered a unique world-view to a large segment of the American public in the confusing decade following World War II. Millions were distributed to service personnel during the war years, and by 1945, adults as well as children were reading an astounding 60 million comic books per month. These books treated such contemporary concerns as the atomic and hydrogen bombs, growth of international Communism, and the Korean War, and they offered heroes and heroines to deal with such problems.
The Hottest Water in Chicago Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780819563378
Pub Date: 24 Apr 1998
Description:
Gayle Pemberton shares the accumulated revelations of a lifetime of observation in sixteen provocative autobiographical essays, interweaving her own history and that of her family with reflections on American literature, art, music, and film. Building on the tradition of such writers as W.E.
Weird Women, Wired Women Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 234
ISBN: 9780819522559
Pub Date: 24 Apr 1998
Description:
Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over thirty years with her darkly comic speculative fiction. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these twenty stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present.
Thieves of Paradise Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 136
ISBN: 9780819564221
Pub Date: 13 Mar 1998
Description:
Centering on the disorienting experiences of the returning soldier and drawing on multiple traditions, Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry is potent, live, and, like the strains of jazz running through it, an erudite and soulful music.
Voices in Bali Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 218
ISBN: 9780819563194
Pub Date: 27 Jan 1998
Illustrations: 21 illus. 30 musical notations.
Description:
A scholar and trained performer of Balinese vocal music and dance, ethnomusicologist Edward Herbst brings unique talents to bear in this provocative book. The lessons of his Balinese masters enable him to offer fresh insight to this culture's aesthetics and cultural elements. Appropriating John Cage's effective style of "mixing theory, anecdote, context, philosophy, and humor," Herbst crafts an accessible body of work, compelling in substance and form.
Signs of Life Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 302
ISBN: 9780819563231
Pub Date: 18 Jan 1998
Illustrations: 16 illus.
Description:
Joan Schenkar, widely regarded as America's most original female contemporary playwright, is the author of numerous experimental plays which she refers to as "comedies of menace." Bristling with wit and intelligence, the collection features Signs of Life, Cabin Fever, The Universal Wolf, Burning Desires, The Last of Hitler, and Fulfilling Koch's Postulate. These plays explore issues of feminism and gender politics, history and memory, sexuality and violence, bringing to life such figures as Gertrude Stein and Marlene Dietrich, Hitler and Eva Braun, P.
Listening to Salsa Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 302
ISBN: 9780819563088
Pub Date: 01 Jan 1998
Illustrations: 10 illus.
Description:
For Anglos, the pulsing beats of salsa, merengue, and bolero are a compelling expression of Latino/a culture, but few outsiders comprehend the music's implications in larger social terms. Frances R. Aparicio places this music in context by combining the approaches of musicology and sociology with literary, cultural, Latino, and women's studies.
An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 203
ISBN: 9780819560230
Pub Date: 01 Dec 1997
Description:
A 25th anniversary edition of a book cited by Modern Language Journal as "notable for the original and interesting choice of poems and for the accuracy and poetic quality of the translations." Work by 14 Brazilian poets, including the late João Cabral de Melo Neto, is presented en face with translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Ashley Brown, Jane Cooper, Richard Eberhart, Barbara Howes, June Jordan, Galway Kinnell, Jean Longland, James Merrill, W. S.
Rethinking the Sylph Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 301
ISBN: 9780819563262
Pub Date: 29 Nov 1997
Illustrations: 85 illus. 9 musical examples. Fig.
Description:
Rethinking the Sylph gathers essays by a premier group of international scholars to illustrate the importance of the romantic ballet within the broad context of western theatrical dancing. The wide variety of perspectives -- from social history to feminism, from psychoanalysis to musicology -- serves to illuminate the modernity of the Romantic ballet in terms of vocabulary, representation of gender, and iconography. The collection highlights previously unexplored aspects of the Romantic ballet, including its internationalism; its reflection of modern ideas of nationalism through the use and creation of national dance forms; its construction of an exotic-erotic hierarchy, and proto-orientalist "other"; its transformation of social relations from clan to class; and the repercussions of its feminization as an art form.
Choreographing Difference Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 244
ISBN: 9780819563217
Pub Date: 28 Nov 1997
Illustrations: 26 illus.
Description:
The choreographies of Bill T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others, have helped establish dance as a crucial discourse of the 90s. These dancers, Ann Cooper Albright argues, are asking the audience to see the body as a source of cultural identity - a physical presence that moves with and through its gendered, racial, and social meanings.