“Over the centuries a repertoire of solo pipa pieces has developed and this study focuses on those found in the Hua collection, which encompasses the pieces in the repertoire of the Hua family, and was printed, using the wooden block technique, in 1819. Among the works are many ancient melodies which were handed down through […]
This collection represents an engagement with American history, technology, and cultures. Murphy’s poetry ranges from fairly straightforward narrations of events to experimental pieces using a variety of American-speaking subjects and several angles of vision on cultural creations—Elvis Presley, Holly Golightly, and Elmore James, to name just a few. Formal choices include the interlocking movements of the sestina and the rondau, the ebb and flow of loose blank verse, and the syncopated variety of free verse.
“What continues to affect me in Robert Miltner’s Against the Simple is the silence that haunts the edges of experience and meaning. Like the lonely streetscapes of Giorgia De Chirico, Miltner’s poems, often cast in brief sentences surrounded by an eerie quiet, haunt us with the unseen and the unheard which seem to lurk just around the corners of language and consciousness. Often his images ‘tease us out of thought.’ In poems like ‘Eating Alone’ the uncanny strangeness is almost hallucinatory. ‘How true is the algebra of emptiness?’ House Noises at Night asks. These dreamingly attentive, watching and listening poems are kind of answer.” –Richard Hague
“Edward Micus won’t write the kind of poem whose language leads only to charming confusions, whose music is machine-pressed, a tin ornament. His poems instead speak directly, and their quiet, searing imagery burns down the fence between visible and invisible world. That music you hear—it’s the rhythm of affection, for places, lovers, friends. It’s the rhythm of the blood ‘taking in what it can, making its laps, / leading us on.’” —Richard Robbins
“After reading Primer for Non-Native Speakers, I feel like I’ve just come back from a trip to Russia. Philip Metres’s brilliantly compressed lyrical narratives capture the grandeur and the bleakness of an almost mythological country, where a bronze statue of the great poet Pushkin now gazes out on the golden arches, and the swear of a slammed door is more expressive than a mouthful of words. These are subtle, accomplished, shimmering poems that explore the nuances of being an outsider in a language.”—Maura Stanton
Frank Mendez, a child of Mexican immigrants begins his memoir with the story of his father’s harrowing migration from Mexico to Texas in 1920 as he escaped from Zapata’s guerrrillos and continues with his story of growing up in northeast Ohio. He recounts the Mendez family’s experience with the Depression, living in the Lorain, Ohio barrio, labor issues, racism, and World War II. Mendez dropped out of high school in 1943 and enlisted in the Marine Corps where he served twenty-two months in the Pacific theatre. When he returned to Lorain, he received his high school diploma, bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and a professional engineering license.
“There is a sadness to McBride’s poetry that only a deep thinker can recreate, someone who has been inside the beautiful dark hollows of disappointment. It is encouraging to read the powerfully rendered thoughts of a vulnerable mind in a cynical time—here is a poet unafraid to be hurt; here is a poet bleeding in his own glass crop. Encouraging? Yes, because McBride understands that defensive poetry has no value.” — Larissa Szporluk
Drawing upon his experiences and knowledge as a professional anthropologist, Kent Maynard takes readers on a sensory journey through the cultures and landscapes of a fascinating and foreign world.
“These precise, plain-spoken poems are limned by a subtle music, not to mention a lyric grace that is never overplayed. For in a world as harsh as this one, a world delimited by war, beauty is as appalling as it is necessary. Hugh Martin’s great achievement is to remind us of this necessity, and to assert the power of poetry as witness and as solace.” —James Harms
For more than a decade, Marquette University has honored Frank L. Klement, a longtime member of its history department whose reputation as a historian was established with his “alternative view” of the Civil War, with the annual Frank L. Klement Lectures: Alternative Views of the Sectional Conflict. Lecturers are asked to examine an unexplored aspect of the Civil War or to reinterpret an important theme of the conflict, including, among others, the war’s effect on race and gender, historians’ interest in studying the experiences of representative individuals as well as communities, and the emerging field of memory studies.
