In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world's wealthiest nation. It is easy in America to do nothing and suckle the trickling down of the rich, but these poems urge that we have a community responsibility to alter the way we act. Through varied lenses, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, from Goethe to contemporary electronica, from the 1982 Tylenol Murders to the Stanley Cup, these poems assemble the rhetoric of our cultural landscape into a call to arms. We must change our ways.

In this sixth collection by award-winning poet Sharon Dolin, Manual for Living offers three distinct approaches to life, each one riven by flashes of joy and despair, and all conditions in between. With a fresh slant on the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the title section offers a part-serious, part tongue-in-cheek series of advice poems. An ekphrastic sequence based on the "black paintings" of Goya follows, as a darker meditation on life. The final section, "Of Hours," is a contemporary sequence of psalms where the possibility for redemption in prayer exists. As in all of her work, Dolin's lyric voice attends to language and the world equally. Her verbal sleights-of-hand offer readers insights for ways to live. Manual for Living is a wise book: drink deeply from it.

Having taken great risks -- to immigrate to America, to take monastic vows -- Bengali physician Meena Chatterjee and Brother Flavian are each seeking safety and security when they encounter Johnny Faye, a Vietnam vet, free spirit, and expert marijuana farmer. Amid the fields and forests of a Trappist monastery, Johnny Faye patiently cultivates Meena's and Flavian's capacity for faith, transforming all they thought they knew about duty and desire. In turn they offer him an experience of civilization other than war and chaos. But Johnny Faye's law-breaking sets him against a district attorney for whom the law is a tool for ambition rather than justice. Their confrontation leads to a harrowing reckoning that ensnares Dr. Chatterjee and Brother Flavian, who must make a life-or-death choice between an act of justice that may precipitate their ruin or a betrayal that offers salvation.Inspired by the real-life state police kidnapping and murder of a legendary storyteller and petty criminal, The Man Who Loved Birds engages pressing contemporary issues through a timeless narrative of ill-fated romance. Celebrated author Fenton Johnson has woven a seamless, haunting fable exploring the eternal conflicts between free will and destiny, politics and nature, the power of law and the power of love.

David Hernandez's Dear, Sincerely is his most intimate and dynamic collection to date, bringing the reader into poems that are simultaneously personal and universal, and sometimes political. With his characteristic dreamlike imagery, inventive rhythms, and biting wit, Hernandez's voice reaches toward us with an accessible profundity. Dear, Sincerely is an imaginative book that explores the Self, the collective We, the cosmos, and the murky division that separates one from the other.

This volume contains articles in the fields of translation theory. Litlerature and linguistics, and will appeal to international specialists in the humanities, especially in English and Icelandic studies.

We'd not slept in days, or else we were/ still sleeping—who could tell?" someone asks in the opening poem of Eternity & Oranges. The voices we encounter in this book speak on the verge of disappearance, from places marked by disintegration and terror. Christopher Bakken's poems are acts of conjuring. They move from the real political landscapes of Greece, Italy, and Romania, into more surreal spaces where history comes alive and the summoned dead speak. In the formally diverse long poem, "Kouros/Kore," but also in this book's terse and harrowing dream songs, Bakken writes with devastating force, at every turn "Guilty of the crime of praise" while "begging for an antidote to beauty.

Taking Dante and other catalogers of failure and ruin (Baudelaire, Trakl, Rimbaud) as its guiding lights, Scarecrow charts situations of extremity and madness: “Are you / insistent? Are you dead? / Are you guilty? Has your / name been lifted, a vein / of earth from earth?” It also charts the insistence of time’s passing and with it the awakening to both new and foreclosed possibilities. What will remain for us after the disaster? How will we rebuild? To whom will we address ourselves and with what voice? Also a love poem, one of desire and hope, Scarecrow aligns a tragic sensibility with a faith in the other and in the redemptive power of forgiveness. Within the beauty and strangeness of this work rests an imperative that captures the directive of poetry at its best: “Present yourself / in the full radiance of captivation.” In its mystery and defiance, Robert Fernandez’s collection does precisely this. An online reader’s companion will be available at robertfernandezsite.wesleyan.edu.

