New Books

Announcing “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light”

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Unique perspectives on the roots and reaches of contemporary Native Theater

“This play clearly illuminates the collective grief, disconnection, and suffering many indigenous people experience because of the brutalities of colonization. But more importantly, Joy’s voice gives us strength, by reconnecting us to our ancestors, to our guardian spirits, and to each other.”
— Victoria Nalani Kneuhbuhl, Pacific Island author and playwright

 

Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page will be at Yale University March 5th, 4PM. 

Joy Harjo’s play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is the centerpiece of this stunning collection that is also comprised of essays and interviews detailing the roots and the reaches of contemporary Native Theater. Harjo blends storytelling, music, movement, and poetic language in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. The collection is accompanied by interviews with Native theater artists Rolland Meinholtz and Randy Reinholz, and it includes essays on Harjo’s work by Mary Kathryn Nagle (an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee nation, playwright, and attorney) and by Priscilla Page (of Wiyot heritage, a writer, performer, and educator), who looks at indigenous feminism, jazz, and performance as influences on Harjo’s theatrical work.

Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of poetry, which include such well-known titles as Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, In Mad Love and War, and She Had Some Horses. These titles and her memoir Crazy Brave have garnered many awards. Priscilla Page is a writer and dramaturg as well as a senior lecturer in the department of theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

March 5, 2019
136 pp., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $40.00 978-0-8195-7865-5
Paper, $15.95 978-0-8195-7866-2

Announcing “Oxota”

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Experimental Poetic Fiction Modeled on Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin

“It is a deep pleasure to reopen this book, a book of estrangement, of fragmentation, of scattered light and scattered speech, of bridges of sense cast over waters of foreignness. Oxota records a trusting encounter between two poetries across cultural difference unimaginable today.” —Eugene Ostashevsky, editor of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment

 

Between 1983 and 1991 author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, often staying with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. She decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow, and cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically “long,” she determined that hers would be “short.” The result is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas). Oxota (which means variously “huntress,” “hunt,” and “desire” in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground.

LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, teacher and translator. She is John F. Hotchkis professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley

March 5, 2019
292 pp. 6 x 8″
Paperback, $18.95 978-0-8195-7876-1

Announcing Anna Halprin’s “Making Dances that Matter”

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Dance innovator shares wisdom and scores 

 

“Anna Halprin is a pioneer of postmodern dance, a warrior for connecting arts to social issues, and a healer of individuals and communities.”
–Wendy Perron, author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer

In Making Dances that Matter, Halprin presents her philosophy and experience as well as step-by-step processes for bringing people together to create dances that foster individual and group well-being. At the heart of this book are accounts of two dances: the Planetary Dance, which continues to be performed throughout the world, and Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line. Halprin shows how dance can be a powerful tool for healing, learning and mobilizing change.

Anna Halprin, an avante-garde postmodern dancer turned community artist and healer, has created groundbreaking dances with communities all over the world. She also founded the groundbreaking San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop as well as the Tamalpa Institute, and is the author of several books including Moving Toward Life which was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1995.

February 5, 2019
232 pp., 7 x 10″
Paper, $27.95 978-0-8195-7565-4
Unjacketed Cloth, $85.00 978-0-8195-7844-0
Ebook, $22.95 978-0-8195-7566-1

Announcing “The Work-Shy” now available in paperback!

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Wesleyan is pleased to announce that BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP’s The Work-Shy is now available in paperback!

Activating what poet Susan Howe calls “the telepathy of the archive,” these poems of The Work-Shy occupy identities rooted in the demimonde and in places of confinement; they build portraits of individuals at once denied work and subjected to its punishing routine. As “translations” of apparently unredeemable texts, the poems convert the dubious paradigms of delinquency, degeneracy, and madness into a mutable archive of infidel culture. Published under the collective, anonymous signature of the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, the archival work of “atavistic clairvoyance” retains the proper name of every voice it hears. By converting the procedures of appropriation and sampling into a poetics of close listening, The Work-Shy operates at the crossroads of lyric and documentary poetries, of singularity and collectivism. An online readers companion is available at bluntresearchgroup.site.wesleyan.edu and a book trailer can be found below:

BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP is a nameless constellation of poets, artists, and scholars from diverse backgrounds.  Drawing on examples of anonymous collectives in the arts, BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP presumes that the forging of individual voices in poetry is collaborative by nature, and it challenges the convention of the single author by using a collective signature. Work by BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP has been published by Noemi Press and appeared in museums across the country.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Praise for The Work-Shy:

Selected by Yale Review as one of the “best first books” of 2016.

