All Announcements

Happy National Dance Day!

by sbazarian • September 19, 2020

September 19th is National Dance Day. Celebrate by checking out some recent titles from Wesleyan University Press!

Our newest dance publication is The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976 by Wendy Perron. The book explores the legacy of The Grand Union, 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. The book delves into the “collective genius” of The 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.

Other titles are listed below. Check them out!

A Day with Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings at Mass MoCA

by mkolson • September 15, 2020

Wall Drawing 793B by Sol LeWitt

Wall Drawing 579 by Sol LeWitt

Wall Drawings 439 and 527 by Sol LeWitt

Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce that Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom has been named a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award in the nonfiction category. Check out Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom, available from HFSbooks.com.

In spring of 2019, Wesleyan University Press published the first ever LeWitt biography entitled Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom. Bloom’s biography of LeWitt draws on personal recollections of LeWitt, whom he knew in the last years of the artist’s life, as well as LeWitt’s letters and papers and over one hundred original interviews with his friends and colleagues, including Chuck Close, Ingrid Sischy, Philip Glass, Adrian Piper, Jan Dibbets, and Carl Andre. The absorbing chronicle brings new information to our understanding of this important artist, linking the extraordinary arc of his life to his iconic work. Plus, it includes 28 beautiful illustrations of the artist’s work. Pick up this title to read more about Sol LWwitt and his “ideas.”

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (commonly known as Mass MoCA) draws visitors both near and far to the city of North Adams in the Berkshire Hills. A mill town for much of its history, North Adams stands out for its industrial brick architecture all along the small but mighty Hoosic River. Mass MoCA’s campus finds its home in one of these old mill buildings—collections, exhibits, offices, event venues, and commercially rented space now occupy the converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex. The Sprague Electric Company occupied the building most recently, prior to Mass MoCA’s arrival.

Mass MoCA’s industrial roots shine during any visit. The space is immense and allows for large works—particularly sculpture and installation pieces—to be viewed in their incredible totality. Light shines from floor to ceiling windows that line all external walls. Bridges and ramps bring separate buildings together in a maze of levels. Situated in one of these buildings, occupying three floors, we find “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective.” The bright colors, precise lines and angles, and massive scale that define Sol LeWitt’s most famous pieces suit the space perfectly. See the pictures included at the end of this post for a look at some of the works featured in the exhibit!

Sol LeWitt came to fame in the 1960s for his wall drawings and structures, though he was accomplished with many other artistic forms too (including drawing, printmaking, photography, and artist’s books). While Mass MoCA’s LeWitt exhibit is focused mainly on wall drawings, it is organized chronologically, so if you work your way up from the first floor to the third, you will see how his work developed throughout his career. From subtle pencil drawings to complex colored illustrations, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings offer a great scope of the artist’s influence, theory, and practice. LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both Minimal and Conceptual art. His work is defined by three-dimensional qualities whether those are physical or representative. From his “structure” sculptures made from wood, metal, and cinder blocks, to his wall drawings of graphite, crayon, colored pencil, India ink, or and/or acrylic paint, LeWitt’s artwork masters the strategic, systematic organization of lines and shapes.

According to LeWitt’s artistic and conceptual principles, his wall drawings were not usually assembled by the artist personally. LeWitt sold the instructions and the rights to individual works, allowing for distinct teams to interpret and execute his plans. In 1971 LeWitt explained that “each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently”– his certificates of authenticity, along with his instructions (which vary in length, specificity, and use of text and design), LeWitt believed that art can have both a conceptual creator and a collective, experiential maker. His wall drawings are constructed on site and can be taken down, moved, or re-constructed at any time; in this way, LeWitt incorporates a transient dynamic directly into the physical forms taken on by his art.

Wall Drawing 289 by Sol Lewitt	Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at Mass MoCA	Wall Drawings 1247 and 1260 by Sol Lewitt
Wall Drawings 821, 852, and 853 by Sol LeWitt	Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas by Lary Bloom in the Mass MoCA Gift Shop	Wall Drawing 915 by Sol LeWitt

Announcing “Conjure”

by sbazarian • September 8, 2020

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“Independent, skeptical, laconic, and always lyrical, Rae Armantrout is a poet of wit and precision. … The rewards of her quicksilver verse are many: she helps, as William Blake once put it, to cleanse the doors of perception. You look anew at everyday things and delight in language’s myriad marvels and traps. You also laugh out loud.
–Brian Reed, Paris Review

“Unsettling, slippery intimations move just below the surface of Rae Armantrout’s enigmatic and unforgettable new collection of poems. For the record, Rae Armantrout is my favourite living poet.”
—Nick Cave

“How did the synthesis / cross the abyss?” A question each of us has been asking ever since we emerged from the tunnel of our mother, and one that poses itself more loudly as we near the next such channel. 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. One third of all adults seem bent on killing another third, while the remainder passively watches, hoping that nobody gets too extreme. These poems explore the restless border between self and non-self. One and another tussle and blur. As Armantrout writes in “Conjure,” “In a sentimental story // there is only one / of something // one newborn, one moment…” or one place for our attention to land, while in fact there are countless species dwindling to extinction. These poems ask us to look with new eyes at what we’ve done and continue to do.

