Wesleyan University Press Fall 2018
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wesleyan university press fall 2018 Wesleyan University Press bury it sam sax Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets sam sax’s bury it, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, desire, diaspora, and personhood. 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. “bury it is lit with imagery and purpose. A vitalizing and necessary book of poems.” September 2017 James Laughlin Award citation from 88 pp., 6 x 9" Judge Tyehimba Jess Paper, $14.95 • 978-0-8195-7731-3 (CAD 19.00) Ebook, $11.99 • 978-0-8195-7732-0 “Buried inside these turbulent and tragic elegies are the poetry sorrows so often borne in silence by queer or questioning youth. The unearthing and examination of these root causes Wesleyan Poetry of untimely death among at-risk kids forms a terrifying necrology, an urgent inquest into the violence perpetrated ,!7IA8B9-fhhdbd! by a society still harboring hostility toward otherness.” D. A. Powell “sam sax’s poems are stunning variations on desire and death in our post-postmodern era: desire as death, desire for death, the death of desire. Yet even as he buries our many lost to the ravages of AIDS and cancer and suicide, he resurrects them, in deeply moving elegies that reject sentimental praise, in reliving encounters with them that pulse with the erotic, in language that is at once plain and reverential. We are thus immersed here in the mysteriously human, as even the technologies we seek to explicate ourselves and our world are revealed and embraced as themselves ultimately inexplicable. sam also of interest sax has created an astonishing poetry that is at once a My Vocabulary grim meditation on mortality and yet a hymn to the glory Did This to Me of being alive.” The Collected Rafael Campo, author of Comfort Measures Only Poetry of Jack Spicer JACK SPICER sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator and the EDITED BY author of Madness. PETER GIZZI AND This project is supported in part by an award from the KEVIN KILLIAN National Endowment for the Arts. Paper, $27.95 · 978-0-8195-7090-1 Ebook, $22.99 · 978-0-8195-7109-0 wesleyan.edu/wespress Wesleyan University Press Wobble rae armantrout Poems written on the shifting ground of imminent systemic collapse Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout is at once a most intimate and coolly calculating poet. If anyone could produce a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin’s playful “Little Tramp” and Charlize Theron’s fierce “Imperator Furiosa,” it would be Armantrout. Her language is unexpected yet exact, playing off the collective sense that the shifting ground of daily reality may be a warning of imminent systemic collapse. While there are glimmers here of what remains of “the natural world,” the poet confesses the human failings, personal and societal, that have led to its devastation. No one’s senses are more acutely attuned than Armantrout’s, which makes her an exceptional observer and reporter November of our faults. She leaves us wondering if the American 160 pp., 6 x 9" Dream may be a nightmare from which we can’t awaken. Cloth, $24.95 • 978-0-8195-7823-5 (CAD 31.00) Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, the poems in Ebook, $19.99 • 978-0-8195-7824-2 Wobble play peek-a-boo with doom. poetry “The fact that she is able, in book after book, to write her Wesleyan Poetry own—and very realistically American—version of “sinking into / what happens” is also no small achievement. She is a poet who in the short lines of her brief, fragmented verse ,!7IA8B9-fhicdf! has given us a lot of possibilities, all of them charged with language that aims to contain multitudes.” Ilya Kaminsky, Boston Review “Armantrout’s poetry has always been turned to the present moment. Its formal lineage is from William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists, with their enjambments of modern experience. Poetically, Armantrout has always aimed at knowing life by isolating it from narrative.” Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement rae armantrout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fourteen books of poetry. She has published nine books also of interest with Wesleyan University Press, including Entanglements, Partly, and Versed. Partly New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015 RAE ARMANTROUT Paper, $19.95 · 978-0-8195-7773-3 Ebook, $15.99 · 978-0-8195-7656-9 wesleyan.edu/wespress Wesleyan University Press American Poets in the 21st Century Poetics of Social Engagement edited by michael dowdy an d claudia rankine Showcases the most innovative and politically engaged poets working in the U.S. 