A mesmerizing poetry collection by "an ecstatic surrealist on imaginal hyperdrive" (Eliot Weinberger).

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry Three kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia) “The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.

In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn’t the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. The writer, traumatized by the violent death of her mother when she was a child, lives alone with her dog and struggles to finish her book. The photographer, stunted by the death of his grandmother and caretaker, struggles to take a single picture and enters into a complicated relationship with the writer. The old man, facing his past in small doses, spends his time watching television and reorganizing the objects in his apartment to stay distracted from the deterioration around him. A depiction of the cycles of abuse and trauma in a prolonged end-time, Imagine a Death examines the ways in which our pasts envelop us, the ways in which we justify horrible things in the name of survival, all of the horrible and beautiful things we are capable of when we are hurt and broken, and the animal (and plant) companions that ground us. ​ Innovative Prose

Poetry. African American Studies. "The domain of poet Will Alexander's nervy curiosity ranges from the icy Himalayas, to African savannahs, from physics, astronomy, and music, to alchemy, philosophy, and painting. Orishas, angels and ghosts all sing to this poet, instructing him in their art of verbal flight. This is a poet whose lexicon, a 'glossary of vertigo, ' might be culled from the complete holdings of a reconstituted Alexandrian library endowed for the next millenium"--Harryette Mullen.

WINNER OF THE 2019 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Book of 2018 Forrest Gander’s first book of poems since his Pulitzer finalist Core Samples from the World: a startling look through loss, grief, and regret into the exquisite nature of intimacy Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”

An anthology of poetry that traces the history of poetry's changing relationship to nature, featuring the work of over 140 poets.

A marathon dance mix consisting of thousands of mashed up text and image samples, In the House of the Hangman tries to give a taste of what life is like there, where it is impolite to speak of the noose. It is the third part of the life project Zeitgeist Spam. If you can't afford a copy ask me for a pdf.

American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010 illuminates the dynamic transformations that occurred in American literary culture during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The volume is the first major critical collection to address the literature of the 2000s, a decade that saw dramatic changes in digital technology, economics, world affairs, and environmental awareness. Beginning with an introduction that takes stock of the period's major historical, cultural, and literary movements, the volume features accessible essays on a wide range of topics, including genre fiction, the treatment of social networking in literature, climate change fiction, the ascendency of Amazon and online booksellers, 9/11 literature, finance and literature, and the rise of prestige television. Mapping the literary culture of a decade of promise and threat, American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010 provides an invaluable resource on twenty-first century American literature for general readers, students, and scholars alike.

Microsoft SQL Server implements extensive support for location-based data. Pro Spatial with SQL Server 2012 introduces SQL Server’s spatial feature set, and covers everything you'll need to know to store, manipulate, and analyze information about the physical location of objects in space. You’ll learn about the geography and geometry datatypes, and how to apply them in practical situations involving the spatial relationships of people, places, and things on Earth. Author Alastair Aitchison first introduces you to SQL Server’s spatial feature set and the fundamental concepts involved in working with spatial data, including spatial references and co-ordinate systems. You’ll learn to query, analyze, and interpret spatial data using tools such as Bing Maps and SQL Server Reporting Services. Throughout, you'll find helpful code examples that you can adopt and extend as a basis for your own projects. Explains spatial concepts from the ground up—no prior knowledge is necessary Provides comprehensive guidance for every stage of working with spatial data, from importing through cleansing and storing, to querying, and finally for retrieval and display of spatial data in an application layer Brilliantly illustrated with code examples that run in SQL Server 2012, that you can adapt and use as the basis for your own projects.

[BLACK AND WHITE EDITION] "Janice Lee is a genius." - Eileen Myles, author of Inferno (a poet's novel) ART: Original Holga photographs by Rochelle Ritchie Spencer SOUND: original music by Resident Anti-Hero "Daughter is quantum. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language -- in minimal bursts of physical intensities, their magnitude measured in intimate discretes. Janice Lee's prose is energy transfer of the elementary particles of the matter of language. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language, understood at the infinitesimal level. No other book ever written has entered my body and being so physically pure. There is not distance between the state of narrative and the matter of being. I turn the page of her body." - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Reel to Reel "Daughter, the new volume by Janice Lee, seems to rise as intuitive quantum ascent. It is praxis of the marred, of the seemingly uneven. Janice Lee understands that writing cannot exist as narrative outcome. In Daughter there is reckoning with the cosmos as phantom, as something that does and does not exist. Energies appear by means of paradox and evaporation." - poet Will Alexander, author of The Sri Lankan Loxodrome "In Daughter, Janice Lee floods the body of a book with the body of a body, all its hybrid, constantly damaging and mending cells. From field to field among the pages we are subject to a brain-damaged, collide-o-scopic file of some internet-age Acker'd Frankenstein having lived to see god die; and yet still must go on walking in the deity's corpse... The result is a meticulous and terrifying resurrection, a glitchy screamtext passed in dire silence to the reader the way blood passes from mother into child. - Blake Butler, author of There is No Year "Lee's surgical cadences and sharp fragments work here as writing will work-to force attention to detail. Which is the unnatural order of things. - Vanessa Place, author of La Medusa and Dies: A Sentence