Samuel R. Delany is one of literature's most iconic voices. An acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. his works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction through their formally consummate and materially grounded explorations of difference. This anthology of essays, talks, and interviews addresses topics such as sex and sexuality, race, power, literature and genre, as well as Herman Melville, John Ashbery, Willa Cather, Junot Diaz, and others. The second of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. This diverse collection displays the power of a towering literary intelligence. It is a rich trove of essays, as well as a map to the mind of one of the great writers of our time.

Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American master Be Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Most of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer's growing readership to savor and enjoy. "When your body brushed against me. . ." When your body brushed against me I rememberedHow we used to catch butterflies in our handsDown in the garden.We were such patient childrenFollowing them from flower to flowerWaiting and hoping.With our cupped hands we used to catch themAnd they answered us with a soft tickleFor they never stopped flying.In bed I remembered them and cried forThe touch of their fast wings, the impatienceOf their bright colorsI am too old for such gamesBut even tonight, now your body has reminded me of butterfliesI lie here awake, pretending.

An exploration of ethical dynamism in vocal life Ways of Voice is the first ethnomusicological monograph to delve deeply into the diverse, variegated techniques of voice production in North India. It explicitly thematizes the dynamic movement between vocal dispositions—singers who consciously retrain themselves in order to acquire a different voice, focusing on the ways in which singers not only "have" voice, but actively acquire, cultivate and contest particular vocal dispositions. The book deals extensively with the formation and contestation of particular, historically grounded ways of voice, from Bollywood film singers to modern raga vocality to pop Sufi song. Working from dozens of concrete examples, it fills an important gap both in South Asian ethnomusicology and in the emerging field of voice studies. Audio and video examples are provided on the online companion site.

Theorizing the experiences of black and brown bodies in hip hop dance Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop Dance, an Afro-diasporic dance form, which have generally reduced the style to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes that Hip Hop Dance is a collective and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. Roberts argues that the experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop Dance from the streets of urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

How NEA funding policies have shaped the field of dance Funding Bodies is the first scholarly study of NEA to focus specifically on dance. It departs from a choreographic question: How have federal grant guidelines rewarded specific patterns of dance practice and production? Drawing upon archival documentation of NEA narratives, program eligibility guidelines, and standards of evaluation as well as testimony from past and present insiders, Wilbur's work theorizes endowment as an economic and practical struggle by people with differential power and competing investments in the production and professionalization of dance. With a wealth of detail and previously untold stories, this institutional history brings clarity to the complex processes that underlie the continuing struggle to achieve equitable resource distribution and parity of opportunity in American dance. An online teaching guide is available.

An ethnography about local working musicians in Brazil's "most African" city Living from Music in Salvador examines the labor of musicians in Salvador da Bahia, widely regarded as Brazil's most African city. Drawing on fieldwork that spans over sixteen years, the book explores local musicians' lives as members of a flexible work force, emphasizing questions of race, social class, and cultural politics in relation to professional music making. From clubs and restaurants, to Carnaval parades and festival celebrations, to concert stages and recordings, the abiliy of musicians to earn a living wage is contingent on their navigating industry and societal conditions that are profoundly informed by the entrenched legacies of colonization and slavery.

Elegiac and searching, poems written in the long shadow of immigration The poems in Wendy Xu's third collection, The Past, fantasize uneasily about becoming a palatable lyric record of their namesake, while ultimately working to disrupt this Westernized desire. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Wendy Xu immigrated to the United States in 1989, three days ahead of the events of Tian'anmen Square. The Past probes the multi-generational binds of family, displacement, and immigration as an ongoing psychic experience without end. Moving spontaneously between lyric, fragment, prose, and subversions in "traditional" Chinese forms, the book culminates in a centerpiece series of "Tian'anmen Square sonnets" (and their subsequent erasures), to conjure up the irrepressible past, and ultimately imagine a new kind of poem: at once code and confession. "Tian'anmen Sonnet" (dead air in air ... ) Dead air in airThe anniversary of languageholds you back againstbucolic dreaming, down streamfrom here is runninga miraculous color, elegy bursts like a ribbon in airThinking again of the Square todayBold sky, passing episodes of cloudVegetation mutters in the Far West A column of ghostsgoing violet over timeFamiliar song looping overheadLines pressed in air

