Ingram
Все книги издательства IngramItself
<P>What do «self» and «it» have in common? In Rae Armantrout's new poems, there is no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of everyday occurrence with wit, sensuality, and an eye alert to underlying trauma, as in the poem «Price Points» where a man conducts an imaginary orchestra but «gets no points for originality.» In their investigations of the cosmically mundane, Armantrout's poems use an extraordinary microscopic lens—even when she's glancing backwards from the outer reaches of space. An online reader's companion is available at http://raearmantrout.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>
Solkattu Manual
<P>Solkattu, the spoken rhythms and patterns of hand-clapping used by all musicians and dancers in the classical traditions of South India, is a subject of worldwide interest—but until now there has not been a textbook for students new to the practice. Designed especially for classroom use in a Western setting, the manual begins with rudimentary lessons in the simplest South Indian tala, or metric cycle, and proceeds step-by-step into more challenging material. The book then provides lessons in the eight-beat adi tala, arranged so that by the end, students will have learned a full percussion piece they can perform as an ensemble. Solkattu Manual includes web links to video featuring performances of all 150 lessons, and full performances of all three of the outlined small-ensemble pieces. Ideal for courses in world music and general musicianship, as well as independent study. Book lies flat for easy use.</P>
Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire
<P><B>Winner of the Griffin Poetry Trust's International Poetry Prize (2014)</B><BR><B>Runner-up for the Northern California Book Reviewers Northern California Book Award (2014)</B></P><P>Fire— its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms—is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes—Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water—have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader's companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>
Endarkenment
<P>The poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko's writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language—although «perpetually incomplete» and shifting in meaning—remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet's Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko's work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications. Check for the online reader's companion at endarkenment.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>
The Folded Heart
<P>Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood—commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own—a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing «the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true.»</P><P>Water and light are constant images in this book, apt conduits to the past. Memories are refracted «in the faces of old regrets.» But they are not wholly lost for they inform the present; they continue «beating loud.» The Folded Heart is a lyrical compression of language, precise, intensely felt.</P>
Travel Scholarships
<P>Nine students from London's Antillean School receive travel scholarships to visit their island homelands in the Caribbean. Accompanied by their eccentric Latin professor, they set sail on what they expect to be a thrilling educational voyage. Little do they realize that, prior to their arrival on board, their ship had been hijacked by escaped convicts who murdered its original captain and crew. This is the only novel by the legendary Jules Verne that has never been available in English until now. Although ostensibly written for an adolescent audience, its suspense-filled plot, sophisticated narrative style, and critique of European colonialism make it an engrossing read for all ages.</P>
In Defense of Nothing
<P><B>Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015)</B></P><P>Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance—in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi's poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. In Defense of Nothing is an immensely valuable introduction to the work of this extraordinary and singular poet. Check for the online reader's companion at http://petergizzi.site.weleyan.edu.</P>
The Logbooks
<P>In 1757, a sailing ship owned by an affluent Connecticut merchant sailed from New London to the tiny island of Bence in Sierra Leone, West Africa, to take on fresh water and slaves. On board was the owner's son, on a training voyage to learn the trade. The Logbooks explores that voyage, and two others documented by that young man, to unearth new realities of Connecticut's slave trade and question how we could have forgotten this part of our past so completely. </P><P>When writer Anne Farrow discovered the significance of the logbooks for the Africa and two other ships in 2004, her mother had been recently diagnosed with dementia. As Farrow bore witness to the impact of memory loss on her mother's sense of self, she also began a journey into the world of the logbooks and the Atlantic slave trade, eventually retracing part of the Africa's long-ago voyage to Sierra Leone. As the narrative unfolds in The Logbooks, Farrow explores the idea that if our history is incomplete, then collectively we have forgotten who we are—a loss that is in some ways similar to what her mother experienced. Her meditations are well rounded with references to the work of writers, historians, and psychologists. Forthright, well researched, and warmly recounted, Farrow's writing is that of a novelist's, with an eye for detail. Using a wealth of primary sources, she paints a vivid picture of the eighteenth-century Connecticut slavers. The multiple narratives combine in surprising and effective ways to make this an intimate confrontation with the past, and a powerful meditation on how slavery still affects us.</P>