FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY) A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time—and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral. In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources—poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where “I can’t see the bugs; I don’t hear the birds”—Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. “I owe him,” she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, “must learn, at last, how to look.” Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.

The instant New York Times bestseller and publishing phenomenon: Marina Keegan’s posthumous collection of award-winning essays and stories “sparkles with talent, humanity, and youth” (O, The Oprah Magazine). Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Marina left behind a rich, deeply expansive trove of writing that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. Her short story “Cold Pastoral” was published on NewYorker.com. Her essay “Even Artichokes Have Doubts” was excerpted in the Financial Times, and her book was the focus of a Nicholas Kristof column in The New York Times. Millions of her contemporaries have responded to her work on social media. As Marina wrote: “We can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over…We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.” The Opposite of Loneliness is an unforgettable collection of Marina’s essays and stories that articulates the universal struggle all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to impact the world. “How do you mourn the loss of a fiery talent that was barely a tendril before it was snuffed out? Answer: Read this book. A clear-eyed observer of human nature, Keegan could take a clever idea...and make it something beautiful” (People).

Mary Immaculate is just twelve years old the day she goes missing. Berry-picking in the woods near her village in outport Newfoundland, Mary has an encounter with something from another world. When she is finally found, Mary is taken to hospital in St. John's, where her attending doctor makes the decision to adopt her out of poverty. Duley's authentic portrayal of outport life sits in stark contrast to life in upper-level St. John's, making this a novel as much about class distinction as it is a stunning narrative of a woman's life in pre-Confederation Newfoundland. Originally published in 1939 to acclaim in Britain and the US, Cold Pastoral was the second novel by Margaret Duley, the acknowledged "first novelist" from Newfoundland.

Faulknerista collects more than twenty years of critically influential scholarship by Catherine Gunther Kodat on the writings of one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, William Faulkner. Initially composed as freestanding essays and now updated and revised, the book’s nine chapters place Faulkner’s work in the context of current debates concerning the politics of white authors who write about race, queer sexualities, and the use of the N-word in literature and popular culture. The Faulknerista of the title is a critic who tackles these debates without fear or favor, balancing admiration with skepticism in a manner that establishes a new model for single-author scholarship that is both historically grounded (for women have been writing about Faulkner, and talking back to him, since the beginning of his career) and urgently contemporary. Beginning with an introduction that argues for the critical importance of women’s engagement with Faulkner’s fiction, through comparative discussions pairing it with works by Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, and David Simon, Faulknerista offers a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, written in an accessible style and aimed at stimulating discussions of Faulkner’s work and the rich interpretive challenges it continues to present.

This book argues that touch and movement played a significant role, long overlooked, in generating perceptions of ancient material culture in the late 18th century. At this time the reception of classical antiquity had been transformed. Interactions with material culture – ruins, sculpture, and artefacts – formed the core of this transformation. Some such interactions were proto-archaeological, such as the Dilettanti expeditions to Athens and Asa Minor; others were touristic, seen in the guidebooks consulted by travellers to Rome and the diaries they composed; and others creative, resulting in novels, poetry, and dance performances. Some involved the reproduction of experience in a gallery or museum setting. What all encounters with ancient material culture had in common, however, is their haptic sensory basis. The sense typically associated with the Enlightenment is vision, but this has obscured the equally important contribution made by touch and movement to the way in which a newly materialised Graeco-Roman world was perceived. Kinaesthesia, or the sense of self-movement, is rarely recognised in its own right, but because all encounters with sites and objects are embodied, and all embodiment takes place in motion, this sense is vital to forming more abstract or imaginative impressions. Theories of embodied cognition propose that all intellectual processes are also physical. This book shows how ideas about classical antiquity in the volatile milieu of the late 18th century developed as a result of diverse kinaesthetic relationships.

Every poem, Robert Frost declared, "is an epitome of the great predicament, a figure of the will braving alien entanglements". This study considers what Frost meant by those entanglements, how he braved them in his poetry, and how he invited his readers to do the same. In the process it contributes significantly to a new critical awareness of Frost as a complex artist who anticipated postmodernism--a poet who invoked literary traditions and conventions frequently to set himself in tension with them. Using the insights of reader-response theory, Judith Oster explains how Frost appeals to readers with his apparent accessibility and then, because of the openness of his poetry's possibilities, engages them in the process of constructing meaning. Frost's poems, she demonstrates, teach the reader how they should be read; at the same time, they resist closure and definitive reading. The reader's acts of encountering and constructing the poems parallel Frost's own encounters and acts of construction. Commenting at length on a number of individual poems, Oster ranges in her discussion from the ways in which the poet dramatizes the inadequacy of the self alone to the manner in which he "reads" the Book of Genesis or the writing of Emerson. Oster illuminates, finally, the central conflict in Frost: his need to be read well against his fear of being read; his need to share his creation against his fear of its appropriation by others.