Self-Portrait with Cephalopod
Self-Portrait with Cephalopod

Author: Kathryn Smith

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Published: 2021-02-09

Total Pages: 77

ISBN-13: 1571317481

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Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod—selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction. Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light—but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, “the bloody hand holding back / the skin,” revealing “the world’s inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth.” These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.

The Soul of an Octopus
The Soul of an Octopus

Author: Sy Montgomery

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-07-12

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1501161148

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Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction * New York Times Bestseller * A Huffington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year * One of the Best Books of the Month on Goodreads * Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year * An American Library Association Notable Book of the Year “Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus does for the creature what Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk did for raptors.” —New Statesman, UK “One of the best science books of the year.” —Science Friday, NPR Another New York Times bestseller from the author of The Good Good Pig, this “fascinating…touching…informative…entertaining” (The Daily Beast) book explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus—a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature—and the remarkable connections it makes with humans. In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities—gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple “sleights of hand” to get food. Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal’s color-changing techniques. With her “joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures” (Library Journal Editors’ Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds.

Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer

Author: Sue Taylor

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780262700917

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A study of Hans Bellmer's eroticized images and the psychological origins of his disturbing art.

The Octopus Museum
The Octopus Museum

Author: Brenda Shaughnessy

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2021-06-29

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 1524711497

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Now in paperback, this collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics. Informed as much by Brenda Shaughnessy's worst fears as a mother as they are by her superb craft as a poet, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.

The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz
The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz

Author:

Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 1571319603

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In 1578, during months of imprisonment for his reformist beliefs, San Juan de la Cruz composed a series of narrative poems inspired by the Biblical Song of Songs—and, the story goes, a popular love song overheard from his cramped cell—that take God as the beloved. Erotically charged, initially scandalous, his mystical poetry engages with the journey of the soul through the darkest trenches of suffering and despair toward an enlightened spiritual connection with God. For hundreds of years, these poems have resonated deeply with those who search for meaning in the dark, and have influenced generations of poets, artists, and philosophers. This bilingual edition of the Complete Poems—including “Dark Night” and both the Sanlúcar and Jaén manuscripts of “Spiritual Canticle”—presents an intimate and exceptionally collaborative new translation from María Baranda and Paul Hoover. Baranda, one of the most distinguished Mexican poets of her generation, lends her deft hand with expansive, meditative poetry. Hoover—the accomplished American poet, editor, and translator—offers his dexterity with form and the possibilities of language. The product is uniquely faithful to image and idea, and loyal to the ecstatic lyricism of this canonical text. A volume that hums with the soul’s longing to find solace, The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz is a collection to be treasured.

The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde
The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde

Author: Alyce Mahon

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-05-26

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0691141614

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"This is the first book to examine the cultural history of Marquis de Sade's (1740-1814) philosophical ideas and their lasting influence on political and artistic debates. An icon of free expression, Sade lived through France's Reign of Terror, and his writings offer both a pitiless mirror on humanity and a series of subversive metaphors that allow for the exploration of political, sexual, and psychological terror. Generations of avant-garde writers and artists have responded to Sade's philosophy as a means of liberation and as a radical engagement with social politics and sexual desire, writing fiction modelled on Sade's novels, illustrating luxury editions of his works, and translating his ideas into film, photography, and painting. In The Sadean Imagination, Alyce Mahon examines how Sade used images and texts as forms that could explore and dramatize the concept of terror on political, physical, and psychic levels, and how avant-garde artists have continued to engage in a complex dialogue with his works. Studying Sade's influence on art from the French Revolution through the twentieth century, Mahon examines works ranging from Anne Desclos's The Story of O, to images, texts, and films by Man Ray, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Peter Brook. She also discusses writings and responses to Sade by feminist theorists including Angela Carter and Judith Butler. Throughout, she shows how Sade's work challenged traditional artistic expectations and pushed the boundaries of the body and the body politic, inspiring future artists, writers, and filmmakers to imagine and portray the unthinkable"--

Dynamic Paleontology
Dynamic Paleontology

Author: Mark A.S. McMenamin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 3319227777

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Using a series of case studies, the book demonstrates the power of dynamic analysis as applied to the fossil record. Written in an engaging and informative style, Dynamic Paleontology outlines the best application of quantitative and other tools to critical problems in the paleontological sciences including such topics as analysis of the Cambrian Explosion and the question regarding the presence of life on Mars. The book considers how we think about certain types questions and shows how we can refine our approach to analysis right from the beginning of any particular research effort. The analytical tools presented here will have wide application to other fields of knowledge; as such the book represents a major contribution to our deployment of modern scientific method.

Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods
Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods

Author: Danna Staaf

Publisher: The Experiment, LLC

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1615197419

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From the author of Nursery Earth, a “nimble, fast, surprising, smart, and weird in the very coolest sense of the word” (Sy Montgomery) exploration of the sometimes enormous, often bizarre creatures that ruled the seas long before the first dinosaurs—a Science Friday Book Club Pick Cephalopods, Earth’s first truly substantial animals, are still among us: Their fascinating family tree features squid, octopuses, nautiluses, and more. The inventors of swimming, cephs presided over the sea for millions of years. But when fish evolved jaws, cephs had to step up their game (or end up on the menu). Some evolved defensive spines. Others abandoned their shells entirely, opening the floodgates for a tidal wave of innovation: masterful camouflage, fin-supplemented jet propulsion, and intelligence we’ve yet to fully measure. In Monarchs of the Sea, marine biologist Danna Staaf unspools how these otherworldly creatures once ruled the deep—and why they still captivate us today. Publisher’s Note: Monarchs of the Sea was previously published in hardcover as Squid Empire.

Walking Your Octopus
Walking Your Octopus

Author: Brian Kesinger

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781614040064

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A beautifully produced and richly illustrated book that showcases the day-to-day adventures of independent girl-about-town Victoria Psismall and her pet land octopus Otto. Thirty panoramic, full-page illustrations humorously chronicle the duo's home and social activities that include (among other things) bathing, biking, dating, cooking, playing croquet, and pumpkin carving. Accompanying text explains the "do"s and "don't"s of living with a large land octopus. The book's art is extremely detailed, and each illustration tells its own visual story. The Victorian era characters and period-influenced design elements combine to create a wonderful, collectible art-object for those who still value the classic elegance of ink-on-paper. The hardcover binding is plussed with two-layer embossing and spot varnish, and the interior is printed on extra heavy paper. An exquisite volume for lovers of books, art and pets.