For twenty-five years, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has defined Cleveland’s image as the “Rock and Roll Capital of the World.” But while the Rock Hall has become an iconic landmark for the city of Cleveland and for fans of rock and roll around the world, it was just one missed phone call away from never being built in Cleveland. If the prominent singer and actress Leslie Gore hadn’t contacted radio personality Norm N. Nite in August 1983, the Hall of Fame would not be in Cleveland—period.

“In Leah Osowski’s exquisite debut, hover over her, the poet immerses us in geographies of unrealized adolescence, where young women are singular amidst their cacophonous backdrops, whether beside a lake, inside a Dali painting, or stretched out in a flower garden. These spaces are turned inside out for us through Osowski’s linguistic curiosity and unforgettable imagistic palate. Negative possibilities hang around every corner as well, showing us the ways in which we are also complicit in the constructions and obstructions of gender. As the speaker in ‘she as pronoun’ says, ‘she’s I and she’s you every / time you hid beneath your own arms.’ But through the evolution and renaissance of Osowski’s speaker, we find affirmation in these shared connections, transparency in the landscapes of growth and escape, and the freedom that comes from the task of unflinchingly examining our whereabouts inside of them.”
—Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

In keeping with the central theme that the stories we tell ourselves—and, by extension, our understanding of who we are—are shaped by the spaces in which we tell them, the poems in How Blood Works vary drastically in form. From traditionally lineated lyrics to more architectural, segmented prose pieces, the poems themselves become a space for narratives of the self to play out.

“Jason Gray’s How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women’s bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, ‘what is heavenly for what is Heaven.’” — Andrew Hudgins

Grace Goulder Izant spent the last six decades of her long and productive life in Hudson, Ohio, and this, her final book, was the one that lay closest to her heart. Bringing to it her knowledge as a historian of Ohio, she lifts the story beyond the limitations of local history and makes it illuminate an entire region and time. Illustrated with numerous historical photographs and drawings from her private collection, this edition preserves the enduring quality and historical heritage of this quaint village.

Doctors today are struggling: debt, divorce, substance abuse, burnout, suicide. They succeed or fail on professional treadmills; patient encounters measured out with coffee spoons. The doctor-patient relationship is crumbling. Bureaucratic and corporate masters make their never-ending arguments of insidious intent. The overwhelming questions: Now where to turn? How do physicians—and their patients—avoid being crushed by the demands of science, of perfection, of expectations? How do we recover the awe we once felt in this world in which we expend our life force every day? How can we find joy once more?

In this provocative and vigorously argued interdisciplinary study of the development of institutional censorship, Clare Spark explores the complexities of 20th-century American cultural politics through the protagonists of the Melville Revival. She investigates closely the history of the Revival and its key critics, who manipulated Melville’s life and writings in the service of their own particular social and political agendas. Although often boldly conjectural and speculative, Spark’s assertions are based on her meticulous and thorough exploration of either newly opened or previously unexplored archival materials of leading Melville scholars.

Hunting the Unicorn is the first treatment to discuss the entire body of Pitter’s verse. It will appeal to scholars and general readers as it places Pitter into the overall context of twentieth-century British poetry and portrays a rather modest, hardworking woman who also “witnessed” the world through the lens of a gifted poet.

After creeping out of bed on a frigid January night in 1832, teenage farmhand Abraham Prescott took up an ax and thrashed his sleeping employers to the brink of death. He later explained that he’d attacked Sally and Chauncey Cochran in his sleep. The Cochrans eventually recovered but—to the astonishment of their neighbors—kept Prescott on, somehow accepting his strange story.

When schoolchildren from Kent, Ohio, and Florence, Italy, were invited to express their thoughts about “Where I’m From” in poetry, the connections that emerged between these students from different continents were remarkable. Their responses to this prompt—“lo vengo da” in Italian—demonstrate the underlying importance of home, families, the natural world, and the creative identities that children harbor within them.