Powerful essays on the state and aims of contemporary poetry.

This thoroughly researched overview on one of the most absorbing literary phenomena of recent decades—the trespassing of cultural and linguistic borders—departs from the canonical point of view offered by the English works of the Nobel laureate, Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, to approach the work of the emerging Hungarian-English poet Ágnes Lehóczky. Through the epistemological filter offered by some guiding texts (such as Bauman, Hall, Braidotti, and many others), this study allows the reader to discover the recounting of a search for an identity, where the adoption of English as an artistic vehicle is only the first thread that unites the two “nomadic” authors. Striving to “locate” language and identity, Brodsky and Lehóczky face the limits of doing so, due to the fluid and nomadic nature of language itself. This suggests, if not answers, then new ways of expression, which draw the language of our future.

In these wide-ranging essays, Erik Davis explores the codes—spiritual, cultural, and embodied—that people use to escape the limitation of their lives and enrich their experience of the world. These include Asian religious traditions and West African trickster gods, Western occult and esoteric lore, postmodern theory and psychedelic science, as well as festival scenes such as Burning Man (of which Davis is the best-known chronicler). Articles on media technology further explore themes Davis took up in his acclaimed book Techgnosis, while his profiles of West Coast poets, musicians, and mystics extend the California terrain he previously mapped in The Visionary State. Whether his subject is collage art or the “magickal realism” of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, transvestite Burmese spirit mediums or Ufology, tripster king Terence McKenna or dub maestro Lee Perry, Davis writes with keen yet skeptical sympathy, intellectual subtlety and wit, and unbridled curiosity. The common thread running through all these pieces is what Davis calls “modern esoterica,” which he describes in his preface as a ‘no-man’s-land located somewhere between anthropology and mystical pulp, between the zendo and the metal club, between cultural criticism and extraordinary experience, whether psychedelic, or yogic, or technological.” Such an ambiguous and startling landscape demands that the intrepid adventurer shed any territorial claims and go nomad. Davis wanders with sharp eyes and an open mind, which is why Peter Lamborn Wilson calls him “the best of all guides to modern American spirituality.”

Here, Jayne L. Warner has created a unique biographical tapestry that illuminates not only the life of one of Turkey's leading literary and cultural authorities, but also the emergence of a republic in his native country, and sheds new light on the history of one of the world's great cities. Sumptuously illustrated throughout with evocative period pictures of Istanbul, Turkish Nomad tells the extraordinary life story of this poet, thinker, and diplomat. As a young boy, Halman surveyed the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, walked through the ruins of Byzantium, and grew up in the modern nation created by the charismatic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Talat S. Halman would go on to serve the republic as its first minister of culture. The more than four decades Halman lived primarily in the United States are not overlooked but are used to discuss how his ideas developed as he taught at leading unversities-Princeton, Columbia, New York University-and introduced Americans to Turkish literature and culture through his translations and public lectures. We In the Turkish Nomad we follow the literary, scholastic, and journalistic journey of a restless writer, who might best be described by the title of one of his books, The Turkish Muse, his 2006 collection of literary reviews tracing the development of Turkish literature during the Turkish Republic.

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.

Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative.

Using a critical examination of the collage poetics of Ronald Johnson, this book sets out to understand Johnson's poetry in the context of the "New American" collage tradition, stretching from Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky and beyond. Additionally, the book assesses Johnson's work in relation to wider questions concerning literary chronologies, especially the discontinuities commonly seen to exist between nineteenth-century Romantic and twentieth-century modernist literary forms.