{"title":"Essays","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"ruefle-mary-madness-rack-and-honey-collected-lectures-wave-2012","title":"Ruefle, Mary: Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures","description":"\u003cp\u003eWave Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: August 7, 2012\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher's Marketing: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis is one of the wisest books I've read in years... -- \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNo writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act--the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back... Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle's work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that's vital and welcome, that doesn't make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. - \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Kenyon Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eProfound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny...These informal talks have far more staying power and verve than most of their kind. Readers may come away dazzled, as well as amused... -- \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way. This is a desert island book. -- \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eMatthew Dickman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe accomplished poet is humorous and self-deprecating in this collection of illuminating essays on poetry, aesthetics and literature... -- \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Examiner\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include \"Poetry and the Moon,\" \"Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World,\" and \"Lectures I Will Never Give.\" Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eMadness, Rack, and Honey\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eresists definition, demanding instead an utter--and utterly pleasurable--immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":7861511880740,"sku":"9781933517575","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ruefle.jpg?v=1525899392"},{"product_id":"purpura-lia-all-the-fierce-tethers-essays-sarabande-2019","title":"Purpura, Lia: All the Fierce Tethers: Essays (Sarabande, 2019)","description":"\u003cp\u003eSarabande, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 9, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher's Marketing: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003eReaders familiar with Lia Purpura's highly praised essay collections--Increase, On Looking, and Rough Likeness--will know she's a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between humans and the things they see. The subject matter of All the Fierce Tethers is wonderfully varied, both low (muskrats, slugs, a stained quilt in a motel room) and lofty (shadows, prayer, the idea of beauty). In \"Treatise Against Irony,\" she counters this all-too modern affliction with ferocious optimism and intelligence: \"The opposite of irony is nakedness.\" In \"My Eagles,\" our nation's symbol is viewed from all angles--nesting, flying, politicized, preserved. The essay in itself could be a small anthology. And, in a fresh move, Purpura turns to her own, racially divided Baltimore neighborhood, where a blood stain appears on a street separating East (with its Value Village) and West (with its community garden). Finalist for the National Book Critics Award, winner of the Pushcart Prize, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":11479459364900,"sku":"9781946448309","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/allfiercethethers.jpg?v=1560543071"},{"product_id":"synthesizing-gravity-selected-prose-by-kay-ryan","title":"Ryan, Kay: Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose [hardcover]","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSynthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose\u003c\/em\u003e by Kay Ryan (Grove Press, hardcover)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 14, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \"The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSynthesizing Gravity\u003c\/i\u003e gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan's probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-- including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-- \u003ci\u003eSynthesizing Gravity \u003c\/i\u003ebristles with Ryan's crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and her appetite and appreciation for the genuine. Among essays like 'Radiantly Indefensible,' 'Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,' and 'The Abrasion of Loneliness,' are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness, and other under-loved concepts. Edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman, this generous collection of Ryan's distinctive thinking gives us a surprising look into the mind of an American master.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31304809545751,"sku":"9780802148186","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_5b1cb67a-7e71-4059-94b6-0d4bacd298af.jpg?v=1585610359"},{"product_id":"dailiness-essays-on-poetry-by-mark-jarman","title":"Jarman, Mark: Dailiness: Essays on Poetry","description":"\u003cp\u003ePaul Dry Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: February 18, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher's Marketing:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"In this wonderful collection of essays, Mark Jarman explores with wit and passion the practice of poetry--of making it, of reading it, of living it. In his vivid analyses of works by Brooks, Boisseau, Donne, Herbert, Rukeyser and Twichell, among others, he explores how the poems and their authors negotiate time and mortality, faith and devotion. He also offers an intimate examination of his own gorgeous work and how it comes onto the page. A delight for readers and writers of poetry.\"--Margot Livesey, author of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Flight of Gemma Hardy\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eand\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eMercury\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe essays in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eDailiness\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e are about how a poet makes a poem. For Mark Jarman a poem results from a deliberate and conscious act. He is especially interested in the way human consciousness connects devotional prayer to poetry. In these essays he considers poems written millennia apart--from \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eGilgamesh\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e to George Herbert's work, from the poems of Robert Frost to those of Seamus Heaney, to his own recently-written poems and those of his contemporaries. As the poems celebrate the work of daily creation, they possess a religious aspect. 