Discusses literary representations of death to explore the relation between writing and death--death understood as both the death of the individual and the death of meaning.

The long form poem is a practice of poetics in joy, gratitude, sadness, resilience and pain. This literary work serves as a practice of self-reflection and accountability in the wake of the prison system. This poem is dirge work acknowledging unjust atrocities, but reveling in our human resilience.

In 2002, Neil Whitehead published Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death, in which he applied the concept of poetics to the study of violence and observed the power of violence in the creation and expression of identity and social relationships. The Poetics of Processing applies Whitehead’s theory on violence to mortuary and skeletal assemblages in the Andes, Mexico, the US Southwest, Jordan, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Turkey, examining the complex cultural meanings of the manipulation of remains after death. The contributors interpret postmortem treatment of the physical body through a poetics lens, examining body processing as a mechanism for the re-creation of cosmological events and processing’s role in the creation of social memory. They analyze methods of processing and the ways in which the living use the physical body to stratify society and gain power, as evidenced in rituals of body preparation and burial around the world, objects buried with the dead and the hierarchies of tomb occupancy, the dissection of cadavers by medical students, the appropriation of living spaces once occupied by the dead, and the varying treatments of the remains of social outsiders, prisoners of war, and executed persons. The Poetics of Processing combines social theory and bioarchaeology to examine how the living manipulate the bodies of the dead for social purposes. These case studies—ranging from prehistoric to historic and modern and from around the globe—explore this complex material relationship that does not cease with physical death. This volume will be of interest to mortuary archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, and cultural anthropologists. Contributors: Dil Singh Basanti, Roselyn Campbell, Carlina de la Cova, Eric Haanstad, Scott Haddow, Christina Hodge, Christopher Knusel, Kristin Kuckelman, Clark Spencer Larsen, Debra Martin, Kenneth Nystrom, Adrianne Offenbecker, Megan Perry, Marin Pilloud, Beth K. Scaffidi, Mehmet Somel, Kyle D. Waller

This book presents 18 highly influential essays on Chinese literature and semiotics by Professor Zhao Yiheng, including his analysis and discussions of the development of Chinese literature and its characteristics from traditional to modern times. It is divided into three parts: traditional Chinese literature, contemporary Chinese literature, and semiotics. In the first part, Professor Zhao summarizes the core elements of narrative cultural relations, ethical dilemmas, and narrative features. He also provides a comprehensive description of the formal structures in Chinese traditional literature. Taking the traditional Chinese play White Rabbit as a case, he discusses the connections between the narrative structure and the characteristics of Chinese novels and stratification of Chinese culture.

Is death the end, or a new beginning? Should it be feared, or embraced? Or is it simply a ceasing to exist? What better way to examine this great unknown than through poetry. Author Stephanie Buckwalter explores eight poems and poets, with chapters on John Donne, Emily Bronte, Walt Whitman, and five others. Accompanied by biographical information on the poet and end-of-chapter questions for further study, Buckwalter unravels each poem, including detailed analysis of form, content, poetic technique, and theme, encouraging readers to develop the tools to understand and appreciate poetry.

Marianne Boruch indulges in the joy of the short leap between poetry and the essay

In this deft analysis, Vernon Shetley shows how writers and readers of poetry, operating under very different conventions and expectations, have drifted apart, stranding the once-vital poetic enterprise on the distant margins of contemporary culture. Along with a clear understanding of where American poetry stands and how it got there, After the Death of Poetry offers a compelling set of prescriptions for its future, prescriptions that might enable the art to regain its lost stature in our intellectual life. In exemplary case studies, Shetley identifies the very different ways in which three postwar poets--Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery--try to restore some of the challenge and risk that characterized modernist poetry's relation to its first readers. Sure to be controversial, this cogent analysis offers poets and readers a clear sense of direction and purpose, and so, the hope of reaching each other again.