Rolling Down Black Stockings is a personal recollection of Esther Royer Ayers’s youth spent in a highly restrictive and confined religious community. Her story is as much a search for identity and a longing for a mother’s love as it is a tale about a totalitarian culture that led to her departure from the Old Order Mennonite religion. This poignant story is told in three books: book 1 describes her youth in a farm community on the outskirts of Columbiana, Ohio; book 2 follows the struggles of Ayers as she tries to fit in with another culture after leaving the church when her family moves to Akron, Ohio; and book 3 discusses the history and cultural dynamics of the religion.

The Romance of History is a collection of articles and essays which reflects the varied professional interests of eminent diplomatic historian Lawrence S. Kaplan. The collection is drawn largely from Kaplan’s former students—accomplished scholars in their own right—but also features senior colleagues.

Romantic Poems, Poets, and Narrators will be valuable to specialists not only in romantic period studies but in literary theory and poetics as well. Students of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats will appreciate these refreshingly subtle, tactful, and convincing new readings of the major romantic poems. The book is a scholarly and engaging guide to the various and complex discourses—formalist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, new historicist—that have provided the terms in which these poems have been and currently are received.

Rooms and Fields is history not simply documented and explored but also deeply felt. A poetic inquiry, its concerns are uniquely and fundamentally intimate. Compassion drives this collection of spare and gracious poems.

“Mary Ann Samyn’s Rooms by the Sea introduces us to an exciting new voice. These poems are haunting, delicate, and full of care and wonder at life’s exigencies. ‘If there is music here, it is deep-throated,’ one poem says. Reading this book, one responds, ‘Yes, the music is here, embodying the richness and anguish of being alive.’”—Tom Andrews

Roses in December is a touching collection of two Crankshaft storylines of characters who find themselves dealing with the incurable condition of Alzheimer’s disease. First, Ed Crankshaft’s best friend Ralph is confronted with the trauma of his wife Helen’s worsening Alzheimer’s. He never knows if the love of his life will recognize him on those days that he visits her at Sunny Days Nursing Home. Ralph and Helen’s love story unfolds with humor and heartbreak.

Drawing upon heretofore unavailable archival materials and oral histories, Rosie the Rubber Worker offers readers a personal as well as scholarly account of the era and highlights the important role many women played in wartime production and how their work affected their lives during the war and after.

General William V. Judson was Military Attaché and Chief of the American Military Mission in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. His letters, memoranda, and reports constitute one of the most informed eye-witness accounts of war and revolutionary conditions under the Provisional and Bolshevik Governments of Russia after the February Uprising and abdication of Czar Nicholas II and shed light on the initiation of U.S.-Soviet relations.

Since the 1970s, urban communities have had to face the wrenching process of economic restructuring. Events are too often framed [by the media] with a kind of economic determinism that denies agency to individual communities. To what degree can industrial cities still imagine themselves as authors of their own economic fates? Author Perry Bush explores this question by focusing on the small midwestern city of Lima, Ohio.

“These poems are like yen the color and the size of dollars.  They are American poems, they are English, but they almost seem like versions of the Japanese.  The music is lovely and the form is graceful.  They are a delight to read.”—Gerald Stern