Dreamwork is a poetic exploration of the then and there, here and now, of landscapes and inscapes over time. It is part of a poetry series on dream and its relation to actuality. The poems explore past, present, and future in different places from Canada through New Jersey, New York and New England to England and Europe, part of the speaker’s journey. A typology of home and displacement, of n…
Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier’s small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary’s first entry was marked 28 June 1915. After some research, Hart discovered that Charles Smith was an Anglo-Canadian, born in Kent, and that this diary was almost all that remained of this forgotten man, who lik…
This second, revised edition of a pioneering volume, long out of print, presents translations of Japanese Zen poems on sorrow, old age, homesickness, the seasons, the ravages of time, solitude, the scenic beauty of the landscape of Japan, and monastic life. Composed by Japanese Zen monks who lived from the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth century, these poem…
The interplay between the external world (ching) and the poet’s inner world (ch’ing) lies at the heart of Chinese poetry, and understanding the interaction of the two is crucial to understanding this work from within its own tradition. Closely coordinating her discussions of poetry and criticism so that practice and theory become mutually enriching and illuminating, Sun offers sensitive and…
Pentasyllabic poetry has been a focus of critical study since the appearance of the earliest works of Chinese literary criticism in the Six Dynasties period. Throughout the subsequent dynasties, traditional Chinese critics continued to examine pentasyllabic poetry as a leading poetic type and to compile various comprehensive anthologies of it.The Matrix of Lyric Transformation enriches this tra…
Writing Self, Writing Empire examines the life, career, and writings of the Mughal state secretary, or munshi, Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. ca. 1670), one of the great Indo-Persian poets and prose stylists of early modern South Asia.
The sestina is a form in which words repeat regularly, intricately, appearing and reappearing in new contexts with new meanings.
Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence.
Cruising the New York City subway, the Transfer Queen is on the prowl! These voyeuristic figure drawings—both poetic and visual—sketch the men of Gotham’s transportation system. A.W. Strouse and Patty Barth spy on strangers with a special kind of anonymous intimacy.
To Be, or Not to Be: Paraphrased is an expanding deconstruction of Hamlet’s famous existential question, achieved by putting the line through paraphrasing software 50 times.