New Books

Gerald Vizenor continues his WWI saga with “Native Tributes”

Historical novel about Native American veterans who march in the post-WWI Bonus Army during the Great Depression

In Native Tributes, sequel to the critically acclaimed Blue Ravensauthor and scholar Gerald Vizenor tells the story of restless Native American veterans of WWI and their fight to reclaim their rights during the Great Depression.

In the summer of 1932 brothers  Basile and Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu travel from the White Earth Reservation, MN, to Washington, DC, to protest with the Bonus Army–a group comprised of thousands of military veterans demanding the bonus pay they’d been promised for WWI service.

General Douglas MacArthur brutally forces the veterans from the National Mall, and the Beaulieu brothers move to an encampment of needy veterans in “Hard Luck Town” on New York City’s East River. They meet other veterans who refuse to be defeated by the sorrow of the times.

In New York City, the brothers also visit the Biblo and Tanner Booksellers, a gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz, the Modicut Puppet Theatre, and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Aloysius, the painter of Blue Ravens, finds inspiration in the Modernist work of Arthur Dove, Chaïm Soutine, Marc Chagall, and others.

Native Tributes is a journey of liberty that escapes the enticement of nostalgia and victimry, and reveals life in its barest form.

Gerald Vizenor is the author of more than thirty books of nonfiction, literary criticism, fiction, and poetry, such as Blue Ravens, Treaty Shirts, and Favor of Crows. He attended college on the GI Bill after serving in the United States Army for three years, mostly in Japan, and studied at New York University and the University of Minnesota. Vizenor is a citizen of the White Earth Nation.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s preface to “Counter-Desecration”

Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and the late Marthe Reed, is a work of collaborative eco-activism and a call to action for readers and writers.

 

Contributors (including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, Hoa Nguyen, Jennifer Scappettone, Cheryl Savageau, Rusty Morrison, Bhanu Kapil, Christopher Cokinos, etc.) call on humanity to end this era of environmental and spiritual destruction, beginning with this clear and provoking preface by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

This glossary delivers terminological impression of shifts in language and in consciousness fostered to address the perilous state of today. Continually fed now since Euro-invasion, intentional attempts at extinction/slaughter of the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous peoples (estimates say that 75 to more than 100 million people rapidly perished at the hands of the Euro-invader and his diseases) undoubtedly spurred the initial methane surge of the Anthropocene. This is, immediate and dire, an enduring era of environmental injustice, survivance under unequal protection from colonial, imperial resourcing, with political sabotage by collective lessening of efforts to combat climate change. Now, in the Sixth Extinction epoch segment, we strive to locate lingual succinctness in attending to the multitudinous expression with participatory means to discern and disseminate information necessary to better the state of the world for all peoples and all lives dependent on our shared planet. Moreover, we strive to employ as vernacular this nomenclature and vocabulary in idiolect of intentional lexicon while gathering activist effort for gross intervention, reclamation, renewal, revivance, and restoration, by whatever means necessary to keep this world inhabitable and whole beyond what damage has already diminished its complete viability.

In imagining a book that would clarify the new ways that we respond to the call our earth, her oceans, and the surrounding atmosphere surely sing, Counter-Desecration brings sustenance and power with terms made in collective remedying. From dysoptics to echolocution, reciproesis to terrotic, the countenance of communication encounters the need of a global population on its mettle. Torpor (the rest state required of an activist) and vivitocracy (a social mind-set built on the idea that all life deserves equally to exist) bring a sense that our collective strength and support of the planet might still replenish and recover her ability to continue, and thus we along with her, or at least give a sense of the hope for future life here. This book allows us fortitude and wisdom to secure what means we might to continue to cherish and to equip us to protect our planet with concise and meritorious language and action: a generous undertaking for which I am exceptionally grateful and believe indispensable for writers, speakers, readers, and researchers working for vital cause and solution.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory

The Sentient Archive summons a feast of diverse voices, giving each the space to speak without forcing them into a single chorus. Instead, the book works like a landscape where these voices and their shimmering echoes intersect, inviting us in to join the unfinished, disappearing dance of movement and memory, of the sentient body and its archival impulse, its fragile yet insistent resistance to the slippage of time. Collectively, these voices testify to the whispers and the wild feelings in our bones that can hardly be put into words, but bear our social flesh forward.” —Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body

The Sentient Archive gathers 28 smart essays by scholars and practitioners in dance, performance, science, and the visual arts. These challenging essays cross boundaries within and between disciplines while exploring the ways the human body serves as a repository for knowledge.

