Wesleyan is pleased to announce we are releasing new editions of Ernest Hebert’s collection of novels known as the Darby Chronicles. The Chronicles include seven books that cover 35 years in the life of a small New England town as seen through the eyes of three families—the Elmans, the Salmons, and the Jordans—each representing a distinct social class. It all starts with The Dogs of March, cited for literary excellence in a first novel in 1980 by the Earnest Hemingway Foundation (now the PEN / Faulkner Foundation). “For more than a decade Ernest Hebert has been shaping with relatively scant fanfare one of the most interesting accomplishments of contemporary American fiction —a seven-volume cycle about Darby, a southern New Hampshire hill town, into which…

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“Through a wrenching psychoanalysis of the violence of aestheticization, Andrea Brady brings her intelligence and grief to the ways in which pastoral ethics implicate both drone attack and lyric poem. In a time of mediatized intimacy and shut borders, this work crucially undermines the authority of distances.”—Lisa Robertson, author of Nilling: Prose Essays “Word by affecting word, image by terrifying image, these powerfully harrowing poems tell the story of modern imperial warfare, hellish technologies of death, and unacknowledged faraway victims.”  —Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring how the physically intimate relationships between military drone operators and their victims are mediated, not only through the technological interfaces of…

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buy from HFS books buy from Bookshop.org On March 11, 2011 the most powerful earthquakes in Japan’s recorded history devastated the north east of Japan, triggering a massive tsunami with waves as high as 130 feet and traveled as far as six miles inland. As a result, three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex experienced level seven meltdowns. The triple disaster, known as 3.11, had 15,899 confirmed deaths with 3529 people still missing. On five separate journeys, Japanese-born performer and dancer Eiko Otake and historian and photographer William Johnston, visited multiple locations across the Fukushima prefecture. The powerful photographs, selected from tens of thousands that Otake and Johnston created, document the irradiated landscape and how Eiko placed her lone body in those…

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buy from HFS Books buy from Bookshop.org 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…

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On Wednesday, May 13 at 8PM ET ISSUE is celebrating American composer Alvin Lucier’s 90th birthday! This stream will span 30 hours and feature 90 artists. Join “I Am Sitting in a Room: Alvin Lucier’s 90th Birthday Celebration here.  Alvin Lucier is highly respected within the field of music for his innovative and creative ideas. As composer Steven Reich has noted, “Lucier’s work in live and taped electronic music has produced beautiful and influential results. I particularly admire ‘I am Sitting in a Room’ as a moving, personal taped speech piece, and ‘Music for Solo Performer’ as the first work with brain wave generated sounds.” Lucier’s written and edited works includes three books published by Wesleyan University Press. Chambers: Scores by Alvin Lucier is a…

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On May 8, we are celebrating Phillis Wheatley’s birthday. Phillis Wheatley was an African American poet who published books of poetry after being enslaved in America. The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a book of poetry which imagines the life of Wheatley. Jeffers is a poet who examines a variety of topics in her work. Karla Strand of Ms. magazine praises her work: “With her latest volume, award-winning poet Jeffers presents an arresting and meticulously researched collection of poems imagining the life of remarkable life and revolutionary work of Phillis Wheatley.” The Age of Phillis is published by Wesleyan University Press and is available here. 

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Wesleyan University Press is virtually celebrating what would have been Joseph Ceravolo 87th birthday! Ceravolo began writing poetry in 1957 while serving in the US Army in Germany. After earning a degree in civil engineering, Ceravolo studied poetry with Kenneth Koch at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Often associated with poets in the New York School such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, Ceravolo’s collections include Fits of Dawn (1965), Millennium Dust (1982), and The Green Lake is Awake (1994), among others. He was the first recipient of the Frank O’Hara Award. Ron Silliman notes that Ceravolo’s later work reveals him to be “one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.” To read Ceravolo’s work, we direct you to Collected Poems,…

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Celebrate Earth day with Wesleyan University Press’s EcoPoetic publications! Poets consider ecological and social collapse and our shared responsibilities in the contemporary moment. Collected from contributors including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene compiles terms—borrowed, invented, recast—that help configure or elaborate human engagement with place. Each entry is a work of art concerned with contemporary poetics and environmental justice backed with sound observation and scholarship. In Trophic Cascade, Camille 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, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, all the while…

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To continue the Poetry Month celebration, we would like to highlight two recently released anthologies! These works extend the boundaries of typical poetry pieces and we are pleased to honor them. Best American Experimental Writing 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 writers and artists culled from both established authors—including Anne Boyer and Alice Notley—as well as new and unexpected voices, like Kamden Hilliard
and Kanika Agrawal, BAX 2020 presents an expansive view of today’s experimental and high-energy writing practices. A perfect gift for discerning readers as well as an important classroom tool, Best American Experimental Writing 2020 is a vital addition…

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At Wesleyan we are always celebrating poetry. This poetry month we take time to reflect on some of the books that have come out over the past year. This has been a difficult, unusual year. It has been an awkward year for many who have published new books; a year full of doubts and unexpected challenges. Today we’re thinking about three poetry collections that deserve some special attention. Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems of Alfred Arteaga collects the poetry of a leading avant-garde Chicano 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…

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We are saddened to learn of the passing of Jo Miles Schuman, co-editor of A Spicing of Birds: Poems by Emily Dickinson. Here is a remembrance from Jo’s daughter, Elisabeth: “Jo Miles Schuman, passed away in the wee hours of Wednesday, March 17, 2021. Jo was most at home in the country, an avid bird watcher, dedicated gardener, and a passionate and perfection-driven artist. She filled our lives with stories of animals, the natural world, and the arts. She took as much pleasure in your interests and accomplishments as in her own, and always had many projects hopping at once. Whether she was cooking up a fish dinner, spending time on her beloved island, building another bookshelf, or working on a new print in her…

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April is Poetry Month! Celebrate by checking out some of WUP’s recently published collections. In Asked What Has Changed, Ed Roberson departs from the traditional nature poem, reclaiming a much older tradition and drawing into poetry’s orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems test how far the lyric can go as an answer to our crisis, even calling into question poetic form itself. Roberson was honored with a Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the 2016 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. In Magnified, Minnie Bruce Pratt writes a collection of love poems that draw us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. Even as she asks, “What’s the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to…

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We celebrate Women’s History Month by honoring amazing work by Camille Dungy, Hafizah Geter, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Honorée FFanonne Jeffers, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rae Armantrout, Evie Shockley, and Kerri Webster. View a sampling of poems here     The collection of love poems in Magnified 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…

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buy from HFS Books buy from Bookshop.org “Ed Roberson’s new collection, Asked What Has Changed, answers this question with the keen observations his poetry is known for, in a dancing syntax that, also characteristically, never fails to challenge and surprise.  The poems flutter through images at a dizzying pace and offer a cornucopia of subtle takes on the sonnet, adding a sturdy but flexible sonnet-stanza to our tradition’s stock of forms.  From his current vantage point, twelve stories above Lake Michigan and eight decades into an African American life, Roberson’s view encompasses what is, at once, the mark of his apartment’s “luxury” status and the “source of Chicago’s smelly tap water.”  Another breathtaking contribution to his inquiry into how black aesthetics can sharpen our understanding…

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Did you miss AWP 2020 due to the pandemic? Did you miss the virtual conference in 2021? Catch up on what you may have missed from our booth! Click on any of the images to order from HFSBooks.com. Use code QAWP21 to get 30% off all orders and receive free shipping (USA only) on orders of $50 or more. You can also check out our events here through April 2nd.

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