Dissolving Tensions dismisses the long-held argument that a British-American rapprochement did not occur until the mid-1890s. Instead, author Phillip E. Myers shows that the rapprochement was distinct prior to the Civil War, became more distinctive during the conflict, and continued to take shape afterward.
Conventional medical narratives often fail to capture the incoherent, surreal, and logic-twisting reality of the contemporary healthcare experience, where mystery, absurdity, and even cruelty are disguised as logic, reason, and compassion. In this new collection of stories by physician and writer Jay Baruch, characters struggle in their quest for meaning and a more hopeful tomorrow in a strange landscape where motivations are complex and convoluted and what is considered good and just operates as a perpetually shifting proposition.
In the summer of 2013, Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner and author who often writes about her interactions with patients, underwent routine one-day surgery. A surgical mishap led to a series of life-altering and life-threatening complications, resulting in two prolonged hospital stays and a lengthy recovery. During twenty-six days in the hospital, Davis experienced how suddenly a caregiver can become a care receiver and what it’s like to be “on the other side of the sickbed.” As a nurse, she was accustomed to suffering and to the empathy such witnessing can evoke, but as a patient she learned new and transforming lessons in pain, fear, loneliness, abandonment, and dependency; in the fragility of health and life; in the necessity of family support; and, ultimately, in the importance of gratitude.
“In Little Nest Diana Lueptow shows a unique skill for bridging the everyday and the mythic. In lines and sentences that blend formal elegance with earthy, idiomatic force, Lueptow weaves surprising and moving connections between ourselves and our histories, just as she reconciles our vulnerability with our fundamental need for what Stevens once called ‘ideas of order.’ But don’t be fooled by this poet’s meticulous technical care: ‘Nimble isn’t the half of it. Fierce is. . . .’ begins ‘Mink and Rabbit,’ and that declaration makes a fitting emblem for Lueptow’s own well-wrought yet ferocious collection.”
—Peter Campion
“Local Fauna opens with a meta-poem about Jack Spicer, and I couldn’t help but think of his ‘dictated’ poetry, poetry as vessel, poetry getting down what needs to be said. Brian Brodeur’s poems have this urgency—life, death, cruelty, politics, war, capitalism, and love. Hard truths come through the past, radio interviews, zoo animals, neighbors, personas, and pop songs. Brian Broduer’s poetry has insistence and morality, inclusivity and beauty. Local Fauna is terrific.”
—Denise Duhamel
Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Mark Doty, Judge
“It’s a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender… Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category.”
—Mark Doty, from the Foreword
When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he also authorized the U.S. Army to recruit black soldiers for the war effort. Nearly 200,000 men answered the call, and several thousand of them came from Canada. What compelled these men to leave the relative comfort and safety of home to fight in a foreign war? In African Canadians in Union Blue, Richard M. Reid sets out in search of an answer and discovers a group of men whose courage and contributions open a window on the changing understanding of the American Civil War and the ties that held black communities together even as the borders around them shifted and were torn asunder.
Teaching Hemingway and Modernism presents concrete, intertextual models for using Hemingway’s work effectively in various classroom settings, so students can understand the pertinent works, definitions, and types of avant-gardism that inflected his art. The fifteen teacher-scholars whose essays are included in the volume offer approaches that combine a focused individual treatment of Hemingway’s writing with clear links to the modernist era and offer meaningful assignments, prompts, and teaching tools.
For sixty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America’s greatest struggle. Civil War History Readers reintroduce the most influential articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy and tactics, to political leadership, race, abolitionism, the draft, and women’s issues, as well as the war’s causes, its aftermath, and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published fresh and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of America’s “middle period.”
In the two decades before the Civil War, free Americans engaged in “history wars” every bit as ferocious as those waged today over the proposed National History Standards or the commemoration at the Smithsonian Institution of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In One Nation Divided by Slavery, author Michael F. Conlin investigates the different ways antebellum Americans celebrated civic holidays, read the Declaration of Independence, and commemorated Revolutionary War battles, revealing much about their contrasting views of American nationalism.
