Publicity

Announcing “The Lazarus Poems” from Kamau Brathwaite

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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.

 

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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

 

100 Years Later: Focusing on Native American Service in WWI

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April 6, 1917: The United States entered World War I, when the U.S. Senate voted 82–6 to declare war on Germany. President Woodrow Wilson enacted conscription to recruit thousands of eligible young men into military service. Most of the approximately 12,000 Native Americans who enlisted were volunteers, as Native Americans were, largely, not yet citizens of the United States. In addition to this service, Native Americans purchased approximately $25 million worth of war bonds to support the cause. 

Although the Code Talkers of WWII are better known today, Natives in WWI—most notably the Choctaw—were also tasked with interrupting German spies and halting the interception of Allied communication. This was accomplished with the use of localized Native dialects, which few of the enlisted understood and none of the enemy could decipher. This would aid Allied victory as German troops no longer could predict Allied supply transport or military movements.

The Choctaw were not the only Native nation represented in military service. Other nations, such as the Anishinaabe of the White Earth Reservation, featured in Gerald Vizenor’s book, Blue Ravens, also contributed to the Allied victory. 

In his historical novel, Vizenor reimagines the lives of his great uncles—brothers who served in on the battlefields of France during World War I. He follows the travels and experiences of these two soldiers, before, during the war, and after they return home. Praised as one of our most original, and outspoken, contemporary Native American authors, Vizenor’s visionary writing addresses historic events through an imaginative, postmodern aesthetic. More information can be found at our Blue Raven reader’s companion.

Below: A video of Vizenor lecturing on Blue Ravens and WWI.

The story of Vizenor’s uncles will continue in his next novel, Night of Tributes, due out in 2018. The brothers, now combat veterans, join the Bonus Army to march on Washington DC) in his next novel, Night of Tributes, due out in 2018.

Click on the photos below to enlarge and access the captions.

Wesleyan University Press @ AWP2017 – Washington D.C.

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Join us @ AWP2017, in Washington DC!

Booth #137

awp2017wip

Come to our panel!

Working with Archives—Ethics, Strategies, and Methods

Saturday, February 11, 2017 – 1:30pm-2:45pm
Marquis Salon 1 & 2, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two

Gerald Vizenor
Jena Osman
Harmony Holiday
Daniel Tiffany

Writers sometimes use archival records as sources of inspiration and information. Our panelists, including poets, a fiction writer and a historian, look at the use of public records as a source to gain better emotional understanding of their subject, and as evidence of sometimes grim historical events that have been overlooked or intentionally ignored. The panelist will discuss the methodologies and strategies of working with archival material, as well as the important ethical considerations of working with these often sensitive materials.

Meet the Authors
and have your books signed

Rae Armantrout, Friday 11-12

Peter Gizzi, Friday 1-2

Shane McCrae, Friday 2-3

Camille Dungy, Friday 4-5PM

Stop by booth 137 to see our new titles!

awp2017 new new books

 Trophic Cascade (Camille T. Dungy)

Because When God Is Too Busy (Gina Athena Ulysse)

In The Language of my Captor (Shane McCrae)

Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (Erín Moure)

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Archeophonics (Peter Gizzi)

BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing (Seth Abramson)

The Work-Shy (Blunt Research Group)

Partly: New and Selection Poems, 2001-2015 (Rae Armantrout)

Hot off the press, in time for cool autumn afternoons

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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

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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

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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_3“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

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.

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

Gerald Vizenor at Birchbark Books!

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Gerald Vizenor has been welcomed by Birchbark Books for a reading from his new book Treaty Shirts: October 2034—A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation. The reading will be held at the Bockley Gallery (near Birchbark Books in Minneapolis) on Tuesday, August 9th at 7pm.

Vizenor-Treaty-R-72-3Birchbark Books is owned and operated by New York Times bestselling and National Book Award winning author, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe). As a store that prides itself in their belief in “the power of good writing, the beauty of handmade art, [and] the strength of Native culture,” they are the perfect partner to Vizenor’s Treaty Shirts. In this masterful, candid, surreal, and satirical allegory set in an imagined future, seven natives are exiled from federal sectors that have replaced the federal reservation system. Banished because of their dedication to a democratic ethos, they declare a new, egalitarian nation on an island in Lake of the Woods—a lake bordering Ontario and Minnesota.