RAE ARMANTROUT is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of fifteen books of poetry. She has published ten books with Wesleyan University Press, including Entanglements, Partly, and Versed. She lives in Everett, Washington.

Announcing “Un-American”

by sbazarian • September 8, 2020

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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 Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian-Muslim woman and a Black man born into a Southern Baptist family in the Jim Crow South and George Wallace’s Alabama, Geter charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships through poems complicated by migration, language, racism, queerness, loss, belief and lapsed faith, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Amidst considerations of family and country, Geter weaves in testimonies for Black victims of police brutality, songs of lament that hone each tragedy and like Antigone, demand we bear intimate witness to the ethical failings of the state. Through her mother’s death and her father’s illnesses, we witness Geter lace the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord in a collection rich with unflinching intimacy that, turning outward to face the country, examines how all of this is, like the speaker herself, stretched between the context of two nations. This collection that thrums with authenticity and heart.

“Hafizah Geter’s Un-American reads like a high lyric conversation overheard. Poem after poem, the most ordinary of items—cups, cards, couches—get ratcheted up into their proper glory. In other words, Geter sees the world as a stage set for what she needs to tell her family but can’t, what she needs to hear from her family but won’t. And all of this is done with attention to what this one beautiful story says about the so-called American story.”
—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

“Here is the history of this country in all its blood and complication, with all its promise and betrayal. These poems are an accounting, a testimony, a prayer—poems meant to quiet the animal inside us. A beautiful book.”
—Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You

“In Un-American, Hafizah Geter creates a new kind of portraiture. A family is slowly etched in relief in language both lush and exacting. This gorgeous debut troubles and reshapes notions of belonging against the backdrop of a country obsessed with its own exclusions, erasures, borders, institutions, and violence. Geter’s poems simmer original forms of witness and resistance.”
—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

HAFIZAH GETER, born in Zaria, Nigeria, is an author and editor whose poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Announcing “The Grand Union”

by sbazarian • September 8, 2020

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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—before they became known as pillars of postmodern dance. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes and dozens of interviews, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances in both physical and emotional terms. What were the elements of their uncanny synergy? To what extent did their performing selves reveal their real, everyday selves? During the period when artists of different disciplines were redefining art, the Grand Union contributed to this experimentation by questioning the conventions of concert dance. The book includes 65 photographs.

“I didn’t know how much I needed this book in my library until now. It is so alive, a beautifully researched book, giddily holding and challenging the myth. A band of dance anarchists that left no choreographic traces but changed almost everything that has been danced in contemporary dance since. One of these artists and one of my teachers, Barbara Dilley, calls Grand Union her ‘art mother.’ I call the writing and dance giants documented (and imagined) an art book triumph.” —Ralph Lemon, choreographer

“An articulate writer, Perron witnessed much of Grand Union’s history, and has spent fifty years thinking deeply about the issues it raises. Her book is a great gift to the dance field, and to cultural studies in general.”
—Elizabeth Zimmer, Guest Artist, Hollins University MFA Program in Dance

Wendy Perron is a former dancer/choreographer and current writer and teacher. A former editor-in-chief of Dance magazine, she is the author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings.

Announcing “A Forest of Names”

by gsanford • September 8, 2020

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“Ian’s poetry project about the student victims in Sichuan is an ambitious, long-time endeavor. His project demonstrates a deep understanding of the tragic event and the humanitarian loss in a society. The poetry often deals with the intuitive and compelling translations of simple Chinese characters that make up a Chinese name. When a child is born, the family, rich or poor, always bestows all the best wishes, hope, and imagination to this newborn baby through the act of naming. Our names are always carefully chosen, and they reflect the mentality within Chinese culture. The names are often poetically striking. Ian’s writing comes from his deep fascination for cross-cultural practices and profound understanding of Chinese history and literature.

