ENG 001: Into the Minds of the Faculty (2024)

"Description
Winner of the Omnidawn Open
Selected by Arthur Sze
Poems that question how we connect with ourselves and each other across the vast gulf of history

Devonte Travels the Sorry Route explores how we manipulate language and form to create narratives of identity. These poems were generated in response to Brian Counihan’s painting, “Sorry Route,” and focus on an African American character named Devonte who traverses time and whose sense of identity is constantly being cut by historical events. Devonte embodies the blood of black folk and inhabits multiple dimensions, resisting attempts of containment.

Drawing on a “cartography of allusions” from Egyptian, Native American, Vodou, jazz, and Anansian sources, T.J. Anderson III explores what it means to be “a stalker of history” and writes with authenticity, mythic imagination, and verve. Devonte Travels the Sorry Route is a singular accomplishment that extends the range and enriches the depth of contemporary American poetry.

Arthur Sze, author of Compass Rose"

"In “When Malindy Sings” the great African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar writes about the power of African American music, the “notes to make the sound come right.” In this book T. J. Anderson III, son of the brilliant composer, Thomas Anderson Jr., asserts that jazz became in the twentieth century not only a way of revising old musical forms, such as the spiritual and work song, but also a way of examining the African American social and cultural experience. He traces the growing history of jazz poetry and examines the work of four innovative and critically acclaimed African American poets whose work is informed by a jazz aesthetic: Stephen Jonas (1925?–1970) and the unjustly overlooked Bob Kaufman (1925–1986), who have affinities with Beat poetry; Jayne Cortez (1936– ), whose work is rooted in surrealism; and the difficult and demanding Nathaniel Mackey (1947– ), who has links to the language writers. Each fashioned a significant and vibrant body of work that employs several of the key elements of jazz.

Anderson shows that through their use of complex musical and narrative weaves these poets incorporate both the tonal and performative structures of jazz and create work that articulates the African journey. From improvisation to polyrhythm, they crafted a unique poetics that expresses a profound debt to African American culture, one that highlights the crucial connection between music and literary production and links them to such contemporary writers as Michael Harper, Amiri Baraka, and Yusef Komunyakaa, as well as young recording artists—United Future Organization, Us3, and Groove Collection—who have successfully merged hip-hop poetry and jazz."

""Fueled with ecstatic rage and syncopated with jazzed-up pistons and B-bop timing belts, T. J. Anderson's RIVER TO CROSS is a long ride and deep plunge into the American subconscious. Lyrical, linguistically inventive, and deadly serious, Anderson wields surrealism to create surprising metaphors and revelatory dream symbols for our age, for the struggles our spirits and bodies engage. Attuned to 'you who are off' and taking the pulse of 'that red bud that brews/the blood in bloom,' RIVER TO CROSS is a momentous achievement worthy of our attention and celebration"—Khaled Mattawa."

"A, as in almanac for the dead but still dreaming. B, as in bestiary for the broken and the brave. C, as in crisis, catharsis, or conclusion: the cosmological fate of us all and how we choose to end things. Offering up an eclectic landscape of language experiments, patches of surrealism, and more traditional tales, Postludes spans the style spectrum from A-Z, analog to digital, and heartbreak to hope in its earnest and empathetic variations on the theme of finality and The End."--Publisher's website.
"1st printing: 2017"--title-page verso.

Boasting a cast of dreamful characters, from Young Escher to George Bailey to a wide array of inanimate objects absconded from the dark tonics of our childhood -- be they headless dolls, cuckoo clocks, inverted carpets or ravenous prisms, SKULL KINGDOMS: AN IMAGINARY OMNIBUS dives headlong into the radii of the imagination, measuring our inner landscapes against the sharp, enchanted edges of the playgounds we create to keep us safe from the outer world. In these formally audacious escapologies, speakers duck the responsibilities of adulthood, choosing to crash into Ottomans or sway along with imaginary galleons over the violence of growing up and its hungry regimes that would blot out all color to leave us listless. Concluding with a roleplaying game of loneliness, Skull Kingdoms proposes a fanciful, novel cartography for reimaging an otherwise jagged, savagery of terrain. -- From back cover.

"A girl flees to outer space in a bathtub, a man opts to live inside a vending machine, marble game glitches, tent cities, telescope murders, the beautiful afterlife of a book, an advent calendar for broken hearts, cheat sheet for transmigration of the soul, and many more “unstories” of characters arriving at points of no return."--From publisher's website.

"“The world map/colored yellow and green/draws a straight line from Boston to Cairo,” observes Pauline Kaldas in her rich collection Egyptian Compass. And so these poems navigate seamlessly between two worlds, the West and the Middle East, linking memory and perspective of the now through a chorus of Egyptian and American voices."

"Looking Both Ways is a collection of interlinked essays that explores family, language, politics, identity, and culture. These essays move across time and space, beginning in Egypt and crossing the ocean to follow the author s travels and the challenges of adapting to American culture and creating a family in her new world. From recounting her attempt to retrieve a stolen nativity camel to relaying her sense of cultural indignation when her husband tells her to follow a recipe, these essays use humor to dive deeper into the experience of what it means to live as an Egyptian in the United States. This book explores culture, identity, and displacement, offering a unique vision into the Arab American immigrant experience."