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. The institution of town meeting, the beauty of the landscape, and the enduring qualities of the architecture all give the New England town the power to shape the identity of its inhabitants - in a good way. This premise is put on trial - and to a vote - in Whisper My Name, the third novel in Hebert's Darby Chronicles. The story unfolds as seen through the eyes of three men: the reporter Roland LaChance, the farmer Avalon Hillary, and the founder of a land trust, Raphael "Reggie" Salmon. Magnus Mall, a national corporation, wants to buy the Hillary farm and transform the property into a mall to serve western New Hampshire and eastern Vermont. The aging Hillary is torn between the traditions of his family and "the thought of the money." LaChance is not only chasing down leads in his reportage on the mall - he's chasing down the story behind his own origins. Along the way he falls in love with Sheila "Soapy" Rayno, an aphasic girl from Darby whose origins are equally mysterious. As usual, the Jordan clan plays a pivotal role in this rousing tale of greed, power, and lust. This third novel in the Darby Chronicles will appeal to anyone interested in the clash of cultures in small-town America.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. A major character in earlier Darby novels, Estelle takes center stage in The Passion of Estelle Jordan. Presently she is sliding into late middle age, drawn to two lovers who could not be more different: the widowed farmer Avalon Hillary and a mysterious young punk Estelle calls Trans Am in honor of the car he drives. And there's a threat, not to Estelle - she can take care of herself - but to Noreen Cook, a younger woman Estelle sees as a version of her own secret, vulnerable self. Putting herself in Noreen's shoes to save her, Estelle may be in for way more than she bargained for. The Passion of Estelle Jordan, like that of Christ, is rife with sin, suffering, sacrifice, and perhaps redemption. The Passion of Estelle Jordan is for anyone going through a change of life.

An innovative suite of poems for the drone age The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war.' With its sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality, this book offers a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution. Excerpt from "Opened" This is the box, frozen against hierarchyat a value of some $10m, simply a form of being; surgeon's box, patient's wound,an idea of enclosure that can fit any medium. The gaze is on the side of things. The angel of evil could not have done that. A child is in heaven. The box is empty, saying nothing but "construction." It really islike swatting flies; we can do it forevereasily and you feel nothing.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. His life had come to this: save a few deer from the jaws of dogs. He was a small man sent to perform a small task. Howard Elman is a man whose internal landscape is as disordered as his front yard, where native New Hampshire birches and maples mingle with a bullet-riddled washer, abandoned bathroom fixtures, and several junk cars. Howard, anti-hero of this first novel in Ernest Hebert's highly acclaimed Darby Chronicles, is a man who is tough and tender. Howard's battle against encroaching change symbolizes the class conflict between indigenous Granite Staters and citified immigrants with "college degrees and big bank accounts." Like the winter-weakened deer threatened by the dogs of March - the normally docile house pets whose instincts arouse them to chase and kill for sport - Howard, too, is sorely beset. The seven novels of Hebert's Darby Chronicles cover 35 years in the life of a small New England town as seen through the eyes of three families - the Elmans, the Salmons, and the Jordans - each representing a distinct social class. It all starts with The Dogs of March, cited for excellence in 1980 by the Hemingway Foundation (now the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction).