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Watch.\" --John D'Agata\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without 'complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.' Jenny Boully has done it.\" --Mary Jo Bang\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer--in the best way.\" --Ander Monson\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJenny Boully's essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. 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The reader can only fantasize about the original contexts that might have made such information significant to its author, and ultimately, implies that the body of any text consists of nothing but a void-filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination.\" First published in 2002 and excerpted in such anthologies as \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Next American Essay\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003eand \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Best American Poetry 2002\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, THE BODY: AN ESSAY continues to challenge conventional notions of plot and narrative, genre and form, theory and practice, unremittingly questioning the presumptive boundaries between reflection, imagination, and experience.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31337257074711,"sku":"9780979118920","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_c1ca5f07-7daf-45da-b7df-39a0867b8514.jpg?v=1586745558"},{"product_id":"the-undercommons-fugitive-planning-black-study-by-stefano-harney","title":"Moten, Fred \u0026 Stefano Harney: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning \u0026 Black Study","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Undercommons: Fugitive Planning \u0026amp; Black Study \u003c\/em\u003eby Fred Moten \u0026amp; Stefano Harney (Autonomedia, paperback)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: May 1, 2013\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Politics. Philosophy \u0026amp; Critical Theory. Introduction by Jack Halberstam. In this series of essays, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in THE UNDERCOMMONS, Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of THE UNDERCOMMONS.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\"This is a powerful book, made of words and sounds, crisscrossed by subversion and love, written and studied 'with and for,' as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it. The roar of the battle is never distant while reading THE UNDERCOMMONS. The London riots and occupy, practices of refusal, marronage and flight, slave revolts and anti-colonial uprisings frame a challenging rethinking of concepts such as policy and planning, debt and credit, governance and logistics. 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V. Club\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eCBC Books\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Rumpus.\u003c\/i\u003e And a Winter's Most Anticipated Book by \u003ci\u003eVanity Fair\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Week. \u003c\/i\u003eStarred Reviews: \u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBooklist.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as \u003ci\u003eThe Low End Theory\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eMidnight Marauders\u003c\/i\u003e. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, \u003ci\u003eWe Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service\u003c\/i\u003e, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAbdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he's remembering \u003ci\u003eThe Source\u003c\/i\u003e magazine cover announcing the Tribe's 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg's death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that--like the low end, the bass--are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31341261488151,"sku":"9781477316481","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/image_291fa694-2181-4e50-8678-c94da39f0bce.gif?v=1586836587"},{"product_id":"the-calamity-form-on-poetry-and-social-life-by-anahid-nersessian","title":"Nersessian, Anahid: The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life by Anahid Nersessian (University of Chicago Press, paperback)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: August 12, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003cspan\u003eRomanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. 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These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. 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We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase \"Did you see?\" The feeling that we're living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten--and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Unreality of Memory\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eTitanic\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003eto Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end--if indeed it will--and why we can't stop fantasizing about it.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCan we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? 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Norton, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: August 20, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher's Marketing: \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDemonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eEssential Essays\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e showcases Adrienne Rich's singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich's lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31549099048983,"sku":"9780393355130","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/rich.gif?v=1591039894"},{"product_id":"angels-saints","title":"Weinberger, Eliot: Angels \u0026 Saints","description":"\u003cp\u003eWith a guide to the illustrations by Mary Wellesley (New Directions, hardcover)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 1, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \"\u003cspan\u003eAngels have soared through Western culture and consciousness from Biblical to contemporary times. But what do we really know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom a litany of angelic voices, Weinberger’s lyrical meditation then turns to the earthly counterparts, the saints, their lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies, followed by a glimpse of the afterlife.