“Herein are the voices of children sacrificed to the barbaric dogmas of eugenics and conformity; an archaeology of inhumanity that should haunt us forever.”—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

“A stunning collection of poems…The Work-Shy exemplifies some of the most important work poetry can do—to create the space to notice those who have been disparaged, muted, and trapped.”—Emma Schneider, Full Stop

“The language of The Work-Shy cuts straight through, as sharp and alive as the eyes that peer out from its photographs.”—Carmen Gimenez-Smith, author of Milk and Filth

“The Work-Shy tears out pages from the bleak archives of California’s founding to reveal the hidden schematic—an exploded view—of white supremacy’s moving parts…a sonic tour de force.”—Henk Rossouw, Boston Review

“What is new in The Work-Shy is its authors’ articulation of a poetics of listening. Whether it is possible for texts to listen, what even precisely it would mean, is rightly left unresolved.”—Eli Mandel, MAKE Magazine

“The Work Shy documents moments in time that resonate with us still, as each breathes up through history like an iron shackle around the leg. A heartbreaking and necessary read.”—Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Life in a Box is a Pretty Life

October 2, 2018
160 pp.,7 x 9”
Paper, $14.95 978-0-8195-7861-7
Jacketed Hardcover, $24.95 978-0-8195-7678-1
Ebook $18.99 978-0-8195-7679-8

Announcing “How to Dress a Fish”

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A vision of identity at the intersection of language, history, and family

“This essential and captivating debut will draw readers into intersections of history, memory, exile, and return. Abigail Chabitnoy’s poems are tender and direct—they restore worlds, mend fragmented histories by revealing our human longing for land and for memories embraced in language.”
—Sherwin Bitsui, author of Shapeshift

 

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent, addresses the lives disrupted by the Indian boarding school policy of the US government. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great-grandfather, who was taken from Alaska to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy finds that reconnection through blood and paper does not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

Abigail Chabitnoy is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat. Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City.

December 11, 2018
152 pp., 6 x 9”
Paper, $14.95 978-0-8195-7849-5
Unjacketed Cloth, $30.00 978-0-8195-7848-8

Announcing “Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America”

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Revisioning Indigenous musicology

“This volume provides an exciting collection of diverse, multigenerational Indigenous and settler perspectives on Indigenous musical modernities. Case studies considering multiple topics and genres are thoughtfully interwoven to provide models for continuing the much-needed work of decolonizing Native North American ethnomusicology.”
— Charlotte Frisbie, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

 

Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States explore topics that range from powwow, Native Classical, and hip-hop to television soundtracks and experimental music in Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America. Working from the premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music.

Contributors: 
Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk
Victoria Lindsay Levine
Gordon E. Smith
Anna Hoefnagels
Christina Leza
Elyse Carter Vosen
T. Christopher Aplin
John-Carlos Perea
Byron Dueck
Jessica Bissett Perea
Dawn Avery
Dylan Robinson
Beverley Diamond
Trevor Reed

About the Editors
Victoria Lindsay Levine is professor of music at Colorado College and is the author of Writing American Indian Music, coauthor of Choctaw Music and Dance, and co-editor of This Thing Called Music. Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō) is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University and is the co-editor of Opera Indigene and Arts of Engagement.

February 5, 2019
360 pp.  6 x 9”
Paper $26.95, 978-0-8195-7863-1
Unjacketed Cloth $85.00, 978-0-8195-7862-4

More Than Just A Dance

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The excitement surrounding Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (a MoMA exhibit running through Feb. 3, 2019) brings to mind some phenomenal Wesleyan books—new and old—that feature artists who are in the exhibit.

Trisha Brown, one of the founders of the Judson Theater, was an American choreographer and dancer who helped birth the postmodern dance movement. Brown, amongst other artists, challenged traditional understandings of choreography by employing new compositional methods that stripped dance of its theatrical conventions and instead implemented everyday gestures from domestic and urban spaces. Brown has created over one hundred dances, six operas, one ballet, and a significant body of graphic works.

In Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art, art historian Susan Rosenberg emphasizes how boundary-defying Brown’s work really was through personalized interviews with Brown and colleagues whom she has eternally inspired. By outlining the formation of Brown’s artistic principles and utilizing her archives, Rosenberg eloquently demonstrates why the late choreographer was the first woman choreographer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius Award”.

 

Anna Halprin is a legendary pioneer for postmodern dance as well. She taught and led workshops and classes at the Judson Dance Theater. In fact, Trisha Brown was one of her students. In her forthcoming book Making Dances that Matter: Resources for Community Creativity, Halprin demonstrates how dance can be a powerful tool for healing, learning, and mobilizing change.

She gives insight into her personal philosophy and past experiences as well as step-by-step processes to create unifying dances such as the “The Planetary Dance” and “Circle the Earth.” These two dances continue to be performed around the world.

