This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood—including sexual abuse—using a "cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism." Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.

Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo's aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo's poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo's later work reveals him to be "one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation." Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem "The Hellgate," are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.

Science fiction emerged in Russia considerably earlier than its English version and instantly became the hallmark of Russian modernity. We Modern People investigates why science fiction appeared here, on the margins of Europe, before the genre had even been named, and what it meant for people who lived under conditions that Leon Trotsky famously described as "combined and uneven development." Russian science fiction was embraced not only in literary circles and popular culture, but also by scientists, engineers, philosophers, and political visionaries. Anindita Banerjee explores the handful of well-known early practitioners, such as Briusov, Bogdanov, and Zamyatin, within a much larger continuum of new archival material comprised of journalism, scientific papers, popular science texts, advertisements, and independent manifestos on social transformation. In documenting the unusual relationship between Russian science fiction and Russian modernity, this book offers a new critical perspective on the relationship between science, technology, the fictional imagination, and the consciousness of being modern.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is generally seen as one of the most important figures whose ideas had a great influence on the French Revolution (1789). Many immediately associate him with the concept of "the noble savage." However, just as with his political and philosophical writings, his love for botany and scenery would change the landscape of continental Europe, if not the world. This book presents a unique view of the young Rousseau's awakening love for plants, and his sometimes euphoric appreciation of the scenery during his endless walks. The author unfolds the development of Rousseau's concept of nature, which makes it possible to pinpoint the exact and pivotal moment of change in his thinking about the natural environment. This culminated in a vision that converged with the the Marquis de Girardin's ideas about landscaping. The reader follows the Marquis during the development of the first English Garden in France, where Rousseau probably spent the happiest weeks of his life. While the park represents Rousseau's dream come true, it was destined to become the place of both his death and his tomb. In text and photographs this book captures the character of the park, built around the concepts of two men of fundamentally different character. It is the park's intricate mixture of bliss and gloominess that put a spell on the reader and every visitor.

This book describes the life of the famous archaeologist and shrewd trader Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) from a Dutch perspective since his commercial succes started in the Netherlands. We see how two myths meet: the myth of the ancient city Troy and the the myth of the poor boy that was determined to find the remains of this legendary city.Dutch text.

H.L. Mencken, in his illustrious career as a journalist, made his reputation with satirical writing and controversial ideals. Although his is a name not customarily associated with short fiction, it was his first literary love. From 1900 to 1919, he published nearly 60 stories and short-shorts, sometimes pseudonymously. Here for the first time, 30 of Mencken's thoroughly entertaining stories are collected, showcasing Mencken's wit and skill in a medium for which he is not well known. Meet a bumbling anarchist newspaper editor; the `Charmed Circle' of Long Island in a story strikingly prescient of F. Scott Fitzgerald; a shop owner whose mannequins belie a horrific secret; and a pair of wily entrepreneurs working in the Caribbean, among plenty of other excellent, amusing, and memorable stories. "Superb, clever, or hilarious use of language… Read Epithalamium, a sendup of the social rigmarole of marriage for its exquisite choice of words, or the Poe-esque The Window of Horrors, about a clothier and his obsession with life-like mannequins, for its chills. For quintessential Mencken, read The Man of God, whose lowly grocer becomes an evangelist." - Publishers Weekly

Appetite is a book that explores our American Mythologies, particularly masculinity and film. Smith investigates our fascinations with the body, gender, and entertainment in poems that are critically observant, darkly funny, darkly angry, and, sometimes, heartbreaking.Whether he is cataloging shirtless men in films and bad television, lyricizing the anxieties of childhood, or redrawing the lines of cultural membership, Appetite attacks its subjects with wit, candor, and compassionate intensity. These poems announce their presence with a style that is as beautifully wrought as it is provocative.In the America of Appetite, the usual hierarchies are obliterated: the disposable is as valuable as the traditional, pop culture is on the same level as the sacred, and the pleasurable simultaneity of past and present are found in high art and the tabloid. Smith’s work engages our contemporary moment and how we want to think of ourselves, while nodding to rich poetic, cultural, and personal histories.