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThreaded throughout \u003cem\u003eAngels and Saints\u003c\/em\u003e are the glorious illuminated grid poems by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. These astonishingly complex, proto-'concrete' poems are untangled in a lucid afterword by the medieval scholar and historian Mary Wellesley.\u003c\/span\u003e\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31615994134551,"sku":"9780811229869","price":26.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/eliot.gif?v=1593114941"},{"product_id":"09-01-2020-mcclanahan-rebecca-in-the-key-of-new-york-city-a-memoir-in-essays","title":"McClanahan, Rebecca: In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eRed Hen Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 1, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn this lively and deeply affecting memoir, Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York as only a stunned newcomer can: in overheard conversations on park benches, songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. Having uprooted their settled lives in North Carolina to pursue a long-held dream of living in Manhattan, she and her husband struggle to find jobs, forge friendships, and create a home in a city of strangers. The 9\/11 attacks and a serious cancer surgery complicate their story, merging the public with the private, the present with the past, to shape a journey richer than either could have imagined.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31639999578135,"sku":"9781597098502","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/1_739ab520-cf36-473f-b755-fe17229d1ef1.gif?v=1594150754"},{"product_id":"gluck-louise-american-originality-essays-on-poetry","title":"Glück, Louise: American Originality: Essays on Poetry","description":"\u003cp\u003eFarrar, Straus \u0026amp; Giroux (paperback, 2018)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Five decades after her debut poetry collection, \u003ci\u003eFirstborn\u003c\/i\u003e, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Originality \u003c\/i\u003eis Glück's second book of essays--her first, \u003ci\u003eProofs and Theories\u003c\/i\u003e, won the 1993 PEN\/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück's moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom its opening pages, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Originality\u003c\/i\u003e forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of \"narcissism\" and \"genius\" that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Originality\u003c\/i\u003e is a seminal critical achievement.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32905778593815,"sku":"9780374537463","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/lg_15c71115-c0bb-4ec4-b050-f84d89ebf780.gif?v=1602181690"},{"product_id":"03-30-2021-the-depositions-new-and-selected-essays-on-being-and-ceasing-to-be-by-thomas-lynch","title":"Lynch, Thomas: The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be","description":"\u003cp\u003eW. W. Norton, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: March 30, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: A wry and compassionate selection of essays reflecting on mortals and mortality, from the acclaimed author of \u003cem\u003eThe Undertaking\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eFor nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life’s work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch’s signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Depositions\u003c\/em\u003e provides an essential selection from these masterful collections—essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies—as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch’s hyphenated identities—as an Irish American, undertaker-poet—is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn “Gladstone,” from \u003cem\u003eThe Undertaking\u003c\/em\u003e, Lynch reflects on his then twenty-five years as an undertaker at the Midwinter Conference for Michigan funeral directors, which incongruously takes place on an island in the Caribbean. 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The press of the author’s own mortality animates the new essays, sharpening a curiosity about where we come from, where we go, and what it means.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAs Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch’s work allows us “to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously.” With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32978223431703,"sku":"9780393541380","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/tl.gif?v=1607214310"},{"product_id":"04-27-2021-white-magic-essays-by-elissa-washuta","title":"Washuta, Elissa: White Magic: Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eTin House Books, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 27, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThroughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, \"starter witch kits\" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life--\u003cem\u003eTwin Peaks\u003c\/em\u003e, the \u003cem\u003eOregon Trail II\u003c\/em\u003e video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham--to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32980404731927,"sku":"9781951142391","price":26.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ew.gif?v=1607478673"},{"product_id":"02-16-2021-the-witch-of-eye-essays-by-kathryn-nuernberger","title":"Nuernberger, Kathryn: The Witch of Eye: Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eSarabande Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: February 16, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called \"witches\" of the past. \u003ci\u003eThe Witch of Eye\u003c\/i\u003e unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes torture and forced confessions alongside accounts of gentleness of legendary midwives. In one essay about a trial, we learn through folklore that Jesus's mother was a midwife who cured her own son's rheumatism. In other essays there are subtle parallels to contemporary discourse around abortion and environmental destruction. Nuernberger weaves in her own experiences, too. There's an ironic look at her own wedding, an uncomfortable visit to the Prague Museum of Torture, and an afternoon spent tearing out a garden in a mercurial fit. Her researched material is eye-opening, lively, and often funny. An absolutely thrilling collection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32982037626903,"sku":"9781946448705","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/kn.gif?v=1607537378"},{"product_id":"03-02-2021-minor-feelings-an-asian-american-reckoning-essays-by-cathy-park-hong","title":"Hong, Cathy Park: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning: Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eOne World, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 2, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.