Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize

It's nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that. Her poems interweave Palestine's historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha's elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed.

This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. Let the plural be a return of us the speaker of On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities. In these poems, Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn't an idea; it is a radical act. Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first. --Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World

Native Americans of the Cuyahoga Valley presents an accessible distillation of the complex history of Native peoples of the region, from precontact times to today. Essential to anyone seeking a fuller understanding of the history of the Cuyahoga Valley and Northeast Ohio, the book includes essays on archaeology, history, and contemporary issues in today's Native American communities.

A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers offers multiple perspectives and vital insights on caring for the artist behind the creative work. Julie Brooks Barbour and Mary Biddinger have compiled a reader-friendly collection of brief essays that address challenges faced by many contemporary writers. Each essayist also includes a writing prompt to help spark inspiration for readers. This volume is ideal for writers at various stages in their careers, from beginners to mid-career writers, and to those returning to the page after time away. Contributors to this volume are Kelli Russell Agodon, Abayomi Animashaun, Emily Corwin, Mixby Dickon, Sarah Freligh, Suzanne Frischkorn, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Charles Jensen, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Jenny Sadre-Orafai.

The purpose of this book is to welcome you to your own poetry studio. Like an art studio, recording studio, dance studio, yoga studio, or basketball court, Poetry Studio invites you into a creative space where you can make a new poem even when you might not feel creative. Whether you're in an MFA program or a college class, writing your first poem or are a published poet, these prompts are meditations and invitations for you to write.

Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems was conceived from a poetic dialogue on how to shed light on the art and science behind the material construction of a poetry collection, and to generate a conversation around an art form too-long hermetically obscured. This anthology of interconnected essays (craft, lyric, and critical) explores the art and technique of poetry manuscript assembly as articulated by poets in all stages of their careers. Stylistically innovative, the essays range in conception from lyrical meditations, close readings, extended metaphors (including bookshelf assembly, cooking, caring for one's mother, and bonsai trees), and an F.A.Q for writers seeking to ask the hard questions of their manuscripts, and themselves. Theorizing the poetry manuscript process through creative and aleatory means and celebrating the richness and depth of our poetic origins and legacies, this anthology, a primer in autopoiesis, is a timely, invaluable, and compact resource for creative writing teachers, as well as emerging and established poets honing their craft. Writers in other genres (fiction and non-) will also benefit from this widely applicable yet nuanced and craft-based discussion of how to bring a book into being from vital contemporary perspectives on the narrative and lyric traditions.

Contributors: Diane Seuss, Heather Treseler, Christopher Salerno, Annie Finch, Stephen Kampa, Alyse Knorr, Harvey Hix, Karyna McGlynn, Philip Metres, Kazim Ali, Cyrus Cassells, and Victoria Chang

Brilliant artists share stories on artistic life and business, full of lessons we can all learn about living a creative life. Featuring the voices of thirty artists and arts workers, Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography provides first-hand accounts of creative administration in action. The book pairs big topics with actionable tactics, addressing themes like equity, activism, design thinking, leadership, collaboration, family, ethics, and care. Provocative, candid essays and interviews expand our view of what creativity and leadership can be, as each chapter closes with experiments for the reader to try and adapt to their own thinking, work, and life. Artists on Creative Administration emerged from the National Center for Choreography-Akron's acclaimed Creative Administration Research program. As editor, Tonya Lockyer shares: This book is for anyone looking for paths forward; for anyone who believes we are in an exceptional moment of change-change is happening and needs to happen.

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise shakes its tail feathers, reveling in a body that cannot be contained in gender binaries. Its opening sequence re-imagines the Judaeo-Christian Eve as a queer person who, instead of eating of the proverbial forbidden fruit, conjures a femme lover: God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / So I made a beloved / in mine, she says. Eve's power triggers a jealous God to manipulate Adam toward behaviors of toxic masculinity and to exile the two humans from the Garden of Eden. This retelling, accompanied by other retellings of classical and biblical narratives, indicts the ways in which religion and myth have created and buttressed compulsory heterosexuality. Elsewhere in the collection, Phillips delights in the autobiography of their imagination, the rendering of self after self after self. Would you stay // & watch me, Phillips asks in the titular poem, wondering if the beloved will deem them desirable, even though they are masculine without being a man, even / though / I have no blue velvet / skirt or ruby-raw / throat?

The Beginning Was the End is the definitive account of DEVO's vibrant early history, from the authors of the first-ever book about the band. The Beginning Was the End features more than eighty never-before-seen images of the band members and their visual history as it tells the unlikely story of a collection of creative misfits who formed a musical kinship, drawing material and inspiration from the industrial Midwestern environs of Northeast Ohio. With the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings as a catalyst, DEVO channeled protopunk energy into a sprawling art project that would pioneer the use of music videos, innovate technology in pop music, define the aesthetic of the 1980s New Wave/MTV era, and maintain an edge of social, political, and cultural criticism that continues their relevance fifty years after their formation.