Make no mistake: Martha Bragg Picket is a headstrong southern woman with a rebellious spirit, a characteristic her son Michael shares. Yet to see her after almost twenty years of marriage, it might no longer seem clear. A Yankee contractor's arrival in town catalyzes her dissatisfaction, leading her to turn her life upside down -- unaware that her son will follow suit. Both heartfelt and shrewdly humorous, this widely acclaimed first novel from author Fenton Johnson is an affecting look at one woman's reawakening and her son's coming of age in the heartland of America.

Along with his siblings, Raphael Hardin left his childhood home in rural Kentucky. Grappling with an AIDS diagnosis, he returns to care for his dying father. Told from the perspectives of Raphael, his family, and their lifelong neighbor, Fenton Johnson's landmark novel reveals the blood struggles and binding loves of a broken family made whole.

Playing hopscotch in the schoolyard or hide-and-seek in the woods, Appalachian children once recited traditional nursery rhymes from memory. As kids do, they frequently altered the original rhymes, making them even more colorful in the process.In Mommy Goose: Rhymes from the Mountains, author Mike Norris honors this special piece of American heritage with a one-of-a-kind collection of fifty original nursery rhymes celebrating Appalachian tradition and speech. Illustrated with art-quality photographs of more than one hundred new hand-carved and -painted works by renowned folk artist Minnie Adkins, this enchanting book introduces readers of all ages to the whimsical world of Mommy Goose and shares her love of the rare music of Appalachian speech and of words in general.Mommy Goose is designed to engage young children with a series of simple and often humorous verses that gradually become more challenging as the book progresses. Readers can advance to longer, more complex rhymes as their skills develop -- at home or with the guidance of teachers. Featuring sheet music for the original song "Tell me, Mommy Goose," this multidimensional book is certain to entertain while introducing a new generation to hallowed folk traditions.

Morphology is the general theory of form and formation, which can be seen as the innovative and fruitful point of intersection of the scientific and the humanistic cultures. The three papers presented in the book by Olaf Breidbach, Pietro Corvaja and Angelo Vianello respectively illustrate different features of morphology from the epistemic viewpoints of history of science, mathematics and biology. The texts were produced in the context of the second meeting of the “Centro Interdipartimentale di Morfologia F. Moiso”, which took place in Udine on 14 December 2007.

Excavation of approximately a third of a hectare in the north-western part of the historic core of Worcester revealed evidence for activity dating from the Roman to the post-medieval and early modern period. The deepest deposits were recorded in geotechnical and archaeological boreholes, and in two sondages: the rest of the site was excavated to the depth of formation level for development.The earliest feature was a Roman road running on the approximate alignment of the present-day Newport Street. Deposits relating to road construction and ground consolidation comprised metal-working waste, with finds of later 2nd to 3rd-century date. No in situ evidence of Roman occupation was excavated. These levels were sealed by alluvial deposits. In the early 13th century the area was divided by boundaries, which were consolidated during the subsequent medieval and post-medieval periods into building plots with frontages onto both Newport Street and Dolday. The Newport Street frontage was developed with substantial stone and timber buildings, some over stone-built cellars. A series of ovens, hearths, structures and surfaces suggest a mixture of craft and domestic activities took place in the back plots of these properties. The style, construction and layout of some of the medieval buildings, coupled with artefactual and environmental evidence, suggest the occupants were relatively prosperous.The major plot boundaries changed little throughout the post-medieval and early modern period, although documentary research indicates a complex history of ownership and holdings featuring sub-division, amalgamation and multiple occupancy. The street frontages of both Newport Street and Dolday continued to be occupied throughout the post-medieval and early modern periods. Open spaces and structural remains, including wells, hearths, ovens and cess pits, in the back plots reflect a variety of activities associated with trade and domestic activity. Finds and environmental evidence has helped to link some of these structures to trades associated with the owners and occupants known from historical records. The remains of bread-ovens, a bake-house, a malthouse and a warehouse for hemp have been identified, and there is more tentative archaeological evidence for cordwaining, cloth-making, brewing and distilling, the latter trades replacing cloth-making as that trade declined in the 17th and 18th centuries. The sub-division of properties and the crowding of small cottages into the back plots during the 18th and 19th centuries reflect the increase in residential occupancy that resulted in over-crowding and a decline in status for this area of the city.The excavations represent the first large-scale archaeological investigation of this part of Worcester. The results complement those of previous major investigations of the Roman and medieval town and provide valuable insights into the economic and social status of the medieval town’s expansion onto the former floodplain. An integrated approach, analysing all aspects of the archaeological evidence in combination with detailed study of the available documentary and historical sources, has been particularly valuable in achieving an understanding of the site in later periods, providing the first major archaeological study of the post-medieval development of the city.