\"--Claudia Rankine, author of \u003ci\u003eCitizen\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times \u003c\/i\u003e- \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post \u003c\/i\u003e- NPR - \u003ci\u003eTime \u003c\/i\u003e- \u003ci\u003eNew Statesman \u003c\/i\u003e- \u003ci\u003eBuzzFeed\u003c\/i\u003e - \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e - The New York Public Library - \u003ci\u003eBook Riot\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBinding these essays together is Hong's theory of \"minor feelings.\" As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these \"minor feelings\" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, \u003ci\u003eMinor Feelings\u003c\/i\u003e forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":32988666363927,"sku":"9781984820389","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_3e69005f-25c3-43bd-b4df-4c4ed50510de.jpg?v=1608169199"},{"product_id":"04-01-2021-nemerovs-door-essays-by-robert-wrigley","title":"Wrigley, Robert: Nemerov's Door: Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eTupelo Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 1, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: In his youth, Robert Wrigley had little interest in poetry; you even could call it an active disinterest. 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She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities--outcasts and visionaries--on the margins of society.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWells meets Finisia Medrano, an itinerant planter and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists to rewild the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing watershed discipleship in New Mexico; another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming--guns into plowshares. She watches the world's greatest tracker teach how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in new ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBlending reportage, memoir, history, and philosophy, Wells opens up seemingly intractable questions about the damage we have done and how we might reckon with our inheritance. \"Brilliant in its quest . . . [and] an essential document of our time\" (Charles D'Ambrosio), \u003ci\u003eBelievers \u003c\/i\u003edemands transformation: If the Earth is our home, if our home is being destroyed-- \u003ci\u003ehow then shall we live\u003c\/i\u003e?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":33026138177559,"sku":"9780374110253","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/lw_df487f6a-12de-4174-8685-a47b01a35bec.gif?v=1611257280"},{"product_id":"04-20-2021-synthesizing-gravity-selected-prose-by-kay-ryan","title":"Ryan, Kay: Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose","description":"\u003cp\u003eGrove Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 20, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \"The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSynthesizing Gravity\u003c\/i\u003e gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan's probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-- including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-- \u003ci\u003eSynthesizing Gravity \u003c\/i\u003ebristles with Ryan's crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and her appetite and appreciation for the genuine. Among essays like 'Radiantly Indefensible,' 'Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,' and 'The Abrasion of Loneliness,' are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness, and other under-loved concepts. Edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman, this generous collection of Ryan's distinctive thinking gives us a surprising look into the mind of an American master.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":33026176778263,"sku":"9780802148582","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_d46cde08-84c7-4dfe-9ac4-f4fa716dd5d7.jpg?v=1611260632"},{"product_id":"abdurraqib-hanif-a-little-devil-in-america-notes-in-praise-of-black-performance","title":"Abdurraqib, Hanif: A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance","description":"\u003cp\u003eRandom House, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 30, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A stirring meditation on Black performance in America from the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of\u003ci\u003e Go Ahead in the Rain\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Whether heralding unsung entertainers or reexamining legends, Hanif Abdurraqib weaves together gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance. I read this book breathlessly.\"--Brit Bennett, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Vanishing Half\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. \"I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,\" she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines--whether it's the twenty-seven seconds in \"Gimme Shelter\" in which Merry Clayton wails the words \"rape, murder,\" a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt--has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib's own personal history of love, grief, and performance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAbdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, \u003ci\u003eA Little Devil in America\u003c\/i\u003e exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space--from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39279869460503,"sku":"9781984801197","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ha.gif?v=1617219610"},{"product_id":"09-07-2021-places-ive-taken-my-body-essays-by-molly-mccully-brown","title":"Brown, Molly McCully: Places I've Taken My Body: Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003ePersea Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 7, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003cspan\u003eIn seventeen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body--in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder. In spite of--indeed, in response to--physical constraints, Brown leads a peripatetic life: the essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, ranging from the rural American South of her childhood to the cobblestoned streets of Bologna, Italy. Moving between these locales and others, Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the world's oldest anatomical theater, the American Eugenics movement, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Throughout, Brown offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences, woven together in consideration, always, of what it means to be human-flawed, potent, feeling.