Contributors include Tomie Hahn, Nancy Goldner, Marcia B. Siegel, Jenn Joy, Alain Platel, Catherine J. Stevens, Meg Stuart, André Lepecki, Ralph Lemon, and other notable performers, scholars, and artists.

Bill Bissell is the director of performance at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Linda Caruso Haviland is an associate professor at Bryn Mawr College and the founder and director of its dance program.

Development of the content of The Sentient Archive was supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center fulfills this mission by investing in ambitious, imaginative arts and heritage projects that showcase the region’s cultural vitality and enhance public life, and by engaging in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural leaders. For more information, visit www.pcah.us.

 

Keeping up with Samuel Delany, finalist for a Locus Award & honored by CHOICE

Samuel Delany’s In Search of Silence,The Journals of Samuel R. Delany, 1957–1969 was recently honored by Choice as a 2017 Outstanding Academic Titles

Choice presents this title to award “outstanding works for their excellence in presentation and scholarship, the significance of their contribution to the field, their originality and value as an essential treatment of their subject, and significance in building undergraduate collections.”

In Search of Silence was also selected as a finalist for the 2018 Locus Award for Non-Fiction. Winners will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle, WA June 22-24, 2018 according to Locus Magazine.

For more by Samuel Delany, check out his newest title, The Atheist in the Attic in the Outspoken Authors series from PM Press. The book is a “suspenseful and vivid historical narrative, recreating the top-secret meeting between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza caught between the horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant ‘big bang’ of the Enlightenment.” (from publisher) You will also find more Delany coming from Wesleyan in the Spring of 2019, a collection of never before published letters from between 1988–1991: Letters from Amherst. The book will collect five letters written to close friends, covering such topics as the San Francisco arts community, writing practices and story development, and his family history.

Wesleyan UP acquires Paris Press

Bookshelf

View a list of Paris Press books now available through Wesleyan. 

Paris Press and Wesleyan University Press are pleased to announce Wesleyan’s acquisition of Paris Press. As of May 1, all Paris Press books will be available through Wesleyan University Press and its distributor, University Press of New England. “For years, readers have delighted in the books published by Paris Press. What an opportunity, to bring on board books by such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Bryher, and Muriel Rukeyser,” says Wesleyan University Press director Suzanna Tamminen. “Now these books and those of so many other extraordinary women writers will have a long and vital life with Wesleyan University Press. We look forward to working with each of these beautiful, courageous, and daring books and to ensuring that they continue to inspire readers.”

Jan Freeman, founding director of Paris Press, comments, “I am thrilled and deeply honored that Paris Press authors and books will be part of Wesleyan University Press, a press with a great literary history, a press that I have admired for decades. This is a dream come true. Director Suzanna Tamminen will provide a welcoming home for the Paris Press list, which will forever reflect what is essential in literature. It has been a privilege to usher each Paris Press book into the world. I hope that Wesleyan will bring new audiences to these groundbreaking books and that the Paris Press family of readers, educators, and writers will continue to enthusiastically support the Paris Press at its new home.”

Paris Press (1995–2018) was founded with the mission of publishing groundbreaking yet overlooked literature by women and educating the public about its books and authors. Its titles encompass many genres including essays, poetry, fiction, memoir, letters, drama, and creative nonfiction. Their common attribute is their daring—in style and in the courage to speak truthfully about society, culture, history, and the heart. Paris Press authors include Muriel Rukeyser, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Bryher, Ruth Stone, Zdena Berger, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Wesleyan University Press, based at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, was established in 1957 and focuses on poetry, literature, music, and dance. The press’s internationally renowned poetry series has the distinction of having earned five Pulitzer Prizes, two Griffin Awards, and two National Book Awards. The press’s list reflects the university’s commitment to boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.

