Now in paperback, the final, posthumous collection of poems by Deborah Digges: rich stories of family life, nature's bounty, love, and loss--the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty. When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that captures a stunning gift that prevailed to the end. Here are poems that speak of her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children; the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood; the moods of nature; and throughout, touching all subjects, is the call to poetry itself.

Examining the compelling and often poignant connection between women and the material culture of death, this collection focuses on the objects women make, the images they keep, the practices they use or are responsible for, and the places they inhabit and construct through ritual and custom. Women?s material practices, ranging from wearing mourning jewelry to dressing the dead, stitching memorial samplers to constructing skull boxes, collecting funeral programs to collecting and studying diseased hearts, making and collecting taxidermies, and making sculptures honoring the death, are explored in this collection as well as women?s affective responses and sentimental labor that mark their expected and unexpected participation in the social practices surrounding death and the dead. The largely invisible work involved in commemorating and constructing narratives and memorials about the dead-from family members and friends to national figures-calls attention to the role women as memory keepers for families, local communities, and the nation. Women have tended to work collaboratively, making, collecting, and sharing objects that conveyed sentiments about the deceased, whether human or animal, as well as the identity of mourners. Death is about loss, and many of the mourning practices that women have traditionally and are currently engaged in are about dealing with private grief and public loss as well as working to mitigate the more general anxiety that death engenders about the impermanence of life.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Holding thought loops, metaphoric maneuvers, startling juxtaposition, and clever catachresis, a guided journal allows students of the art of discourse a place to test the waters before leaving safe harbor. Nancy Dafoe’s guided journal is designed to complement her book Breaking Open theBox: A Guide for Creative Techniques to Improve Academic Writing and Generate Critical Thinking, but it may be used independently from that text by composition instructors and writing teachers interested in helping their students develop, practice, and master creative techniques and skills in order to advance and enliven writing. The design of Dafoe’s guided journal—featuring teacher and student sides—is intended to make it easy for writing instructors to work with their students on individual concepts. This guided journal contains models and exemplars, as well as encourages explorations in language. Skilled academic writers, essayists, and novelists have long known that savvy application of poetic techniques and practice in language play makes for better writing in every genre and for more powerful rhetoric.

Presenting a broad range of fully annotated selections from the long history of poetry in English, this anthology provides a rich and extensive resource for teaching traditional canons and forms as well as experimental and alternate trajectories (such as Language poetry and prose poetry). In addition to a chronological table of contents suited to a literary-historical course framework, the volume offers a list of conceptual and thematic teaching units called “Poems in Conversation.” Instructors will find the Conversations helpful for lesson plans; students will find them equally helpful as a resource for presentation and paper topics. Headnotes to each poet are designed to be useful to both instructors and students in the classroom: for instructors new to particular poets, the headnotes will provide helpful grounding in the most current scholarship; for students, they will provide frameworks and explanations to help them approach unfamiliar texts. As a unique feature in the current market, this anthology also incorporates contemporary song lyrics from alternative, indie, rap, and hip-hop songs, fully integrated into the Conversations as rich material for teaching in the under­graduate classroom.

Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers—perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighborhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, indigenous writers. There are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi. There are prose pieces by Aldo Leopold, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. And most of all, there are poems: from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz and Jericho Brown. The book includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family—think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.

The Misdirection of Education Policy: Raising Questions about School Reform proposes critically important questions about the wisdom of American public education policy and reform initiatives. Laying out the particulars of three policy strands—creation of STEM curricula/schools, expansion of charter schools/privatizing, and teacher accountability/testing tied to job security— The Misdirection of Education Policy exposes complications, contradictions, and deliberate deceptions in these supposed solutions to very real issues in education. Dafoe theorizes that obstacles facing American education are far more complicated than policy makers suggest or consider. The Misdirection of Education Policy poses the question of whether it is practical to offer an education that is not merely practical in its ends, opening doors far beyond career readiness and filling employers’ job slots. The approach suggested here is designed to offer an arterial that allows students and teachers to do more than simply prepare for STEM careers; it advocates for an education that helps people navigate life by becoming explorers who remain curious and analytical about their world.