I see this work as conceptual as can be. It is a beautiful and persistent effort of a poet’s heart and mind working together, dealing with our tragic reality.”
—Ai Weiwei, on A Forest of Names: 108 Meditations

A Forest of Names: 108 Meditations presents a never-before-seen form of poetic translation that is in turns a haunting indictment of political corruption, a healing tribute to people whose names have been erased, and a stunning meditation on how the roots of language suggest a new path forward. When an earthquake in China toppled schools, burying the children inside, the Chinese government brutally prevented parents from learning who died, how many, and why—and forbid revealing the names of the children. Following artist Ai Weiwei’s gathering of their names, at risk to his own safety, poet and artist Ian Boyden provides poetic meditations on them. His image-driven investigations of the etymologies of the names provide a new kind of translation, one that bridges the origins of language and what those origins grow to evoke. This haunting, heart-breaking, and ultimately triumphant book questions what it means to be human in an age where memory is too often treated as a crime, and what happens when language must become unforgettable.

Ian Boyden is a visual artist, translator, and writer. Consistent across his productions are an intense interest in material relevance, place-based thought, and ecology, with a deep awareness of East Asian aesthetics. He studied for several years in China and Japan, and ultimately received degrees in art history from Wesleyan University and Yale University. His work is interdisciplinary, and past collaborations have involved scientists, poets, composers, and visual artists.

___

June 4

Xiǎoyù

曉鈺

Daybreak Treasure

One jade dawn, instead of searching the horizon,
she walked the limitless shore of her own waking.

___

July 30

Tiānwēi

天威

Celestial Awe

He carried no iron into battle.
When he lifted his hand,
he brandished the sky.

This haunting, heart-breaking, and ultimately triumphant book questions what it means to be human in an age where memory is too often treated as a crime, and what happens when language must become unforgettable.

IAN BOYDEN is a and writer, translator, and visual artist. Consistent across his productions are an intense interest in material relevance, place-based thought, and ecology, with a deep awareness of East Asian aesthetics. He studied for several years in China and Japan, and ultimately received degrees in art history from Wesleyan University and Yale University. His work is often interdisciplinary, including collaborations that have involved a variety of scientists, poets, composers, and other artists.

Celebrating Barbara Guest’s 100th Birthday!

by icohen • September 6, 2020

Wesleyan University Press is virtually celebrating what would have been Barbara Guest’s 100^th birthday! Guest’s monumental career as a writer spanned over 60 years, during which she was deeply intertwined with poets of the New York School including Frank O’Hara and later on, with the Language poets. Over her life, she wrote extensively for Art News and published numerous poetry collections including Fair Realism (1989) and The location of things (1985). Throughout her life, Guest remained deeply fixated on the possibility of “invoking the unseen” through poetry. She took inspiration from Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler and New York School poet John Ashbery, both of whom blurred the lines between reality and imagination, and subject and object. In the introduction to The Collected Works of Barbara Guest, poet Peter Gizzi writes that Guest’s written works compel the reader to “reconsider modernist traditions” and “delimit” poetry temporally and spatially, allowing her words to spill off the page as if they have no concrete beginning nor end. In the end of her final book, The Fair Gaze, Guest quotes philosopher Theodor Adorno: “in each genuine art work something appears that did not exist before;” such words encapsulate Guest’s life-long project of pioneering a post-modernist poetic tradition that stands at the edge of the horizon, gesturing towards an imagined becoming.

To read Guest’s works and celebrate September 6^th, 2020 – what would have been her 100^th birthday – we direct you to The Collected Works of Barbara Guest, edited by her daughter, Hadley Haden Guest, and published by Wesleyan University Press in 2013.

For a preview of the book, see her poem “Passage” below (pp. 130):

_________________________________________

Passage

for John Coltrane

Words

after all

are syllables just

and you put them

in their place

notes

sounds

a painter using his stroke

so the spot

where the article

an umbrella

a knife

we could find

in its most intricate

hiding

slashed as it was with color

called “being”

or even “it”

Expressions

For the moment just

when the syllables

out of their webs float

We were just

beginning to hear

like a crane hoisted into

the fine thin air

that had a little ache (or soft crackle)

golden staffed edge of

quick Mercury

the scale runner

Envoi

C’est juste

your umbrella colorings

dense as telephone

voice

humming down the line

polyphonic

Red plumaged birds

not so natural

complicated wings

French!

Sweet difficult passages

on your throats

there just there

caterpillar edging

to moth

Midnight

in the chrome attic

_________________________________________

Happy 100th, Barbara!

