Research & Innovation

World War I has been called “the poets’ war,” as it was characterized by a massive outpouring of works of literature during and after the war. Much of this literary harvest, as Paul Fussell brilliantly demonstrated in The Great War and Modern Memory, hinged on an ironic response to the deadly absurdities of World War I.

The poet Patrick Phillips brings us a stunning third collection that is at its core a son’s lament for his father. This book of elegies takes us from the luminous world of childhood to the fluorescent glare of operating rooms and recovery wards, and into the twilight lives of those who must go on. In one poem Phillips watches his sons play “Mercy” just as he did with his brother: hands laced, the stronger pushing the other back until he grunts for mercy, “a game we played // so many times / I finally taught my sons, // not knowing what it was, / until too late, I’d done.” Phillips documents the unsung joys of midlife, the betrayals of the human body, and his realization that as the crowd of ghosts grows, we take our places, next in line. The result is a twenty-first-century memento mori, fashioned not just from loss but also from praise, and a fierce love for the world in all its ruined splendor.

The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significant traditions, genres, and themes of civil rights literature. While civil rights scholarship has typically focused on documentary rather than creative writing, and political rather than cultural history, this Companion addresses the gap and provides university students with a vast introduction to an impressive range of authors.

The Altar of Innocence is about a mother who is an unfulfilled artist and a daughter who struggles to untangle the web of her mother’s depression, alcoholism, and suicide attempt. As the daughter grows into a woman, she experiences her own confrontation with depression and a crumbling marriage.  Deeply dissatisfied with the explanation of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain, she peers into her own dark night of the soul and undertakes a spiritual journey.  In order to finally claim her voice, she must overcome the patriarchy of the mental health system, challenge her treatment options, and navigate an increasingly difficult relationship with her husband.  The poems in The Altar of Innocence come from my heart and from the sincere desire to share my journey in the hopes that others may find courage and inspiration.

The essays collected here consider how conceptions of blood permeate discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900 in England and continental Spain and in the Anglo- and Ibero-Americas. The authors explore how ideas about blood in science and literature have supported, at various points in history, fantasies of human embodiment and difference that serve to naturalize social hierarchies already in place. Situating the complex relationship between modern and pre-modern conceptions of race at the junction of early modern medicine, heredity, religion, and nation, The Cultural Politics of Blood challenges established accounts of the genealogy of modern racism.

A Week With Beijing by Meg Eden – published February 7th 2015 – is Neon‘s second chapbook. This book of twenty-one poems charts the narrator’s relationship with the mysterious Beijing, a woman who personifies the city for which she is named. We see Beijing through a time of tumultuous change: industries rise and fall, the Olympic games come and go, and her husband purchases a mistress. In these poems her vulnerabilities are laid bare and we catch fleeting glimpses of Beijing as she really is.

The Cultural Politics of Blood works to interrogate and often undermine the most commonly accepted cultural histories of blood and race.

PN Review, Oversound, Poetry Northwest, AzonaL, New England Review, Provincetown Arts, Five Points, Poetry, The Account, Georgia Review, B O D Y, Literary Imagination, Manchester Review, Great River Review, Cortland Review, Tikkun, Scoundrel Time, Lana Turner, Molly Bloom, Matter, Writer's Chronicle, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Ploughshares, Split This Rock, Threepenny Review, Chicago Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Literary Hub.

Edouard Glissant's work has begun to make a significant impact on francophone studies and some corners of postcolonial theory. His literary works and criticism are increasingly central to the study of Caribbean literature and cultural studies. This collection focuses on the particularly philosophical register of Glissant's thought. Each of the authors in this collection takes up a different aspect of Glissant's work and extends it in different directions. twentieth-century French philosophy (Bergson, Badiou, Meillassoux), the cannon of Caribbean literature, North American literature and cultural theory, and contemporary cultural politics in Glissant's home country of Martinique all receive close, critical treatment. What emerges from this collection is a vision of Glissant as a deeply philosophical thinker, whose philosophical character draws from the deep resources of Caribbean memory and history. Glissant's central notions of rhizome, chaos, opacity, and creolization are given a deeper and wider appreciation through accounts of those resources in detailed conceptual studies.
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The poet Raymond Patterson once asked “But who can conceive / Of cities lost in a blackman?” That’s what these poems are about: what does it mean to be nearly broken by something you love? Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, a confrontation of the hard realities that frame America. These poems question an incongruous America: “A black boy says sorbet / is one thing—a black boy says get the fuck out the car is quite another.” Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear “the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world.”