Research & Innovation

In Kara Candito’s prize-winning debut collection a “garish/human theatre” comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the “glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves” and Puccini’s Tosca meets the din of the Times Square subway station. Ferociously witty and intensely lyrical, Taste of Cherry speaks to us in a language that is simultaneously private and public, sensual and cerebral.

There, he finds a country filled with poignant memories for him: early artistic success, marriage, the birth of two daughters, and a love affair that divided his family. Told with elegance and transporting historical sensitivity, Emily Mitchell’s first novel captures the life of a great American artist caught in the reckoning of a painful past in a world beset by war.

A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man’s life 

 

At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a “certifiable” offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. 

 

A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts’s years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts’s survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.

The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic. At the Barriers will solidify Gunn’s rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.

This initiative aims to expand the number of Americans mastering what military and intelligence officials have labeled" critical-need" languages, particularly Arabic, Chinese, Rus sian, Hindi, and Farsi. Throughout his speech, President Bush talked about foreign language education as a means to protect the United States in the short-term by" defeating [terrorists] in foreign battlefields so they don't strike us here at home."

PLACE HOLDER TEXT

from Peepal Tree Press:

In Tanya Shirley’s She Who Sleeps With Bones, the hauntings of memory and the spiritual lead us to eloquently shaped epiphanies that turn what appear at on the surface to be simple and tidy stories into profound meditations on the human condition. Shirley acts as a witness to the lives of those around her, yet she is a biased witness, one who has become so enmeshed in the lives of her 'characters' that gradually we become convinced that she has erased the lines that would allow us to distinguish her from the people who enter her work. The collection is anchored by a series of spiritual poems that beautifully enact the mysteries of inner sight and clairvoyance of a poet who is a reluctant seer, who comes from a family of seers:

Her reluctance arises from the toll that sight brings to the poet - the burden of feeling, and speaking the truths that haunt. And yet for all its spiritual intelligence, these are poems of earthy sensuality and celebratory humor that are fully rooted in the every day details of living, loving, fearing, laughing and hoping.

Shirley’s poems are beautifully crafted and they reveal her deft handling of syntax and musicality. She is as meticulous in her choice of words and images as she is in her honesty of emotion and risk-taking.
Ultimately, however, it is the resilience of her joy that remains with us after each poem - for all its complications, (and there are many explored here - deaths of dear friends and relatives, the anxieties of being an alien in another country, the perils of unrequited love, the importance of size in sexual play, and the premonitions of tragedy) the world is ultimately full of wonder and joy for Tanya Shirley, a joy that she manages to make sublimely contagious.
 

The Middle East—now a single consumerist Caliphate led by Lebanese pop singer Caliph Fred—is in an uproar after an attack on the al-Aqsa Mosque gets televised on the Holy Land Channel. The world is on the brink of a total radioactive, no-survivors war, and human­kind's last hope is Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., celebrity heir, debauched party animal, and Elvis impersonation scholar. But Eliot's got his own problems. His evangelical dad is breeding red heifers in anticipation of the Rapture. Eliot's dissertation is in the toilet. And he has a doppelgänger. An evil doppelgänger.

In Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics Jason R. Rudy connects formal poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell’s electric field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics.

Taije Silverman's debut collection chronicles her family's devotion and dissolution through the death of her mother. Ranging in style from measured narratives to fragmented lyrics that convey the ambiguity of loss, these poems both arc into the past and question the possibility of the future, exploring the ways in which memory at once sustains and fails love. Ultimately the poems are elegies not only to one beloved mother, but to the large and diffusive presences of Keats, Mandelstam, a concentration camp near Prague, a coming-of-age on a Greek island, and the nearly traceless particles of neutrinos that--as with each detail toward which the poet lends her attention--become precious as the mother departs from her position at the center of the world. Furious, redemptive, and deeply immediate, Houses are Fields is a beautifully moving first book.