The Bockley Gallery has long been supportive of Minnesota artists, and indigenous artists—including George Morrison and Norval Morrisseau.

Gerald Vizenor is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. One reader described Treaty Shirts as feeling “utterly like Ojibwa poetry [or dream song] in prose form.” Vizenor as long been known for his uncanny ability to transfer the power, imagery, and natural motion of traditional storytelling to the written word. He will chat with guests and sign books following the reading.

Vizenor_Gerald 2015GERALD VIZENOR is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His novels Shrouds of White Earth and Griever: An American Monkey King in China both won the American Book Award; Griever also received the New York Fiction Collective Award. He is currently writing his sequel to Blue Ravens, an engrossing historical portrayal of Native American soldiers in World War I.

Vizenor’s novel Blue Ravens and Favor of Crows: New and Selected Haiku are available in paperback now!

Visit our Gerald Vizenor’s companion website.

Remembering Jelle Zeilinga de Boer

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It is my sad task to inform you that Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, Wesleyan University Press author and Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, emeritus, passed away last Saturday, a month before his 82nd birthday.

Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, photo by Bill Burkhart.

Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, photo by Bill Burkhart.

Jelle received his BS and PhD from the University of Utrecht before coming to Wesleyan as a postdoctoral fellow in 1963. During his early years at Wesleyan he worked closely with Geology Professor Jim Balsley in the field of paleomagnetism. In 1977 Jelle was named the George I. Seney Professor of Geology and in 1984 he was named the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Sciences.

In the 1970s Jelle worked as a joint professor at the University of Rhode Island at the Marine Sciences Institute where he was a PhD supervisor for Bob Ballard, who found the Titanic in 1985. Ballard later invited Jelle to go diving in the submersible Alvin to collect rocks in the Cayman Trough.

Jelle was the author of four books, Volcanoes in Human History (with D.T. Sanders), Earthquakes in Human History, Stories in Stone (2009), and New Haven’s Sentinels (2013)—the latter two published by Wesleyan University Press.

Originally interested in coming to the United States to study the Appalachian Mountains, Jelle’s research focused on the geotectonics of the Appalachians, Southeast Asia, and South and Central America.

In 2015 Jelle received the Joe Webb Peoples Award, presented annually by the Geological Society of Connecticut to someone who has contributed to the field of geology in Connecticut. Wesleyan’s current Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science Joop Varekamp, Jelle’s friend and colleague, was quoted by The Wesleyan Argus at the time of this award: “[De Boer] was an outstanding teacher, who received the Binswanger prize for excellence in teaching roughly a decade ago. His classes were very well-liked by many, and he taught many intro science classes until the day that he retired. [His] great talents were in drawing in students to the field of E&ES, making people enthusiastic about Geology, and his field trips on the Geology of Connecticut aroused interest among students who never thought that they would be interested in science.”

Jelle is survived by his wife, Felicité, his son, Bjorn, daughters Byrthe and Babette, their spouses, and his four grandchildren, Cheyne, Indiana, Braedon and Marino.

The funeral services will be private. A memorial event will be planned for the fall.

Announcing “My Music, My War” from Lisa Gilman

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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

“Hamilton” History Lessons & The Federalist Papers

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The Federalist Papers, edited by Jacob E. Cooke

The Hamilton buzz won’t be ending anytime soon. Lin Manuel Miranda, a Wesleyan alum, has created a hit that will irrefutably change the stage and much beyond. With tickets basically impossible to lay your hands on to this phenomenal rejuvenation to both America’s early history and Broadway’s musical scene, it’s no surprise you can’t go a week without Hamilton coming up.

This Broadway musical isn’t just helping American musical practice evolve, either—the show’s ubiquitous presence in American pop culture has teachers across the nation incorporating the score into their history lessons. This contemporary, youthful take on our “founding fathers’ is helping to  revitalize interest in America’s early history. Twenty-thousand New York The Federalist Papers, edited by Jacob E. CookeCity 11th graders will be able to go further than just incorporating the soundtrack, though:

The Rockefeller Foundation and the show’s producers are financing a program to bring 20,000 New York City 11th graders, all from schools with high percentages of students from low-income families, to see Hamilton at a series of matinees. As part of the program, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History will develop curriculum.

