Begins a series presenting collections of survey articles pivoting around the notion of computation. The inaugural topics include generalized rational approximation subject to linear constraints, matrix exponential approximations in the numerical solution of differential equations, unbounded fan-in circuits, and fixpoint semantics for a Petri net model of definite clause logic programs. Each article is self-contained and all assume a high sophistication in mathematics. Future volumes may focus on a special subfield such as computational graph theory, approximation, or computability. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Explains to structural engineers some of the basic equations for analyzing and designing buildings that were devised at the end of the 19th century but were so unmanageably complex to solve that they were displaced by approximation techniques until the recent advent of electronic computer. Heyman (engineering, U. of Cambridge) warns that some of the equations turn out not to fit reality as close as future occupants of buildings might prefer, and explains how to use them and in what context. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Begun by poet Sam Hamill in reaction to an invitation to attend First Lady Laura Bush's White House Symposium "Poetry and the American Voice" on February 12, 2003 (subsequently canceled), site contains poems or personal statements from over 4,600 poets to register their opposition to the Bush administration's policies toward war in Iraq. Allows for the submission of new poems and also provides links to anti-war activities, news items and other anti-war organizations.

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

A collection of poems about marriage by one of our most celebrated poets.

"The great pleasure of this book is the writing itself. Not only is it free of academic and ‘lit-crit' jargon, it is lively prose, often deliciously witty or humorous, and utterly contemporary. Poetry's Afterlife has terrific classroom potential, from elementary school teachers seeking to inspire creativity in their students, to graduate students in MFA programs, to working poets who struggle with the aesthetic dilemmas Stein elucidates, and to teachers of poetry on any level." --- Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Arizona State University "Kevin Stein is the most astute poet-critic of his generation, and this is a crucial book, confronting the most vexing issues which poetry faces in a new century." ---David Wojahn, Virginia Commonwealth University At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates. Kevin Stein is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University and has served as Illinois Poet Laureate since 2003, having assumed the position formerly held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism. digitalculturebooksis an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

It has been variously labelled ‘Language Poetry’, ‘Language Writing’, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing’ (after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and ‘language-centred writing’. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism à la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that ‘it’ has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s. In Poetry & Language Writing David Arnold grasps the nettle of Language poetry, reassessing its relationship with surrealism and providing a scholarly, intelligent way of understanding the movement. Poets discussed include Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Barrett Watten.

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine. Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions—those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.

Canon Vs. Culture explores the consequences of one of the main educational shifts of the last quarter century-- the changes from academic inquiry conducted through a selected list of accepted authorities to an investigation of the cultural operations of an entire society.

Explores the ways in which American poetry has documented and sometimes helped propel the literary and cultural revolutions of the past sixty-five years.