In a long sequence of prose poems, questionnaires, and standardized tests, The Boy in the Labyrinth interrogates the language of autism and the language barriers between parents, their children, and the fractured medium of science and school. Structured as a Greek play, the book opens with a parents' earnest quest for answers, understanding, and doubt. Each section of the Three Act is highlighted by Autism Spectrum Questionnaires which are in dialogue with and in opposition to what the parent perceives to be their relationship with their child. Interspersed throughout each section are sequences of standardized test questions akin to those one would find in grade school, except these questions unravel into deeper mysteries. The depth of the book is told in a series of episodic prose poems that parallel the parable of Theseus and the Minotaur. In these short clips of montage the unnamed boy explores his world and the world of perception, all the while hearing the rumblings of the Minotaur somewhere in the heart of an immense Labyrinth. Through the medium of this allusion, de la Paz meditates on failures, foundering, and the possibility of finding one's way.

Unhistorical draws on historical narrative, confessional poetry, and detective fiction to tell the story of a contemporary romantic relationship that begins in Scotland and falls apart in America, as the narrator finds herself in the role of spectator to her partner's genius. Many of these poems draw from the elegiac tradition, following a speaker who is, at turns, tourist in and historian of a landscape that is foreign to them. The middle section of this manuscript, entitled The Resurrectionists, follows an alternate version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson as they journey to solve a mystery in Scotland while grappling with their own anguished friendship. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name: Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow: yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent: ; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .0001pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;}

Doom Scroll explores an anxious domesticity. These prose poems hedge toward moments of levity--a Joy Division song, a meal at Denny's, underwear draped over a fence like a lurid dreamcatcher --as a pandemic lockdown, busted politics, and other existential dreads loom in the margins.

Sarah Green's The Deletions is a spiritual and psychological reckoning with ecological grief, infertility grief, and the loss of a marriage. These poems live at the intersection of ode and elegy, simultaneously observing and reflecting upon multiple kinds of love (friendship, romance, family). With a tone that ranges from poignant to stoic and from playful to irreverent, the speaker sifts through generational layers of divorce, revisiting the violence of teen girlhood and ultimately rediscovering her own resilience.

Winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize

Velvet Hounds is a completely combustible collection of poetry. In extravagant, shape-shifting imagery and mythic-meets-black-leather vernacular, Seu takes readers on a journey through reckless youth, first love, addiction, bliss, agony and mayhem. Velvet Hounds is a semi-autobiographical collection bearing reckless witness, with nothing held back, to the wreckage bulimia nervosa makes of a body and spirit as well as the pain and personal schisms from which such a disorder might stem.

In Velvet Hounds, Seu also delves into the difficulties of growing up the biracial, pansexual, wayfaring child of a deceased pastor and fundamentalist Christian writer mother. The book chronicles the effects of her mother's and her own wavering mental health and through that lens, the incoherent and dangerous labyrinth two people's psychosis can create when they collide. From impassioned, ecstatic, abstracted odes like G-Spot, strongroom, throne room of baritone ache & Clitoral Sinewed capsule / of holy spirit. My body, / the electric chair / berserk. To the clarity and searing vulnerability of narrative sequences like the long poem Ox Hunger Essay which chronicles different thresholds in the narrators struggle with death, betrayal, bulimia, and the isolation of identity I developed a habit of wringing / my stomach out in my throat. Never shying away from the erotic, visceral, nightmarish or any juiced-up phantasmagorical earthly heaven, Velvet Hounds is a thunderstorm you'll lose yourself inside.

The poems in Instructions between Takeoff and Landing take place in the middle of myriad journeys: tracking the twin Voyager satellites as they vanish into the unknown, reckoning with a troubling national history, looking back at life lived and forward to the life yet to come. Speakers meditate on the death of loved ones and their own mortality, relationships bent and broken, misleading histories at odds with personal stories, faith and doubt, a ubiquitous media culture, and their own origins and hoped-for destinations. Weaving deft transitions in tone from tender to bombastic, apologetic to brash, and humorous to elegiac, this collection asserts the ways in which even now, we strive to contain Whitmanic multitudes within the constantly shifting borders of self. Poems hover in the liminal space between traditional and innovative form, locating there a way to entice the reader to enter while pushing the boundaries of what poetry can do. Amid this collection's formal inventions, poems offer a sustained reading comprehension exam that both encapsulates and interrogates the speaker, the culture, and even the reader. In the context of a nation hinging on the axes of justice, freedom, self-expression, and tragedy, the voices in these poems reflect on how they both shape and are shaped by the invisible forces and inescapable influences that surround us.

