Subjects

Announcing “Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form” by Katherine In-Young Lee

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South Korean percussion genre samul nori goes global

“This book is a timely and sorely needed contribution to ongoing intellectual debates within ethnomusicology and world music studies. Lee’s investment in musical form as both a physical force and explanatory object reveals processes and motivations not solely accessible by so-called “cultural” or “extra”-musical explanations.”— Nathan Hesselink, professor of Ethnomusicology, University of British Columbia

The South Korean percussion genre, samul nori, is a world phenomenon whose rhythmic form is the key to its popularity and mobility. Based on both ethnographic research and close formal analysis, author Katherine In-Young Lee focuses on the kinetic experience of samul nori in Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form, drawing out the concept of dynamism to show its historical, philosophical, and pedagogical dimensions. Breaking with traditional approaches to the study of world music that privilege political, economic, institutional, or ideological analytical frameworks, Lee argues that because rhythmic forms are experienced on a somatic level, they swiftly move beyond national boundaries and provide sites for cross-cultural interaction.

Katherine In-Young Lee is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2012. Her work has appeared in Journal of Korean Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Journal of Korean Traditional Performing Arts.

200 pp., 31 illus., 6 x 9”
Paper, $24.95
978-0-8195-7706-1
Unjacketed Hardcover, $80.00
978-0-8195-7705-4
Ebook, $19.99
978-0-8195-7707-8

       

Announcing “Trophic Cascade” by Camille Dungy in PAPERBACK!

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Poems about birth, death, and ecosystems of nature and power

“Earthly and visionary, a soulful reckoning for our twenty-first century, held in focus through echoes of the past and future, but always firmly rooted in now. Each poem is a bridge in the music of a language that we believe and trust, that heals.”—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems

Trophic Cascade by renowned poet Camille Dungy is out in paperback! In this fourth book in a series of award-winning survival narratives, 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, a world in which we all must survive, these poems resonate within and beyond the scope of the human realms, delicately balancing between conflicting loci of attention. These poems are written in the face of despair to hold an impossible love and a commitment to hope.

Camille Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and Guidebook to Relative Strangers, as well as the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

 

September

92 pp. 7 x 9″

Paper, $14.95

978-0-8195-7856-3

 

ebook, $19.99

978-0-8195-7720-7

    

Announcing “The Listeners” by Roy R. Manstan

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An untold story of scientists and engineers who changed the course of the Great War

“Mr. Manstan has captured a critical part of our nation’s history and role in preserving world peace by telling the story of those in the background whose toils and untold stories made it possible for a war-torn world to survive.”—Dr. Peter “Skip” Scheifele, University of Cincinnati

Roy R. Manstan’s new book, The Listeners: U-boat Hunters During the Great War, details the struggle to find a solution to the unanticipated efficiency of the German U-boat as an undersea predator during World War I. Success or failure was in the hands and minds of the scientists and naval personnel at the Naval Experimental Station in New London, Connecticut. Through the use of archival materials, personal papers, and memoirs, The Listeners takes readers into the world of the civilian scientists, engineers and naval personnel who were directly involved with the development and use of submarine detection technology during the war.

Roy R. Manstan is the co-author of Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel and author of Cold Warriors: The Navy’s Engineering and Diving Support Unit. He lives in East Haddam, CT.

 

September

340 pp., 75 illus., 7 1/4 x 9 1/4”

Jacketed Cloth, $34.95

978-0-8195-7835-8

 

Ebook, $23.99

978-0-8195-7837-2

History / Military

 

      

Announcing “Citizen Azmari” from Ilana Webster-Kogen

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An examination of popular Ethiopian music styles in Tel Aviv

“Weaving together ethnographic and theoretical narratives, the author gives voice to her subjects and to their music creators and territories where sound and silence speak—often more loudly than words.”
— Dr. Denis-Constant Martin, Centre Les Afriques dans le monde (LAM), Sciences-Po Bordeaux, France

In the thirty years since their immigration from Ethiopia to the State of Israel, Ethiopian-Israelis have put music at the center of communal and public life, using it simultaneously as a mechanism of protest and as appeal for integration. Ethiopian music develops in quiet corners of urban Israel as the most prominent advocate for equality, and the Israeli-born generation is creating new musical styles that negotiate the terms of blackness outside of Africa. For the first time, this book examines in detail those new genres of Ethiopian-Israeli music, including Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop, Ethio-soul performed across Europe, and eskesta dance projects at the center of national festivals. This book argues that in a climate where Ethiopian-Israelis fight for recognition of their contribution to society, musical style often takes the place of political speech, and musicians take on outsize roles as cultural critics. From their perch in Tel Aviv, Ethiopian-Israeli musicians use musical style to critique a social hierarchy that affects life for everyone in Israel/ Palestine.

