Defacing The Monument

Frames, Erasures, Graffiti --Writing in Relation --Guidestars, Tangles, Hauntologies.

Poetry. In THE MARKET WONDERS, the Market itself becomes a thinking person: lover, parent, poet, philosopher. The first section reads as if the Dow Jones and the Dao De Jing had been playfully conflated; like the latter work, this is a "Book of Changes" and a work of philosophy. The speaker of these poems focuses tightly on the developing consciousness of her infant daughter, and then broadly on world events, in what they call "total awareness, incessant recording." While the timeline of the book's contents almost numbly identifies days by the closing numbers of that day's Dow, the mathematics at play are much wider than market measurements. They include theoretical physics-with the poet insisting the market penetrates all events-and brain physiology, as well as the purpose of poetry itself. Briante pushes the poetic domain beyond the lyric, beyond traditional subjects like nature (although the poet's consciousness omits nothing: cardinals in a tree, for instance), and into enumeration as meditation, money movement as an overarching shared consciousness. Briante turns the expectations of poetry upside down when she explains, "I wish more poets would write about money," and a fairytale narrated in footnotes suddenly has exact measurement thrust into it. By the end of the book, we see how financial theories, rightly or wrongly applied can distort the ordinary acts of living, impoverish entire communities. There is nothing, however, impoverished about THE MARKET WONDERS, a work rich with marvels drawn from our ordinary world. "Across the bottom of our imported flat-screen televisions race the names of the winners and the losers: NFL and NBA scores, Dow Jones Industrial Averages, news on the most recent school shooting or celebrity overdose. Amidst this incessant flagellation of news that is incapable of staying news, Susan Briante has imagined a remarkable poetics for our post-Occupy lives. Intimate yet public, THE MARKET WONDERS creates nothing short of a new linguistic bridge between revelation and awe." Mark Nowak "Poetry's conventions tend to assume that poetry does not need to bother itself with the economic machinations of something like the Dow. These conventions are wrong and Susan Briante's THE MARKET WONDERS proves it. This is poetry that is only the richer for how it weaves the economics that shape our daily lives into it. This is one of the most beautiful and moving books I have read in recent years." Juliana Spahr "An intimate almanac of family life, Susan Briante's newest book also describes the collisions between an I and late capitalism. In this way, the market becomes a throat, a tree, a poet it becomes the inorganic force Briante brushes and glances in her poems: 'Always a story, no matter how avant-garde you live, ' a poet tells the speaker in a dream. THE MARKET WONDERS is a devastating meditation on value and love and economy, a book that asks its readers to pay careful heed of the markets' inescapable trespass into our interior lives. This book is not just stunning, it's also important, a clarion call." Carmen Gimenez Smith"

The Antiracist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering artistic communities for a new millennium of writers. Inspired by June Jordan 's 1995 Poetry for the People, here is a blueprint for a 21st-century workshop model that protects and platforms writers of color. Instead of earmarking dusty anthologies, imagine workshop participants Skyping with contemporary writers of difference. Instead of tolerating bigoted criticism, imagine workshop participants moderating their own feedback sessions. Instead of yielding to the red-penned judgement of instructors, imagine workshop participants citing their own text in dialogue. The Antiracist Writing Workshop is essential reading for anyone looking to revolutionize the old workshop model into an enlightened, democratic counterculture.

This is not a book about Winston Churchill. It is not principally about his politics, nor his rhetorical imagination, nor even about the man himself. Instead, it addresses the varied afterlives of the man and the persistent, deeply located compulsion to bring him back from the dead, capturing and explaining the significance of the various Churchill myths to Britain's history and current politics. The authors look at Churchill's portrayal in social memory. They demonstrate the ways in which politicians have often used the idea of Churchill as a means of self-validation - using him to show themselves as tough and honest players. They show the man dramatized in film and television - an onscreen persona that is often the product of a gratuitous mixing of fact and fantasy, one deliberately shaped to meet the preferences of the presumed audience. They discuss his legacy in light of the Brexit debate - showing how public figures on both sides of the Leave/Remain debate were able to use elements of Churchill's words and character to argue for their own point-of-view.

