Karen Volkman’s award-winning collection Spar has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, “Someone was searching for a Form of Fire,” and this wild urge to seek form—and thus definition—in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind’s evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker. While very much a living voice, the poems’ speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric flights. As its title suggests, Spar embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.

"Renata and Maria have questions about their future. Who doesn't? But when Renata convinces Maria to hold a séance, the girls get more than they bargained for. They conjure up a mysterious figure who answers their questions but also tells them how he knows the answers: they're fictional. Renata and Maria are characters in a play called S.P.A.R., a play written by the mysterious man. He proves he's their maker by predicting the future, twisting reality and finally showing them the audience. Renata's not happy about being in S.P.A.R. The play becomes a contest of wills between author and character. But it's not a fair fight: after all, he has the script. And when Renata tries to enlist the audience's help, the author proves that the audience is fictional as well!" --

A crucial guide to life before—and after—Tinder, IVF, and robots. What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of sexual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and sex and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created? In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve? In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heterosexual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for sex and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.

Decommissioning the Brent Spar chronicles the events leading up to the recent decision to recycle the offshore installation in a Norwegian fjord; the Greenpeace campaign to stop it being dumped at sea; the repercussions of Shell's decision to abort the decommissioning at the eleventh hour; and the dialogue processes that have occurred to attempt to resolve the issue. This book will give a balanced, impartial account of the whole situation to its present day, its key aim being to inform the reader about the facts and mechanisms of the dialogue process and the need to approach decisions in a different way. Readers will benefit from an account of the mistakes made by both sides, the input from government, the scientific community, the press and public, and can apply this knowledge to future environmental issues.