A lyrically and formally innovative exploration of desire and its cost

DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse's 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn't always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms--from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun--DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.

[sample text]

from Etymythology

I'm clocked by etymology,

by the way even stilettos take their name
from a knife. The way a knife, well-honed,
can strip anything to the bone. Bear

with me, sometimes even the myths grow
blurry in the distance. The root of Artemis,
goddess of the hunt, is still unknown,

but likely comes from artamos--butcher.
Let's call this a kind of etymythology,
post hoc history; let's call Artemis

the root. For her wild heart. Her failed
femininity. Goddess of gender-fucked
girls. Crooked prayer. The word worship

is shaped from two shards--meaning worth
& its giving. A mouth gives faith shape
like clay. I mean that to pray is to god

a God. To be butch & butcher
the myth of a son, was to make
a goddess of myself.

New edition of one of the founding works of Language writing

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language--the things people say and the ways they say them--shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream--and work--toward a more capacious we

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious we. How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

perched

i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.

under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.

if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.

--after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reminds us that the elegy is lament but also--as it has been for centuries--a work of love

Peter Gizzi has said that the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world. For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, a holding open. In Gizzi's voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also--as it has been for centuries--a work of love. This new poetry, Kamau Brathwaite has written about Gizzi, taking such care of temperature--the time & details of the world--meaning the space(s) in which we live--defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. A way of writing about hope.

[sample poem]

Creely Song
all that is lovely
in words, even
if gone to pieces
all that is lovely
gone, all of it
for love and
autobiography
as if I were
writing this
hello, listen
the plan is
the body and
all of it for love
now in pieces
all that is lovely
echoes still
in life & death
still memory
gardens open
onto windows
lovely, the charm
that mirrors
all that was, all
that is, lovely
in a song

Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called writing through).

John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant. He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now. -The American Record Guide

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away.

Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museum

This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets--or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this distance between the learning and the telling, Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to decide/who you must become.

[Sample Poem]

Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking Lot

I watch her crow. Not as a crow crows
but as herself. She's not here for the art.
She's here for the minivans that devour

diaper bags, car seats, children. She waits
for the doors to retract and expel fruit,
Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking.

She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps.
Like me, she won't appear human here.
While her legs bring her from one delicious

scrap to another, I work my own inventory.
Once my parents named me Swift Raven--
a real Indian Princess name.

I flew unblinded, my hair in a blue-black
braid down my back. Now, I'm ungainly,
more harpy than girl. My mouth, a curve

calling for carrion. I'm not here for the art.
I'm here for the mirrors, here to unpair
earrings and unclasp foil from gum. My beak

ready to unbind carapace from quiver.
Like Ggugguyni, I'm a scavenger
lurching from one disaster to another.

See how we curate cataclysms' aftermath.
While we work, Ggugguyni tells me a story.
Once, my grandfather said, a long time ago

there was a raven. He opened a door
and it was day. Then he drew his wing shut.
What Ggugguyni didn't say, but what I heard: once

he closed the door and it was night. Today
I'm telling you this story instead: my mouth
is a comma, my mouth is exclamation,

my mouth is my body holding open the door.
Witness my body create day. See how the light
appraises my collection. See how the sunlight
exposes how shadow bleached everything white.

Lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism

During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht's question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song's possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with each other, but what they might yet do together.

[Sample Poem]

from ARS POETICA 1: CORAL

To write poetry after Castle Bravo.
Then to write poetry after 1500 feet.
After high-quality steel frame buildings
not completely collapsed, except
all panels and roofs blown in.
After 2,000 feet.
After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed
or standing but badly damaged.
After 3,500 feet.
After church buildings completely destroyed.
After brick walls severely cracked.
After 4,400 feet.
After 5,300 feet.
After roof tiles bubbled and melted.
After 6,500 feet.
After mass distortion of large steel buildings.
To write the Cold War and doves.
The Cold War and tapeworms.
The Cold War and sails of ships.
The Cold War and the steel of bridges.
To write poetry after that.
To write in a world with few nutrients,
one that rocks back and forth.
The same beginning in both the sea and the land.
To write poetry that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton.
And then poetry that knows
the long, stinging tentacles capturing.
Knows the water.
The Atlantic and the Pacific.
The connections between.
The one moving into the other.
To develop poetry in the stomach
that then exits through the mouth
which is the anus.
To write poetry in the blue
that is the absence of green.
Light penetration.
Whorls of tentacles.
The slime earth too.
Hunters and farmers.
Shallow water.
Few nutrients.
High fecundity.
Rapid growth.
Multiarmed morphology and tube feet.
To write tube feet.
To write the exact place.
Seaward slope place.
Sea terrace place.
Algal ridge place.
Coral algal zone place.
Seaward reef flat place.
Islet or interisland reef crest place.
Lagoon reef flat place.
Lagoon terrace place.
Lagoon floor or basin place.
Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place.
To write poetry after.