Sport has always been central to the movements of both the nation-state and the people who resist that nation-state. Think of the Roman Colosseum, Jesse Owens’s four gold-medal victories in the 1936 Nazi Olympics, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s protest at the 1968 Olympics, and the fallout Colin Kaepernick suffered as a result of his recent protest on the sidelines of an NFL game. Sport is a place where the body and the mind are the most dangerous because they are allowed to be unified as one energy. Bodies Built for Game brings together poems, essays, and stories that challenge our traditional ideas of sport and question the power structures that athletics enforce. What is it that drives us to athletics? What is it that makes us break our own bodies or the bodies of others as we root for these unnatural and performed victories? Featuring contributions from a diverse group of writers, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Louise Erdrich, Toni Jensen, Ada Limón, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and Maya Washington, this book challenges America by questioning its games.

In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.

A New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph, Spectator, Observer, and BBC History Magazine, this bold new history of the rise of Christianity shows how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizations. The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion deliberately attacked and suppressed the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to "one true faith." Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyrs' deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless, and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth, and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the first century to the sixth, those who didn't fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial, and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces, and their priests killed. It was an annihilation. Authoritative, vividly written, and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable debut from a brilliant young historian.

Poetry. Like lyric field notes from a worldwide anthropological journey, Briante's poems scrutinize human and urban situations. "Amid a riot of signals, cranes, and circuitry--from Mexico City to Antarctica--the reader succumbs to a sense of non-stop construction, to the craven expansion of cities in the glistening fields. In the chaos of sensory overload, the poet still manages to detect 'droplets of pollen slip from anther to stamen,' to feel a stream running dry inside. It's a work of shuddering velocity--an ode, a screed, a lament, a love song of 'pristine and inarticulate mornings.' Susan Briante's PIONEERS IN THE STUDY OF MOTION details the ravages of the world in a voracious struggle to savor its sweetness"--C.D. Wright.

Exploring notions of history, collective memory, cultural memory, public memory, official memory, and public history, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past explains how ordinary citizens, social groups, governments and institutions engage with the past of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It illuminates how and why over the last five decades the debates about slavery have become so relevant in the societies where slavery existed and which participated in the Atlantic slave trade. The book draws on a variety of case studies to investigate its central questions. How have social actors and groups in Europe, Africa and the Americas engaged with the slave past of their societies? Are there are any relations between the demands to rename streets of Liverpool in England and the protests to take down Confederate monuments in the United States? How have black and white social actors and scholars influenced the ways slavery is represented in George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in the United States?How do slave cemeteries in Brazil and the United States and the walls of names of Whitney Plantation speak to other initiatives honoring enslaved people in England and South Africa? What shared problems and goals have led to the creation of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC? Why have artists used their works to confront the debates about slavery and its legacies? The important debates addressed in this book resonate in the present day. Arguing that memory of slavery is racialized and gendered, the book shows that more than just attempts to come to terms with the past, debates about slavery are associated with the persistent racial inequalities, racism, and white supremacy which still shape societies where slavery existed. Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past is thus a vital resource for students and scholars of the Atlantic world, the history of slavery and public history.

Selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets Emily Skaja’s debut collection is a fiery, hypnotic book that confronts the dark questions and menacing silences around gender, sexuality, and violence. Brute arises, brave and furious, from the dissolution of a relationship, showing how such endings necessitate self-discovery and reinvention. The speaker of these poems is a sorceress, a bride, a warrior, a lover, both object and agent, ricocheting among ways of knowing and being known. Each incarnation squares itself up against ideas of feminine virtue and sin, strength and vulnerability, love and rage, as it closes in on a hard-won freedom. Brute is absolutely sure of its capacity to insist not only on the truth of what it says but on the truth of its right to say it. “What am I supposed to say: I’m free?” the first poem asks. The rest of the poems emphatically discover new ways to answer. This is a timely winner of the Walt Whitman Award, and an introduction to an unforgettable voice.