Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts introduces an interdisciplinary and practical approach to the analysis of poetry which focuses on text worlds, namely the contexts, scenarios or types of reality that readers construct in their interaction with the language of texts. The book demonstrates in detail three ways of approaching poetic text worlds, namely as discourse situations, possible worlds, and mental constructs. Clear and detailed introductions to linguistic theories of definiteness and deixis, possible world theory and schema theory are included, making the book accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with these frameworks.

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In the wake of his father’s death, the speaker in Raymond Antrobus’ The Perseverance travels to Barcelona. In Gaudi’s Cathedral, he meditates on the idea of silence and sound, wondering whether acoustics really can bring us closer to God. Receiving information through his hearing aid technology, he considers how deaf people are included in this idea. “Even though,” he says, “I have not heard / the golden decibel of angels, / I have been living in a noiseless / palace where the doorbell is pulsating / light and I am able to answer.” The Perseverance is a collection of poems examining a d/Deaf experience alongside meditations on loss, grief, education, and language, both spoken and signed. It is a book about communication and connection, about cultural inheritance, about identity in a hearing world that takes everything for granted, about the dangers we may find (both individually and as a society) if we fail to understand each other.

No Dialect Please, You're a Poet is situated at the crossroads in research areas of literature and linguistics. This collection of essays brings to the forefront the many ways in which dialect is present in poetry and how it is realized in both written texts and oral performances. In examining works from a wide range of poets and poetries, from acclaimed poets to emerging ones, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to poetics of dialects from a variety of regions, across two centuries of English poetry.

In Ghost Letters, one emigrates to America again, and again, and again, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one grows up in America, and attends university in America, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one wrestles with one’s American blackness in ways not possible in Senegal, though one never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; and one sees more deeply into Americanness than any native-born American could. Ghost Letters is a 21st century Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, though it is a notebook of arrival and being in America. It is a major achievement. —Shane McCrae