Alumni Bookshelf

From the publisher's website:

Judith Skillman's "The Sister," which I accepted for Seneca Review earlier this year, was striking for recasting Cain as sister and memorably arresting for the feral fierceness of the portrait. Her other poems in The Never are equally astute, unsentimental and unflinching; her identification with the icons and motions of mythology, the armature for so many of the poems here, derive from their visceral passions. These poems sizzle with elemental directness and judgment, linguistically sharp and probing.

"The meditative, quiet beauty of Linda Dove's In Defense of Objects helps defend the reader against all sorts of daily blindnesses. Although there are lovely poems here about art, Dove leads us to see the ordinary material world, too, as shaped and heightened. 'Until memory is allocated, objects do not exist,' says a computer science document quoted here, and many of Dove's poems will now be allocated to my memory. Not least of the objects worth defending, this poet shows, are words themselves, which she employs with subtlety, wit, and depth of feeling"--Mary Jo Salter.

A few years have passed since the conquering of the Mein, and Queen Corinn is firmly in control of the Known World-perhaps too firmly. With plans to expand her empire, she sends her brother, Daniel, on an exploratory mission to the Other Lands. There Daniel discovers a lush, exotic mainland ruled by an alliance of tribes that poses a grave danger to the stability of the Known World. Is Queen Corinn strong enough to face this new challenge? Fans of this bold, imaginative series will not be disappointed in the answer.

Imagine you step into a vintage clothing store in a new city. You see: the usual mix of leather jackets, crinoline, motorcycle t-shirts, a yellow sundress, a poison ring. Only all of these clothes belong to Alison Stine, and she's there, saying, "Try this-- it'll fit you better" or "This shirt I've never even worn." As you stand in front of the full-length mirror, tags dangling from your sleeves, you start to see, slowly, what Stine sees: A bullied girl in a science classroom; a sleight-of-hand trick in a dark auditorium; a teenager running in snow from a party.

The workshops in Look Ma,"Hands" on Poetry are designed to help teachers and poets familiarize elementary through high school students with a variety of creative and fun ways to engage their imaginations and write poetry! They do so by encouraging teachers and students to explore, together, the art of poetry; i.e., the art of employing the five senses to capture experience in language. The workshops also introduce young writers to a wide range of poets and the poetic techniques and styles that they have incorporated in their writing.

Late night at the corner diner. Struggling with that character who just won't speak to you or searching for that perfect word. Laboring over gallons of coffee, greasy comfort food, and blank notebook pages. Called by the feelings or ideas that compel a writer to set down her thoughts whenever she can find the time, wondering whether there are others out there doing the same. This is why writers' workshops are so important-they are a place where one's passion and efforts can be shared, acknowledged, and improved in the presence of supportive, honest, risk-taking fellow writers.

Working with a varied and untraditional cast of characters--Wyatt Earp, Jack London, Clara Bow, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Lupino--author Marsha Orgeron examines the Hollywood ambitions of a fading western legend, a successful popular author, a poor Brooklyn girl turned flapper icon, a self-proclaimed avant-garde genius, and a frustrated actress on her way to becoming a director. Investigating their separate involvements with the expanding film industry, Orgeron illustrates the implications of film celebrity during the era in which cinema's impact was first felt.

Unpublished in book form during her lifetime, the poems of Emily Dickinson were nonetheless shared with those she trusted most—through her letters. This XML-based archive brings together seventy-four poems and letters from Emily’s correspondence with her sister-in-law and primary confidante, Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript. These images have zoom functionality as well as a special light-box feature that allows users to view and compare constellations of related documents.

This collection covers varied perspectives on both canonical and lesser-known Catholic women writers, all focusing on unruliness in what is commonly thought of as a restrictive site of writing for women: Catholicism. This volume is comprised of fourteen selected essays divided into three main sections by chronology:  (1) medieval through the seventeenth centuries; (2) eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and (3) the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

"In Constituents of Matter, Anna Leahy looks hard and long at the `solid things' of the world and discovers that they are both reflected and refracted by time. The matter that constitutes her experience occupies a space that is `immense' with `emptiness' but is also `buoyant' with `joy.' Like the moose she looks at and who catches her looking (`Moose, Looking'), I find that I'm contained by a `large life' that's revealed in intervals of repose and stillness."--Michael Collier

For several decades a brutal army of rebels has been raiding villages in northern Uganda, kidnapping children and turning them into soldiers or wives of commanders. More than 30,000 children have been abducted over the last twenty years and forced to commit unspeakable crimes.