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. After almost fifteen years, Hebert has returned to this rich literary landscape for a new novel of the changing economic and social character of New England. Hebert's previous Darby book, Live Free or Die, recounted the ill-fated love between Freddie Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, child of Upper Darby gentility. At its conclusion, Lilith died giving birth to their son. As Spoonwood opens, Freddie, consumed by grief and anger and struggling with alcoholism, is not prepared to be a father to Birch. But as both his family and Lilith's begin to maneuver for custody of the child, Freddie embarks on a course of action that satisfies none of them. Once again, Hebert masterfully conveys the natural and social landscape of contemporary rural New England. Grounded in complex, fully realized characters, Spoonwood offers Hebert's most optimistic vision yet of acceptance and accommodation across class lines.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. The struggle between the rural working class and the upper crust intensifies in this turning-point novel of the Darby Chronicles as Freddy Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, daughter of a prestigious family, embark on their ill-fated love affair. Seeing Darby through new eyes, Freddy comes to realize that "the kind of people who hunkered down among these tree-infested, rock-strewn hills" is "dying out, replaced by people with money, education, culture, people 'wise in the ways of the world. '" As that world increasingly intervenes, the lovers' attempt to bridge the chasm that divides their class-alienated families inevitably collapses in Hebert's tragic tale that echoes Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. This is a book for anyone interested in local politics, privilege, and poverty, all embedded in a story of love and death in the woods and on the ledges of the Granite State.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. Part Falstaff, part King Lear, but all American, Howard Elman was a fifty-something workingman when he burst onto the literary scene in The Dogs of March, the first novel of the Darby Chronicles. Now in this, its seventh installment, the Darby constable is an eighty-something widower who wants to do "a great thing" before he motors off into the sunset. Maybe Howard achieves this goal, but he manages it in strange, wonderful, and dangerous ways. On his quest he's aided, abetted, hindered, and befuddled by his middle-aged children, his hundred-year-old hermit friend Cooty Patterson, a voice in his head, and the person he loves most, his grandson, Birch Latour. At 24, Birch has returned to Darby with his friends to take over the stewardship of the Salmon Trust and to launch a video game, Darby Doomsday. At stake is the fate of Darby. And the world? Maybe. Howard Elman's Farewell begins as a coming of (old) age story, morphs into a murder mystery, expands into a family saga, and in the end might just follow Howard Elman into the spirit world. This is a novel for people who like New England fiction with humor, pathos, and just a touch of magical realism. Howard Elman's Farewell establishes Howard Elman - mill worker, trash man, town cop - as the most fully developed working class character in American fiction.

Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town. The second novel of the Darby Chronicles follows Ollie Jordan, a man with no education, no mentors, and a serious Freudian hang-up. A family history of poverty, stubborn pride, and a culture that runs contrary to mainstream society have robbed Ollie and his people of opportunity, even hope. They live by a culture of "succor and ascendancy." When Ollie is evicted from his shack, he breaks his drinking rules and heads out into the wilderness with his disabled son, Willow, literally chained to him. Father and son are doomed. How that doom plays itself out, as experienced by the disturbed but insightful Ollie Jordan, is what makes A Little More Than Kin unique in contemporary American literature. Hebert gives his rural underclass protagonist the depths of a tragic hero. Though A Little More Than Kin is action-packed and its prose is clean, hard, lyrical, and sometimes very funny, the book is at its heart an exploration into a brilliant mind that has laid waste to itself. This novel will appeal to readers who enjoy prose that explores the human psyche at its most perverse.

The inside-out of dancer/Contact Quarterly editor Nancy Stark Smith's life as seen through the kaleidoscope of her thirty-six year involvement with Contact Improvisation. The book includes Q&As between the authors tracing the history of the dance form; photos of dancing and living; life stories; anecdotes from friends, colleagues, and family; and a description of Stark Smith's Underscore. The Underscore is a framework for practicing and researching dance improvisation that Stark Smith has been developing since the early 1990s. It is a score that guides dancers through a series of "changing states" from solo deepening/releasing and sensitizing to gravity and support, through group circulation and interaction, Contact Improvisation engagements, opening out to full group improvisation with compositional awareness, and back to rest and reflection.