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. 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).

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.

Tracing a period in her life from the 1969 Woodstock Festival through the following years living on the land, this singular dance artist's direct and poetic writings bring a turbulent transitional era to life. Arriving in New York in the early 60's from California, she brought with her a series of pieces that proved to be a serious influence on the development of "postmodern" dance in years to come. Her "dance-constructions" were based on a concern with bodies in action, the movement not being stylized or presented for its visual line but rather as a physical fact. Combining drawings, "dance reports" (short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on the author's memory), and documentary materials such as scores, descriptions, letters to colleagues, and photographic records of performances, Forti's eye toward creating idioms for exploring natural forms and behaviors is evident throughout.Simone Forti shifted from painting in 1955 to study dance with Anna Halprin and went on to study composition with Robert Dunn at the Merce Cunningham Studio leading to her association with Judson Dance Theater in the '60s. Her work spans from early minimalist dance-constructions, through animal movement studies, news animations, land portraits, and currently, Logomotion, an improvisational form based on the resonance between movement and the spoken word. She performs and teaches worldwide.

Inside Motion is a comprehensive study of anatomical imagery based on the Todd-Clark body alignment work as developed by dancer and teacher John Rolland. Carefully organized as a learning manual, it comprises a complete description of the skeletal system. The basic goal of the work is the improvement of one's physical balance through a creative learning process that integrates mental and physical capacities. Students are guided to both think and feel their way through the body and, in the process, release layers of hidden kinesthetic information.

Pioneering movement educator Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen's innovative approach to embodiment, movement analysis and reeducation, Body-Mind Centering, is the subject of this book of collected essays, interviews, and exercises written for Contact Quarterly dance journal between 1980 and 2009. Drawing from both Western and Eastern scientific knowledge, BMC is an experiential study of the body systems and the evolutionary developmental patterns that underlie human movement. Her unique viewpoint is made evident in twenty-one chapters addressing specific systems, including the organs, neuroendocrine system, fluids, developmental movement, reflexes, perceptual system, embryology, cellular, and autonomic nervous system. Over the last thirty years, BMC has engaged the interest of a wide range of people involved in dance, performing arts, athletics, therapy, healthcare, child development, meditation, and other body/mind disciplines. The third edition includes sixteen additional pages with new articles on inspiration, expiration, and dancing through the transitional fluid, a subject index and List of Explorations.

This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin'sRemainders of the American Century, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world.

From Destiny's Child to Lemonade, Homecoming, and The Gift, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has redefined global stardom, feminism, Black representation, and celebrity activism. This book brings together new work from sixteen international scholars to explore Beyonce's impact as an artist and public figure from the perspectives of critical race studies, gender and women's studies, queer and cultural studies, music, and fan studies. The authors explore Beyoncé's musical persona as one that builds upon the lineages of Black female cool, Black southern culture, and Black feminist cultural production. They explore Beyoncé's reception within and beyond North America, including how a range of performers - from YouTube gospel singers to Brazilian pop artists have drawn inspiration from her performances and image. The authors show how Beyoncé's music is a source of healing and kinship for many fans, particularly Black women and queer communities of color. Combining cutting edge research, vivid examples, and accessible writing, this collection provides multiple lenses onto the significance of Beyoncé in the United States and around the world.

On March 11, 2011 one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history devastated Japan, triggering a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex in a triple disaster known as 3.11. On five separate journeys, Japanese-born performer and dancer Eiko Otake and historian and photographer William Johnston visited multiple locations across Fukushima, creating 200 transformative color photographs that document the irradiated landscape, accentuated by Eiko's poses depicting both the sorrow and dignity of the land. The book also includes essays and commentary reflecting on art, disaster, and grief. "By placing my body in these places, I thought of the generations of people who used to live there. Now desolate, only time and wind continue to move." - Eiko Otake "This book is of people who had lived in Fukushima and had to leave, and of people who had died there before the disaster. This book is of Fukushima, of a dancer, of a performance, of a gaze. A gaze of a dancer, of time, and of a photographer. And this book is of you, your gaze. When you take time to look at and look into each photograph, we hope it becomes a performance for you and with you, of Fukushima. By witnessing events and places, we actually change them and ourselves in ways that may not always be apparent but are important. Through photographing Eiko in these places in Fukushima, we are witnessing not only her and the places themselves, but the people whose lives crossed with those places." - William Johnston

Black ecopoet observes the changing world from a high-rise window. Award-winning poet Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain. Departing from the traditional nature poem, Roberson's work reclaims a much older tradition, drawing into poetry's orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems entail the evolution of the traditional "nature poem,' each realizing its failure at an answer to our crisis, and even calling into question poetic form. Reflections on the natural world and moments of personal interiority are interwoven with images of urbanscapes, environmental crises, and political issues. These poems speak life and truth to modernity in all its complexity. Throughout, Roberson takes up the ancient spiritual concern—the ephemerality of life—and gives us a new language to process the feeling of living in a century on the brink.

Once a blue moon, a love like this comes along. This collection of love poems draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death.

Essays and occasional writings from one of literature's iconic voices. Samuel R. Delany is an acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. His "prismatic output is among the most significant, immense and innovative in American letters," wrote the New York Times in 2019; "Delany's books interweave science fiction with histories of race, sexuality, and control. In so doing, he gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world." This anthology of essays, lectures, and interviews addresses topics such as 9/11, race, the garden of Eden, the interplay of life and writing, and notes on other writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Hart Crane, Ursula K. Le Guin, Holderlin, and a note on—and a conversation with—Octavia Butler. The first of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. These sharp, focused writings by a bestselling Black, gay author are filled with keen insights and observations on culture, language, and life.

A mystical masterworkThis book by the great Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange, exhibiting ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the 'sycorax video style' he's been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: that of the afterlife. Brathwaite performs a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in his poetry and is is a poet of undeniable stature, writing the final poems of his career. Central to the book is a series of poems outlining the speaker's (the poet's) experiences with what he calls "Cultural Lynching." These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies the racial politics and ageism underlying the events described. The speaker's pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word.

from Okazaki Fragmentsby Kanika Agrawal These proceedings in natureThese proceedings in cold biologyThese proceedings in chemical societyThese proceedings in physical communication We refer to the concentration of residuesWe observe that one sedimentsfaster than the otherWe presume as fact that most of what we dois in growing incompleteshort chainsWe further support the conclusionWe indicate direction alsoby another method We are grateful to Drs. BAX 2020, guest-edited by Joyelle McSweeney and Carmen Maria Machado, is the sixth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology series compiling an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring a diverse roster of new and established authors - including Anne Boyer, Alice Notley, and Raquel Salas Rivera - BAX 2020 presents an expansive view of high-energy writing.

SOME JOY FOR MORNINGNow the connection with springhas dissolved. Now that hysteriais blooming.Says every day I want to fly my kite. Says what's a grammar when you is no longer you.My world is hydrogen burning in space and inthe fullness of etc. I have read the news andlearned nothing.I try to understand thewhooshing overhead. But for alittle light now.I didn't realize the treewas weeping. How was I toknow I am not alone. Wildlight.The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.

In this powerful epistolary novel, acclaimed Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor interweaves history, cultural stories, and irony to reveal a shadow play of truth and politics. Basile Hudon Beaulieu lives in a houseboat on the River Seine in Paris between 1932 and 1945. He observes the liberals, fascist, artists, and bohemians, and presents puppet shows with his brother. His thoughts and experiences are documented in the form of fifty letters to the heirs of the fur trade. Vizenor is a unique voice of Native American presence in the world of literature, and in his inimitable creative style he delivers a moving, challenging, and darkly humorous commentary on modernity.