Faculty Bookshelf

In a world where so much hatred is (legally) state-supported, one urgency above all bears holding on to: remembered bodies reflect what any culture decides to see. The elided ones were never there. Or they were there to be deleted. Bruce Bromley’s Guesting, with photographs by Tom Lecky, resists that deletion by exploring—by connecting—the essay’s capacity for analysis and for memory-based scene making, suggesting the reciprocity between a larger world in which analytical activity happens and the lyricism of a self worth fighting for. Each affirms the reality of the other. That affirmation means, for those who can hold to it, that we are audible, visible, here. And we are not alone.

As a species and as a culture, we recognize ourselves by our capacity for possession, so that personhood is made equivalent to ownership. If, however, the way in which we imagine objects predisposes our behavior toward them, art can encourage us to reorient how we comport ourselves in a world that is not meant to be owned, that is not even meant for us. To frustrate the desolation of avarice, we must enrich our view of things, and Making FIgures takes us through the writing of Virginia Woolf, both her fiction and nonfiction, in the service of this imperative.

The Life in the Sky Comes Down (2017, Backlash Press) is a collection of essays, stories, and hybrid forms embracing the two, which looks at non-fiction and fiction as approaches to working with words that can enrich each other, when joined together.

Borrowing her title from the old carnival ride that loops its riders round and round, Nicole Callihan's SuperLoop is as familiar and as thrilling as another go on a long loved ride. Paired with artwork from fellow Brooklyn-ite Re Jin Lee, Callihan's poems sometimes wild, sometimes quiet, always unassuming take us to a place we've been before, but through her eyes that dusty place becomes a bit more magical. Here, the waitress always brings extra whipped cream; divorced parents fall into each other's arms; orchids grow; and, in spite of themselves and the world around them, people find love and walk, albeit reluctantly, into the sunset.

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet's materials--words, objects, phenomena--are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed. Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Carnations reminds us that unremarkable places and events--a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a café--can, in a blink, be new. A short walk home is briefly transformed into a cathedral, and the work-worn body becomes a dancer, a prophet, a muse.

Two unsung women whose power using food as a political weapon during the civil rights movement was so great it brought the ire of government agents working against them In early 1969 Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to cook for the neighborhood children. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers would be feeding more children daily in all of their breakfast programs than the state of California was at that time.   More than a thousand miles away, Aylene Quin had spent the decade using her restaurant in McComb, Mississippi, to host secret planning meetings of civil rights leaders and organizations, feed the hungry, and cement herself as a community leader who could bring people together—physically and philosophically—over a meal.   These two women's tales, separated by a handful of years, tell the same story: how food was used by women as a potent and necessary ideological tool in both the rural south and urban north to create lasting social and political change. The leadership of these women cooking and serving food in a safe space for their communities was so powerful, the FBI resorted to coordinated extensive and often illegal means to stop the efforts of these two women, and those using similar tactics, under COINTELPRO--turning a blind eye to the firebombing of the children of a restaurant owner, destroying food intended for poor kids, and declaring a community breakfast program a major threat to public safety.But of course, it was never just about the food.

Language: A Reader for Writers focuses on the central and complex topic of language, exploring the reality of our multilingual world and the complexities of writing in a multilingual college classroom. It takes on key issues including the nature of language; the effects of globalization; endangered languages; multilingualism and language diversity; language, politics, and power; language and writing; language correctness; and the ways in which language shapes identity. The articles embody a range of experiences, ideas, and strategies-from scientific research and powerful arguments to poetic reflection and playful celebration. Developed for the freshman composition course, Language: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and scientific reading selections, providing students with the rhetorical knowledge and compositional skills required to participate effectively in discussions about language, learning, and the writing process.

The large literature about the politics of Hollywood in the period of McCarthy and the blacklist has largely overlooked political filmmaking during those agitated years. Hollywood Riots examines the most vibrant cycle of independently produced political films made while House Committee on Un-American Activities was investigating communists in the film industry. In doing so, it shifts the focus from the politics of Washington to the politics of Los Angeles and from the films of the Hollywood Ten to the more politically complex films of the progressive community at large. Dibbern shows how the movies produced by progressives at the end of the 1950s, including The Lawless, The Sound of Fury, The Underworld, were the logical cinematic parallel to their political and journalistic advocacy fighting the conservative newspapers. In these films they were recasting political events from California’s recent past as politically-engaged narratives that were inflected with their own fears of persecution. Hollywood Riots re-views the work of notable directors like Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield, as well as introducing unheralded political screenwriters and directors such as Daniel Mainwaring, Jo Pagano, and Leo C. Popkin.

