By any measure—international reputation, influence upon fellow writers and later generations, number of books published, scholarly and critical attention—Robert Creeley (1926–2005) is a literary giant, an outstanding, irreplaceable poet. For many decades readers have remarked upon the almost harrowing emotional nakedness of Creeley’s writing. In the years since his death, it may be that the disappearance of the writer allows that nakedness to be observed more readily and without embarrassment. Written by the foremost critics of his poetry, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work is the first book to treat Creeley’s career as a whole. Masterfully edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, the essays in this collection have been gathered into three parts. Those in “Form” consider a variety of characteristic formal qualities that differentiate Creeley from his contemporaries. In “Power,” writers reflect on the pressure exerted by emotions, gender issues, and politics in Creeley’s life and work. In “Person,” Creeley’s unique artistic and psychological project of constructing a person—reflected in his correspondence, teaching, interviews, collaborations, and meditations on the concept of experience—is excavated. While engaging these three major topics, the authors remain, as Creeley does, intent upon the ways such issues appear in language, for Creeley’s nakedness is most conspicuously displayed in his intimate relationship with words. Contributors Charles Altieri Rachel Blau DuPlessis Stephen Fredman Benjamin Friedlander Alan Golding Michael Davidson Steve McCaffery Peter Middleton Marjorie Perloff Peter Quartermain Libbie Rifkin

This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves.

The revised edition of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sounding and listening, and discusses how sound studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture, street life and sonic technologies, Acoustic Territories opens up a range of critical perspectives--it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an "acoustic politics of space" by engaging auditory experience as found within particular cultural histories and related ideologies. Brandon LaBelle traces sound culture through a topographic structure: from underground territories to the home, and further, into the rhythms and vibrations of streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself as an arena of transmitted imaginaries. The new edition includes an additional "global territory" of the relational, positioning acoustics as a range of everyday practices that rework dominant tonalities. Questions of orientation and emplacement are critically raised, reframing listening as multi-modal and intrinsic to resistant socialities and what the author terms "acts of compositioning." The book is fully updated to include new relevant research and references surfacing since 2010, as well as a new preface to the second edition. Acoustic Territories continues to uncover the embedded tensions and potentialities inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.

South African writer Craig Higginson’s powerful new play is a dark, witty and sexually-charged psychological drama told through the eyes of a beautiful English teacher and her French-Congolese pupil. A ‘state of the nation’ exploration of the tensions between the first and third worlds the play explores issues around language, power, identity, sex, past trauma, class, exile and refugees. An exciting new co-production from the internationally-renowned Market Theatre from South Africa and two of the UK’s most prestigious theatre companies.