From Destiny's Child to Lemonade, Homecoming, and The Gift, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has redefined global stardom, feminism, Black representation, and celebrity activism. This book brings together new work from sixteen international scholars to explore Beyonce's impact as an artist and public figure from the perspectives of critical race studies, gender and women's studies, queer and cultural studies, music, and fan studies. The authors explore Beyoncé's musical persona as one that builds upon the lineages of Black female cool, Black southern culture, and Black feminist cultural production. They explore Beyoncé's reception within and beyond North America, including how a range of performers - from YouTube gospel singers to Brazilian pop artists have drawn inspiration from her performances and image. The authors show how Beyoncé's music is a source of healing and kinship for many fans, particularly Black women and queer communities of color. Combining cutting edge research, vivid examples, and accessible writing, this collection provides multiple lenses onto the significance of Beyoncé in the United States and around the world.

This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin'sRemainders of the American Century, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world.

On March 11, 2011 one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history devastated Japan, triggering a massive tsunami and nuclear meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex in a triple disaster known as 3.11. On five separate journeys, Japanese-born performer and dancer Eiko Otake and historian and photographer William Johnston visited multiple locations across Fukushima, creating 200 transformative color photographs that document the irradiated landscape, accentuated by Eiko's poses depicting both the sorrow and dignity of the land. The book also includes essays and commentary reflecting on art, disaster, and grief. "By placing my body in these places, I thought of the generations of people who used to live there. Now desolate, only time and wind continue to move." - Eiko Otake "This book is of people who had lived in Fukushima and had to leave, and of people who had died there before the disaster. This book is of Fukushima, of a dancer, of a performance, of a gaze. A gaze of a dancer, of time, and of a photographer. And this book is of you, your gaze. When you take time to look at and look into each photograph, we hope it becomes a performance for you and with you, of Fukushima. By witnessing events and places, we actually change them and ourselves in ways that may not always be apparent but are important. Through photographing Eiko in these places in Fukushima, we are witnessing not only her and the places themselves, but the people whose lives crossed with those places." - William Johnston

Essays and occasional writings from one of literature's iconic voices. Samuel R. Delany is an acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. His "prismatic output is among the most significant, immense and innovative in American letters," wrote the New York Times in 2019; "Delany's books interweave science fiction with histories of race, sexuality, and control. In so doing, he gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world." This anthology of essays, lectures, and interviews addresses topics such as 9/11, race, the garden of Eden, the interplay of life and writing, and notes on other writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Hart Crane, Ursula K. Le Guin, Holderlin, and a note on—and a conversation with—Octavia Butler. The first of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. These sharp, focused writings by a bestselling Black, gay author are filled with keen insights and observations on culture, language, and life.

Once a blue moon, a love like this comes along. This collection of love poems draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death.

Black ecopoet observes the changing world from a high-rise window. Award-winning poet Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain. Departing from the traditional nature poem, Roberson's work reclaims a much older tradition, drawing into poetry's orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems entail the evolution of the traditional "nature poem,' each realizing its failure at an answer to our crisis, and even calling into question poetic form. Reflections on the natural world and moments of personal interiority are interwoven with images of urbanscapes, environmental crises, and political issues. These poems speak life and truth to modernity in all its complexity. Throughout, Roberson takes up the ancient spiritual concern—the ephemerality of life—and gives us a new language to process the feeling of living in a century on the brink.

A mystical masterworkThis book by the great Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange, exhibiting ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the 'sycorax video style' he's been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: that of the afterlife. Brathwaite performs a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in his poetry and is is a poet of undeniable stature, writing the final poems of his career. Central to the book is a series of poems outlining the speaker's (the poet's) experiences with what he calls "Cultural Lynching." These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies the racial politics and ageism underlying the events described. The speaker's pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word.

from Okazaki Fragmentsby Kanika Agrawal These proceedings in natureThese proceedings in cold biologyThese proceedings in chemical societyThese proceedings in physical communication We refer to the concentration of residuesWe observe that one sedimentsfaster than the otherWe presume as fact that most of what we dois in growing incompleteshort chainsWe further support the conclusionWe indicate direction alsoby another method We are grateful to Drs. BAX 2020, guest-edited by Joyelle McSweeney and Carmen Maria Machado, is the sixth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology series compiling an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring a diverse roster of new and established authors - including Anne Boyer, Alice Notley, and Raquel Salas Rivera - BAX 2020 presents an expansive view of high-energy writing.

SOME JOY FOR MORNINGNow the connection with springhas dissolved. Now that hysteriais blooming.Says every day I want to fly my kite. Says what's a grammar when you is no longer you.My world is hydrogen burning in space and inthe fullness of etc. I have read the news andlearned nothing.I try to understand thewhooshing overhead. But for alittle light now.I didn't realize the treewas weeping. How was I toknow I am not alone. Wildlight.The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.