Contact: Stephanie Prieto, Publicist, Wesleyan University Press  selliott@wesleyan.edu phone: 860.685.7723

Jan Freeman, Founding Director, Paris Press   jbf227@gmail.com  phone: 413.374.1799

Poetry @ LA Times Festival & Split This Rock

Wesleyan University Press is pleased to have authors participating in events at both Split This Rock Poetry Festival and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Camille T. Dungy and Kazim Ali are among the featured readers at Split This Rock, April 19–21

From the festival organizers:

Not only does poetry equip us to speak out against oppression but it helps to sustain us in these extremely perilous times. It reminds us of what it means to be fully human, holds the vision of what is possible, creates community, keeps alive what we value: compassion, justice, love. Poetry helps us find our voice when we feel powerless. It helps us be our best selves, so we can continue the long-term activism our current climate demands.

As we selected sessions for the 2018 festival, we were particularly interested in sessions designed to help us combat despair (or ride through it), learn from one another across generations, celebrate cultures targeted by hate, figure out what it means to live in this time, and equip us all as creative and effective citizens and activists.
Continue Reading Here….

Thursday, April 19 | 7-8:30 PM
Camille T. Dungy, Sharon Olds, Javier Zamora

Saturday, April 21 | 4:15-5:45 PM
Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Terisa Siagatonu

In addition, Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists Evie Shockley and Shane McCrae
will participate in this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 21–22

Shane McCrae

Saturday, April 21 • 11:20am—11:40am
Shane McCrae reading from “In the Language of my Captor”
More info here…

Saturday, April 21 • 2:00pm–3:00pm
Poetry: Trauma and the Problem of Beauty, Conversation 1043
Moderated by David Baker
Speakers include Alessandra Lynch, Shane McCrae, Carol Muske-Dukes, and Patricia Smith
More info here…

Evie Shockley

Saturday, April 21 • 11:00am–12:00pm
Poetry: Self, Cultural Narratives, and Form, Conversation 1041
Moderated by Cyrus Cassells
Speakers include Mary Jo Bang, Christopher Merrill, Evie Shockley, David St. John
More info here…

Saturday, April 21 • 2:40pm–3:00pm
Evie Shockley reading from “semiautomatic”
More info here…

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to NBA Finalist, Shane McCrae!

Wesleyan University Press’s In the Language of My Captor, by Shane McCrae, shortlisted for the National Book Award.

Judges for the 2017 National Book Award in the category of Poetry have selected Wesleyan University Press title In the Language of My Captor as one of five finalists. The judges are esteemed poets Nick Flynn, Jane Mead, Gregory Pardlo, Richard Siken, and Monica Youn.

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book’s three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love.

Critic Valerie Duff-Strautmann described In the Language of My Captor as reminiscent of the great Romanian poet, Paul Celan. And a review in Publisher’s Weekly noted that McCrae’s “raw honesty…refuses to shy away from the effects of oppression and faces up to those not willing to acknowledge their part in a history many want to forget.”

Past Wesleyan titles honored with the National Book Award for Poetry

Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain, 2004
Charles Wright’s Country Music: Selected Early Poems, 1983.
James Dickey’s Buckdancer’s Choice: Poems, 1966

In 2016, Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics was a finalist for the Poetry award. Rae Armantrout’s Versed, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critic’s Circle Award, was a finalist in 2009. And in 1973, The Glorious Revolution in America, by David S. Lovejoy, was a finalist in the History category. ­­­

Announcing “The Lazarus Poems” from Kamau Brathwaite

The Lazarus Poems, by renowned Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange. The book is a mystical masterwork that exhibits a well-earned ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the “sycorax video style” he’s been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: the afterlife. Brathwaite achieves a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in a series of poems outlining experiences of “Cultural Lynching.” These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies racial politics and agism. Brathwaite’s expression of pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word.

 

brathwaitelazarus

KAMAU BRATHWAITE is an internationally celebrated poet, performer, and cultural theorist. He has won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Griffin Poetry Prize, for Born to Slow Horses. A retired professor of comparative literature at New York University, Brathwaite now lives in CowPastor, Barbados.