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39291291009047,"sku":"9780892555383","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/image_a47f0350-08c8-414b-9b19-d2367ed06aa0.png?v=1618619679"},{"product_id":"11-01-2021-silent-refusal-essays-on-contemporary-feminist-writing-by-kristina-marie-darling","title":"Darling, Kristina Marie: Silent Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBlack Ocean, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: December 14, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing:\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eWhat motivates writers to create purposefully difficult texts? In what ways is textual difficulty politically charged? In this collection of smart and accessible essays, Kristina Marie Darling seeks to answer these questions by delving deeply into the idea of difficulty in contemporary women's poetry. Through close engagement with recent poetry and hybrid work from women, non-binary writers, and writers of color, Darling argues that textual difficulty constitutes a provocative reversal of power, in which writers from historically marginalized groups within society can decide who is allowed into the imaginative terrain they have created. In constructing this argument, she shows the full range and artistic possibilities inherent in contemporary texts that foreground textual difficulty as an aesthetic gesture. This is powerful reading that will change how you think about contemporary poetry and its subversive possibilities.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39308973637655,"sku":"9781939568410","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/kmd.gif?v=1621031904"},{"product_id":"03-15-2022-white-magic-essays-by-elissa-washuta","title":"Washuta, Elissa: White Magic: Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eTin House Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 15, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThroughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, \"starter witch kits\" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life--\u003cem\u003eTwin Peaks\u003c\/em\u003e, the \u003cem\u003eOregon Trail II\u003c\/em\u003e video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham--to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBracingly honest and powerfully affecting, \u003cem\u003eWhite Magic\u003c\/em\u003e establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39363115155479,"sku":"9781953534019","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ew_22c58bcb-27d9-496e-8ac4-c01158fe489c.gif?v=1628791757"},{"product_id":"biss-eula-having-and-being-had","title":"Biss, Eula: Having and Being Had","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eRiverhead Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: August 31, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: A \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eEDITORS' CHOICE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY \u003ci\u003eTIME\u003c\/i\u003e, NPR, \u003ci\u003eINSTYLE\u003c\/i\u003e, AND \u003ci\u003eGOOD HOUSEKEEPING\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\"A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it's possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.\" --Associated Press\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eA timely and arresting new look at affluence by the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author, \"one of the leading lights of the modern American essay.\" --\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\"My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,\" Eula Biss writes, \"the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.\" Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges--in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences--she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eas a writer who \"advances from all sides, like a chess player,\" Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, \"In what have we invested?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39418202128407,"sku":"9780525537465","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_72.gif?v=1634676282"},{"product_id":"05-10-2022-on-autumn-lake-collected-essays-by-douglas-crase","title":"Crase, Douglas: On Autumn Lake: Collected Essays","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNightboat Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: May 24, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003ci\u003eOn Autumn Lake\u003c\/i\u003e collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDouglas Crase’s prose is rich with conviction and desire, inspiring as John Yau wrote, “the kind of attention usually reserved for poetry.” His essays, written as rhythmically as poems, take a personal rather than abstract approach, offering committed and sometimes intimate portraits of John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Lorine Niedecker, and others. With generosity of spirit, Crase shares his devotion to poetry, democracy, and landscape in this handsome volume that greatly enlarges the available body of his work and will be seen as the essential complement to his collected poems.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39433887449111,"sku":"9781643621432","price":23.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781643621432_dc1e1.jpg?v=1635380891"},{"product_id":"07-19-2022-believers-making-a-life-at-the-end-of-the-world-by-lisa-wells","title":"Wells, Lisa: Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePicador, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: July 19, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: \"An essential document of our time.”\u003cbr\u003e—Charles D'Ambrosio, author of \u003ci\u003eLoitering\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eWe find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming—guns into ploughshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrough this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, \u003ci\u003eBelievers \u003c\/i\u003eis able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39533813137431,"sku":"9781250849380","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781250849380_9598d.jpg?v=1638061966"},{"product_id":"bellamy-dodie-bee-reaved","title":"Bellamy, Dodie: Bee Reaved","description":"\u003cp\u003eSemiotext(e), paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 19, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSo. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Dodie Bellamy, \"Hoarding as \u003cem\u003eÉcriture\u003c\/em\u003e\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book \u0026amp; Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, \u003ci\u003eWhen The Sick Rule The World\u003c\/i\u003e, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39557525241879,"sku":"9781635901573","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail-2021-12-07T112626.239.gif?v=1638905531"},{"product_id":"06-7-22-horn-lars-voice-of-the-fish-a-lyric-essay","title":"Horn, Lars: Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGraywolf Press, paperback\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePub Date: June 07, 2022\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher's Marketing: Lars Horn’s\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eVoice of the Fish,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003ethe latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn’s adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"block-field block-body\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field body expander\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"body-inner\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ca class=\"trimmer more\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"block-field block-field-list-price\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40103390674967,"sku":"9781644450895","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_10_f96df1b2-a555-461c-8300-0f81a24878e9.gif?v=1652996014"},{"product_id":"07-19-22-ravinthiran-vidyan-worlds-woven-together-essays-on-poetry-and-poetics","title":"Ravinthiran, Vidyan: Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics","description":"\u003cp\u003eColumbia University Press\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: July 19, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\nPublisher's Marketing: Writing about poetry follows models provided either by academic scholarship or literary journalism, each with its pitfalls. The former distances the reader from the poem and effaces the critic’s personality. In literary journalism, the critic is front and center, but the discussion is introductory and prioritizes value judgments. In either case, entrenched practices and patterns of privilege limit one’s perspective. The situation worsens when it comes to minoritized poets and poets from the Global South, where the focus is on restrictive notions of identity: the stylistic innovations of literary works get ousted by prefabricated historical narratives.\n\u003cdiv data-panel=\"main\" class=\"tab-panel\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"sp__the-description\"\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003eIn\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eWorlds Woven Together\u003c\/i\u003e, the critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of writers. His essays are open-ended, attentive, and curious, unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative. Discussing neglected authors and those well-known in the West, Ravinthiran sees politics as inseparable from literary form and is fascinated by the relation of the creative consciousness to the violences of history. The book features essays on writers including Mir Taqi Mir, Ana Blandiana, A. K. Ramanujan, Marianne Moore, Eunice de Souza, Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, Rae Armantrout, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Galway Kinnell, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Vahni Capildeo. Revealing serendipitous connections—between poems and cultures, between lines of verse and the lives we lead—\u003ci\u003eWorlds Woven Together\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis for all readers fascinated by the mechanics and politics of poetry.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40104977137687,"sku":"9780231202756","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_26_2619fa49-7e5f-45d0-b267-24a9f0264abb.gif?v=1653087572"},{"product_id":"10-25-22-gay-ross-inciting-joy-essays","title":"Gay, Ross: Inciting Joy: Essays","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlgonquin Books, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: October 25th, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Delights\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships. Throughout \u003ci\u003eInciting Joy\u003c\/i\u003e, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn \"We Kin\" he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in \"Share Your Bucket\" he explores skateboarding's reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in \"Grief Suite\"; and in \"Through My Tears I Saw,\" he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn an era when divisive voices take up so much air space, \u003ci\u003eInciting Joy\u003c\/i\u003e offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Full of energy, curiosity, and compassion, \u003ci\u003eInciting Joy\u003c\/i\u003e is essential reading from one of our most brilliant writers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40282845085719,"sku":"9781643753041","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_68a6fbcd-1192-4630-a747-3ae1cc4fa654.gif?v=1662254258"},{"product_id":"10-04-22-harjo-joy-catching-the-light","title":"Harjo, Joy: Catching the Light","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eYale University Press, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: October 4th, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublisher Marketing: United States Poet Laureate and winner of the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award Joy Harjo examines the power of words and how poetry summons us toward justice and healing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\"Her enduring message--that writing can be redemptive--resonates: 'To write is to make a mark in the world, to assert \"I am.\"' The result is a rousing testament to the power of storytelling.\"--\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\"Harjo writes as if the creative journey has been the destination all along.