'Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette' seeks to give expression in poem and metaphor to the United States as a personally lived and engaged with culture. The span, accordingly, involves both site and journey, a roster of art, people, different authorships, film, music, photography, cities, society. Prose sketches both serious and antic as well as verse. American Studies with a difference.

A. Robert Lee's latest poetry collection, IMAGINARIUM: SIGHTINGS, GALLERIES, SIGHTLINES, revolves around two central themes: imagination and sight. Each section delves into how we perceive and envision reality on a wide-ranging scale. The opening section, "Sightings," focuses on a selection of renowned paintings by artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Frida Kahlo. "Galleries" broadens the traditional definition of the term to encompass perspectives from various locations, including a French a...

WRITTEN EYE: VISUALS/VERSE by A. Robert Lee presents poems inspired by various works of visual art. By creatively narrating and reflecting on the "action" depicted in paintings or sculptures, Lee aims to engage with and enhance their significance. These accessible and insightful poems showcase the poet's playful exploration of a diverse array of international artworks, including paintings, photography, films, sculptures, and architecture, highlighting the influence of both literary and vis...

OFF COURSE: ROUNDABOUTS & DEVIATIONS is A. Robert Lee's newest collection that blends poetry and prose. Beneath the thoughtfully crafted and approachable exterior of Lee's writing lies a deep, intricate voice that intentionally challenges conventional literary boundaries. The collection offers unique perspectives on the peculiarities and often humorous aspects of everyday life. Infused with wit and a dark yet friendly humor, Lee's work aims to entertain while also provoking recognition. Wh...

Can it now be doubted that Native American/First Nations literary voice has become other than an established, and hugely compelling, compass? Native North American Authorship takes bearings, a roster of close readings yet situated within the wider latitudes and longitudes of timeline, place, memory. The emphasis falls throughout upon imagination, the "breath" within given texts be they fiction, poetry or self-writing. This is also to emphasize Native writing as modern (and in some...

The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. This new study analyses three recent literary tranches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices – Hunter Thompson to Frank Chin, Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a...

IMAGINARIUM: SIGHTINGS, GALLERIES, SIGHTLINES, A. Robert Lee’s latest collection of poetry, turns on two connecting keynotes: imagination and sight. Across a broad canvas each of its sequences explores the ways we go about imagining as much as seeing reality. Sightings, which opens the book, turns upon a dozen or so celebrated paintings, among them J.M.W. Turner and Frida Kahlo. Galleriesextends the usual meaning of the term to include vantage-points like a French archeological c...

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, and Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays...

OFF COURSE: ROUNDABOUTS & DEVIATIONS is A. Robert Lee’s latest collection that interleaves poetry and prose. Beneath the carefully crafted and accessible surface of Lee’s work lies a profound, complex voice that deliberately disrupts traditional literary boundaries and distinctions. Different takes on the odd, oftentimes the antic, at work in the daily round. Seamed in wit, dark but congenial humor, Lee’s work is aimed to amuse yet at the same time, stir recognitions. Fake corresponden...

Beat literature? Have not the great canonical names long grown familiar? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Likewise the frontline texts, still controversial in some quarters, assume their place in modern American literary history. On the Road serves as Homeric journey epic. "Howl" amounts to Beat anthem, confessional outcry against materialism and war. Naked Lunch, with its dark satiric laughter, envisions a dystopian world of power and word virus. But if these are all essent...

The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence.The contributors scrutiniz...