The best single-volume anthology of science fiction available--includes online teacher's guide

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction features over a 150 years' worth of the best science fiction ever collected in a single volume. The fifty-two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher's guide at http: //sfanthology.site.wesleyan.edu/ accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting.

The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world's most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.

Keen, pithy meditations on a world that continues to surprise us

The poems in Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout's new book are concerned with this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world in a time of escalating disasters. From the bird who check-marks morning/once more//like someone who gets up/to make sure// the door is locked to bat-faced orchids, raising petals like light sails as if about to take flight, these poems make keen visual and psychological observations. The title Go Figure speaks to the book's focus on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible so that: We name things/ to know where we are. Moving with the deliberate precision that is a hallmark of Armantrout's work, they limn and refract, questioning how we make sense of the world, and ultimately showing how our experience of reality is exquisitely enfolded in words. It's true things fall apart. Armantrout writes. 'Still, by thinking/we heat ourselves up.

Sample Text

HYPER-VIGILANCE

Hilarious,

the way a crab's slender
eye-stalks
stand straight up

from its scuttling
carapace--

the way vigilance
takes many forms?

*

That bird check-marks morning
once more

like someone who gets up
to make sure

the door is locked.

*

I sound
like I know
what I'm talking about.

I sound like a comedian.

Interplanetary war, capture and escape, diplomatic intrigues that topple worlds.

In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of the happily reasonable man, Bron Helstrom -- an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he -- or she -- seems.

New poetry by the author of acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need faces the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth.

Idra Novey's first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days raising children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey's spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda.

Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we'd go under. Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our bit part in the history of the future.

[sample text]

The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek

We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it.

We tattooed with it.

We said Hallelujah, the poor man's tanning lotion.

Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die.

We got funny at Clarion, flung each other's underwear into the trees.

Why was it we got naked there like nowhere else?

Maybe we knew we were getting rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water.

Maybe we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we'd go under, get sucked to the bottom.

We'd sink and become creek bed; its deep mud would claim us, hold us hard and close.

A flowing collection of poetry that is also a guide for life.

Poems about birth, death, and ecosystems of nature and power

Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry (2018)

In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, Dungy writes positioned at a fulcrum, bringing a new life into the world even as her elders are passing on. In a time of massive environmental degradation, violence and abuse of power, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. Dwelling between vibrancy and its opposite, Dungy writes in a single poem about a mother, a daughter, Smokin' Joe Frazier, brittle stars, giant boulders, and a dead blue whale. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope. A readers companion will be availabe at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

How the counterculture movement changed Vermont--and America

Going Up the Country is part oral history, part nostalgia-tinged narrative, and part clear-eyed analysis of the multifaceted phenomena collectively referred to as the counterculture movement in Vermont. This is the story of how young migrants, largely from the cities and suburbs of New York and Massachusetts, turned their backs on the establishment of the 1950s and moved to the backwoods of rural Vermont, spawning a revolution in lifestyle, politics, sexuality, and business practices that would have a profound impact on both the state and the nation. The movement brought hippies, back-to-the-landers, political radicals, sexual libertines, and utopians to a previously conservative state and led us to today's farm to table way of life, environmental consciousness, and progressive politics as championed by Bernie Sanders.

An award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam.

