A posthumous collection of essays, reviews, and interviews by Larry Levis

Will a city girl’s horse dreams ever come true? For Jordan McKenzie, moving from Los Angeles to rural Michigan was a big change. In LA, she was used to giant shopping malls and classmates who came to school in makeup and heels. In North Adams, Michigan, the nearest Walmart is thirty miles away. Since Jordan is a jeans-and-sneakers kind of girl, she hoped she’d fit in better here—plus, there are horses in Michigan! She has wanted one forever, but in LA they were too expensive. Draft horses—gentle giants—are her favorites, with their dependable demeanors, huge size, and muscle power. Even though all the North Adams kids have horses, Jordan’s busy mother barely agrees to let her coop a couple of chickens on their newly rented farm. Jordan’s wish may never come true. Then she meets Star Gazer, a Percheron mare, at a farm auction and makes a desperate bid to save the aging horse from the slaughterhouse. Jordan is thrilled to bring her home, but Star Gazer is lame and skittish. Can Jordan’s loving care nurse her back to health? And can she make Star Gazer a part of the family before her mother decides to find her a new home?

The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became A darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves. --from "Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It" The Darkening Trapeze collects the last poems by Larry Levis, written during the extraordinary blaze of his final years when his poetry expanded into the ambitious operatic masterpieces he is known for. Edited and with an afterword by David St. John and published twenty years after Levis's death, this collection contains major unpublished works, including final elegies, brief lyrics, and a coda believed to be the last poem Levis wrote, a heart-wrenching poem about his son. The Darkening Trapeze is an astonishing collection by a poet many consider to be among the greatest of late-twentieth-century American poetry.

Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives." Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife (1976), The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981), Winter Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). "It is not an exaggeration to say that the death of Larry Levis in 1996—; of a heart attack at 49—; sent a shock wave through the ranks of American poetry. Not only was Levis a good friend to many poets (not simply of his own generation but of many poets older and younger as well), his poetry had become a kind of touchstone for many of us, a source of special inspiration and awe. With Larry Levis’ death came the sense that an American original had been lost. . . . It is not at all paradoxical that he saw both the most intimate expressions of poetry and the grandest gestures of art, of language, as constituting individual acts of courage. One can only hope that, like such courage, Larry Levis’s remarkable poems will continue to live far into our literature."—; from the Afterword, by David St. John

Most tourism theories have been developed from the tourists' perspective and focus on the Anglo-American experience. This unique book for researchers and students of tourism is the first to look at the host gaze; how it is constructed, how it has developed, how it varies between countries and how the tourism industry can affect it. By looking at the gazes of both Western and non-Western hosts, this book analyses the consequences such a gaze can have upon the tourist.

Offers lyrically presented facts about space and with perspective illustrations and additional explanations in the margins.

This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries. Male gazing has typically been disparaged and even stigmatized as a reflection of misogyny and an instrument of objectification, often justifiably so. But as this book argues and illustrates, male gazing can also be understood as an illuminating, intellectually engaging, aesthetically compelling, and even politically progressive practice. This study recounts how the author’s own coming-of-an-age as a gazer became the basis for his long career teaching and writing about American fiction and poetry and poetry, canonical and contemporary, as well as about film, painting, TV, and rock-and-roll. It includes closely-reasoned analyses of work by James Baldwin, Rembrandt, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Bob Dylan, Robert Stone,Tim O’Brien, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank O’Hara, Italo Calvino, John Schlesinger as well such cultural phenomena as the British Invasion of the 1960s, the Judgment of Paris in Greek mythology, the technology of seeing (kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes) and the concept of 'objectification' itself.

The Star Gazer, a coming-of-age novel, is one of those stories. It tells of the struggle of every man to find both joy and meaning in life while battling the instability and unhappiness that surrounds us all.

Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a "representative life" of our time.

Die Tryin' traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by - and produces - a particular form of masculinity: boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.