Far Beyond the Field is a first-of-its-kind anthology of haiku by Japanese women, collecting translations of four hundred haiku written by twenty poets from the seventeenth century to the present. By arranging the poems chronologically, Makoto Ueda has created an overview of the way in which this enigmatic seventeen-syllable form has been used and experimented with during different eras. At the same time, the reader is admitted to the often marginalized world of female experience in Japan, revealing voices every bit as rich and colorful, and perhaps even more lyrical and erotic, than those found in male haiku. Listen, for instance, to Chiyojo, who worked in what has been long thought of as the dark age of haiku during the eighteenth century, but who composed exquisitely fine poems tracing the smallest workings of nature. Or Katsuro Nobuko, who wrote powerfully erotic poems when she was widowed after only two years of marriage. And here, too, is a voice from today, Mayuzumi Madoka, whose meditations on romantic love represent a fresh new approach to haiku.

Far Beyond the Field is a first-of-its-kind anthology of haiku by Japanese women, collecting translations of four hundred haiku written by twenty poets from the seventeenth century to the present. By arranging the poems chronologically, Makoto Ueda has created an overview of the way in which this enigmatic seventeen-syllable form has been used and experimented with during different eras. At the same time, the reader is admitted to the often marginalized world of female experience in Japan, revealing voices every bit as rich and colorful, and perhaps even more lyrical and erotic, than those found in male haiku. Listen, for instance, to Chiyojo, who worked in what has been long thought of as the dark age of haiku during the eighteenth century, but who composed exquisitely fine poems tracing the smallest workings of nature. Or Katsuro Nobuko, who wrote powerfully erotic poems when she was widowed after only two years of marriage. And here, too, is a voice from today, Mayuzumi Madoka, whose meditations on romantic love represent a fresh new approach to haiku.

From the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have worked on systems to help humans survive for the astounding 28,500 days (78 years) needed to reach another planet. They’ve imagined and tried to create a little piece of Earth in a bubble travelling through space, inside of which people could live for decades, centuries, or even millennia. Far Beyond the Moon tells the dramatic story of engineering efforts by astronauts and scientists to create artificial habitats for humans in orbiting space stations, as well as on journeys to Mars and beyond. Along the way, David P. D. Munns and Kärin Nickelsen explore the often unglamorous but very real problem posed by long-term life support: How can we recycle biological wastes to create air, water, and even food in meticulously controlled artificial environments? Together, they draw attention to the unsung participants of the space program—the sanitary engineers, nutritionists, plant physiologists, bacteriologists, and algologists who created and tested artificial environments for space based on chemical technologies of life support—as well as the bioregenerative algae systems developed to reuse waste, water, and nutrients, so that we might cope with a space journey of not just a few days, but months, or more likely, years.

Much has been written about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' heyday in the 1960s and '70s, but the story of their profound, ongoing influence on 21st century social justice movements has until now been left untold. This book unearths this legacy.

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets. Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.

Rumi the Persian poet is widely acknowledged as being the greatest Sufi mystic of his age. He was the founder of the brotherhood of the Whirling Dervishes. This is a collection of his poetry.

Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides a readable introduction to this new paradigm. With an interdisciplinary approach, the book addresses a wide range of health impacts felt in the Anthropocene, including food and nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable disease, dislocation and conflict, and mental health. It also presents strategies to combat environmental changes and its ill-effects, such as controlling toxic exposures, investing in clean energy, improving urban design, and more. Chapters are authored by widely recognized experts. The result is a comprehensive and optimistic overview of a growing field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world. Students of public health will gain a solid grounding in the new challenges their profession must confront, while those in the environmental sciences, agriculture, the design professions, and other fields will become familiar with the human consequences of planetary changes. Understanding how our changing environment affects our health is increasingly critical to a variety of disciplines and professions. Planetary Health is the definitive guide to this vital field.

Poetry. African American Studies. Philosophy. Essays. Now available as a second edition with a new preface from the author, Will Alexander's TOWARDS THE PRIMEVAL LIGHTNING FIELD (O Books, 1998) is a work of vertical philosophy revealing the strata of cultures and language, like geographical layers seen all at once. These essays comprise Alexander's search for origins outside the warrens of the visible, revealing a singular imagination that moves with the force of a manifesto and the impossible dexterity of the unknown. Described by Eliot Weinberger as probably the only African-American poet to take Aimé Cesaire as a spiritual father, Alexander's singular voice resonates far past the constrictions of the rational world. His work resembles no one's and is instantly recognizable. In part, he is an ecstatic surrealist on imaginal hyperdrive. He is probably the only African-American poet to take Aimé Césaire as a spiritual father...[Alexander] is a poet whose ecstasy derives from the scientific description of the stuff and the workings of the world.--Eliot Weinberger Will Alexander is by far the most original poet working in the United States today. A major force in the dissemination of surrealism, there is absolutely no one who sounds like Alexander, and he, most emphatically sounds like no one else.--Justin Desmangles If the quotidian amounts to little more than a dossier of unitary suffering, then Will Alexander's visionary essays commence the ignition of evolution beyond inclemency. Césaire, Lorca, Cheikh Anta Diop, non-European philosophy and cosmology, alchemical and anti-statist traditions: all animate this work; its range is incomparable. André Breton wrote that for surrealism 'life is elsewhere;' TOWARDS RGE PRIMEVAL LIGHTNING FIELD takes us in pleasure and terror along the way to that range, shimmering beyond grim power, 'where the waters and suns are both kindled by splendour.'--Barry Maxwell

A breakneck procedural that is beautifully written and masterfully crafted, Erin Young's The Fields is a dynamite debut—crime fiction at its very finest. Some things don't stay buried. It starts with a body—a young woman found dead in an Iowa cornfield, on one of the few family farms still managing to compete with the giants of Big Agriculture. When Sergeant Riley Fisher, newly promoted to head of investigations for the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office, arrives on the scene, an already horrific crime becomes personal when she discovers the victim was a childhood friend, connected to a dark past she thought she’d left behind. The investigation grows complicated as more victims are found. Drawn deeper in, Riley soon discovers implications far beyond her Midwest town.

Born to a poor, landless farmer in the month of the monsoon rains, twins Zara and Tara grow up amongst the fields of wheat and cotton in a remote village in Pakistan. During an afternoon spree of games, Tara is kidnapped from the fields and raped. All seems to be resolved after her parents accept an unexpected marriage proposal for their “dishonoured” daughter. But the nightmare resurfaces when a newspaper clipping emerges, calling the union into question. Determined to rescue her twin, Zara embarks on a harrowing quest for justice, battling keepers of a culture that upholds propriety above all else and braving the unknown dangers of an urban centre. Set in the early 1980s against the backdrop of martial law and social turmoil, Beyond the Fields is a riveting, timely look at profound inequality, traditions that disempower women in our world, and survival as a dance to the beat of a different future.