During the summer of 1864 a Union column, commanded by Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith, set out from Tennessee with a goal that had proven impossible in all prior attempts—to find and defeat the cavalry under the command of Confederate major general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest’s cavalry was the greatest threat to the long supply line feeding Sherman’s armies as they advanced on Atlanta.

Cyrus S. Eaton was born on December 27, 1883, in the quiet Nova Scotian village of Pugwash. He often visited Cleveland, Ohio, spending summer vacations from college with his uncle and was employed in 1905 by his first teacher, John D. Rockefeller Sr., as a clerk and troubleshooter for the East Ohio Gas company, one of the Midwest’s major utilities in which Rockefeller had an interest. Eaton became a U.S. citizen in 1913 and passed away at age ninety-five on May 9, 1979.

Richard Tayson’s second book of poems, The World Underneath, concerns birth, motherhood, explorations of the feminine in a world scarred by war, environmental crisis, and violence. The book’s locus is a series of poems related to a home birth, an event that leads the poems’ speaker to question the place of the individual within the home, the world, and the wider universe. All things connect, as the speaker travels cross-country to the birth then back to where he lives in a multiracial relationship of two men committed to each another. The book’s widest aim is to unite the personal and the universal, the masculine and the feminine, the gay and the non-gay. As they explore the crucial dilemmas of our time, Tayson’s poems probe beneath ordinary experience to discover the ineffable and the difficult-to-say, the space between what we know and what remains distant, unreachable.

Overshadowed by the so-called Good War that followed, the Great War—the First World War—captured the imagination of American writers both while the conflict was underway and during the decades that followed. As these authors struggled and, at times, fought with one another to define the war’s elusive meaning, they produced a body of short fiction astonishing in its range of styles and themes.

Some of the richest of these short stories, originally published in long-forgotten magazines and books, have remained lost—until now. The first collection of its kind, World War I in American Fiction brings together 26 stories to present a fuller picture of the war’s immediate impact on American culture and its subsequent, deeply contested memory. The volume features canonical authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Katherine Anne Porter, and Edith Wharton alongside writers who deserve a wider readership, such as Thomas Boyd, Kay Boyle, Claude McKay, and Laurence Stallings. The stories highlight the lingering effects of the war on veterans, women, and African Americans, and they take the reader from the contested skies over the Western Front to the influenza-ravaged American home front. An extensive introduction places the stories in their historical and literary context.

World, Self, Poem collects the best of the essays submitted by poets and scholars from around the U.S. and Canada, and beyond, for presentation at the “Jubilation of Poets” festival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in October 1986. In this collection, eighteen critics consider the works of a number of important postmodern poets and, using various approaches, confront some of the central problems posed by the poetry of the past 25 years.