\"--\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIn this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet. Composed of intimate vignettes that take us through the author's life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory--in both the private, individual journey and as a vehicle for prophetic, public witness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eHarjo insists that the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure--to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40282861207575,"sku":"9780300257038","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_09d7b564-4b24-42b8-989f-fe3034bfabff.gif?v=1662255186"},{"product_id":"savage-kathryn-groundglass-an-essay","title":"Savage, Kathryn: Groundglass: An Essay","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eCoffee House Press, paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePublication Date: August 2nd, 2022\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \"Could there be something humbling and revolutionary in understanding myself as a site of contamination?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"text\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGroundglass\u003c\/i\u003e takes shape atop a polluted aquifer in Minnesota, beside trains that haul fracked crude oil, as Kathryn Savage confronts the transgressions of U.S. Superfund sites and brownfields against land, groundwater, neighborhoods, and people. Drawing on her own experiences growing up on the fence lines of industry and the parallel realities of raising a young son while grieving a father dying of a cancer with known environmental risk factors, Savage traces concentric rings of connection--between our bodies, one another, our communities, and our ecosystem. She explores the porous boundary between self and environment, and the ambiguous yet growing body of evidence linking toxins to disease. 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For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40283534327831,"sku":"9781566896375","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ibg.common.titledetail_cca258da-db81-49c7-b14a-574210d77fd2.gif?v=1662353347"},{"product_id":"griffin-farah-jasmine-in-search","title":"Griffin, Farah Jasmine: In Search of a Beautiful Freedom","description":"\u003cp\u003eW. W. 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An essay collection on writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes: HOLE STUDIES keeps listening. What is it we need from each other? What could we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness and moments that matter. It honors everyday acts of thinking and trying. Essays explore the music of the Swet Shop Boys, the literature of the US's brutal war in Iraq, the career of Sinéad O'Connor, the aesthetics of the Dirtbag Left, the legacies of the war on terror, feminism on the job, and illness in America. HOLE STUDIES is an intimate document and a critical guide. HOLE STUDIES would like to work for you.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePraise for HOLE STUDIES\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf Montaigne returned today as a feminist and Sontag a poet, they might have together crafted an essay collection as astonishing as Hilary Plum's HOLE STUDIES. Plum rigorously examines her many subjects (from a history journal's MLA citations to Sinéad O'Connor's infamous televised protest) and then rigorously interrogates her examinations. Each page holds more brilliance and artistry than should be possible. HOLE STUDIES is an exciting read and a conceptual achievement, and Plum is one of the best American essayists around.\u003cbr\u003e--Jeannie Vanasco\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHilary Plum offers a vital interrogation of our very reason for being in this striking volume of essays. Her explorations range from the personal to the global, from the expansive traumas of war to the exponential reach of pop culture. Her reflections are often debilitating, yet she ultimately guides us toward the beginnings of forms, frameworks, and reasons for why we might want to keep moving forward in a destabilized world.\u003cbr\u003e--Andre Perry\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Sinéad O'Connor ripped up the pope on SNL, in 1992, I think I was more changed, more moved, as a human, woman, and artist, than I've ever been able to articulate even to myself. Courtney Love, in 2005, warned other women about Harvey Weinstein on TV, 12 years before it was\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eat all\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eok to do so. HOLE STUDIES is a space to watch and describe and repeat these kinds of utterances--these miracles--and to shine that unflinching, flexible, responsive and feeling kind of light (that light of dignified presence) into all these dustbins and hollows and holy hell holes full of maggots and molesters, colonizers, CEOs, all our bloated most belligerent ogres. Hilary Plum articulates to me what these real utterances have meant and I leave this book only thinking of the ways, one way, I might say something of value--off-script--before I'm dead.\u003cbr\u003e--Caren Beilin\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI didn't realize how much, in this moment, I needed to read about literature as a space of radical hope until I was in the midst of HOLE STUDIES. Literature, in Hilary Plum's brilliant, generous analysis, is at its most potent when it enacts language and form to create a space of sharing, care, and transformation, where the stakes are the stakes of how to be together in the world--which is to say, the stakes of love.\u003cbr\u003e--Sara Jaffe\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLiterary Nonfiction. Essays. 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In 1946, animated by \"a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way,\" and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Adopting the format of the review essay, he surveyed the post-war cultural landscape while advancing his reflections on excess, non-knowledge, and the general economy. Focusing on literature as a mode of sovereign uselessness, he tackled prominent and divisive figures such as Henry Miller and Albert Camus. In keeping with Critique's mission to explore the totality of human knowledge, Bataille's articles did not just focus on the literary but featured important reflections on the science of sexuality, the Chinese Revolution, and historical accounts of drunkenness, among other matters. Throughout, he was attuned to how humanity would deal with the excessive forces of production and destruction it had unleashed, his aim being a way of thinking and living that would inhabit that excess. 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Beginning with an article on Nietzsche and fascism written shortly after the liberation of Paris and running to the end of 1948, these texts make available for the first time in English the systematic diversity of Bataille's post-war thought.