Among the various issues debated in philosophy today, this book focuses on one which is unquestionably central: can we claim to have any regulated procedure that uses common norms to resolve human disagreements? Although this is a question with profound classical roots, it is explored in this work through the prism of a key notion in today’s thought: controversy. The aim of adopting this approach is to determine whether controversies might constitute this regulated procedure. What are controversies? Are they only a type of reasoned and ordered debate? Are they a complex process of making or fixing rational beliefs? Each chapter of this book can be seen as a way of contributing to the analysis of human rationality, but viewed not so much as something unitary and pre-established that needs to be discovered, but rather as something that is neither unitary or pre-established; something that still needs to be achieved.

From 1981 to 2000, Sulfur magazine presented an American and international overview of innovative writing across forty-six issues, totaling some 11,000 pages and featuring over eight hundred writers and artists, including Norman O. Brown, Jorie Graham, James Hillman, Mina Loy, Ron Padgett, Octavio Paz, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. Each issue featured a diverse offering of poetry, translations, previously unpublished archival material, visual art, essays, and reviews. Sulfur was a hotbed for critical thinking and commentary, and also provided a home for the work of unknown and younger poets. In the course of its twenty year run, Sulfur maintained a reputation as the premier publication of alternative and experimental writing. This was due in no small measure to its impressive masthead of contributing editors and correspondents: Marjorie Perloff, James Clifford, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Tuma, Allen Weiss, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, Marjorie Welish, Jerome Rothenberg, Eliot Weinberger, managing editor Caryl Eshleman, and founding editor Clayton Eshleman.A Sulfur Anthology offers readers an expanded view of artistic activity at the century's end. It's also a luminous document of international poetic vision. Many of the contributions have never been published outside of Sulfur, making this an indispensible collection of poetry in translation, and poetry in the world.

Today, Henry David Thoreau's status as one of America's most influential public intellectuals remains unchallenged. Recent scholarship on Thoreau has highlighted his activism as a committed antislavery reformer and proto-environmentalist whose life became a seminal model for the image of the liberal conscience. While modern scholars have firmly established Thoreau's relevance, their focus on his public activism has undervalued the complexity and range of his contributions to American political thought and has neglected crucial facets of his philosophy regarding democratic citizenship. In The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan McKenzie analyzes not only Thoreau's well-known works but also his journals and correspondence to provide a fresh portrait of the Sage of Walden as a radical individualist. This new account examines the influence that ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics, had on Thoreau and demonstrates his importance as one of the best modern interpreters of Socrates's vision of the self. McKenzie also argues that Thoreau's own political life was shaped by a theory of privatism that encouraged both a radical simplification of one's commitments and regular engagement in experiments that plumbed life for its most essential values.Shunning grand abstractions and cosmopolitanism in favor of the wonders of daily life, Thoreau's work provides a critique of political and social life that seeks to restore the wholeness of the human subject by rescuing it from the clutches of public concerns. Indeed, McKenzie's nuanced, provocative analysis reveals Thoreau as a multifaceted philosopher who brilliantly wrestled with the complexities of ethical participation in modern democracy.

The itineraries suggested in this book interrogate the ontological and metaphysical sense of aesthetic experience, understood as the primary experience, in which our complexity as human beings is invested by the world and manifests itself. Readers will find two different yet convergent intentions. The first, exquisitely ontologico-aesthetic, develops Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh-element towards an ontology of virtuality, with the aim of understanding a new entity, neither properly living nor properly artificial, appearing on the background of being. The second, predominantly aesthetico-metaphysical, takes the entity’s force of being in the aesthetico-linguistic experience of deixis, and tries to show the work of the aesthetic logos as a condition of possibility for meta-empirical inference.working title