When the speaker's Iranian grandmother who read fortunes passes away, she begins to understand that she's inherited her grandmother's gifts. Without an initiation to forecasting, the speaker is left to make sense of her history and her future through signs and experiences she can't explain. The poems excavate the past to make sense of loss and inheritance, of magic and fate. Teeming with foxes and birds, Malak translates what's seen and unseen, and what can be heard in the quiet.

The archaeology of the ancient American Indian Hopewell earthwork-builders of the Ohio Valley has intrigued scientists and the public alike for more than two hundred years. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, professional inquiry into the Hopewell phenomenon has accelerated. Contemporary researchers are approaching old questions with new methods and interpretive perspectives, state-of-the-art survey technologies, and novel analytical techniques. As a result, our understanding of the Hopewell world has significantly deepened. This two-volume set presents some of the most current research on Hopewell archaeology within the Ohio Valley and beyond.

Volume Two turns to the world of everyday settlements and domestic life at the Brown's Bottom locality in the Ohio Hopewell core area, as well as farther afield in northern Ohio and southern Michigan. New evidence is presented for long distance linkages between Hopewell centers in Ohio, Indiana, and Georgia. The relative importance of native cultigens in the economies of Ohio Hopewell communities is explored with new botanical and contextual data from recent research. The concluding chapter by Dr. Mark Seeman comments on the more seminal developments in Ohio Hopewell research since 2000 then turns an eye to the future.

There is a general consensus among the North American archaeologists specializing in the Middle Woodland period (ca 100B.C. to ca A.D. 400) that the Ohio Hopewell was a rather straight forward complex of small-scaled peer polity communities based on simple gardening and extensive foraging practices and occupying dispersed habitation locales loosely clustered around major earthworks. This book challenges this general consensus by presenting a radically alternative view. It argues that the Ohio Hopewell episode can be better and more coherently characterized by treating it as a complex social system based on dual and mutually autonomous social networks of clan alliances and world renewal cults, and that this dual clan-cult social system was, in fact, the culmination of such social systems that were widely dispersed across the Eastern Woodlands. The cults were devoted to treating their deceased members and/or dependants as sacrificial offerings to enhance the sacred powers of nature and the clans were devoted to transforming their deceased into ancestors and the stresses these opposing mortuary practices generated underwrote the dynamics of the Ohio Hopewell and brought about the monumental earthworks as sacred locales of world renewal cults.

Annah Browning's poetry collection Witch Doctrine is a gothic instruction manual for how to exist in a heartbreaking world. Through a series of spell poems and a cast of haunting personas--including a sentient house, a mentoring witch, and a housekeeping ghost--Browning leads the reader in dark and slyly humorous mediations on mortality, loss, feminist power, and survival: you'll take / another branch for the fire / and you will make it.

The idea for Pursuing John Brown began in Hudson, Ohio, where John Brown grew up and where Joyce Dyer has lived for forty years. In 2007, a chance occurrence started her off on the pursuit of her controversial neighbor, a quest that simultaneously pulled Dyer into his century, and John Brown into hers.

In this work of hybrid creative nonfiction, Dyer retraces John Brown's steps across the country, occasionally taking roads that lead to tangential sites. Along the way, intimate questions form about John Brown's personal life-his role as son, husband, father, friend. Her pursuit forces her to confront hard questions about slavery, race, violence, and American democracy and brings her closer to understanding John Brown, herself, and us.

A quarter century after Sigmund Freud ineffectually attempted to save psychoanalysis from being swallowed up by medicine by penning The Question of Lay Analysis, the task of achieving and broadening that goal fell on a small band of psychologists in New York. In the early 1950s, these psychologists found themselves up against what was then the nation's most powerful lobby - organized medicine - and having to annually beat back legislative attacks in Albany that would have handed physicians and psychiatrists control over psychotherapy.

Leading this band, formally known as the Joint Council of New York State Psychologists on Legislation, was Rollo May. Guided by his theories on anxiety that would later shape a new American existential psychology, May emerged as a leading voice against the making of man over in the image of the machine. He inspired his fellow pioneering psychologists to withstand the overwhelming power of organized medicine and see their profession through its frontier struggles. Further, in addition to defeating organized medicine's attempts to amend New York's Medical Practice Act, the Joint Council helped lay the legal framework for the humanistic psychology movement that emerged shortly after the enactment of a law regulating the psychology profession in the Empire State in 1956.

Frontier Struggles provides the first behind-the-scenes look at the political maneuvers, espionage, infighting, and inspirational fortitude that enabled New York's psychologists to open the door to the regulation of their profession in New York and beyond. From the alliances the psychologists forged with leading physicians and psychiatrists and even Freud's nephew, to the strategies the Joint Council deployed to sway legislators and the general public, Frontier Struggles follows the crisis that, in May's words, marked the change of psychology as a profession in this state from its adolescence to its manhood.