"Replete with wonders, the poems in this radiant debut collection are tuned to the frequency of ordinary facts made strange by the poet’s ability to see into what is, and by doing so to let the rest of us understand what is really there: between 'backyards' and 'bitten heels' falls the blessing.  'You remember everything / with its own small fire,' she says, and that’s exactly how the poems in Phrasebook for the Pleiades burn--mapping her own finite, named world with an eye always on something close to the infinite.  

--Eamon Grennan

This book engages cosmopolitanism―a critical mode which moves beyond cultural pluralism by simultaneously privileging difference and commonality―in order to examine its particular deployment in the work of several African American writers. Deeply influenced and inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, the writers closely examined in this study―Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Albert Murray―have advanced cosmopolitanism to meet its own theoretical principals in the contested arena of racial discourse while remaining integral figures in a larger tradition of cosmopolitan thought. Rather than become mired in fixed categorical distinctions, their cosmopolitan perspective values the pluralist belief in the distinctiveness of different cultural groups while allowing for the possibility of inter-ethnic subjectivities, intercultural affiliations, and change in any given mode of identification. This study advances cosmopolitanism as a useful model for like-minded critics and intellectuals today who struggle with contemporary debates regarding multiculturalism and universalism in a rapidly, yet unevenly, globalizing world.

The People We Hate at the Wedding is the story of a less than perfect family. Donna, the clan’s mother, is now a widow living in the Chicago suburbs with a penchant for the occasional joint and more than one glass of wine with her best friend while watching House Hunters International. Alice is in her thirties, single, smart, beautiful, stuck in a dead-end job where she is mired in a rather predictable, though enjoyable, affair with her married boss. Her brother Paul lives in Philadelphia with his older, handsomer, tenured track professor boyfriend who’s recently been saying things like “monogamy is an oppressive heteronormative construct,” while eyeing undergrads. And then there’s Eloise. Perfect, gorgeous, cultured Eloise. The product of Donna’s first marriage to a dashing Frenchman, Eloise has spent her school years at the best private boarding schools, her winter holidays in St. John and a post-college life cushioned by a fat, endless trust fund. To top it off, she’s infuriatingly kind and decent. As this estranged clan gathers together, and Eloise's walk down the aisle approaches, Grant Ginder brings to vivid, hilarious life the power of family, and the complicated ways we hate the ones we love the most in the most bitingly funny, slyly witty and surprisingly tender novel you’ll read this year.

Dead reckoning is the nautical term for calculating a ship’s position using the distance and direction traveled rather than instruments or astronomical observation. For those still recovering from the atrocities of the twentieth century, however, the term has an even grimmer meaning: toting up the butcher’s bill of war and genocide.

As its title suggests, Dead Reckoning is an attempt to find our bearings in a civilization lost at sea. Conducted in the shadow of the centennial of the First World War, this dialogue between Romanian American poet Andrei Guruianu and Italian American essayist Anthony Di Renzo asks whether Western culture will successfully navigate the difficult waters of the new millennium or shipwreck itself on the mistakes of the past two centuries. Using historical and contemporary examples, they explore such topics as the limitations of memory, the transience of existence, the futility of history, and the difficulties of making art and meaning in the twenty-first century.

In Made in the Image of Stones the past is not something you can learn about. It is the burden of inheritance, of a consciousness that we stand upon stones, that our foundations are shaky but they are all we have, that the image we have of ourselves is carved in the likeness of others. For more than eighty pages Guruianu carries the weight of this burden through poems where the surreal meets the painfully real, the strikingly vivid, a kinship that reveals the imperfect nature of memory as well as the limitations of individual consciousness and cultural identity. The signs are everywhere and they are chiseled in marble and molded in bronze. But we are also stubborn, the lap of history is not enough to hold us. Ultimately, while the poems bow to lineage and roots in our acceptance and humility, there is a refusal, a stubborn hope that the future isn’t yet written in stone.

Throughout the poems that make up Portrait Without a Mouth, a follow up to Guruianu's Made in the Image of Stones, the Angel of History finally turns his head towards the present and lifts his eyes to the future. He sees the same ancient stones dotting the fields, the same ruins dusted off and resurrected only to be toppled again. Of those he meets he asks a single question: Where does history end, and where do we begin? Silence, a shrug of the shoulders. At the end of the day he shakes his head and mutters underneath his breath. Maybe a prayer. Language rearranged into a different version of tomorrow.

In her debut collection, Hua Shi Hua (Ahsahta 2017), Jen Hyde examines how the mechanisms of language shape worlds. This four parts of the collection, “speaking / China / transform / flowers,” unfolds in a precise lyricism that never shies from confronting the stubbornness of translation while Hyde wields it as her own to claim literacies of heritage and art. Dividing the book’s sections with Mandarin Chinese characters (all of which sound the same to the Western ear) and drawing from both classic Chinese and English texts, Hyde synthesizes and bisects biracial identification to culture and belonging. 

Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book’s four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.

Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving.

With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

New York School Painters & Poets charts the collaborative milieu of New York City poets and artists in the mid-twentieth century. This unprecedented volume comprehensively reproduces rare ephemera, collecting and reprinting collaborations, paintings, drawings, poetry, letters, art reviews, photographs, dialogues, manifestos, and memories. Jenni Quilter offers a chronological survey of this milieu, which includes artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Alex Katz, Jasper Johns, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and Rudy Burckhardt, plus writers John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Edwin Denby, Larry Fagin, Frank O’Hara, Charles North, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Anne Waldman, and more. 

What does it mean to claim your space in a world that’s ending? Sarah Sala’s Devil’s Lake breaks open the American moment of unchecked gun violence, climate changes, and the growing rift between "us" and "them" with formal daring. Like a prism, this startling debut fractures into shades of possibility and memory, queering science, nature, and form to lay bare the colors of joy despite a world that seems intent on its destruction.

"Sarah Sala's work goes beyond our everyday use of a word like catharsis to its older definition, a purgation. It is urgent, and yet, in the many faces of violation here, there is a voice that wants to make us safe, and it does this by presenting America with its own broken surface. These poems burst from the seed of Yeats's terrible beauty. They brandish themselves on blank space, praise what negation does to desire, and shiver gorgeously with rare kindness. In their gleam, we see splendor, outrage, and "a torrential downpour into nothingness." - Natalie Eilbert

“Queen of Spades raises gambling to a metaphysics that reminds us being in the world is an amalgam of gratuitous rules, chance, danger, and faintly Borgesian sleights-of hand. Many may read Shum’s smart, fast, impressive debut as a how-to fiction about betting, but at the end of the day it’s really all about the epistemologically and ontologically incomprehensible all the way down.”

—Lance Olsen

How might the unsayable become known to us? In the arts, silence and blank space often attempt to convey what cannot be said, making one revelation even as another is withheld. In this meditative study, Leah Souffrant explores how creative forms of reticence can communicate knowledge and create experience. Attending to word and image and what hovers between, Souffrant describes an aesthetics of attention to absence and presents a poetics of the unsayable.

Through the work of Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lorna Simpson, Rachel Zucker, and others, Souffrant investigates creative gestures and critical assertions at the intersection of phenomenology, feminism, and form. She invites readers to dwell in the spaces created by works that withhold explication, remain silent or blank, and discover the understanding made available to us in such spaces when we give them our attention. While acknowledging that language inevitably is inadequate, Souffrant examines the ways in which creative works nevertheless translate experience into form, and can — echoing Maurice Merleau-Ponty —“make us advance toward” richer understanding of what is often most difficult to grasp.

"Like the haunted, disconnected heads on a wanted poster, Michael Tyrell's daring and fiercely intelligent poems signify nothing less than the mystery of existence, the relationship between how one is perceived to what one really is, if such a thing were possible to express. To read these remarkable poems is to enter the shadow world of the wanted, where every surface is vulnerable to a violence, real or implied, that will crack it open to reveal a secret code. A book of masks where the disguised often forgets it wears the mask and the mask forgets it is not the face, The Wanted invites us to 'enter the wet bladed edges/ which break us again into separate beings, / pour salt into wherever we bleed.' Enter with caution and be prepared to lose yourself." --Henry Israeli

In The Rival, Sara Wallace takes her readers on an intimate journey through a woman’s solitary, surreal rural childhood and her brutal, sexually fraught first marriage to the conflicted redemption she finds in motherhood and a second chance at love. In this debut poetry collection, Wallace reveals how closely emotional devastation and transcendence can coexist. The Rival is sensuous, darkly humorous, and frequently luminous in its unflinching exploration of the inner life.