Ilana Webster-Kogen is the Joe Loss Lecturer (assistant professor) in Jewish Music at SOAS, University of London. Her work has appeared in Ethnomusicology Forum, African and Black Diaspora, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies.

 

September

248 pp., 12 illus., 2 tables, 6 x 9”

Unjacketed Cloth, $80.00

978-0-8195-7832-7

 

Paper, $26.95

978-0-8195-7833-4

 

Ebook, $21.99

978-0-8195-7834-1

Announcing “American Poets in the 21st Century” edited by Michael Dowdy and Claudia Rankine

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Showcases the most innovative and politically engaged poets working in the U.S.

“These poets help us think about the society we have, the way that identities form within and against it, the attitudes we can examine if we want to know how to stand up, or see more clearly, or fight back.”
—Stephanie Burt, Harvard University

American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement emphasizes the ways in which innovative American poets have blended art and social awareness, focusing on aesthetic experiments
and investigations of ethnic, racial, gender, and class subjectivities. Rather than consider poetry as a thing apart, or as a tool for asserting identity, this volume’s poets create sites, forms, and modes for entering the public sphere, contesting injustices, and reimagining the contemporary. Like the earlier anthologies in this series, this volume includes generous selections of poetry as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. A companion web site will present audio of each poet’s work.

Michael Dowdy is the author of Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization and Urbilly. He is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina.

Award-winning poet, critic and activist Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric, and she edits the American Poets in the Twenty-First Century series. She is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

 

September

416 pp., 2 illus., 6 x 9”

Unjacketed Cloth, $80.00

978-0-8195-7289-7

 

Paper, $29.95

978-0-8195-7830-3

 

Ebook, $23.99

978-0-8195-7831-0

Announcing “bury it” by sam sax

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“bury it is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously.”
—Tyehimba Jess, judge of 2017 Laughlin Award

sam sax’s bury it, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, writes from the root of experience with poems written in response to coming of age, young gay suicide, desire, and generational weight. What follows are raw and expertly crafted mediations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. What’s at stake is survival itself and the archiving of a lived and lyric history. In this phenomenal second collection of poems, sam sax invites the reader to join him in his interrogation of the bridges we cross, the bridges we burn, and bridges we must leap from.

sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator currently living in Brooklyn. He’s the author of Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series, and the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion.

 

Publication of this book is funded by the
National Education Association.

 

September

88 pp., 6 x 9”

Paper, $14.95

978-0-8195-7731-3

 

eBook, $11.99

978-0-8195-7732-0 Poetry

Announcing “The Long Journeys Home” by Nick Bellantoni

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The moving stories of two Indigenous men and their repatriations

In The Long Journeys Home, Nick Bellantoni tells the tale of two men who, in death, found their way back home.

Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia (ca.1792–1818) and Itankusun Wanbli (ca.1879–1900) lived almost a century apart and came from different indigenous nations—Hawaiian and Lakota. Yet the tragic circumstances that led them to leave their homelands and to come to Connecticut, where they both died and were buried, have striking similarities.

In 1992 and 2008, descendant women had dreams which told them that their ancestors wished to “come home.” Both families started the repatriation process. Then Connecticut State Archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni oversaw the archaeological disinterment and forensic identifications in returning these men to their families and communities. The Long Journeys Home chronicles these intergenerational stories, both examples of the wide-reaching and long-lasting impacts of colonialism.

Nicholas F. Bellantoni is an associate adjunct professor in the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut and Emeritus Connecticut State Archaeologist at the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.

September
260 pp., 15 illus., 3 maps, 6 x 9”
Cloth, $28.95
978-0-8195-7684-2
ebook, $24.99 Y,
978-0-8195-7685-9 History / Biography

The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund
at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

    

sam sax is recipient of a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship

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For Immediate Release—August 29, 2018

Wesleyan author sam sax is recipient of a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship

from The Poetry Foundation:

The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine announce the winners of the 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships: Safia Elhillo, Hieu Minh Nguyen, sam sax, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Paul Tran. The $25,800 fellowship is among the largest and most prestigious awards available for young poets in the United States.

