Poetry. Winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award for an outstanding first book-length collection of poetry or prose. "UNCONTAINABLE NOISE is wildly alive: a collage that is part shoot-out at the poetry corral, part love story, a collection that overmodulates fearlessly into new domains of tone. Steve Davenport has created a new world that is ribald, violent, reverent, and thoroughly word-drunk" Alice Fulton."

Say It Hot Volume II: Industrial Strength is a collection of essays on American poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and issues of interest to artists and academics. A companion volume to Say It Hot, these essays are brutally honest and acutely intelligent. From the book: “Literary authors these days no longer make livings off their work. Their books are not to be found in bookstores, and the books are rarely printed by major New York publishing houses. No one reads their works except for other literary authors and the professors who are evaluating their tenure and promotion folders at the colleges and universities at which they are employed, and it’s a minor miracle if a literary book from a small press sells a thousand copies. Fiction writers from wealth write about writing or they write about the ridiculous “sufferings” of the rich. Fiction writers from the lower classes write about the primordial filth from which they’ve physically escaped but from which they’ll never mentally be able to leave behind. Like war veterans, people who’ve fought it out in the miasma of poverty and blue- collar hell can never get the stink out of their skins, try as they may. Just like people who haven’t been to war can spot vets who have, middle-class people and the rich can spot people who’ve grown up poor, no matter what their position in life or the quality of their designer suits. Those suits just don’t fit right, and the neckties make them fidget and sweat. What the well-heeled authors and the working-class writers have in common is that they’ve been trained not to pronounce moral judgment.”

Everyone knows what noise is. Or do they? Can we in fact say that one man's noise is another teenager's music? Is noise in fact only an auditory phenomenon or does it extend far beyond this realm? If our common definitions of noise are necessarily subjective and noise is not just unpleasant sound, then it merits a closer look (or listen). Greg Hainge sets out to define noise in this way, to find within it a series of operations common across its multiple manifestations that allow us to apprehend it as something other than a highly subjective term that tells us very little. Examining a wide range of texts, including Sartre's novel Nausea and David Lynch's iconic films Eraserhead and Inland Empire, Hainge investigates some of the Twentieth Century's most infamous noisemongers to suggest that they're not that noisy after all; and it finds true noise in some surprising places. The result is a thrilling and illuminating study of sound and culture.

Sound is an integral part of contemporary art. Once understood to be a marginal practice, increasingly we encounter sound in art exhibitions through an array of sound making works in various art forms, at times played to very high audio levels. However, works of art are far from the only thing one might hear: music performances, floor talks, exhibition openings and the noisy background sounds that emanate from the gallery café fill contemporary exhibition environments. Far from being hallowed spaces of quiet reflection, what this means is that galleries have swiftly become very noisy places. As such, a straightforward consideration of artworks alone can then no longer account for our experiences of art galleries and museums. To date there has been minimal scholarship directed towards the intricacies of our experiences of sound that occur within the bounds of this purportedly 'visual' art space. Kelly addresses this gap in knowledge through the examination of historical and contemporary sound in gallery environments, broadening our understanding of artists who work with sound, the institutions that exhibit these works, and the audiences that visit them. Gallery Sound argues for the importance of all of the sounds to be heard within the walls of art spaces, and in doing so listens not only to the deliberate inclusion of sound within the art gallery in the form of artworks, performances, and music, but also to its incidental sounds, such as their ambient sounds and the noise generated by audiences. More than this, however, Gallery Sound turns its attention to the ways in which the acoustic characteristics specific to gallery spaces have been mined by artists for creative outputs, ushering in entirely new art forms.

Few composers have responded as powerfully to place as Frederick Delius (1862–1934). Born in Yorkshire, Delius resided in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia before settling in France, where he spent the majority of his professional career. This book examines the role of place in selected works, including 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', Appalachia, and The Song of the High Hills, reading place as a creative and historically mediated category in his music. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary art, and literature, and more recent writing in cultural geography and the philosophy of place, this is a new interpretation of Delius' work, and he emerges as one of the most original and compelling voices in early twentieth-century music. As the popularity of his music grows, this book challenges the idea of Delius as a large-scale rhapsodic composer, and reveals a richer and more productive relationship between place and music.

Weaving multiple storylines with vivid description of characters, Haske’s debut novel brings new life and a unique voice to the fiction of rural America. North Dixie Highway is a story of family bonds, devolution, and elusive revenge. When Buck Metzger’s childhood is interrupted by the disappearance of his grandfather, several family members and close friends plot revenge on the suspected killer. From remote towns in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to the Texas/Mexico border, to war-torn Bosnia, Metzger struggles for self-identity and resolution in a world of blue-collar ethics and liquor-fueled violence.

Driving Identities examines long-standing connections between popular music and the automotive industry and how this relationship has helped to construct and reflect various socio-cultural identities. It also challenges common assumptions regarding the divergences between industry and art, and reveals how music and sound are used to suture the putative divide between human and non-human. This book is a ground-breaking inquiry into the relationship between popular music and automobiles, and into the mutual aesthetic and stylistic influences that have historically left their mark on both industries. Shaped by new historicism and cultural criticism, and by methodologies adapted from gender, LGBTQ+, and African-American studies, it makes an important contribution to understanding the complex and interconnected nature of identity and cultural formation. In its interdisciplinary approach, melding aspects of ethnomusicology, sociology, sound studies, and business studies, it pushes musicological scholarship into a new consideration and awareness of the complexity of identity construction and of influences that inform our musical culture. The volume also provides analyses of the confluences and coactions of popular music and automotive products to highlight the mutual influences on their respective aesthetic and technical evolutions. Driving Identities is aimed at both academics and enthusiasts of automotive culture, popular music, and cultural studies in general. It is accompanied by an extensive online database appendix of car-themed pop recordings and sheet music, searchable by year, artist, and title.