This textbook takes a new approach to teaching creative writing that centers the concerns of multicultural students. It focuses on the experiences of those who wish to write through their diverse identities, including ethnic, cultural, racial, national, regional, and international identity as well as gender identity, sexual preference, class position, and disability. Combining the study of culturally diverse literature with the process of writing, students are encouraged to engage with various texts and to use them to inspire their own work. Organized around a series of writing prompts and discussions of literary readings that address identity, place, perception, family, community, encounters, inheritance, and resistance, this book offers both writers and teachers a way to engage with the practice of writing from a multicultural perspective.

"While ranging from creek banks to hummocks, from barrier islands to ridges and hollers (from the Kansas River to West Penobscot Bay, to the Edisto, to various tributaries of the New and the James, the Neuse and the Savannah), the poems in ACCORDING TO SAND exhume often lost and surprising senses of the world and of words. They track, these creaturely poems, the abundant and the minimal, singing (in praise and loss) the uncanniness of existence. Into the waters and the lives there, this collection goes: the ghost crabs, fungi, heron crap, shifts of light, of history, family, time, a doll’s head on a riverbank, deadfall, leaves, weeds; yes, lots of plants, some in blossom, many edible. There are lyric sequences. There are the strange ekphrastics of “Thaw” and “Figure Drawn on the Ground as the Bull Moose Urinates Upon Waking.” There are riddles (can you hear, maybe even name, what from the other-than-human-world is speaking?). Also historical and botanical persona narratives, rimas dissolutas, and other echoes among them. ACCORDING TO SAND is an aching, wryly joyous collection that embodies the erosive and porous qualities of sand and invites us to recognize how we might remain among the remains, settling, shifting, filtering, and surviving."

"On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and "wonder the woods." In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing--lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness--invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase.

Reading this book is like trying to grasp a live fish or to study the seeds of a jewelweed pod the moment they unfurl: joyful, exhilarating, wakeful, wise, and riddled with each moment's loss. It orients by disorienting, because how else, Moeckel asks, can being in such an altered, changing, resilient place feel.

Here are upwellings from the interior Piedmont. Here is an eco-psychological lingua terra, an Anthropocene pilgrimage, a chronicle of presence, and presence's peregrinations. Here, most of all, is an experience in attention to place, the events of the seasonal, day-to-day flora and fauna of the Carolina Piedmont. Here we reside in the space where one thought has ended and another has not yet begun, where one way of life has ended and another is still being dreamed.

Those who love good writing and/or nature will love Thorpe Moeckel's exploration in this Wonder Almanac."

"Upstate South Carolina, 1979, late December. The decade is rapidly nearing its end as the holidays approach, and down along Painter Creek in the shadow of a mountain by the same name, nine-year-old Lucinda Mae, with the help of her best friend Jean, doesn’t have any trouble finding things to do. But Lucinda Mae is having trouble at school. Her teacher at Laurel Fork Elementary, Miss Cartmill, seems to be wasting away like she’s ill. Lucinda Mae and Jean have fear and respect for Miss Cartmill, and they’re worried about her. But Miss Cartmill keeps calling Lucinda Mae “saucy.” The girl’s a good student and works hard, but she doesn’t know what saucy means. Is saucy a good thing or a bad thing to be? Is Miss Cartmill in trouble? If so, can they help her?

As the events of this story unfold, Lucinda Mae grows closer to what saucy means, closer indeed to her friend Jean, her family, her community, the people, places, history, and critters, as well as to Miss Cartmill and herself. It all starts on the last day of school before winter break when Lucinda Mae shares with her class at school a photograph that her grandmother, Mimi, took years before of a one-eyed lady in a red dress standing on top of Painter Mountain. The one-eyed lady is covered with sweat, and her reindeer are grazing nearby, but instead, she hitches a wild turkey, a red fox, an osprey, a whitetail deer, a brook trout, and a panther to pull her carriage. What? The next day, by chance, Lucinda Mae and Jean go poking around Old Man Speed’s rundown place up the creek, where they make a discovery about the man and their teacher, Miss Cartmill, which sets into motion an adventure by turns suspenseful, magical, meditative, and redemptive."

Arcadia Road is three long poems – narrative, lyrical, meditative – each as audacious as down-to-earth, each as strange as intimate. Moeckel’s trilogy is as rich, lush, and organic as the soil of his Virgina Blue Ridge homestead. In a mode both contemporary and as old as Hesiod, Moeckel sustains a cosmic and earthbound incursion into essential techniques and textures of life. These poems are organic and intimate, revolving around the time, work, grace and struggle of bringing food from field to table. - From publisher's website

This volume, evolving from a recent symposium, brings together a group of prominent literary theorists and architects to discuss the entente between postmodernism and architecture.
English
-- Description based upon print version of record.