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, September this volume includes generous selections of poetry as well 416 pp., 2 illus., 6 x 9" as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays. This Unjacketed cloth, $80.00 x • 978-0-8195-7829-7 (CAD 101.00) unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching Paper, $29.95 • 978-0-8195-7830-3 (CAD 38.00) tools. A companion website will present audio of each Ebook, $23.99 • 978-0-8195-7831-0 poet’s work. poetry Poets included: American Poets in the 21st Century Rosa Alcalá, Brian Blanchfield, Daniel Borzutzky, Carmen Giménez Smith, Cathy Park Hong, Christine Hume, Bhanu Kapil, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, Fred Moten, ,!7IA8B9-fhidad! Craig Santos Perez, Barbara Jane Reyes, Roberto Tejada, Edwin Torres Essayists included: John Alba Cutler, Chris Nealon, Kristin Dykstra, Joyelle McSweeney, Danielle Pafunda, Molly Bendall, Eunsong Kim, Michael Dowdy, Brent Hayes Edwards, J. Michael Martinez, Martin Joseph Ponce, David Colón, Urayoán Noel “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 also of interest more clearly, or fight back.” American Stephanie Burt, Harvard University Poets in the is a poet and critic whose books include 21st Century michael dowdy The New Poetics Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism EDITED BY and Globalization. Award-winning poet, critic, and activist CLAUDIA RANKINE claudia rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, AND LISA SEWELL including Citizen: An American Lyric. Paper, $32.95 · 978-0-8195-6728-4 Ebook, $25.99 · 978-0-8195-7449-7 wesleyan.edu/wespress Wesleyan University Press Counter-Desecration BAX 2018 A Glossary for Writing Best American Experimental Writing Within the Anthropocene edited by seth abram son, jesse edited by linda russo damiani, and myung mi kim and marthe reed An anthology New vocabulary of dynamic, for a world on forward-thinking the brink writing BAX 2018, guest-edited by Myung Mi Kim, is the Counter-Desecration collects 135 original terms and fifth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology definitions articulated by a diverse, international series compiling an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, community of poets, including Brenda Hillman, non-fiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos. The a diverse roster of new and established authors— Anthropocene is a term proposed for our present including Layli Long Soldier and Simone White— geological epoch during which the role of humanity BAX 2018 presents an expansive view of high-energy in the transformation of earth’s environment writing. globally is increasingly perceptible. The terms in “Restive exploration brings together these otherwise this glossary map new perspectives that provide a beguilingly multifarious works. What does not way to approach the interlinked social, economic, change is the necessity for change.” and environmental forces that shape our lives and the world around us. Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry is the James H. McNulty Chair of “Affirming the imagination’s importance in effecting myung mi kim English at SUNY Buffalo. Her books includeUnder change, with marvelous invention this poets’ Flag, The Bounty, DURA, Commons, River Antes, and glossary of terms responsive to the Anthropocene Penury. is an assistant professor of illuminates losses and violations, offers resources, seth abramson Communication Arts and Sciences at the University inspires hope.” of New Hampshire. jesse damiani is editor-at- Lynn Keller, author of Recomposing Ecopoetics large of VRScout and a Forbes contributor. He lives marthe reed is the author of five books, and is in San Francisco. co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books. linda russo is clinical associate professor in the department of English at Washington State University, and the author of three books of poetry and a collection of lyrical essays. August August 360 pp., 29 illus., 6 x 9" 144 pp., 5V x 8V" Unjacketed cloth, $40.00 x • 978-0-8195-7817-4 (CAD 50.00) Paper, $19.95 • 978-0-8195-7818-1 (CAD 25.00) Unjacketed cloth, $30.00 x • 978-0-8195-7845-7 (CAD 38.00) Ebook, $15.99 • 978-0-8195-7819-8 Paper, $16.95 • 978-0-8195-7846-4 (CAD 21.00) Ebook, $13.99 • 978-0-8195-7847-1 poetry anthology / experimental writing nature essays Best American Experimental Writing ,!7IA8B9-fhiege! ,!7IA8B9-fhibib! wesleyan.edu/wespress Wesleyan University Press Native Tributes Roots in Reverse Historical Novel Senegalese Afro-Cuban Music and gerald vizenor Tropical Cosmopolitanism richard m.