Böcker utgivna av University of Iowa Press

Children in Tactical Gear offers a brilliant feed of stark incantations and unsparing satire. Set in distinctly American landscapes, including toy weapon assembly lines and the compounds of the super rich, and voiced by imperiled children, failed adults, and even a smart home speaker, this collection demonstrates the unsettling force of a surreal imagination under duress.

"The Lengest Neoi embraces and complicates what it means to err-to wander or go astray; a deviation from a code of behavior or truth; a mistake, flaw, or defect. Beginning with the collection's title, which combines a colloquial Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi/"Pretty Girl") and the English suffix for the superlative degree (-est), these poems wander, deviate, and flaw across bodies, geographies, and languages. From the Nantucket Whaling Museum to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, from childhood speech and bodily correction to the history of the American Chestnut Tree and anti-Asian sentiment and policies, from voicemails to experimental translations between English and Cantonese-this book asks: to wander or go astray from where? Who and what defines error? What is a right translation? Of language, of body, of self, of history? The speaker's insatiable desire for self-definition-to transform "error" into poetic space and play-leaves her wondering if the process of creating and looking doesn't also embody a kind of projected, and potentially problematic, fantasy of self. Ultimately, the collection grapples with how one might be "still of the histories that define me," and able to locate sites of agency and self-creation. In this debut collection from Stephanie Choi, you'll find the poet's "tongue writing herself, learning to speak.""--

The Tigers of Lents the story of the Garrison family, who live in Lents, an outer neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. At the heart of it all, there are the three Garrison sisters: Sara, the eldest, a fiery soccer star on the precipice of pulling herself out of the life of poverty she's always known; Elaine, shy and struggling with the weight she carries both physically and mentally; and Rachel, a reader and poet whose imagination stalls at trying to picture a better life.

"At the age of forty-three, Amy Lee Lillard learned she was autistic. She learned she was part of a community of unseen women who fell through the gaps due to medical bias and social stereotypes. And she learned that her brash and trashy family of women may have broken under the weight of invisible disability. A Grotesque Animal explores the making, unmaking, and making again of a woman with invisible and unknown disability-through a combination of personal storytelling and cultural analysis, through wide-ranging styles and mixed media. A battle cry that dissects anger, sexuality, autistic masking, bodies, punk, and female annihilation to create a new picture of modern women"--

"Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional effort to make the American novel matter after 1965. During this era, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture vied with novels for a specific kind of prestige - often figured as "importance" or "relevance" - that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. This trans-media competition, Brier argues, is a crucial but largely unacknowledged event in the literary and economic history of the American novel. In the face of it, the novel lost some of the symbolic specialness it formerly held. That loss, in turn, generated not just a much-discussed rhetoric of crisis but also a host of unexamined, intertwined effects on both literary form and the business of novel production. Drawing on a range of novels and on the archives of publishers, editors, agents, and authors, Novel Competition shows how fiction's declining position in a transformed "popular-prestige" economy reshaped the post-1965 American novel as art form, cultural institution, and commodity"--

"Combining performance theory with original archival research, Rowdy Carousals makes important interventions in nineteenth-century theater history with regard to the Bowery Boy, a rowdy, white, urban character, most famously exemplified by Mose from A Glance at New York in 1848. First, this book greatly expands the stage history of the Bowery Boy which was not limited to Mose but rather included Mose's compeers and descendants who rollicked through sketches, comedies, and melodramas from the antebellum decades to the Progressive Era. Second, Rowdy Carousals argues that theatrical representations of the Bowery Boy legitimated and disseminated images of working-class whiteness that facilitated class and racial formation in the United States. The Bowery Boy's rowdyism during the antebellum period helped instantiate a concept of a working-class alongside the emergent definitions of the middle class, a tension which was slowly mediated by the appropriation and disciplining of the character by the turn of the century. At the same time, theatrical representations of the Bowery Boy emphasized the privileges of whiteness against nonwhite workers including slaves and free African Americans during the antebellum period, an articulation of white superiority that continued through the early twentieth century with immigrants such as Jews, Italians, and the Chinese. The examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theater, and in print culture in Rowdy Carousals invites theater historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy. This study, finally, suggests links between the Bowery Boy's rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century"--

"Sometimes the word "lyric" seems to appear everywhere: either it's used interchangeably with the word "poetry," or it attaches to descriptions of literature, art, film, and even ordinary objects in order to capture some quality of aesthetic appeal or value or meaning. This book is not yet another attempt to define the lyric, but instead to dig into what the word might be standing in for. This book shows how lyric's taxonomical slipperiness, its ideological baggage, its historical misconstruals and debates whether it ought to be considered a genre, a mode, a style, a structure of address, a remnant of classicism or romanticism or modernism or something else-mobilize its specialness, its exemplarity, its distinct power, and its frequent circulation especially in poetry and poetics. This book argues that long poems in particular that take up lyric-the genre that they have supposedly rejected-do so in order to reimagine the shape of the speaking subject. This book asks: What does lyric mean-and why should it matter to poets and readers? Is it a meaningful term, a useful term? Is it somehow more meaningful or useful than the other kinds of words that animate and describe poetry? Is it maybe more important to consider the way the term is used, the work it does? This book reads lyric as the site at which poets reimagine identity, or exchange innovation for limiting tropes of the subject, or to do both of these things within a single work-or to do something else entirely with the putative links between expression, presence, and subjectivity. This book does not offer a single, fixed definition of lyric, because it is interested more in the ways lyric is imagined within the texts themselves. This book is also interested in undoing some of the habits of thought that recur throughout the discourse of genre by reimagining formalism"--

Frogs and toads have become canaries in the coal mine when it comes to conservation, as the discovery of malformed frogs has brought increased attention to global habitat loss, declining biodiversity, and environmental pollution. Midwestern species of frogs and toads--already declining due to habitat loss from agriculture--have been greatly affected by this worldwide phenomenon. VanDeWalle includes a complete description of each species along with distinguishing characteristics for three subspecies, information about range and habitat preferences, diet, types of calls, and breeding season.

"Big data, sensor networks, rolling newsfeeds: today we are constantly surrounded by communication technologies mapping and remapping the complexity of our interconnected planet. But one technology has been overlooked: the poem. This book tells the story of how, over the century, authors and readers reinvented poetry as a form of macro-scale imagination, able to capture the speed and scope of global capitalist society when all other media fall short. It also asks what that story tells us today: why have we been so keen to picture poetry as a kind of global information system (a picture I call 'epic reading')? What may have been lost? This story, it turns out, takes us back to the years just before the First World War, when new media and new horizons threatened to leave poetry behind--but also opened up a new space of imaginative possibilities that it turned out poetic technique was uniquely able to navigate. It also takes us back to turn-of-the century France, and more specifically to Paris (the 'capital of the nineteenth century') where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire articulated, more clearly than anyone, the challenges of imaginative scale that the coming twentieth century would bring. The book follows Apollinaire's ideas across the Atlantic, and shows how and why his work became a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of American imperialism and into the present day. Threading together Apollinaire's work in the 1910s with that of three of his American successors--Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s, Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s, and Alice Notley starting in the 1970s--it examines why this specific strand of poetic tradition and method has proved so vital to our cultural ideas, a hundred years later, of what poetry can do and of what one individual can imagine."--