Powerful meditations on the nature and limits of human understanding.

Joan Retallack offers a book of forms, like the medieval Book of Hours, intended to draw readers into a meditative experience of time, space, language, the many humors of chance and design, as they intersect and leave their traces on the page. All of civilization to date, all of history is after all aftermath, afterthought, afterimage. The language graphics of AFTERRIMAGES lay claim to the fragility-the gift, the terror, and the whimsy-of the remnant that all images are. Their playful nature is born of the conviction that the present tense-tense, tensile with immanent futurity-must extend itself toward the unintelligible and unknown. This is the frontier where the image hovers on the edge of its own transfiguration, the threshold where poetry can take place.

Expansive, lyrical, and groundbreaking poetry by Ruth Stone, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

A striking interplay of content and style makes this book-length narrative poem a wrenching, compelling tale. Mose is incarcerated in a Texas prison for a crime whose circumstances slowly unfold as he numbers the days of his sentence and fantasizes about a woman inexorably tied to his fate. As the harshness of prison life begins to close in and distort Mose's consciousness, he is increasingly obsessed with the truth of what happened. In the end, that inquiry reveals to him "another world underneath / this one" where everything "is backwards / to what we want." The journey to that world is a suspenseful and powerful study of a man's character and the trap it sets for him.

Over the past two decades, sweeping political changes and burgeoning new technologies have resulted in communities being increasingly defined in global as well as regional and national terms. Although the intellectual terra nova of world cultures remains largely uncharted, this anthology of sixty-two stories from around the non-Euro-American world provides what Elisabeth Young-Bruehl calls "an introductory map to the great wealth of literary works now being produced in, at once, the particular settings of the writers' experiences and the global setting."Young-Bruehl finds that while the cultural diversity the stories exemplify is amazing, so too is the similarity in thematic terms of the concerns that this diversity presents. Thus she organized Global Cultures thematically to highlight and clarify how these worldwide cultures both converge and diverge. A comprehensive general introduction outlines forces behind the transnational approach to literary study and chapter introductions contextualize each story. Stories from India, Cuba, South Africa, and Uruguay are connected by the theme of exile and immigration; tales from Nigeria, Guatemala, Cameroon, and Egypt share a theme of political violence and civil uprisings; works from Taiwan, Chile, Jamaica, and Syria describe commonalities of women facing effects of modernization, prejudice, war, and immigration.Global Cultures contributes to the fast-growing body of contemporary short fictions newly available in English and is an invaluable resource to meet the need for multicultural literature.

The world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in Beautiful Shirt. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: "This is the world as I have known it. / It has a soft outline and is easily victimized."Juxtaposed within a trio of long, introspective poems are shorter lyrics that push the limits of poetic syntaxes and dictions. In all, Beautiful Shirt searches for the true nature of the self through language unfettered by narrative constraints and conventional conceptual identities.

When Alexandra Todd's 21-year-old son is diagnosed with cancer, the family embarks on an odyssey that ultimately steers an expansive course between the gleaming technologies of traditional Western medicine and the gentle arts of alternative healing.

Author of The Heirs of Columbus, Hotline Healers, Interior Landscapes, Crossbloods, and numerous other works, Gerald Vizenor is one of the century's most important and prolific Native American writers. Drawing on the best work of an acclaimed career, Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes.This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor's innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay "Harold of Orange," winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition. Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.A. Robert Lee of the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, provides a lucid introduction to this writer whose "radically self-aware and contemporary satiric tricksterism . . . as easily invokes Jabés, Barthes, Lyotard, or Foucault as bear ceremonial, ghost dance, or dream-catcher."

A renowned poet’s artful collection is a striking body of work

"We can no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of irony about the grand narratives of the past," declare the editors, who also coedited Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1990). The field of art history is not unique in finding itself challenged and enlarged by cultural debates over issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Visual Culture assembles some of the foremost scholars of cultural studies and art history to explore new critical approaches to a history of representation seen as something different from a history of art. CONTRIBUTORS: Andres Ross, Michael Ann Holly, Mieke Bal, David Summers, Constance Penley, Kaja Silverman, Ernst Van Alphen, Norman Bryson, Wolfgang Kemp, Whitney Davis, Thomas Crow, Keith Moxey, John Tagg, Lisa Tickner.

From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

Mark Rudman - poet, essayist, translator, and teacher - has consistently pursued questions of human relationship and identity, and in Rider he takes the poetry of autobiography and confessional to a new plane. In a polyphonic narrative that combines verse with lyrical prose and often humorous dialogue, Rudman examines his own coming-of-age through the lens of his relationships with his grandfather, father, step-father, and son. These memories emerge against the background of a family history anchored in the traditions of Judaism and the culture of the diaspora.

Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities.While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."

Stephen Todd Booker, an inmate on Florida's death row, writes piercingly of incarceration. But he also sings, in a voice at once jagged and polished, of racism in Brooklyn and the South and of growing up black in 20th-century America, as he examines his life experience with metaphors that test the limits of language.

Drawing of the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Banes's Writing Dancing documents the background and developments of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream.Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions, and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers' Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the "drunk dancing" of Fred Astaire.