Examines John Coltrane's late period and Miles Davis's Lost Quintet through the prisms of digital architecture and experimental photography

Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital fuses biography and style history in order to illuminate the music of two jazz icons, while drawing on the discourses of photography and digital architecture to fashion musical insights that may not be available through the traditional language of jazz analysis. The book follows the controversial trajectories of two jazz legends, emerging from the 1959 album Kind of Blue. Coltrane's odyssey through what became known as free jazz brought stylistic (r)evolution and chaos in equal measure. Davis's spearheading of jazz-rock fusion opened a door through which jazz's ongoing dialogue with the popular tradition could be regenerated, engaging both high and low ideas of creativity, community, and commerce. Includes 42 illustrations.

Anthology of new work honoring the legacy of a celebrated African American poet

This carefully and generously curated mosaic of essays, letters, and poems reveals the profound impact that poet Yusef Komunyakaa has had on poets, educators, and readers worldwide. The anthology brings together creative and critical offerings from fellow poets, former students, literary entities, and other admirers. There are emerging and established voices--from previously unpublished writers to Pulitzer Prize winning poets. Together these pieces honor one of the most influential writers of the last half century, one, it turns out, who is as beloved for his teaching as he is celebrated for his creative work. Contributors include Terrance Hayes, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forché, Toi Derricotte, and Martín Espada, among others. Dear Yusef affirms Komunyakaa's transformative influence, showcasing how his mentoring has ignited creativity, nurtured passion, and fostered a sense of belonging among countless individuals. Through the artistry of these testimonials, we witness the transformative power of poetry and the enduring legacy of a true literary icon.

Please note that the hardcover edition is unjacketed.

Sample Poem:

from Reading Yusef, by Major Jackson

Over powdered beignets,
over a demitasse of chicory
near Royal, I came to grips I am the lonely sort
for I am ever seeking potions,
my head sideways, a book winged
in my hand, its words from the chitlin circuit,
fried dough going cold and congealing,
passing tourists drowned out,
a sullen look on my face. It is when I most
want to make love.

Dostoevsky was a way out of my confusion,
as was Baraka whom I gave my reverence freely.

Nothing I believed stayed, and thus, my melancholy
deepened though banjos and clarinets played
the streets through late afternoon rain, maybe
Black Bottom Stomp, eucalyptus and live oaks
aging against arpeggio-runs.

from The Forty-Fourth Poem, by Jennifer Grotz
The first student in my correspondence course who completed the final lesson on Dien Cai Dau was, like many students in that course, incarcerated in the Indiana State Penitentiary. In his essay, he wrote that Dien Cai Dau was the first book of poems he'd ever read. He'd been so taken with the experience that he'd proceeded to read poems from it aloud to his fellow inmates, after which they'd exchanged stories about being in the military, about Vietnam. He wrote about what it was like to witness violence. About what it was like to be numb, or to want to be numbHe also wrote about appreciating beauty, especially natural beauty, and of an awareness of gratitude for some grace that had nonetheless kept him alive, about how the poems still gave him hope. Dien Cai Dau had had a profound effect on him.

from Dear Yusef, by Emily Jungmin Yoon
The framework of your class was always care. Because you cared for us, we cared for one another. From then on, my poetry was always about love, even when it spoke through ugly histories, because I wanted to love the people in those narratives.

A multivoiced dance history book, authored by twelve diverse choreographers

In an effort to deepen our understanding of what dance is and how it has functioned throughout human history, this prismatic book project is dedicated to an artist-centric perception of dance history. This book interrogates the history of dance from the subjective, poetic perspective of a choreographer. Diverse dance artists from the American dance field contribute prismatic, disruptive perspectives on how dance has unfolded over time and what dance history is. They reimagine the question: What is dance history? Twelve illustrated booklets, each written by a working choreographer, address the subject of dance history from nonacademic, subjective, poetic perspectives. The books model a way of enlarging and complicating how we view dance history by giving the authorial microphone to artists, to learn how their embodied perceptions relate to or diverge from the dominant dance canon. With contributions by mayfield brooks, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne. Published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press. Produced by Big Dance Theater with the generous support of The Howard Gilman Foundation, The Starry Night Fund, Big Dance Theater's Board Designated Fund, Virginia and Timothy Millhiser, and King's Fountain., reviewing a previous volume