Celebrating Lorenzo Thomas’ 76th Birthday!

by mkolson • August 31, 2020

On August 31st, 1944, 76 years ago today, beloved poet Lorenzo Thomas was born in the Republic of Panama. Thomas and his family moved to New York in 1948, where he grew up. After serving in Vietnam, Thomas went to Texas as a writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University in 1973. He stayed in Houston until his death in 2005, teaching as a professor at the University of Houston’s downtown campus. He gave back to the Houston community by teaching writing workshops at the Black Arts Center and by organizing the Juneteenth Blues Festival in Houston as well as in other Texan cities.

The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas edited by Aldon Nielsen and Laura Vrana

Thomas’ poetry is known for its deeply personal and political themes. Thomas was part of the Black Arts Movement in New York City and was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, which went on to become the Umbra workshop, whose other members included Ishmael Reed, Calvin Hernton, and Tom Dent (to whom the poem below is dedicated). Influenced by the work of Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire, Thomas identified with and was strongly influenced by African American and African culture.

His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator. His poetry reveals his great knowledge of surrealism, contemporary American popular culture, and cinema. Thomas’ work also highlights his empathy for underprivileged peoples and communities.

Today, we remember Lorenzo Thomas for the immense contributions he has made to the world of poetry and to the study of African-American literature. We share this poem in his remembrance. Between the musical lines of “Discovering American Again,” Thomas offers a meditation and critique of American history and morality that rings true today. With mentions of Black visionaries Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. Du Bois, Thomas highlights the difficulty that Black Americans have long faced in the struggle against white society for equal rights and fair treatment. He shows that this struggle isn’t a new one: “someone has walked this way before.” Native people have long been familiar with the “veneers… and… valences/ [that] could be false and/…distracting”; they know the demands of white propriety, how it calls for civility before freedom. In this poem, Lorenzo Thomas addresses the memory of the roles and roots of both Indigenous and African people in what we have become accustomed to calling America. Happy 76th Birthday, Lorenzo Thomas!

Camille Dungy and “Trophic Cascade” at the 2020 Democratic National Convention

by mkolson • August 20, 2020

Tuesday August 18th marked the second night of the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention. The daytime and pre-show schedule included many important caucus and council meetings. One meeting was held by the Council on the Environmental and Climate Crisis. Poet Camille Dungy was honored to be invited to read from her work during this event, alongside legislators, scholars, and climate experts. Dungy closed the program with her reading of “Characteristics of Life” from Trophic Cascade, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2017. Michelle Deatrick, Host and National Chair/Founder of the DNC Environment and Climate Crisis Council, was moved to tears by Dungy’s words. Read “Characteristics of Life” below and check out the rest of this year’s DNC schedule.

Camille Dungy reading from Trophic Cascade at the 2020 DNC

Trophic Cascade by Camille Dungy

Pick up your own copy of Trophic Cascade and experience the rest of the collection!

Wesleyan University Press’ Antiracist Reading Lists!

by mkolson • August 18, 2020

To celebrate the continuous struggle for freedom and equality in America, Wesleyan University Press has compiled a few antiracist reading lists in order to amplify BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices, experiences, and histories. Below are just a few of the fantastic titles Wesleyan University Press has published by BIPOC authors or about the Black historical legacy. Poetry, music and dance, autobiography, science fiction, historical novels, and more show the breadth of these lyrical, literary, and scholarly contributions. We are dedicated to supporting Black authors and stories, to listening and learning through publishing and reading. This moment is highlighting just how much work there is to be done in order to dismantle systemic racism in our country; these books help show us why that work is so important and how we can begin to integrate it into our daily lives and reading practices. Black lives matter!

To order books and view our full list of titles, please visit https://www.hfsbooks.com/publishers/wesleyan-university-press/ or click on the below cover images to visit a book page directly. And don’t forget to look out for Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times edited by Christina Baade and Kristin McGee– forthcoming in Spring 2021!

The following list includes poetry, science fiction, historical novels, and non-fiction.

A Hubert Harrison Reader

Five Black Lives

African American Connecticut Explored

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof

The Little Edges by Fred Moten	The Book of Landings by Mark McMorris	Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
Un-American by Hafizah Geter	The Lazarus Poems by Kamau Brathwaite	Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa
The Peacock Poems by Sherley Anne Williams	semiautomatic by Evie Shockley	In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
To See the Earth Before the End of the World by Ed Roberson	Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha by Ananya Chatterjea	Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers	Fela: Kalakuta Notes by John Collins	The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas
Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae by Michael E. Veal	Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle by Gina Athena Ulysse	Come home Charley Patton by Ralph Lemon
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by Tricia Rose	The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory by Anne Farrow	The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany
How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy	Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor	In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo