The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture sheds light on how imaginary works of fiction, film, and television reflect, refract, and respond to the recessionary times specific to the twenty-first century, a sustained period of economic crisis that has earned the title the “Great Recession.” This collection takes as its focus “Bust Culture,” a concept that refers to post-crash popular culture, specifically the kind mass produced by multinational ...

Alternating Current’s annual literary journal dedicated to historical and contemporary views on history contains poetry, maps and historical photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by various authors, both contemporary and historical, about various topics of history.Within these covers fantastically drawn by artist Terry Fan, you’ll meet the Romanovs, Serbian poet Vojislav Ilic, Dr. Zhivago, Stephen Crane, Geronimo, Lord Strathcona, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You’l...

Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she h...

Praise for Saeed Jones:"Jones is the kind of writer who's more than wanted: he's desperately needed."—FlavorWire"I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness, and outright joy."—D. A. Powell"Prelude to Bruise works its tempestuous mojo just under the skin, wreaking a sweet havoc and rearranging the pulse. These poem...

A poetic history of the twentieth century from one of our most beloved, popular, and highly lauded poets—a stirring, strikingly original, intensely imagined recreation of the most potent voices and searing moments that have shaped our collective experience.XX is award-winning poet Campbell McGrath's astonishing sequence of one hundred poems—one per year—written in a vast range of forms, and in the voices of figures as varied as Picasso and Mao, Frida Kahlo and Elvis Presle...

A collection of poems by the renowned Beat poet, Gregory Corso.Gregory Corso's collection of poems contains works of major proportions. The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. The second major work, "The Geometric Poem," published previously in a limited edition by Fernanda Pivano in Italy, is a complex visionary restatement of themes from ancient Egyptian religi...

Accessible and engaging, the poems in Randall R. Freisinger's Nostalgia's Thread are provocative reconsiderations of the American experience as depicted in ten of Norman Rockwell's best known paintings. These poems remind us that visual art is never static, the beholder's eye never innocent. They bear witness to the fact that each cultural era must inevitably reinterpret its rich artistic inheritance within the context of its current collective experience. With unflinching honesty and deep co...

Lauded poet Christopher Merrill hatched a brilliant plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. The poets would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read it aloud to the group. As poets heard the poems, they noted memorable words, images, and lines, which they would borrow to insert in subsequent poems of their own. These rounds continued, until, in a process of call and response and unprecedented collaboration, 80 poems had been co...

“Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist"As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill...

"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." —Guy Davenport, Harper'sJohn D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist Henry Darger, who died in obscuri...

Inspired by inaugural poets of the past, Inauguration is a collection of poems crafted in response to the commencement of a new administration. Writing out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, one of the most divided cities in the country, Goodwin and Wilkinson trade ruminations of survival in a hostile political climate. Yet Inauguration transcends partisan rhetoric. It is a rallying call to reflect back as we collectively forge our way forward.

"The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin's, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing."--Hayden Carruth, Sulfur"Harrison inhabits the problems of our age as if they were beasts into which he had crawled, and Letters to Yesenin is a kind of imaginative taxidermy that refuses to stay in place up on the...