“No one writes like Kamau Brathwaite. He is a poet of global importance. The book is an intimate, mystical lens to gaze across time periods and literary modes and frames. The overall effect is mesmerizing, even transcendent, from his lush, mystical descriptions of island nature to his totally unexpected arresting invitation to a beheading. This is a liberatory, heartbreaking book.”
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Dead Youth, or, The Leaks

“This book is Kamau Brathwaite’s grand, retrospective understanding of his entire poetics—which has extended and developed and ramified across well over half a century of enormous human change. It is also a culmination of his insistent, original vision. Lazarus, recalled from the dead, is reprised in the history of the collective mind of a once enslaved and now resurrected people—a mind embodied in the individual mind of this magnificent poet and called back to life by his absolute freedom to speak.”
—Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

 

Hot off the press, in time for cool autumn afternoons

New & Forthcoming Poetry from Wesleyan University Press 

Armantrout_Partly R-300-3“You know when you look at a word until it means nothing and then, suddenly and at last, everything? The word is poetry. The poet is Rae Armantrout.”
—Daniel Handler, author of the national bestseller We Are Pirates

Arm_Rae_C_300_9

A collection of new and selected poetry from Pulitzer prize-winning author, Rae Armantrout. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout’s mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books, Up To Speed, Next Life, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winning volume Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, and Itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gizzi-Archeophonics R-300-3Short-listed for the 2016 National Book Awards

“Gizzi (is) a poet whose interest lies in articulating his experience of the world in all its disorienting glory.”
American Poets

Gizzi_Peter-C2_R_150_3
Defined as the archeology of lost sound, archeophonics, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one’s emotional memory. It is a private book of public and civic concerns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BRG_Work_R_150_3The 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

These poems “translate” asylum texts—the writing of the incarcerated and misunderstood—into a wider field of social conflict and utopian fragments of not-yet-being. Activating what Susan Howe calls “the telepathy of the archive,” the poems of The Work-Shy become part of a “book of listening,” occupying identities rooted in the demimonde and in places of confinement.

brgchildren

BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP is a nameless constellation of poets, artists, and scholars from diverse backgrounds. Their work has appeared in museums across the country.

Announcing “My Music, My War” from Lisa Gilman

The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

A study of music in the everyday lives of U.S. troops and combat veterans.

“A gifted interviewer, Lisa Gilman goes beyond stereotypes of the wounded American soldier by painting a complex and nuanced emotional portrait of contemporary soldiers’ lives, ones which the media rarely allow us to see and hear.”
—Jonathan Ritter, coeditor of Music in the Post-9/11 World

A study of music in the everyday lives of U.S. troops and combat veterans.

During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, technological developments in music listening enabled troops to carry vast amounts of music with them, and allowed them to easily acquire new music. Digital music files allow for easy sharing, with fellow troops as well as with friends and loved ones far away. This ethnographic study examines U.S. troops’ musical-listening habits during and after war, and the accompanying fear, domination, violence, isolation, pain, and loss that troops experienced. My Music, My War is a moving ethnographic account of what war was like for those most intimately involved. It shows how individuals survive in the messy webs of conflicting thoughts and emotions that are intricately part of the moment-to-moment and day-to-day phenomenon of war, and the pervasive memories in its aftermath. It gives fresh insight into musical listening as it relates to social dynamics, gender, community formation, memory, trauma, and politics.

Visit our Spotify page for a related playlist: play.spotify.com/user/wesleyanup

gilman mymusicmywar

Lisa Gilman is an associate professor in the Department of English and Folklore Program at the University of Oregon. She is the author of The Dance of Politics: Performance, Gender, and Democratization in Malawi and director of the film Grounds for Resistance: Stories of War, Sacrifice, and Good Coffee. Her articles have appeared in Folklore, Popular Music, and Journal of American Folklore.

 

My Music, My War makes an original contribution to current studies on music and war, with its nuanced discussion of how music listening is used to define, and at times resist, gendered norms and rhetorics of hyper-masculinity, as well as the complex roles that music plays in veterans’ reintegration into civilian life.”  —Kip Pegley, coeditor of Music, Politics, and Violence

 

Music Culture Series

April

240 pp., 6 x 9”

Unjacketed Cloth, $80.00 x

978-0-8195-7599-9

 

Paper, $26.95

978-0-8195-7600-2

 

eBook, $21.99 Y

978-0-8195-7601-9