The fellows will make their first joint appearance at the Dodge Poetry Festival in October, and the December 2018 issue of Poetry will feature a sampling of their work.

“Our 2018 fellows created their own trails and important beautiful markers for those who will follow them into the future,” said Poetry editor, Don Share. “Each of these fellows energetically speaks to and contributes to the ever-increasing interest in contemporary poetry, especially among young people.”

Established by Ruth Lilly in 1989 for one student recipient nominated by a university writing program, the fellowship program expanded to two spots in 1996, then five in in 2008. After a generous gift from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund in 2013, it became the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. Now open to any U.S. poets between the ages of 21 and 31, regardless of whether or not they are affiliated with academic institutions, the fellowship’s expanded inclusivity created space for more young poets to flourish and develop their craft.

This year’s cohort includes a founding member of Slam NYU, a Warren Wilson College MFA candidate, a National Poetry Series winner, a PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry winner, and a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize winner.

# # #

sam sax is the author of bury it, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award given by the Academy of American Poets. bury it will be published by Wesleyan University Press in September 2018.

Contact:
Stephanie Prieto (Elliott), Publicist & Web Manager

Wesleyan University Pres
215 Long Lane, Middletown, CT 06459
WEB: ​www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
EMAIL: selliott@wesleyan.edu
PHONE: 860-685-7723

Announcing “BAX 2018” with guest editor Myung Mi Kim

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An anthology of dynamic, forward-thinking writing

“Whenever a newspaper succumbs to the clickbait of fake news; whenever a search engine becomes a surrealist troubadour by chance; whenever a witless chat-bot strives to rickroll you—these experimental writers ensure that you show up for the future of literature on time.”
—Christian Bok, author of The Xenotext

Best American Experimental Writing 2018, guest-edited by Myung Mi Kim, is the fifth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology series compiling an exciting
 mix of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring a diverse roster of writers and artists culled from both established authors—like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Don Mee Choi, Mónica de la Torre, Layli Long Soldier, and Simone White—as well as new and unexpected voices, including Clickhole.com, BAX 2018 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 2018 is a vital addition to the American literary landscape.

Myung Mi Kim is the author of Under Flag, The Bounty, DURA, Commons, River Antes, and Penury and is the James H. McNulty Chair of English at SUNY Buffalo.

Seth Abramson is the author of six poetry collections and is an assistant professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the University of New Hampshire.

Jesse Damiani is a former Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing fellow and current Editor-at-Large of VRScout.

 

August
360 pp., 29 illus., 6 x 9”
Paper, $19.95
978-0-8195-7818-1
Unjacketed cloth, $40.00
978-0-8195-7817-4
Ebook, $15.99
978-0-8195-7819-8

Announcing “Counter-Desecration” edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed

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New vocabulary for a world on the brink

“Affirming the imagination’s importance in effecting change, with marvelous invention this poets’ glossary of terms responsive to the Anthropocene illuminates losses and violations, offers resources, inspires hope.”
—Lynn Keller, author of Recomposing Ecopoetics

Counter-Desecration collects 135 original terms
and definitions articulated by a diverse, international community of poets, including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos. The Anthropocene is a term proposed for our present geological epoch during which the role of humanity in the transformation of earth’s environment globally is increasingly perceptible. The terms in this glossary map new perspectives that provide a way to approach the interlinked social, economic, and environmental forces that shape our lives and the world around us.

Linda Russo is the author of three books of poetry, including Participant (Lost Roads Press), winner of
 the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize, and To Think of her Writing Awash in Light (Subito Press), a collection of lyrical essays. Her scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press) and other edited collections. She teaches creative writing and literature at Washington State University.

Marthe Reed was the author of five books, including Nights Reading, (em)bodied bliss, and the collaborative Pleth with j hastain. She was co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books, and her poems have appeared in Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and New American Writing, among other publications.

 

August

144 pp., 5 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2 ”

Unjacketed cloth, $30.00

978-0-8195-7845-7

 

Paperback, $16.99

978-0-8195-7846-4

 

eBook, $13.99

978-0-8195-7847