Winner of the 2019 National Book Award “The sight lines in Sze’s 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity.” ―The New York Times From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices—from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent—and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry. “These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests.” ―Lit Hub “The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines.” ―Library Journal

Winner of the 2014 Orion Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the John Burroughs Association 2014 Medal for Distinguished Natural History Book In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field—from her native Scottish “byways and hills” to the frigid Arctic in fourteen enthralling essays. She dissects whatever her gaze falls upon—vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, orcas rounding a headland, the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. In so doing, she questions what, exactly, constitutes “nature,” and upends the idea that it is always picturesque. Written with precision, subtlety, and wry humor, Sightlines urges the reader: “Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see.”

Newly available in paperback, this landmark volume is the definitive study of the work of visionary American artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014). Since the late 1960s, Holt’s wide-ranging production has included Land art—particularly the monumental Sun Tunnels (1973–76)—as well as significant projects in sculpture, installation, photography, film, and video. A comprehensive representation of Holt’s working process in both word and image, Alena J. Williams’s momentous publication illuminates the artist’s interest in physical space and reveals how the geographic variety and boundlessness of the American landscape afforded her numerous opportunities to develop large-scale projects beyond the confines of New York City’s gallery walls. Contributions by a distinguished group of writers—including Pamela M. Lee, Lucy R. Lippard, Ines Schaber, and Matthew Coolidge—chart Holt’s fascinating trajectory from her initial experiments with sound, light, and industrial materials to major site interventions and environmental sculpture. James Meyer’s valuable interview with Holt and Julia Alderson’s illustrated chronology expand our knowledge of this groundbreaking artist and the crucial contexts in which she worked. More than twenty original writings by the artist and a rare selection of her concrete poetry, documentary photographs, and preparatory drawings reveal Holt’s revolutionary concepts of space, time, optics, and scale.

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.

L'artiste native de Cuba Carmen Herrera (née en 1915) peint depuis plus de sept décennies, mais ce n'est que ces dernières années que la reconnaissance pour son travail a projeté l'artiste vers la notoriété internationale. Ce beau volume offre le premier examen soutenu d'elle, depuis le début de sa carrière en 1948 jusqu'en 1978, et s'étend sur les mondes de l'art de La Havane, de Paris et de New York. Les essais considèrent les premières études de l'artiste à Cuba, son implication dans le Salon des Réalités Nouvelles dans le Paris d'après-guerre et sa sortie révolutionnaire de New York. Puis l'ouvrage situe son travail dans le contexte d'un art d'avant-garde latino-américain plus large. Un essai de Dana Miller considère le travail de New York d'Herrera depuis les années 1950 jusque dans les années 1970, lorsque Herrera arrivait et perfectionnait son style de signature. Des photographies familiales personnelles des archives de Herrera enrichissent le récit, et une chronologie traitant de l'intégralité de sa vie et de sa carrière présente des images documentaires supplémentaires. Plus de quatre-vingts œuvres sont illustrées sous forme de plaques de couleur. Ce livre est la représentation la plus étendue des travaux de Herrera à ce jour. (d'après l'éditeur).

Every three years, over the last decade, the Mumbai-based theatre group RAGE - in collaboration with the Royal Court Theatre in London - organizes the Writers' Bloc Workshop. Offering a much-needed artistic retreat to playwrights, this workshop allows aspiring and professional playwrights a chance to perfect their scripts with established actors and professionals from within the industry. Apart from encouraging them to break free from the rigid boundaries of English theatre in India to fashion their own idiom, the workshop also ensures its playwrights access to the final pilgrimage of any script - the stage. As it stands today, the infamous debate on whether an Indian play written in English mirrors a bona fide Indian reality is no longer relevant. Using a vocabulary that is entirely their own - 'unaffected, homegrown and lyrical' - the three plays in this collection convincingly capture the peculiar accents and the particular chaos of our times. Rahul Da Cunha's 'Pune Highway' is set in a seedy hotel room where three friends, having just witnessed the gruesome murder of a fourth, are holed up, desperate to escape its consequences; Ram Ganesh Kamatham's 'Crab' takes a hard-talking look at the existential angst of a new generation, looking at once for purpose and an emotional safe place from an increasingly concrete world; Farhad Sorabjee's 'Hard Places' explores the unspoken borders that divide us from our loved ones and the violently disputed borders between countries. Bridging the invisible lines between the personal and the political and taking us to places and situations a little less familiar and safer than our own, these brilliantly written plays can be performed, and empathized with, across territories.

Chase Payne is a walking contradiction. He's the most powerful psychic in the Community, but the least respected. He's the son of the Community's founder, but with his tattoo sleeves and abrasive attitude, he's nothing like his charismatic family. No one knows what to make of him, which is how he wound up locked in a cell on the Farm yet again. But this time, the only man he's ever loved is there too. Elijah Estrella was used to being the sassy sidekick who fooled around with Chase for fun. But that was before he realized the Community wasn't the haven he'd believed in and Chase was the only person who'd ever truly tried to protect him. Now they're surrounded by people who want to turn them against their friends, and the only way out is to pretend the brainwashing works. With Chase playing the role of a tyrant's second-in-command, and Elijah acting like Chase's mindless sex toy, they risk everything by plotting a daring escape. In the end, it's only their psychic abilities, fueled by their growing love for each other, that will allow them to take the Community down once and for all.

Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. A new reading of how poetry "sees," her work is a passionate defense of the power of the poem, the ethics of perception, and the broader possibilities of American sight. American poems see more fully, and less invasively, than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperial national ideology would allow. Moreover, New argues, their ways of seeing draw on, and develop, a vigorous mode of national representation alternative to the appropriative sort found in the quintessential American genre of encounter, the romance. Grounding her readings of Dickinson, Frost, Moore, and Williams in foundational texts by Edwards, Jefferson, Audubon, and Thoreau, New shows how varieties of attentiveness and solicitude cultivated in the early literature are realized in later poetry. She then discloses how these ideas infuse the philosophical notions about pragmatic experience codified by Emerson, James, and Dewey. As these philosophers insisted, and as New's readings prove, art is where the experience of experience can be had: to read, as to write, a poem is to let the line guide one's way.

A powerful personal account of outer exploration and inner discovery.

Filmmaker, film essayist, installation artist, writer: the Berlin artist Harun Farocki has devoted his life to the power of images. Over the thirty-plus years of his career, Farocki has explored not the images of life but rather the life of images that surrounds us in newspapers, cinema, books, television, and advertising. Harun Farocki examines, from different critical perspectives, his vast oeuvre, which includes three feature films, critical media pieces, children’s television features, “learning films” in the tradition of Brecht, and installation pieces. Interviews, a selection of Farocki’s own writings, and an annotated filmography complete a valuable biography of this pioneering artist and his legendary career.