Rubble Masonry is a collection of lyric essays that takes its title from the practice of stone masons who, rather than using materials cut to ideal measurements, work with found rocks' natural shapes. It combines the rich images and musical language of poetry with prose's capacity to share personal narratives and information from wide-ranging ......
Genealogies of Humor and Satire in Anglo-American Literature, 1711-1856
Comic Belles Lettres presents a significant rethinking of standard categories in scholarship on antebellum American humor-such as Old Southwest humorists and literary comedians-to provide a richer analysis of the comic writers of the period. By introducing an alternative aesthetic category, "comic belles lettres," and placing it in a transnational ......
In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti presents Nathaniel Hawthorne's spouse on her own terms, situating her remarkable life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural context, and freeing her from notions that Nathaniel constructed and that his biographers perpetuated. The first of this two-volume work recounts ......
In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti presents Nathaniel Hawthorne's spouse on her own terms, situating her remarkable life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural context, and freeing her from notions that Nathaniel constructed and that his biographers perpetuated. The first of this two-volume work recounts ......
Chelsea Whitton's debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel, dexterously whirls in sonic circles, ruminating on themes of spiritual bestowal and terrestrial bequest, millennial identity, adult friendship, feminine desire, and the mythmaking at stake in family history. Disoriented speakers who nevertheless believe they know where they are going, and ......
The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South
For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad's Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the ......
Queer New Orleans and the Story of America's Oldest Gay Bar
Cafe Lafitte in Exile tells the story of queer New Orleans through the lens of its most legendary gay bar. The bar has held a central place in New Orleans's queer scene for many years, with a profuse mythology entwining its history. Cafe Lafitte in Exile endeavors to set the record straight. The story begins long before the founding of gay ......
A resurrection pie is defined as any dish made from yesterday's leftovers-a meal that, in essence, rises from the dead. In this spirit, John Wall Barger's new collection of poetry calls forth the past and its dead, describing a bardo-like psychic terrain in a language of fable and trauma. The poems move fast and strange: a man arrives at his ......
A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart chronicles a mother's harrowing journey through infant loss and a disastrous hospital birth, while also exploring the joyful complexities of raising a neurodivergent child. Using image and sound derived from the beauty of the natural world, Kate Gaskin's poems sift through grief while tapping into the sublime ......
