Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry’s innovative and road-tested textbook is an introduction to Rock and R&B suitable for general education courses in music and also accessible for general readers interested in a novel approach to gaining a historically rich, yet concise understanding of these genres. The book is organized around a series of timelines, tables, and figures created by the author, and provides fresh perspectives that bring readers into the heart of the social and cultural import of the music. Charry lays out key theoretical issues, covers the technical foundations of the music industry, and provides a capsule history of who did what when, with particular emphasis on the rapid emergence of distinct genres in the music industry. The book’s figures distill the history and provide new insight into understanding trends. Over 1000 artists, albums, and songs are included here, such as Muddy Water, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Madonna, Talking Heads, and Public Enemy.

Hailed by Milan Kundera as “an heir of Joyce and Kafka,” Prix Goncourt winner Patrick Chamoiseau is among the leading Francophone writers today. With most of his novels having appeared in English, this book opens a new window on his oeuvre. A moving poetic essay that bears witness to the forgotten history of the French penal colony in French Guiana, French Guiana: Memory Traces of the Penal Colony (Guyane: Traces-Mémoires du bagne) is accompanied by more than sixty evocative color photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi and translated, here for the first time, deftly by Matt Reeck.

In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, and many more. A companion web site will present audio of each poet’s work.

Mezzaluna gathers poems from all nine of Michele Leggott’s prior books. In complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision, Leggott creates lush textured soundscapes. Her poetry covers a wide rage of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal.

Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds’ nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. Experimental and deeply grounded, its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.

Going Up the Country is part oral history, part nostalgia-tinged narrative, and part clear-eyed analysis of the multifaceted phenomena collectively referred to as the counterculture movement in Vermont. This is the story of how young migrants, largely from the cities and suburbs of New York and Massachusetts, turned their backs on the establishment of the 1950s and moved to the backwoods of rural Vermont, spawning a revolution in lifestyle, politics, sexuality, and business practices that would have a profound impact on both the state and the nation. The movement brought hippies, back-to-the-landers, political radicals, sexual libertines, and utopians to a previously conservative state and led us to today's farm to table way of life, environmental consciousness, and progressive politics as championed by Bernie Sanders.

For more than a century, Friedrich Hölderlin has been considered one of the key figures in modern European literature. The translations in Odes and Elegies, including poems never before available in English, render forcefully and directly the deep longing and heartbreak of Hölderlin's poetic world. A bilingual edition, this book is the first major translation of these poems since the 1960s. Odes and Elegies opens to the English reader the unique poetic voice that marks Hölderlin's achievement and continuing influence on poetry and philosophy today.

The University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music celebrates its centennial in this lavishly illustrated book. The Hartt School holds unique qualities that continue to distinguish it from other performing arts institutions. Through personal and official written communications, school newsletters, speeches, and the exquisite quality of artistic expression, a belief in the value of art is continually reinforced, often with great eloquence, sometimes with humor, and always from the heart.

Told through the words of those whose lives the meetinghouse shaped, Facing the Past uncovers a hidden past. It begins with the displacement of Indigenous people in the area before Europeans arrived, continues with disputes over worship and witchcraft in the early colonial settlement, and looks ahead to the use of Connecticut’s most iconic white church as a refuge and sanctuary. Relying on the resources of local archives, the contents of family attics, and the extensive records of the Congregational Church, this community portrait details the long ignored genocide and enslaved people and reshapes prevailing ideas about history’s makers.

Lorenzo Thomas (1944−2005) was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass his entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator.

Deborah Hay is an internationally renowned dance artist whose unique approach to bodily practice has had lasting impact on American choreography. Her commitment to dance as a process is as exquisite as it is provoking. Rooted in NYC’s 1960s experimental Judson Dance Theater in New York, Hay’s work has evolved through experimentation with a use of language that is unique to dance. This book is an exploration and articulation of Hay’s process, focusing on several of her most recent works.

Motivated by the inexorable rise of urban-industrial development and the subsequent deterioration of our planet, artists confront the contemporary vulnerability of our natural world, and illustrate the continued relevance of ecology and nature conservation to contemporary artistic practice, and global climate change. In Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art, leading artists Jennifer Angus, Mark Dion, Courtney Mattison, and James Prosek make natural elements their medium conceptually and literally. From prints created with eel bodies and moth wings, to ceramic sculpture mimicking coral bleaching, cabinets filled with colorful plastic collected from oceans and rivers, and walls covered with shockingly beautiful, preserved insects, the artwork reflects an artist’s perspective to natural science, these essays and written conversations showcase the persuasive role artists can play in advocating for the preservation of earth.

What are the uses of musical exoticism? In Wild Music, Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857−1907), baker’s daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at the Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, taught at Smith College for nearly two decades, but sadly ended up almost totally obscure. In 2012, her confessional letters and hundreds of her paintings and sketches turned up in storage at a Connecticut family’s home. Her first biography reveals her as feisty, funny, self-deprecating, caustically critical of mainstream art, and observant of everything from soldiers’ epaulettes to colorful produce layered on delivery trucks. She was determined to paint portraits and landscapes in her distinctive style. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks.

Tallahassee.