When popular jock Brandon Trent appoints Kevin to compile the Book of Busts—a record of the bust, waist, and hip measurements of every senior girl—Kevin fears he’s out of his league. The Book, however, is the key to his popularity, so Kevin accepts the challenge—uncovering much more than he bargained for ...
Samuel Andreyev inhabits several worlds: he is bilingual and lives in France; he is an internationally-known composer; and he is a writer whose material is the bric-à-brac of everyday speech and rhetoric, forged into a poetry of obsessive perfectionism. Part mental autobiography, part ode to a new, radically mobile consciousness--The Relativistic Empire combines the diagrammatic elegance of the comic strip with the complexity and elusiveness of symbolism. Praise for The Relativistic Empire: "The Relativistic Empire is a carnival of specific instructions. Andreyev's declensions describe absurd reality. Humour takes the poems on all the rides, from 'real' to 'false' in all their mirrors." --Alice Burdick, author of Holler "The Relativistic Empire shows the exquisite in the everyday; the slips of the tongue which sharpen the pencil's point until it bleeds. Our things--and the names we give them--slide from strange to stranger, from contained to container. Whistling the orchestration of a beautiful 'teflon ballet,' Andreyev makes the poem march to clockwork and despair." --derek beaulieu, author of Please, No More Poetry and How to Write
The Ritualites is Michael Nardone's book-length poem on the sonic topography of North America. Composed over ten years at sites all across the continent--from Far Rockaway to the Olympic Peninsula, Great Bear Lake to the Gulf of California--the book documents the poet's listening amid our public exchanges, mediated ambiances, and itinerant intimacies. The Ritualites is a series of linguistic rituals that shift, page to page, through a range of forms and genres--a rhapsodic text for occasional singing and a best-selling thriller, a self-help guide and sabotage manual, a score for solo performance and a cacophony of voices.
"This highly theoretical work of ethnomusicology is a reclamation of Indigenous ceremonial and artistic practice arguing that the inclusion and appropriation of Indigenous performers in classical music traditions only enriches the settler nation-state. Robinson gives shape to Western musical and aesthetic practices as well as to Indigenous listening practices in order to eschew traditional (Western) forms of musical analysis. Instead, the work argues that new modes of listening and studying reception, emerging out of critical Indigenous studies, are essential to understanding Indigenous musical expression in ways that do not reify the power of the settler state"--
In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. Though Bernstein’s poems play with form, they incorporate a melancholy, even tragic, sensibility. This “cognitive dissidence,” as Bernstein calls it, is reflected in a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Topsy-Turvy includes an ode to the New York City subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. This collection is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Friedrich Rückert, and Rimbaud; Carlos Drummond, Virgil, and Brian Ferneyhough; and even Caudio Amberian, an imaginary first-century aphorist. Bernstein didn’t set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance: We must “Continue / on, as / before, as / after.” The audio version of Topsy-Turvy is performed by the author.
In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the poetry scene and addresses hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, in both argument and form--a poetic language that resists being absorbed into the conventions of our culture.
Intermediality: the incorporation of digital technology into theatre practice, and the presence of film, television and digital media in contemporary theatre is a significant feature of twentieth-century performance. Presented here for the first time is a major collection of essays, written by the Theatre and Intermediality Research Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research, which assesses intermediality in theatre and performance. The book draws on the history of ideas to present a concept of intermediality as an integration of thoughts and medial processes, and it locates intermediality at the inter-sections situated in-between the performers, the observers and the confluence of media, medial spaces and art forms involved in performance at a particular moment in time. Referencing examples from contemporary theatre, cinema, television, opera, dance and puppet theatre, the book puts forward a thesis that the intermedial is a space where the boundaries soften and we are in-between and within a mixing of space, media and realities, with theatre providing the staging space for intermediality. The book places theatre and performance at the heart of the 'new media' debate and will be of keen interest to students, with clear relevance to undergraduates and post-graduates in Theatre Studies and Film and Media Studies, as well as the theatre research community.
The first collection of writings on poetry that is composed, disseminated, and readon computers; essays and artist statements explore visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamicworks that are created by a synergy of human beings and intelligent machines.
Jerome Rothenberg's Poland /1931, a continuing series of ancestral poems, has been appearing in installments over the course of five years, published in limited edition by various small presses.