The abstractions of modernism reimagined as figurations of collective self-organization

In her debut essay collection, award-winning poet and critic Lesley Wheeler tells the story of her father's unraveling. While she studies poetry in New Zealand on a Fulbright fellowship, his dishonesty smashes her parents' marriage and destroys their savings. Nothing is resolved, even after his death. The past and present keep shifting. Reading contemporary poetry helps Wheeler negotiate the crisis. Cognitive scientists use the term "literary transportation" to describe getting lost in a book--and poems can transport a person, too, not despite but because they are brief and full of gaps. Wheeler's frank, lively essays demonstrate how traveling through a poem's pocket universe can change people for the better. "POETRY'S POSSIBLE WORLDS turns and counterturns between personal remembrance and scholarly observation as Lesley Wheeler pays homage to verse from across the globe. An insightful account of the revision of self that happens over a lifetime, Wheeler charts the complex negotiations of both childhood and adulthood (conflicts of illness, employment, racial violence, and the anthropocene). Rather than laboring toward the illusory comforts of "closure,"however, Wheeler reminds us of poetry's restorative power: its intricate gifts of entrancement and communication, its ability to reflect our all-too-human contradictions and limitations. Ultimately, Poetry's Possible Worlds champions the joy and open-endedness of the lyric, as well as the lasting impact of close reading as proof that, in an ever-changing world, art is manifold."--Shara Lessley, author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert's Wife Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. Essays.

"Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions."—Booklist "Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane."—Time Out New York The poetry of Lucia Perillo is fierce, tragicomic, and contrarian, with subjects ranging from coyotes and Scotch broom to local elections and family history. Formally braided, Perillo gathers strands of the mythic and mundane, of media and daily life, as she faces the treachery of illness and draws readers into poems rich in image and story. When you spend many hours alone in a room you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself— this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it, from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum, who walked four days into the jungle and stayed for the kindness of the tribe— who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender? Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Bobbitt award from the Library of Congress. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

An engrossing and beautifully crafted memoir of imagination, obsession, and disaster from the couch of old-fashioned four-times-a-week psychoanalysis. Slow Fuse of the Possible is a poet's narrative of a troubled psychoanalysis. It is also a commanding meditation on the powers of language, for good and for ill. From the beginning of their time together, it is clear that the enigmatic analyst and Daniels are not a good match, yet both are determined to continue their work--the former in nearly complete silence, and the latter as best she can with the tools at her disposal: careful attention to language, deep reading, and literary imagination. Throughout, the story is filtered through the mind of Emily Dickinson, whose poetry Daniels uses as a fulcrum for the interpretation of her own experience. The book is saturated with Dickinson's verse, and Dickinson is an increasingly haunting presence as crises emerge and the author unravels. This compelling lyric memoir, so richly steeped in all facets of language and the literary, allows readers a glimpse into the mind of a renowned poet, revealing the dazzling and anguished connections between poetry and psychoanalysis.

In her groundbreaking and most politicized collection, Kathleen Ossip takes a hard look at the U.S.A. as it now stands. She meditates on our various responses to our country—whether ironic, infantile, righteous, or defeated. Her diction is both high and low, her tone both elegant and straightforward. The book’s crowning achievement, its anchor, and its centerpiece is the poem “July.” In a generous fifty pages, Ossip recounts a road trip from Bemidji, MN, to Key West, FL, with her daughter riding shotgun. Inspired by images that flick across their car windows and nurtured by intimate conversation and plenty of time to think, the poem has an entertaining cinematic sweep. There are poems based on bumper stickers, the names of churches, little shops. Traveling tests her beliefs, and Ossip fully discloses her doubts and confusions. Ossip is an unconventional, mighty magician with words.

This text uses machine data of poetry readings to discover features of rhythm and intonation and to clear away methodological problems that hamper the teaching of poetic melody. The discussion is linked to the theory of literary form, throwing light on the role of emotion in poetry and fiction.

Provoking Curriculum Studies pushes forward a strong reading of the theoretical and methodological innovations taking place within curriculum studies research. Addressing an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies—conceptualizing scholars as poets and the potential of the poetic in education—it offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Drawing on poetic inquiry, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, life writing, and several types of arts-based research methodologies, this diverse collection spotlights the intellectual genealogies of curriculum scholars such as Ted Aoki, Geoffrey Milburn and Roger Simon, whose provocations, inquiries, and recursive questioning link the writing and re-writing of curriculum theory to acts of strong poetry. Readers are urged to imagine alternative ways in which professors, teachers, and university students might not only engage with but disrupt, blur, and complicate curriculum theory across interdisciplinary topographies in order to seek out blind impresses—those areas of knowledge that are left over, unaddressed by ‘mainstream’ curriculum scholarship, and that instigate difficult questions about death, trauma, prejudice, poverty, colonization, and more.