Poetry. In 1961 Jack Spicer wrote: "It is not unfair to say that a city is a collection of humans. Human beings. In their municipal trust they sit together in cities. They talk together in cities. They form groups. Even when they do not form groups they sit alone together in cities." In 2004 Stephanie Young was given her assignment: to convene a collection of writing by Bay Area poets. The long-anticipated results are in, all 432 pages of them. A precedent-breaking anthology, BAY POETICS goes to the outer limits of "local" and "poetry," ranging as it does from Napa Valley to Santa Cruz and including poems, essays, lists, short fiction, walking tour reports, manifestoes and all points in between. An experiment in 21st century landscape portraiture you won't want to miss.

From the acclaimed author of Blue Self-Portrait comes a blistering new novel, written and set during the state of emergency declared in France in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. In the beautiful and traditionally conservative city of Lyon, police and protestors against new labour laws clash in the streets. Lefebvre's anonymous narrator is a poet existing on a diet of cannabis, bananas and books on oppression under the Third Reich. Drawn by the spectre of an overbearing father and spooked by the liveliness of the local far right, they are torn between the push to find a job and the pull to write. The result is this troubling account of how nationalism feeds off late capitalism; a semi-serious treatise in ten lessons, addressed to young poets, and survival guide for the wilfully idle.

Poetry. California Studies. Foreword by Robert Hass. The poems in this anthology embody what it's like to live in the astonishing weave of cities and towns, landscape and language, climate and history that make up the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Selected by the members of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional poetry collective named after the web of rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the poems in THE PLACE THAT INHABITS US are drawn from both a physical and a metaphoric watershed. From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems by poets well known and not well known, living and dead, map this improbable region. There are egrets and grievous losses here; prayers, panhandlers, Delta mornings and sunsets in the 'hood; the fog, certainly, and the bridges, but there are shades of Dante on a Miwok trail, and Wang-wei haunts the slopes of Grizzly Peak. These poems are internal maps, "the mental maps that for humans," writes Robert Hass in the foreword, "make a place a place." Gathered together, they evoke the San Francisco Bay watershed, the place that inhabits us.

After the second World War, the term “technology” came to signify both the anxieties of possible annihilation in a rapidly changing world and the exhilaration of accelerating cultural change. Technomodern Poetics examines how some of the most well-known writers of the era described the tensions between technical, literary, and media cultures at the dawn of the Digital Age. Poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, and Frank O’Hara, among others, anthologized in Donald Allen’s iconic The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, provided a canon of work that has proven increasingly relevant to our technological present. Elaborating on the theories of contemporaneous technologists such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, J. C. R. Licklider, and a host of noteworthy others, these artists express the anxieties and avant-garde impulses they wrestled with as they came to terms with a complex array of issues raised by the dawning of the nuclear age, computer-based automation, and the expansive reach of electronic media. As author Todd Tietchen reveals, even as these writers were generating novel forms and concerns, they often continued to question whether such technological changes were inherently progressive or destructive. With an undeniable timeliness, Tietchen’s book is sure to appeal to courses in modern English literature and American studies, as well as among fans of Beat writers and early Cold War culture.

'Roots and Routes' gathers essays, talks, interviews, statements, notes, and other prose writings by poets who studied and/or taught at the New College of California’s Masters in Poetics program over the course of its nearly 30-year existence. The collection evokes a much-needed anti-hierarchical, even anarchic, pedagogy in poetry, poetics, and the literary arts, and is part of a general reevaluation of standard higher education models on Creative Writing. As such it will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars interested in America’s recent literary history, as well as to poets outside the academy and the general reader interested in US poetry and poetics.

A Community Writing Itself features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson. The book fills a major gap in contemporary poetics, focusing on one of the most vibrant experimental writing communities in the nation. The writers discuss vision and craft, war and peace, race and gender, individuality and collectivity, and the impact of the Bay Area on their work.