The New York Time‘s “The Learning Network” featured a few examples for teachers, including the staging of “historic rap battles.” Another one of their wonderful examples was delving into the Federalist papers, which Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Jon Jay wrote to defend the American Constitution after critique came of their government being too weak. Originally printed in newspapers, it can be difficult to discern which versions are the final versions, as intended by the authors. But not to fear, because editor Jacob E. Cooke created the “most complete and accurate” edition of The Federalist that has yet to appear. Fully annotated and reproduced from the original newspaper texts, The Federalist features chiefly works by Hamilton, aided by papers by Jay and Madison, to defend the government and its texts that the founding fathers so painstakingly fought to create.

László Moholy-Nagy Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum

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The Theatre of Bauhaus by Walter Gropius and Arthur S Wensinger“You would hardly know, from this show, that Moholy-Nagy shared an era with Picasso and Matisse. Perhaps chalk it up to the First World War and the Russian Revolution and a fissure in Western culture between art that maintained conventional mediums and art that subsumed them in a romance with social change and new techniques. The former held firm in France; the latter flourished in Germany. Americans could thrill to both at once, as interchangeable symbols of the ‘modern.’ It was in America, while he was dying, that Moholy-Nagy seemed to realize and begin to remedy the imbalance, exposing the heart that had always pulsed within the technocratic genius. To be a student of his then must have been heaven,” writes The New Yorker’s art critic  in “The Future Looked Bright”, reviewing the Guggenheim’s current retrospective exhibit on Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy.

Few creative movements have been more influential than the Bauhaus, under the leadership of Walter Gropius. The art of the theater commanded special attention, and its greatest commanders were none other than Oskar Schlemmer, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnár. Theater of the Bauhaus (edited by Walter Gropius and Arthur S. Wensinger, translated by Arthur Wensinger) is a reissued classic on theater design and presentation. Originally published in 1924, Wesleyan’s edition was its debut in English. The text in this volume is a loose collection of essays by Schlemmer, Molnár, and of course Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, with an introduction by Bauhaus leader Walter Gropius. For scholars of Moholy-Nagy’s late work in America, and scholars of Bauhaus in general, it is a necessary read and a collector’s item. The book is an accurate reproduction, from the lay-out and illustrations down to the book’s typography, so that Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagley’s thoughts and ideas come through just as they are meant.

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present is organized by and will be presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Benedict Arnold & AMC’s “Turn: Washington’s Spies”

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Wartime treachery, twisted spies and brutality—sound familiar?

AMC’s period drama TURN: Washington’s Spies is in it’s third season, and tensions are rising in the Arnold household. One can understand how a man could be frustrated, having served as Washington’s finest battle commander only to be sent to work a desk job. This restless man would become synonymous with ‘traitor.’ If you’re loving the drama and intriguing politics of Turn, Eric Lehman’s Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London should be on your summer reading list.

The clandestine meeting of John Andre and Benedict Arnold led to Andre’s death and Arnold’s discovery as a traitor and became one of the most talked about incidents in American history. From an engraving by S. B. Stearns, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, University of Bridgeport Archives.

Maybe AMC’s Turn has you wondering how true the drama between John Andre, Peggy Shippen, and Benedict Arnold is? Or you’re interested in learning more about the charges leveled at Arnold surrounding his leniency towards Loyalists? This new take on the most reviled traitor of the Revolutionary War is filled with fascinating details surrounding his attack on New London, Connecticut, when the settlement was burnt to the ground. Based on research of primary documents, Lehman pays close attention to key changes in Arnold’s character—from his time as a decorated American soldier, to “the point where he went from betraying his comrades to massacring his neighbors and destroying their homes.”

Homegrown Terror, a finalist for both the Indie Book and Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Awards, is a must-read for anyone enthralled by the twists of Benedict Arnold’s storyline in Turn. None of his colleagues saw his betrayal coming, just as readers will not anticipate what Lehman uncovers regarding this Revolutionary War antihero’s psyche.