Poetry. Art. Asian & Asian American Studies. 2014 Kore Press First Book Winner, selected by Joy Harjo. SILENT ANATOMIES is a poetic-visual hybrid that traverses the body's terrain, examining the phenomena of cultural silences. Whether it is shame obscuring the female body, the social stigma shrouding certain illnesses, or the cryptic stories of her ancestors, Monica Ong interrogates the agency of the daughter, who must decide whether or not to speak out. What happens to stories that go underreported, un-translated, or are completely erased?
Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political struggle. By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes from Twilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima, she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse— the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human. This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed, or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people’s main cultural function, which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person.
* The Believer Book Award Finalist * One of the Best Books of 2012 —BuzzFeed “I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died. When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was, That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’” First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham. Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: Someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.) I’m Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how we love and communicate with one another. "A provocative novel... that blurs the boundaries between life and performance, dance, art, and viral video. The novel is also framed in the world of performance art and is itself its own kind of performance... and feels rightly reflective of a moment when dance is pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a performance space." —Slate
This open access book describes and illustrates the surgical techniques, implants, and technologies used for the purpose of personalized implantation of hip and knee components. This new and flourishing treatment philosophy offers important benefits over conventional systematic techniques, including component positioning appropriate to individual anatomy, improved surgical reproducibility and prosthetic performance, and a reduction in complications. The techniques described in the book aim to reproduce patients’ native anatomy and physiological joint laxity, thereby improving the prosthetic hip/knee kinematics and functional outcomes in the quest of the forgotten joint. They include kinematically aligned total knee/total hip arthroplasty, partial knee replacement, and hip resurfacing. The relevance of available and emerging technological tools for these personalized approaches is also explained, with coverage of, for example, robotics, computer-assisted surgery, and augmented reality. Contributions from surgeons who are considered world leaders in diverse fields of this novel surgical philosophy make this open access book will invaluable to a wide readership, from trainees at all levels to consultants practicing lower limb surgery
This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
"Forgive state poet #289-128 / for not scribbling illusions / of trickery as if timeless hell / could be captured by stanzas / alliteration or slant rhyme," remarks the speaker, Maryland Department of Corrections prisoner {#289-128}, early in this haunting collection. Three sections—{#289-128} Property of the State, {#289-128} Poet-in-Residence (Cell 23), and {#289-128} Poet in New York—frame the countless ways in which the narrator's body and life are socially and legally rendered by the state even as the act of poetry helps him reclaim an identity during imprisonment. These poems address the prison industrial complex, the carceral state, the criminal justice system, racism, violence, love, resilience, hope, and despair while exploring the idea of freedom in a cell. In the tradition of Dennis Brutus's Letters to Martha, Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Etheridge Knight's The Essential Etheridge Knight, {#289-128} challenges the language of incarceration—especially the ways in which it reinforces stigmas and stereotypes. Though {#289-128} refuses to be defined as a felon, this collection viscerally details the dehumanizing effects of prison, which linger long after release. It also illuminates the ways in which we all are relegated to cells or boundaries, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
In antiquity, the human body's internal structure was subject to speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy and equally spectacular visions of the body. Dream Anatomy, a lavishly illustrated new publication from the National Library of Medicine, is filled with the anatomical imagery made possible by the printing press, ranging from the detailed and informative to the beautiful, whimsical, surreal, and grotesque. This new catalogue, based on the National Library of Medicine's milestone Dream Anatomy exhibition, displays the anatomical imagination in some of its most astonishing incarnations, from the fourteenth century to present. This fascinating medical art book, filled with rare color illustrations, includes: 170 photos and illustrations Insightful descriptive text Informative description of the print technologies of anatomical illustration History of anatomy timeline Full exhibition checklist Exhibition credits
