A new collection of poetry from the author of Now, Now

Playful love poems to kids, coral reefs, and crowsWinner of the 2024 Cardinal Poetry PrizeFive-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by renowned poet Robert Pinsky. In free verse and invented poetic forms, Rachel Trousdale explores how the interplay between the mind and body illuminates our most important relationships, whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love; the entropic joys of parenthood; illness and grief; and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us. [Sample Poem]Love Poem With Dereliction of DutyIt's true—I like you more than I like the Marquis de Sade; God that mid-April afternoon in 1995, when I said, "let's take a walk" and you said "sure" and we circled the New Haven Green saying who the hell knows what because if we had seen all this falling in love stuff coming, we would have paid more attention; I just know it took two hours, past the churches and the porn shop and over to the cemetery with all those skull-topped slabs leaning memorially against the brownstone wall; round and round we went like marbles dodging the traps in a game of labyrinth; and finally back to campus through that big stone gate which we entered just as the prof of the philosophy class I was skipping came out and I said oh the pain the pain I can't take it any more and doubled up laughing

Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museumThis extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, Wenstrup's poems weave together the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved colonial violence in "an authorial reckoning//with what remains." Outside the Museum of Unnatural Histories Ggugguyni, the Dena'ina Raven, and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as The Curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Every artifact contains competing stories, while some display cases are left empty.Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. There, The Curator questions the space between her familial history and colonial constructs of authenticity. In particular, the poems explore how women experience embodiment when they are seen through filters of race, gender, and class: "Always, I've known I embody that which harms me." At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard.Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos to imagine a future that exists despite the series of disasters and apocalypses documented inside the museum. Eventually it begins to dawn on us that this museum may not be separable from the world, and that there may be no exit from its unnatural histories, composed of beauty and foil wrappers, wilderness and contaminated waters. Here, it is up to each one to "decide/who you must become."[Sample Poem]Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking LotI watch her crow. Not as a crow crows but as herself. She's not here for the art. She's here for the minivans that devourdiaper bags, car seats, children. She waits for the doors to retract and expel fruit, Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking.She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps. Like me, she won't appear human here. While her legs bring her from one deliciousscrap to another, I work my own inventory. Once my parents named me Swift Raven— a real Indian Princess name.I flew unblinded, my hair in a blue-black braid down my back. Now, I'm ungainly, more harpy than girl. My mouth, a curvecalling for carrion. I'm not here for the art. I'm here for the mirrors, here to unpair earrings and unclasp foil from gum. My beakready to unbind carapace from quiver. Like Ggugguyni, I'm a scavenger lurching from one disaster to another.See how we curate cataclysms' aftermath. While we work, Ggugguyni tells me a story. Once, my grandfather said, a long time agothere was a raven. He opened a door and it was day. Then he drew his wing shut. What Ggugguyni didn't say, but what I heard: oncehe closed the door and it was night. Today I'm telling you this story instead: my mouth is a comma, my mouth is exclamation,my mouth is my body holding open the door. Witness my body create day. See how the light appraises my collection. See how the sunlight exposes how shadow bleached everything white.

A new collection of poetry from David Trinidad, author of DIGGING TO WONDERLAND.

"A new edition of Ronald Johnson's masterpiece ARK is a metaphysical poem that could only have been written in our time, of which it displays a new vision. It is a late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible, and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."—Guy Davenport

How a passion for translation fueled the development of a great American poetSo Much Secret Labor is a window into the work of the great American poet, James Wright, whose love of languages and quest for the "true imagination" helped transform American poetry. The book draws on memoir, archival research, interviews, letters, and previous unpublished journal excerpts, presenting a scrupulous and intimate reading of Wright's work and the translations he insisted were as redemptive in his life as they were crucial to his poetics. At its center is a selection of Wright's translations, both from German and Spanish: poems by Trakl, Rilke, Heine, Vallejo, Lorca, and Neruda, among others, including draft versions discovered among his collected papers that have never been published. It also provides an important assessment of the little known formative influence of German poetry on Wright's own poems. Wright's literary relationship with another great mid-century American poet, Robert Bly, is featured here in a portfolio of unpublished letters, typescripts and holographs. These tell the story of their ardentfriendship and earliest translation collaborations, and situates them in the history of the emergence of poetry of the "true imagination" that they were beginning to explore at that time.

Winner of the 2023 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from the 2023 AWP Award Series.

A new collection of poetry from Jan Beatty, author of Body Wars.

Ayn Rand controversially defended rational egoism, the idea that people should regard their own happiness as their highest goal. Given that numerous scholars in philosophy and psychology alike are examining the nature of human flourishing and an ethics of well-being, the time is ripe for a close examination of Rand’s theory. Egoism Without Permission illuminates Rand’s thinking about how to practice egoism by exploring some of its crucial psychological dimensions. Tara Smith examines the dynamics among four partially subconscious factors in an individual’s well-being: a person’s foundational motivation for being concerned with morality; their attitude toward their desires; their independence; and their self-esteem. A clearer grasp of each, Smith argues, sheds light on the others, and a better understanding of the set, in turn, enriches our understanding of self-interest and its sensible pursuit. Smith then traces the implications for a broader understanding of what a person’s self-interest genuinely is, and, correspondingly, of what its pursuit through rational egoism involves. By highlighting these previously underexplored features of Rand’s conceptions of self-interest and egoism, Smith betters our understanding of how vital these psychological levers are to a person’s genuine flourishing.

From Homer to Hatzi-Yavrouda provides a multidisciplinary discussion of the concept of orality in the framework of Greek narrative tradition, from Antiquity to the 21st century.

Hans Christian Andersen is an cultural icon. But what is an icon exactly? And how did Hans Christian Andersen become one? In Denmark and abroad. This book looks into the different meanings and uses of the word icon and into the making of the cultural icon that is Hans Christian Andersen. In branding of businesses, as a cultural heritage, in the ability to transcend culturers.

In Literacy as Conversation, the authors tell stories of successful literacy learning outside of schools and inside communities, both within urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semi-rural towns of Arkansas. They define literacy not as a basic skill but as a rich, broadly interactive human behavior: the ability to engage in a conversation carried on, framed by, or enriched through written symbols. Eli Goldblatt takes us to after-school literacy programs, community arts centers, and urban farms in the city of Philadelphia, while David Jolliffe explores learning in a Latinx youth theater troupe, a performance based on the words of men on death row, and long-term cooperation with a rural health care provider in Arkansas. As different as urban and rural settings can be—and as beset as they both are with the challenges of historical racism and economic discrimination—the authors see much to encourage both geographical communities to fight for positive change.

In a globalized and networked world, where media crosses national borders, contributors reveal how transnational processes have shaped popular representations of scientific and religious ideas in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Ecuador, India, Spain, Turkey, Israel, and Japan. Most Adaptable to Change demonstrates the varied and divergent ways evolutionary ideas and nonscientific traditions and ways of understanding life on Earth have transformed across the globe. By examining a range of popular media forms across a multitude of different geopolitical contexts from the 1920s to today, this book traces how different evolutionary traditions and figures have been championed or discredited by different religious traditions, their spiritual leaders, and politicians using the cultural authority of religion as leverage. It analyzes the ways in which evolutionary theory has been mobilized explicitly for the purposes of addressing wider sociopolitical questions, and it is the first collection of its kind to explicitly explore the role of popular media formats themselves as mediators in institutional debates on the relationship between evolution and religion.

In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.