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"This collection of poetry by West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman explores the difficulty of living with an awareness of the eventual death of all living things"-- "This collection of poetry by West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman explores the difficulty of living with an awareness of the eventual death of all living things. Each of its four sections suggests a coping mechanism for this inevitable predicament, from storytelling, to accepting darkness and death as a creative force, to enjoying disruption and chaos, and finally to embracing the mystery of life as the most triumphant story of all. These difficulties come "not quite haphazardly" and not without a "last light"--something "beyond" and as "sweet as apples." With these moments of grace, Harshman taps into the satisfying richness that comes from unexpected revelations, helping us rise above the fragile recesses of life and death, all while portraying the lost rural worlds of the Midwest and Appalachia in ways untouched by sentiment or nostalgia"--

POETRY / American / General.

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"Gold Bee is a book of lyric meditations, many of them formal in approach, which begins with an exploration of music and its redemptive power, then moves to the underworld, focusing on collective and individual suffering, before finishing with a section asking readers to reconsider the worth of money and gold, and question the realities of daily life"-- "In his collection Gold Bee, Bruce Bond takes his cue from Wallace Stevens's Harmonium, bringing a finely honed talent to classic poetic questions concerning music, the march of progress, and the relationship between reality and the imagination. Blending humor and pathos, Bond examines the absurdities of contemporary life: "The modern air so full of phantom wires, / hard to tell the connected from the confused / who yak out loud to their beleaguered angels." At other times, his intricately crafted lyrics weave together myth and history to explore the various roles music and art play in the human experience, as when Bond's poems meditate on Orphean themes, descending to the underworld of loneliness, commercialism, or death and emerging with hard (and hard-won) truths. Addressing broadly ranging topics--from a retelling of the story of Artephius, the fabled father of alchemy, to a meditation on a fashion ad's wind machine--Bond's voice is always penetrating in its examination, yet wondering in the face of beauty, conjuring for the reader a world where music has "the power / to move stones, not far, but far enough.""--

POETRY / American / General.

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"Opening the space between the ordinary and the visionary, the poems in A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire uncover an intimate relationship with the world around them, from Las Vegas to Italy to the American Midwest. From a lime glowing in an orchard to a miraculous childhood attempt at levitation, Andrew S. Nicholson's poems ground themselves in the commonplace and leap for the luminous. Central to this collection are poems that retell stories of Jacob from the Old Testament, relocated behind casinos, glimpsed in miniature on kitchen floors, and heard speaking in a moment of decay. Through these retellings, Nicholson examines the creation of self, family relationships, and a generative sense of the divine"-- ""In Andrew S. Nicholson's A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire, what is most alive is color, that which gives itself freely, generously: 'Follow the hopeful as they green the day' ('My Garage Fills with an Ever-Increasing Number of Dandelions'). Threaded throughout with Genesis, wherein Jacob wrestles an angel, this gorgeous debut collection builds a ladder firmly rooted here: in sun and earth; in varying and multiple shades of orange; in trials of father and son; in books and paintings; in abandoned casinos; in countries far from home; and/or in the sound of a door closing. Nicholson's poems come from a man standing by himself, in what George Oppen called the 'shipwreck of the singular,' which includes everybody. I'm moved by the luminous generosity, the moral clarity of this work. A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire is news that will stay news." --Claudia Keelan, author of The Devotion Field, Missing Her, and O, Heart "'Who doesn't nurse a secret love?' asks Andrew S. Nicholson in visionary poems that reveal secret worlds cradled inside this one. Whether considering the casinos of Las Vegas, a fresco in Pompeii, or scenes from the Hebrew Bible, the poet endures one of desire's more fraught paradoxes: its unchanging ability to bring change, to turn the known into the unknown. These poems bravely attend to such transformations the way Jacob--the book's patron saint--wrestles with the angel, 'lifting all the flesh / that he can lose.' I admire this poet who knows that blessing doesn't arrive without loss, who remembers 'I was loved once. / Beneath that love, a kindness took root.' The same sweet feeling lingers long after this book is closed. Dear reader: savor it." --Brian Teare "Andrew S. Nicholson's A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire is a gorgeous book. His graceful, playful poems enchant us ('I try to make out the stranger's face, but he's shrinking: / a melting gray blur, an ever-smaller thorn.') and transform us ('Sink into the bathwater, any way is a way / to journey toward that joining'). Nicholson has become one of the great poets of a new and radical kind of pastoral." --Joseph LeaseOpening the space between the ordinary and the visionary, the poems in A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire uncover an intimate relationship with the world, from Las Vegas to Italy to the American Midwest. From a lime glowing in an orchard to a miraculous childhood attempt at levitation, Andrew S. Nicholson's poems ground themselves in the commonplace and leap for the luminous. Central to this collection are poems that retell stories of Jacob from the Old Testament, relocated behind casinos, glimpsed in miniature on kitchen floors, and heard speaking in a moment of decay. Through these retellings, Nicholson examines the creation of self, family relationships, and a generative sense of the divine"--

POETRY / American / General.

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Perhaps the most popular of all canonicalAmerican authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirizeAmerican formations of race and empire. While many scholars have exploredTwain's work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and AsianAmericans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsuexamines Twain's career-long archive of writings about United States relationswith China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain's early writings about Chineseimmigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery andanti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain's ideas about race were notlimited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully craftedassessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, includingAfrican Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations.Drawing on recent legal scholarship,comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting inDarkness engages Twain's best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, HuckleberryFinn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as well as hislesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as theallegorical tale "A Fable of the Yellow Terror" and the yellow face play AhSin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of ChineseExclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connectionsbetween immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.

LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General.

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Throughout Salt Moon, Noel Crook forges the kind of tragic vision Howard Nemerov described as the mark of our finest poets: drawing on myth and memory, Crook's fierce lyrics reveal a world that is at once "hopeless and beautiful . . . giving equal emphasis to both words." Sacrifice and betrayal, parental love and patricide, unleased desire and cornered despair-these antitheses fuel Crook's Ovidian imagination, which ranges freely from Comanche raids in Texas to a slave plantation in North Carolina, from a carpet maker in Istanbul to beggars in Delhi, from her daughter's hospital room to the wa

POETRY / General. --- POETRY / American / General.