Cultural Writing. Essays. For over two decades now, Albert Goldbarth has been cultivating his own hybrid essay variety. A marriage of warmth and intelligence, his essays are narratively driven but poetically lyrical, and openly personal while remaining dedicated to the pleasures of arcane research. "These are a whole new breed," Robert Atwan writes. "Albert Goldbarth has spliced strands of the old genre with a powerful new gene_ and the results are miraculous." In Griffin--that crossbred creature comprised of eagle, lion, and serpent--Albert Goldbarth joins two essays to form one animal. "Roman Erotic Poetry," written on the cusp of a friend's divorce, explores that strangely compound beast we call marriage. "Wuramon," written on the cusp of a friend's struggle with cancer, considers that strangely compound being every one of us is: an amalgam of spirit and physical body. The resulting book is eccentric, learned, and moving.

Griffin

Literature & Fiction

GOLDBARTH, ALBERT

Essays & Correspondence

Essay Press

Poetry. Essays. Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of east consolations or redemptions. Driven by "the need to extend beyond the personal and out the toward the intolerable present," Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, "darkness has its own resolutions." According to Fanny Howe, here elegy and essay "converge and there is left a beautiful sense of the poetic itself as all that is left to comfort a person facing a catastrophic loss." "This is the quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets"--Forest Gander.

I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time

Prevallet, Kristin

History & Criticism

Cultural Writing. Poetry. Essays. Comprised of footnotes to a non-existent text, THE BODY: AN ESSAY is a meditation on absence, loss and disappearance that offers a guarded "narrative" of what may or may not be a love letter, a dream, a spiritual autobiography, a memoir, a scholarly digression, a treatise on the relation of life to book. Christian Bok describes Boully's groundbreaking text as one that "may simply annotate a fantastic biography from another reality, referring only to itself as a kind of dream within a dream...The reader can only fantasize about the original contexts that might have made such information significant to its author, and ultimately, implies that the body of any text consists of nothing but a void-filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination." First published in 2002 and excerpted in such anthologies as The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002, THE BODY: AN ESSAY continues to challenge conventional notions of plot and narrative, genre and form, theory and practice, unremittingly questioning the presumptive boundaries between reflection, imagination, and experience.

The Body: An Essay

Boully, Jenny

Cultural Writing. Biography and Memoir. LETTERS FROM ABU GHRAIB, a collection of e-mail messages sent by Joshua Casteel to his friends and family during his service as a US Army interrogator and Arabic linguist in the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion, is the raw and intimate record of a soldier in moral conflict with his duties. Once a cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point and raised in an Evangelical Christian home, Casteel found himself stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal. He was troubled by what he was asked to do there, although it was, as he writes, "miles within the bounds of what CNN and the BBC care about." Forced to confront the nature of fundamentalism, both religious and political, Casteel asks himself a fundamental question: "How should I then live?"

Letters from Abu Ghraib

History

Casteel, Joshua

Americas

Cultural Writing. Essays. ADORNO'S NOISE is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays that "once again proves how necessary an encounter with [Harryman's] writing has become for us today" (Avital Ronell). ADORNO'S NOISE takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno's aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno's orbit. As Rob Halpern puts it: "ADORNO'S NOISE reinvents the 'essay as form,' but it doesn't stop short of reinventing thinking." Other Carla Harryman titles available from SPD include OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS), BABY, and ANIMAL INSTINCTS.

Adorno’s Noise

Harryman, Carla

Literary Nonfiction. Spring Ulmer's THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION disrupts and redefines established patterns of seeing as she looks both at and beyond suffering and slaughter for an ethical way to live. Relentlessly in relation and in isolation, Ulmer meditates on moral and emotional anaesthesia--our age of numbing. On the road in Rwanda, investigating executions, meditating on photographs of the past, Ulmer interrogates her own and others' often romantic obsession with what is disappearing and asks how to be in touch with the real and reality--either through the self or through its loss. Looking at work by August Sander, Walter Benjamin, Congolese painter Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, John Berger, Jean Genet, Kenzaburo Oe, and others, she finds, with Benjamin, that there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism. THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION offers a catalogue (of people, stories, nature, and art) that maintains that more than just surviving, life can be overwhelmingly and beautifully patterned, and thus, critically, recognizable.

The Age of Virtual Reproduction

Ulmer, Spring

Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. Essay. "For William Carlos Williams a poem is a small or large machine made out of words. Thalia Field and Abigail Lang have taken this proposition seriously, yet playfully. Their luminous pas de deux ludically conjures Gertrude Stein to construct a textual game that leaps linguistic and cultural rifts to find the commonalities of 'various sorts of talk' through which 'the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain.' Together these poets return us to the primal force of language: naming"--Susan Howe.

A Prank of Georges

Field, Thalia

Lang, Abigail

Poetry

Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Edited and with an Introduction by Taylor Brady. Afterword by Andrew Joron. One of the most prolific and original figures in the field of contemporary literature, Will Alexander is known worldwide for his arresting explorations of European and Caribbean surrealism, postcolonial history, twentieth-century philosophy, and contemporary scientific theory. Here, Alexander undertakes nothing less than a redefinition of the essay form itself, opening an "artery of twilight" wherein aesthetic, political, historical, social, cultural, scientific, and theoretical discourses often become indistinguishable elements of a holistic investigation into the composition—or, re-composition—of the physical and metaphysical worlds. SINGING IN MAGNETIC HOOFBEAT is an indispensible record of Alexander's thought, and confirms his reputation as one of the foremost exponents of Afro-futurist modernism."In SINGING IN MAGNETIC HOOFBEAT...Alexander praises his influences; analyzes the politics and aesthetics of the long 20th century; reflects on the repressed, but undeniable importance of African cosmological views to the European Renaissance; and articulates the expansive possibilities of what we might call—non-exclusively—an African diasporic surrealism. For a trail guide to the wonders of Alexandrian poetics, read these essays. For fresh evidence that surrealism is alive, not as a 'movement,' but as a freedom-oriented, imaginatively unbounded mode of being in the world, read these esssays."—Evie Shockley

Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews and a Lecture 1991-2007

Alexander, Will

Literary Nonfiction. Film. Religion &amp; Spirituality. How does one participate (read and write) from within the membranous precinct between our multiple bodies, from within the larger rhizomic field of resonances, where much is sounding and also unsounded? By employing various "divinatory generators" (instructions, methods, trances), the essays in IDEAL SUGGESTIONS: ESSAYS IN DIVINATORY POETICS genuflect to practices that celebrate engagement with uncertainty while cultivating strategies through which one might collaborate with both rupture and rapture.

Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics

Saterstrom, Selah

Religion & Spirituality

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. A lyric meditation on affect, relationality, and environment, OF SPHERE conjures a self and world that both bloom and fall apart. Given this continually unfastening attempt to make a cosmos—to equip, adorn, dress, ornament—what is it to know, and love, and be? In constellation with the experimental prose of writers such as Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector, and H.D., the book investigates ways a woman, aware she's always becoming gendered, might resist sealing into a character according to cultural norms. How to be wind through goldenrod. Clarity streaked with berry juice.

Of Sphere

Kelsey, Karla

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