From the outset, experimental writing has been viewed as a means to afford a more creative space for students to express individuality, underrepresented social realities, and criticisms of dominant socio-political discourses and their institutions. Yet, the recent trend toward multimedia texts has left many composition instructors with little basis from which to assess these new forms and to formulate pedagogies. In this original study, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan provides a critical history of experimental writing theory and its aesthetic foundations and demonstrates their application to current multimodal writing. Sullivan unpacks the work of major scholars in composition and rhetoric and their theories on aesthetics, particularly avant-gardism. She also relates the dialectics that shape these aesthetics and sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. Additionally, she shows how current debates over the value of multimedia texts echo earlier arguments that pitted experimental writing against traditional models. Sullivan further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn’t changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

"Emotionally direct and visually all alike in column-shaped free verse, the poems in this debut from the Minneapolis-based Kiesselbach open up to show startling verbal skills, intellectual depths, and sensory complications. 'Beach Thanksgiving' wheels from seaside scenes into one, then another, sad memory: 'Fire’s an assortment of sparks down the beach/ beside which your new family cooks./ Asked to bear a ring,/ you pulled and pulled at your hair. ' For an elderly mother, once a gardener, 'Joy’s bolted/ in her face to sorrow/ like a pair of shears.' Marital love in the present (Kiesselbach has a particular talent for love poems), what looks like abuse in the past, the cycle of green growing things, the cold of the north, and the warmth of the animal world all inform these investigations of confession and its discontents, of commitments given and withheld, sometimes through stark life story but more often, in a wonderful involution, through symbols contemplated at short remove—in turkeys, for example, whose unlikely dignity rebukes human discontents: 'In fall’s/ ballroom they bow/ and straighten, straighten,/ bow, and finish/ with a salad course.'\u201d—Publishers Weekly

This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker’s reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move to a new house and a new life, a life in which she is always alert to the absences and danger but also a life in which she begins to see language as a kind of salvation. This section also develops the speaker’s first knowledge of sex, primarily in the poems, \u201cThe Goose Girl\u201d and \u201cA Woman Was Raped Here. \u201d The second section follows the speaker into adolescence and young adulthood, and these poems further explore the sexual violence in the world in which the speaker lives, and how this violence affects her own feelings toward sex and romantic love. In the third section, the book finds love, work, and family, and the poems in this section about motherhood echo back to the first section as the speaker’s own parenting is influenced by how difficult it is to love when you know people die.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

A celebration of holiday poetry, fiction, essays, recipes, and songs by more than sixty of the Bluegrass state's finest writers. Gathered here are writings from some of the legendary voices of Kentucky -- and the nation -- as well as original Christmas stories and poetry from some of the state's emerging talents. Among the contributors to this handsome collection are Kentucky's visionaries, storytellers, historians, singers, cooks, children's authors, and poets, including all five Kentucky Poet Laureates. A delight for anyone interested in Kentucky literature, history, or traditions, A Kentucky Christmas promises to be a wonderful holiday gift, a treasured family keepsake, and a necessary addition for libraries and for personal collections.

Whirlwind is one woman’s frank, witty, mordant, sexy look at the breakup of a marriage and its emotional aftermath. With her characteristic linguistic play and mixture of poetic registers and styles, Sharon Dolin takes her readers on an off-the-tracks emotional ride through the whirlwind that goes by the name of divorce. Hang on tight. Here poems are never merely confessional, but use formal aplomb to ride the white-heat rage, hurt, denial, reflection, regret, wistfulness, desire, and sexual passion as they go hurtling through the many stages of grief after the death of a relationship and the rebirth of a more vital self. Dolin tackles difficult subjects unflinchingly in her poems: such as betrayal and the shame of the one being betrayed, being a parent within a volatile breakup, as well as some startling poems on the reawakening of sexuality and an attention to the natural world and politics. In her poem that won a Pushcart Prize, she dons the mask of the Furies to confront her ex-husband and his lover. A journalist of her own heart, Sharon Dolin has written a brazen collection that seethes with the pressure of a story to tell: cathartic and thrilling in equal measure.

