The wildly enchanting new collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa "If I am not Ulysses, I am / his dear, ruthless half brother." So announces Yusef Komunyakaa early in his lush new collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks. And Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the characters Komunyakaa conjures over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here another recalls Napoleon as the emperor "tells the doctor to cut out his heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise"; and here he is just a man, reflecting on why he'd "rather die a poet / than a warrior." Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations, there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected rhythms, his effortlessly surreal images, his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only, say, of king against jester but of man against his own desire, and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past. Another brilliant collection from the man David Wojahn has called one of our "most significant and individual voices," The Emperor of Water Clocks delights, challenges, and satisfies.

A reissue with a foreword and supplement, of a modern classic published in 1960. The invention of the mechanical clock was one of the most important turning points in the history of science and technology. This study revealed six centuries of mechanical clockwork preceding the first mechanical escapement clocks of the West of about AD 1300. Detailed and fully illustrated accounts of elaborate Chinese clocks are accompanied by a discussion of the social context of the Chinese inventions and an assessment of their possible transmission to medieval Europe. For this revised edition, Dr Joseph Needham has contributed a new foreword on recent research and perceptions. In a supplement John H. Combridge details a modern reconstruction of Su Sung's timekeeping device, which together with textual studies modifies our understanding of this important early technology.

'Downright fascinating...indispensable reading' Daily Telegraph 'Nicholas Foulkes' excellent...book is beautifully illustrated. Captivating' Daily Mail For more than 25,000 years, humanity has sought to understand and measure the passing of time, in the process creating some of the most remarkable and beautiful timepieces. Now, in Nicholas Foulkes' lavishly illustrated book, the battle to tame time is brought vividly to life. From the baboon bone dating back to the palaeolithic era that marked the lunar cycle and on to the 3500-year-old water clock at Karnak, from our earliest days mankind has sought to track the passing of time. More recently, the struggles to measure longitude and to create a workable train timetable across the vast, open expanse of the United States have inspired new developments. In Time Tamed, Nicholas Foulkes reveals how we have done this by focusing on some of the most significant developments in timekeeping across the ages. He also highlights the most stunning and lavish clocks and watches in history - from Big Ben to Rolex - for telling the time has never been purely about function, but also about design. The book is filled with remarkable tales, from the 14th century monk in St Albans who created one of the first mechanical clocks to the Holy Roman Emperor who built a clock into an automated ship that fired a cannon to summon guests to dinner. More recently, there was the Surrey woman who used a Napoleonic era watch to 'deliver' the accurate time to London shopkeepers in the wartime era of Churchill, or the Swiss denture maker who solved a tricky problem for the Indian Raj's polo players. Time Tamed is a book you'll want to spend many hours enjoying.

“Clear and lucid” poems from a US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who “journeys through the landscape of memory, consciousness, loss, and love” (The Washington Post). Kay Ryan is acclaimed for her highly relatable, deeply insightful poems. Erratic Facts is her first new collection since the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Best of It, and it is animated with her signature swift, clearheaded, lyrical style. At once witty and melancholy, playful and heartfelt, Ryan examines enormous subjects—existence, consciousness, love, loss—in compact poems that have immensely powerful resonance. Her sly rhymes and strong cadences convey both musicality and wisdom. While these pieces are composed of the same brevity and vitality that have characterized her singular voice over the course of more than twenty years, her imagination is more eccentric and daring than ever. Erratic Facts solidifies Ryan’s place at the pinnacle of American poetry. “Read a poem once and take in its crisp rhythms, subtle rhymes, and arresting images. Read it again and detect its hide-and-seek metaphors and meanings. . . . [Ryan’s] quantum poems pose resonant questions of physics and metaphysics, of attentiveness and caring on scales intimate and universal.” —Booklist

A scholarly study of the role of the incense timekeeper in early Chinese history.

"A selection of new and previously published poems from the celebrated poet"--

What is time? When did we first use it? Does it always work? How do animals tell time? A fun and fascinating look at time from the first calendars and clocks to the digital watches and precise time-keeping methods of today.

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times. On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert. In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.

Warhorses is the haunting, electric work of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who never ceases to challenge and delight his readers. This powerful collection of Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry delves, with his characteristic allusiveness, intelligence, and intensity, into an age of war and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. "Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?" he asks, and the question is hardly moot: "Sometimes I hold you like Achilles' / shield," and indeed all relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line is longer and looser than in Taboo or Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long poems like "Autobiography of My Alter Ego" he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted but desperate prophet. With the leaps and improvisational flourishes of a jazz soloist, Komunyakaa imagines "the old masters of Shock & Awe" daydreaming of "lovely Penelope / like a trophy."