"Moses Unchained is the moving true story of a modern outlaw’s struggle with faith, betrayal, and the accidental nature of life. Zack Rosen was a simple man, but one with many contrasts. An urban Jew from New Jersey who moved south and converted to fundamentalist Christianity, he was not a philosopher or theologian but a man’s man, a tattooed truck driver who built a classic Harley-Davidson from spare parts. Zack met and married Shelley, another converted Jew, but their happiness was brief. Secrets from Shelley’s past came back to haunt them, and her sudden death from pneumon/ia revealed that she had AIDS and she had given the virus to Zack.

Suddenly faced with the loss of his family, his job, his income, and eventually, his own life, Zack became an itinerant evangelist. He introduced himself to author Marilyn F. Moriarty in 1993 with the words, “I got an honorable testimony.” She listened to this story and became his friend and caregiver. At his request, she has told his story here."

"Written and extensively class tested with NSF/NIH support, this timely and useful text addresses a crucial need which is acknowledged in most universities and colleges. It is the need for students to learn to write in the context of their field of study; in this case science. Although numerous "how to" writing books have been published, few, if any, address the central pedagogical issues underlying the process of learning to think and write scientifically. The direct connection between this writing skill and that of critical thinking is developed with engaging style by the author, an English professor. Moriarty's book is an invaluable guide for both undergraduate and graduate science students. In the process of learning the specific requirements of organization demanded by scientific writing, students will develop strategies for thinking through their scientific research, well before they sit down to write. This instructive text will be useful to students who need to satisfy a science writing proficiency requirement in the context of a science course, a course in technical writing, advanced composition, or writing for the profession."

"Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity.

These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls’ book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls.

Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls’ book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them."

"Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan - with a hound in tow - set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O'Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they've known. Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave's dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived."--Publisher.

"The members of Dunlap Fellowship of All Things in Common share everything from their meager incomes to the only functioning toilet in the community house— everything, that is, except secrets. When Omi Ruth Wincott, the youngest member of the disintegrating common-purse community in this small Indiana town, loses her only brother, Woodrun, she withdraws from everyone and fixates on a secret desire: She wishes only for an extravagant head- stone to mark Woodrun’s grave, an expense that the strict, parsimonious community can’t—or won’t—pay for. In her loneliness, Omi Ruth’s only ties to the world remain her National Geographic magazines and a new resident in the house, Northrop, an old man caught between living and dying, maintained in a vegetative state by hospice care.

Observing everything with the keen eye of a girl with a photographic memory, Omi Ruth finds herself learning to grieve in the company of unlikely strangers. With the help of a homeless and pregnant Tracie Casteel, a rebellious Amish boy named Spencer Frye, and the smooth-talking Vaughn Buey who works third shift at Dunlap’s RV plant, Omi Ruth discovers that there are two things of which there is no shortage in the world’s common purse—love and loss."

In this collection of portraits, the eye is the vital ''lamp of the body,'' a spiritual organ van Eerden uses to craft essays that are as much encounters as they are likenesses, as much being seen as seeing. Historical subjects like Simone Weil and the Beguines confront the author's imaginative and intellectual being, while the viscerally close foci of family and a lost marriage must also be reckoned with. The author's religious tradition and the rural landscape of Terra Alta, West Virginia are two backgrounds that are neither chosen nor fully understood, but van Eerden's attention to these matters becomes its own form of devotion, a longing to see and to believe--the longing itself taking on the robustness of faith. This is the common goal of these essays, to fully meet each subject and return to it some form of wholeness, a quest full of lush imagery and insights. -- From Amazon description.

"A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction • A Recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence • One of New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Book

Named a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly• GQ•The New York Times (Selected by Dwight Garner) • NPR • The Wall Street Journal• San Francisco Chronicle• Refinery29•Booklist• Kirkus Reviews • Commonweal Magazine

"In its poetic splendor and moral seriousness, The Sport of Kings bears the traces of Faulkner, Morrison, and McCarthy. . . . It is a contemporary masterpiece."―San Francisco Chronicle

Hailed by The New Yorker for its “remarkable achievements,” The Sport of Kings is an American tale centered on a horse and two families: one white, a Southern dynasty whose forefathers were among the founders of Kentucky; the other African-American, the descendants of their slaves.

It is a dauntless narrative that stretches from the fields of the Virginia piedmont to the abundant pastures of the Bluegrass, and across the dark waters of the Ohio River; from the final shots of the Revolutionary War to the resounding clang of the starting bell at Churchill Downs. As C. E. Morgan unspools a fabric of shared histories, past and present converge in a Thoroughbred named Hellsmouth, heir to Secretariat and a contender for the Triple Crown. Newly confronted with one another in the quest for victory, the two families must face the consequences of their ambitions, as each is driven---and haunted---by the same, enduring question: How far away from your father can you run?

A sweeping narrative of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, The Sport of Kings is an unflinching portrait of lives cast in the shadow of slavery and a moral epic for our time."

Entering its fifth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today. -- Publisher.