Genre Publics is a cultural history showing how new notions of 'the local' were produced in context of the Indonesian 'local music boom' of the late 1990s. Drawing on industry records and interviews, media scholar Emma Baulch traces the institutional and technological conditions that enabled the boom, and their links with the expansion of consumerism in Asia, and the specific context of Indonesian democratization. Baulch shows how this music helped reshape distinct Indonesian senses of the modern, especially as 'Asia' plays an ever more influential role in defining what it means to be modern.

In this powerful epistolary novel, acclaimed Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor interweaves history, cultural stories, and irony to reveal a shadow play of truth and politics. Basile Hudon Beaulieu lives in a houseboat on the River Seine in Paris between 1932 and 1945. He observes the liberals, fascist, artists, and bohemians, and presents puppet shows with his brother. His thoughts and experiences are documented in the form of fifty letters to the heirs of the fur trade. Vizenor is a unique voice of Native American presence in the world of literature, and in his inimitable creative style he delivers a moving, challenging, and darkly humorous commentary on modernity.

CAMINO IMAGINADO Blue leaves, hojas rotas in the shape of stars.Ni un "no" en tu vocabulario but for others;blue in place of green in the shape of Spain.Ojos the color of dirt, chocolate, coffee, time,azules las horas, hojas de horas van y se van,ni una palabra, ni una queja, nor broken bita tu lado beside me andamos walking, sí walkingcaminamos caminos like these, such streets, whatcity. 7/15/95 Paris Xicancuicatl collects the poetry of leading avant-garde Chicanx poet Alfred Arteaga (1950–2008), whom French philosopher Gilles Deleuze regarded as "among those rare poets who are able to raise or shape a new language within their language." In his five published collections, Arteaga made crucial breakthroughs in the language of poetry, basing his linguistic experiments on the multilingual Xicanx culture of the US Southwest. His formal resources and finely tuned ear for sound patterns and language play remain astonishing. His poetical work, presented as a whole here for the first time, speaks more than ever to a moment in which border-crossing, cultural diversity, language-mixing and a multi-cultural vision of America are critical issues.

The Grand Union was a leaderless improvisation group in SoHo in the 1970s that included people who became some of the biggest names in postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, and Douglas Dunn. Together they unleashed a range of improvised forms from peaceful movement explorations to wildly imaginative collective fantasies. This book delves into the "collective genius" of Grand Union and explores their process of deep play. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances. Includes 65 photographs.

Testimonyfor Tamir Rice, 2002-2014 Mr. President,After they shot me they tackled my sister.The sound of her knees hitting the sidewalkmade my stomach ache. It was a bad pain.Like when you love someoneand they lie to you. Or that time Mikaela criedall through science class and wouldn't tell anyone why.This isn't even my first letter to you,in the first one I told you about my roomand my favorite basketball teamand asked you to come visit me in Clevelandor send your autograph. In the second oneI thanked you for your responsible citizenship.I hope you are proud of me too.Mom said you made being black beautiful againbut that was before someone killed Trayvon.After that came a sadness so big it made everyonelook the same. It was a long time before we couldgo outside again. Mr. President it took one whole dayfor me to die and even though I'm twelve and not afraid of the darkI didn't know there could be so much of itor so many other boys here. Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes - linguistic, cultural, racial, familial - of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.

July 30TiānwēiCelestial AweHe carried no iron into battle.When he lifted his hand,he brandished the sky.How do we honor the dead? How do we commit them to memory? And how do we come to terms with the way they died? To start, we can name them. When schools collapsed in an earthquake in China, burying over 5,000 children, the government brutally prevented parents from learning who had died. Artist Ai Weiwei, at risk to his own safety, gathered the names of these children, and their names are the subject of this book. Each poem is a poetic meditation on the image and concept suggested by the etymology in the Chinese characters. This act of poetic translation is both a heartbreaking tribute to people whose names have been erased, and a healing meditation on how language suggests a path forward.

CARE Dress like you care!Eat like you care!Care like you care! You don't thinkapples just grow on trees,do you? * A fish taps a clamagainst a bony knobof coralto crack its shell – which demonstrates intelligenceyes, butis the fishpleased with itself? * Alone in your crib,you form syllables. Are you happy when oneis like another? Add yourselfto yourself. Now you have someone Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers the emergence of new life (twin granddaughters) into an increasingly toxic world: the Amazon smolders, children are caged or die crossing rivers and oceans, and weddings make convenient targets for drone strikes. These poems explore the restless border between self and non-self and ask us to look with new eyes at what we're doing.