Most regimental histories focus narrowly on military affairs and the battlefield exploits to the exclusion of the broader social and political context, while community studies examine civilian life divorced of the military situation. Banners South documents the influences and events that define the Civil War from the perspective of Northern soldiers and civilians, moving beyond the boundaries of the battlefield by exploring the civilian community, Cortland, New York, which contributed many men to the 23d New York Volunteers.

“If I didn’t know the poet personally, I’d think the name Catherine Pierce was a pseudonym, for these poems are not merely edgy, they are razor-sharp—they disembowel. What an extraordinary command of structure, persona, and humor this poet has! In one fell swoop, she has re-invented the ‘love’ poem and eschewed both pretentiousness and the anti-intellectual by being always smart and entertaining.”—Kathy Fagan

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.

“Like Cole Porter, Sarah Perrier turns a world-weary and tender gaze toward the unruly carnival we call love. Perrier shrugs off the post-modern shrugs. In these elegant, wise-cracking, and subversive poems, the inherent estrangement, deception, and screwball comedy of romance is revealed and savored. With the smarts and prescience of Lear’s fool, with the mischief of both Ariel and Caliban, she gene-slices the comic into the tragic, the tragic into the comic, to make a new and radiantly original poetry.” –Eric Pankey

“Maureen Passmore’s poetry I can only liken to cut-and-polished jewels: structurally simple, innately priceless, sharp-edged, and brilliant. . . . With the jeweler’s touch, she brings out just enough edge, elegant and lean, to intrigue us before offering the next edge, then the next. What makes her poetry more than just admirable is the genuine vision behind it: she is determined to recreate emotional experience through a vehicle other than herself. . . . In a time of highly decorative and self-serving artistry, here comes a poet with the strength of the ground.” — Larissa Szporluk

Compiled from papers delivered at the third annual Kent State University Symposium on Democracy held in spring 2002, Democracy and Religion: Free Exercise and Diverse Visions explores the interrelations of politics and religion. The work is divided into four main sections: the constitutional debate regarding the establishment and free exercise of religion clause, the themes of violence and nonviolence as they relate to religion, the free exercise of religion and the rise of fundamentalism, and the challenges to the free exercise of diverse religious practices in a democratic society.

“No star-struck lover or dark mistress inhabits these lively sonnets but a flesh-and-blood, poker-playing Texan with a cell phone, an agent, an anxious mother, and a load of her own worries as she tries to make it in the music business. From the Star Spangled Banner at a racetrack to the warm-up for B. B. King, Spotlit Girl is a nimble character study that captures both the craziness of a performer’s life and the time-stopping intimacy between a vocalist and her audience. The singer’s in the spotlight, and Kevin Oberlin has the focus and the dazzle to make her shine.”—Don Bogen

Kate Northrop’s Back Through Interruption is a deeply moving and thought-provoking collection of poetry. It takes the reader through a world that is at once beautiful and tragic, sacrosanct and profane.

The basic tenet here is that we do not translate words, but texts, and that these competing models can be integrated into a more global theory of translation by viewing the translation process as a primarily textual process. The authors examine in detail the characteristics that make a good translation a text, focusing particularly on the empirical relationship between the theory of translation and it’s practice.

“Everywhere we have been since beginning/Is Mapped in the memory somewhere,’ writes Susan Neale at the outset of this ambitiously conceived and enormously satisfying collection of poems. Here is a poet who wants nothing less than to know the past. Her fields of study are the history of light and darkness, of language and other ways of saying, of reality and dream, and, especially, of women and men as they move toward one another and away in their seismic, often cataclysmic dancing, a continental rift and drift originating in a long-ago state of innocence and wholeness Neal calls ‘the heart’s Pangaea.’ In this debut collection sure to attract wide attention, Susan Neale gives us richly detailed maps leading to discoveries about where we human beings have been, where we are, and where in the world, together and apart, we’re bound.”—David Citino