 

Deborah Hay is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and teacher working in the field of postmodern dance and one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater. Her work focuses on large-scale dance projects involving untrained dancers, fragmented and choreographed music accompaniment, and the execution of ordinary movement patterns performed under stressful conditions. She is the artistic director of the Deborah Hay Dance Company, based in Austin, Texas.

My Body, The Buddhist is a guide into Hay’s choreographic techniques, a gloss on her philosophy of the body (which shares much with Buddhism), and an extraordinary artist’s primer. The book is composed of nineteen short chapters each an example of what Susan Foster calls Hay’s “daily attentiveness to the body’s articulateness.”

We are pleased to announce that Wesleyan is re-issuing Using the Sky, A Dance, by Deborah Hay, in fall 2019.

 

Sally Banes

Sally Banes is a remarkable dance critic, historian, and writer. Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Bane’s Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements.

 

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer and music theorist. He became notorious for indeterminacy in music and non-standard use of musical instruments as well as for being one of the leading figures during the post-war avant-garde.

Silence, by John Cage

Selected Letters of John Cage, edited by Laura Kuhn

John Cage Was, photographs of James Klosty
with comments by a variety of artists and performers.

Wesleyan has published a variety of books by Cage.

 

 

Announcing “Country Acres and Cul-de-Sacs”

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Classic magazine captures New England state on the brink of transformation

In Country Acres and Cul-de-Sacs, Jay Gitlin revisits Connecticut’s dramatic mid-twentieth century changes, through the pages of Connecticut Circle magazine.

In 1938, the first year of its publication, Connecticut Circle magazine covered the opening of the Merritt Parkway in June, a devastating hurricane in September, and a transformative election in November that saw Raymond Baldwin replace Governor Wilbur Cross on the brink of WWII. Covering the news, recreation, literary figures, and politicians, and above all—the achievements and products of the state, Connecticut Circle entertained, promoted, and projected the image of a bustling state with more than its share of creative citizens and renowned institutions of higher learning.

Connecticut Circle cover

With an illuminating introduction and context-setting headnotes for its thirteen sections, this volume provides a wealth of fascinating articles for anyone seeking to reminisce, and understand the values that pushed Connecticut into the postwar world.

Jay Gitlin teaches history at Yale University. He is the author of The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion and co-author of Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. He lives in North Branford, Connecticut.

December 3, 2018
328 pp., 9 x 12”
Paperback, $29.95 978-0-999-7935-0-3

Announcing “Connecticut Architecture” from The Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

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The first comprehensive illustrated history of Connecticut architecture

“This is an exceptionally thoughtful and provocative book, one that offers insights into art and life that are often forgotten in aesthetics. A great book for anyone.”
—Duo Dickinson, author of A Home Called New England

Connecticut boasts some of the oldest and most distinctive architecture in New England, from Colonial churches and Modernist houses to refurbished nineteenth-century factories. In his guide to this rich and diverse architectural heritage, Connecticut Architecture: Stories of 100 Places Christopher Wigren introduces readers to 100 places across the state. Written for travelers and residents alike, the book features more than 200 illustrations and a glossary of architectural terms.

A project of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, the book reflects more than 30 years of fieldwork and research in statewide architectural survey and National Register of Historic Places programs.

Christopher Wigren is an architectural historian and Deputy Director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation.

The Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation was established in 1975 to protect and promote buildings, sites, structures, and landscapes that contribute to the heritage and vitality of Connecticut communities.

 

Publication of this book is funded by the
Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation.

 

November

296 pp., 211 illus. (171 color photos, 17 pierces of line art, 1 map) 9 x 10”

Cloth, $40.00

978-0-8195-7813-6

 

eBook, $32.99

978-0-8195-7814-3

Debut Collection Recalls Lasting Impact of Carlisle Indian School

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In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael’s boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies—while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices—the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY is a poet of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She received her MFA at Colorado State University, where she was an associate editor for Colorado Review. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City.

“Never before have readers been of a mind to apprehend such prodigious poems. Determined by the wealth and control of their poet’s language and the most profound respect for the powers of history, this work insists upon the necessity of poetry. Poems like these change the world, connecting us to each other and all else that sustains life. Herein, the lyric bones are barbed and all the crafts, laden. Not in division, but through the responsibility and gifts of this most crucial poet: Abigail Chabitnoy. With her poems, together we may, as real people, spring from and return to the islands, the sea, and the ice with utmost elegance. Traveling together, and most attentive to our context.” – Joan Naviyuk Kane, 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry

“How to Dress a Fish is a stunning investigation of archive, loss, and kinship. These poems linger in histories erased by US colonialism—not toward recovery, but to study those modalities of mourning, attachment, and invention through which living proceeds nonetheless.” – Matt Hooley, assistant professor of English, Clemson University