“Japan in the 17th century was a relatively peaceful place, unified by the Tokugawa family in 1601 after many centuries of feudal warfare. The resultant peace, however, left many men who had lived by the sword, the samurai class, out of work, and since samurai were not permitted to work at anything else, many became destitute and roamed the countryside; some even turned their hands to poetry and calligraphy. This stability also ensured the rise of the merchant classes, an explosion of the arts from theatre to poetry, and a growth in trade for courtesans who inhabited ‘the floating world of desire’. It is into this remote world and in particular the last decade of that century, that John Givens breathes a whole new life, in his book of short stories exploring the characters of that era, from courtesans to bandits, monks, brigands and rogue samurai.... Givens is not just a gifted storyteller – these stories are freighted with a deep knowledge and cultural understanding of Japan....Givens' prose and dialogues are so authentic that it's almost as if these stories were handed down or were translated from original sources.” – Joseph Woods, The Irish Times It's Japan. The last decade of the 17th century. Men who lived by the sword find themselves without a vocation while women begin to confront new opportunities and threats hitherto unimaginable. The austere demands of the haikai poet are no match for the new popularity of urban performers, and the medieval samurai ethos has been replaced by that of the merchant and the shogun's bureaucrats. This colourful but remote world is portrayed in these stories. Japan's greatest poet Basho features in several of them. We also meet young 'peony girls' who yearn for a life outside the pleasure quarters; a rogue samurai who seeks solace in wine, in the supposed serenity of haikai poetry, in the rigours of Zen Buddhism, and finally in his own acceptance of the impossibility of regaining the past. Another, more murderous samurai evolves into what modern yakuza gangsters see as their historical essence. A mysterious 'daughter of the palace' struggles with an unbearable remorse; a senior government official seeks to preserve Basho's poetic legacy; a teenage sociopath tries to carve out his own career by cutting a bloody swathe across the landscape; and, a bizarrely preternatural pariah supervisor brings his own understanding of things with surprising and sometimes horrifying results. The Plum Rains and Other Stories brings to life a uniquely beautiful and violent world.

Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand up against a dominating and repressive society. Her poetry, novels, memoirs, and children's books reflect her Appalachian upbringing and feature her struggles with racially integrated schools and unwelcome authority figures. One of Utne Reader's "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life," hooks has won wide acclaim from critics and readers alike. In Appalachian Elegy, bell hooks continues her work as an imagist of life's harsh realities in a collection of poems inspired by her childhood in the isolated hills and hidden hollows of Kentucky. At once meditative, confessional, and political, this poignant volume draws the reader deep into the experience of living in Appalachia. Touching on such topics as the marginalization of its people and the environmental degradation it has suffered over the years, hooks's poetry quietly elegizes the slow loss of an identity while also celebrating that which is constant, firmly rooted in a place that is no longer whole.

Arguably the most famous and recognized detective in history, Sherlock Holmes is considered by many to be the first pop icon of the modern age. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective has stood as a unique figure for more than a century with his reliance on logical rigor, his analytic precision, and his disregard of social mores. A true classic, the Sherlock Holmes character continues to entertain twenty-first-century audiences on the page, stage, and screen. In The Philosophy of Sherlock Holmes, a team of leading scholars use the beloved character as a window into the quandaries of existence, from questions of reality to the search for knowledge. The essays explore the sleuth's role in revealing some of the world's most fundamental philosophical issues, discussing subjects such as the nature of deception, the lessons enemies can teach us, Holmes's own potential for criminality, and the detective's unique but effective style of inductive reasoning. Emphasizing the philosophical debates raised by generations of devoted fans, this intriguing volume will be of interest to philosophers and Holmes enthusiasts alike.