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation’s capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.”

A poignant novel about a lifelong friendship, this is the story of Barbara and Marilyn, who once shared an idyllic childhood in the modest Riggs Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. Now, at age 58, each is dealing with a crisis - Marilyn with recurrent breast cancer, Barbara with a difficult relationship with a man. Yet both feel driven to return to the old neighborhood together to solve a decades-old mystery that still haunts them. The heart-wrenching secret they discover tests their friendship.

Judith Skillman sings. She sings of home so as to define it. She sings home back to origins, both Hebrew and Hellenic, that give it warmth and meaning. Her precise, quick stepping lyrics help us find our own way home, and to face the mystery of never fully knowing it. -- David Hamilton, Editor, The Iowa Review

The intelligence, the imagination, the quick humor in Solar Prominence all point in the same direction: toward the poem as a made thing, a thing of light, crafted, the way craft, through its various art, transforms the generalities into the specifics of magic. The layering of detail, the building and unbuilding of the arguments of narrative, the commissions and omissions of the poet's autobiography form designs as well as designations, symbols as well as signatures. There is a wealth of information here, but changed, at every turn, into different riches.

Patrick Phillips' first book, Chattahoochee, received a 2003 "Discovery" / The Nation Award, and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2004. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including recent issues of Poetry, DoubleTake, and Ploughshares. His honors include the Sjoberg Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Pablo Neruda Prize, and a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently a MacCracken Fellow at New York University.

How do new dads teach their daughters how brave baby girls can be...and how smart...and how athletic? Why by lifting them into the air and flying them around the room, turning them into the intrepid Pink Flash!

When he learns that his pregnant wife has been spirited off to a distant city, William responds as any man might—he drops everything to pursue her. But as a fugitive slave in Antebellum America, he must run a terrifying gauntlet, eluding the many who would re-enslave him while learning to trust the few who dare to aid him on his quest.

"James Hoch's poems contain an eerie and clarifying power that reminds that reminds me of Chardin's still lifes. Lake Chardin, Hoch celebrates the beauty and fragility of life by fixing on the luminous details of mortality. He does so through a dense but elegant syntx. Unlike most first books, experience drives Hoch's poems. A PARADE OF HANDS is so sure of itslef that raders will think of James Hoch's achievement and accomplishment rather than of his promise and potential"--Michael Collier.

Selma detests my small considerations of strangers. When she catches me nodding at the panhandlers she ignores, or opening doors for women I don't know, she says nothing, but holds herself tall and aloof. She is doing it for the both of us. She is compensating for what she believes is a weakness in her husband that, even in this day and age, a black man still cannot afford. And she may be right. But at this stage of my life I feel not so much black or male, middle-aged or well-to-do or professional, as incomplete.

Mary Fred Anderson, raised in an isolated fundamentalist sect whose primary obsessions seem to involve an imminent Apocalypse and the propagation of the name "Fred," is hardly your average fifteen-year-old. She has never watched TV, been to a supermarket, or even read much of anything beyond the inscrutable dogma laid out by the prophet Fred.

When Gabriel Lynch moves with his mother and brother from a brownstone in Baltimore to a dirt-floor hovel on a homestead in Kansas, he is not pleased. He does not dislike his new stepfather, a former slave, but he has no desire to submit to a life of drudgery and toil on the untamed prairie. So he joins up with a motley crew headed for Texas only to be sucked into an ever-westward wandering replete with a mindless violence he can neither abet nor avoid–a terrifying trek he penitently fears may never allow for a safe return.

Out of print.

"Alison Stine's best poems here are confessional and meditative sequences, but are shadowed by the tradition of dramatic narrative; they propose types of redemptive performance....Their white spaces are crucial to this ironic self appraisal, in which a lost, outcast belated family is assembled by invocation."--Robert Hill Long

In a changing society, Christians and Jews have looked to the Bible to find values and models. But the Hebrew Bible does not offer just a single model for family behavior or relationships. This volume explores the positive and negative aspects of family life in ancient Israel as portrayed in the Bible. Rashkow examines the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings, looking at the variety of conflicts that emerged: incest, rape, abuse, murder, and hatred.

The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful.

A first-person journal about the author's sponsorship of a Vietnamese refugee family in the mid-'70s.