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40465048469527,"sku":"9781803090603","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/41cTZLBQ-fL._AC_SY780.jpg?v=1672269957"},{"product_id":"nersessian-anahid-keats-39","title":"Nersessian, Anahid: Keats's Odes","description":"\u003cp\u003eUniversity of Chicago Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: December 13, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.\" In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—\"Ode to a Nightingale,\" \"To Autumn\"—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book emerges from Nersessian's lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry; but more, it \"is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.\" Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats's enduring work.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40465048567831,"sku":"9780226826523","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/217HmFf_MdL._AC_SY780.jpg?v=1672269961"},{"product_id":"guriel-jason-on-browsinpb","title":"Guriel, Jason: On Browsing","description":"\u003cp\u003eBiblioasis, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 15th, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon--and gaining new appreciation--amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops. 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But in recent years, he has also written a series of unconventional essays that he calls \"examination papers,\" which he defines as \"designated inquiries to myself.\" In these linked essays, most of which resemble prose-poems, with only a few lines set on each page, Wright explores abiding artistic and philosophical concerns, including language, aesthetic form, knowledge, time, and death. Soul and Substance presents these pieces for the first time. Drawing on everything from African mythology to mathematical axioms, Wright reflects on a wide range of topics: the difficulties of defining and confronting death; the challenge of transcending one's own consciousness; the nature of rhythm and the structure of space; and the relationship among the self, the body, and the material world. Throughout, the book examines the limits of human knowledge and the implications of our always imperfect understanding. Experimental and original, Soul and Substance is an important addition to the work of a major writer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40523521294359,"sku":"9780691245959","price":95.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_e12873ff-1cb1-4f96-9967-048cb7cb311e.jpg?v=1678316627"},{"product_id":"wright-jay-soul-and-spb","title":"Wright, Jay: Soul and Substance","description":"\u003cp\u003ePrinceton University Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: June 6, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A collection of new and startlingly original essays from an acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwright Jay Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the past half century. 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Experimental and original, Soul and Substance is an important addition to the work of a major writer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40523521327127,"sku":"9780691245966","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_36802d9c-6e5d-49a2-962f-a16e319d670f.jpg?v=1678316628"},{"product_id":"majmudar-amit-black-avatpb","title":"Majmudar, Amit: Black Avatar","description":"\u003cp\u003eAcre Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: May 5th, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The first nonfiction collection by internationally acclaimed writer and translator Amit Majmudar, \u003ci\u003eBlack Avatar\u003c\/i\u003e combines elements of memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe eight pieces in this deeply engaging volume reflect author Amit Majmudar's comprehensive studies of American, European, and Indian traditions, as well as his experiences in both suburban Ohio and the western Indian state of Gujarat. The volume begins with the title piece, a fifteen-part examination of \"How Colorism Came to India.\" Tracing the evolution of India's bias in favor of light skin, Majmudar reflects on the effects of colonialism, drawing upon sources ranging from early Sanskrit texts to contemporary film and television. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOther essays illuminate subjects both timely and timeless. \"The Ramayana and the Birth of Poetry\" discusses how suffering is portrayed in art and literature (\"The spectrum of suffering: slapstick on one end, scripture on the other, with fiction and poetry . . . in the vastness between them\"), while in \"Five Famous Asian War Photographs\"--a 2018 \u003ci\u003eBest American Essays\u003c\/i\u003e selection--Majmudar analyzes why these iconic images of atrocity have such emotional resonance. In \"Nature\/Worship,\" another multi-part piece, the author turns his attention to climate change, linking notions of environmentalism to his ancestral tradition of finding divinity within the natural world, connections that form the basis of religious belief.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePerhaps the greatest achievement of these wide-ranging essays is the prose itself--learned yet lively, erudite yet accessible--nimbly revealing the workings of a wonderfully original mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40526530281495,"sku":"9781946724618","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_bf9d4fe7-7aea-41de-b942-7121e4258f7d.jpg?v=1678568165"},{"product_id":"hejinian-lyn-allegoricapb","title":"Hejinian, Lyn: Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday","description":"\u003cp\u003eWesleyan University Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 7, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003ci data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAllegorical Moments\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eis a set of essays dedicated to rethinking allegory and arguing for its significance as a creative and critical response to sociopolitical, environmental, and existential turmoil affecting the contemporary world. Traditionally, allegorical interpretation was intended to express an orthodoxy and support an ideology. Hejinian attempts to liberate allegory from its dogmatic usages. Presenting modern and contemporary materials ranging from the novel to poetry to painting and cinema to activist poetry of the Occupy movement, each essay in the book \"begins again\" with different materials and from different perspectives. 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