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Limiting Outer Space propels the historicization of outer space by focusing on the Post-Apollo period. After the moon landings, disillusionment set in. Outer space, no longer considered the inevitable destination of human expansion, lost much of its popular appeal, cultural significance and political urgency. With the rapid waning of the worldwide Apollo frenzy, the optimism of the Space Age gave way to an era of space fatigue and planetized limits. Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with scholarship on the 1970s, this cutting-edge volume examines the reconfiguration of space imaginaries from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives. Rather than invoking oft-repeated narratives of Cold War rivalry and an escalating Space Race, Limiting Outer Space breaks new ground by exploring a hitherto underrated and understudied decade, the Post-Apollo period.
Poetry. Literary Criticism. Middle Eastern Studies. LGBT Studies. Edited by Lindsey Boldt, Steve Dickison, and Samantha Giles. Compiled on the occasion of Arab American poet and painter, Etel Adnan's receipt of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, HOMAGE TO ETEL is a collection of original writings written in tribute by friends, colleagues and admireres of Etel Adnan and her work. Contributors are Ammiel Alcalay, Jen Benka, David Buuck, Norma Cole, Steve Dickison, Thom Donovan, Sharon Doubiago, Simone Fattal, Robert Grenier, Benjamin Hollander, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Stephen Motika, Nancy J. Peters, Csaba Polony, Megan Pruiett, Brandon Shimoda, Roger Snell, Cole Swensen, Stacy Szymaszek, Lynne Tillman, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Anne Waldman.
Fiction. Etel Adnan's novel "PARIS, WHEN IT'S NAKED amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French Capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of SITT MARIE-ROSE, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indespensable book by an indispensable writer" -Morgan Gibson.
Poetry. Translated from the French by Simone Fattal and Cole Swensen. MUM IS DOWN is Oscarine Bosquet's second collection of poetry to be translated into English. "MUM IS DOWN is at once a harrowing work and, by the sheer integrity of its agonistic confrontation with the unthinkable, a profoundly redemptive one. The unswerving poetic force of her language proves yet again that Bosquet stands among the most formally audacious and humanly perceptive poets of her generation in France." Michael Palmer"
Memoir. Essay. The latest book from an original writer, thinker and filmmaker whose other books (also available from SPD) have attracted a considerable following. "This, Jalal Toufic's fifth book, can be read as a single aphorism, an aphorism composed of aphorisms. And although it is the shortest of his books to date, it is the greatest. Under love's rubric, themes from Toufic's earlier books reappear - memory, the untimely occurrence, the undead of history and their recurrence in film, the hyperrealities of oblivion, ruination. The book is set in contexts (and particularly that of the Arab World) in which not time but other faster forces are bringing about an end to things.There is, in my opinion, no more subtle or powerful thinker today than Jalal Toufic, and none whose ideas are, in the end, more beautiful" - Lyn Hejinian.
Poetry. WELL WELL REALITY is a collection of poems written in collaboration by Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop over a number of years. The distinct voices of these two momentously prolific poets merge to create a new, lyric voice: a vast, plural assemblage of name, gender, and language. "When Rosmarie Waldrop writes poetry, when she writes poems, she writes her poems: the poems, the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop. When Keith Waldrop writes poetry, when he writes poems, he writes his poems: the poems, the poetry of Keith Waldrop. But when Rosmarie and Keith, when Keith and Rosmarie write poems together, whose poems are those poems? They are the poems of a third poet, whose name and gender and origin and language we do not know. But what we do see, and hear, are the poems."--Jacques Roubaud
A new collection of short prose writings in Will Alexander's signature "vertical philosophy." THE COMING MENTAL RANGE brings readers deep into the revolutionary poetics and philosophy of multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and musician Will Alexander. Gathering together a group of Alexander's short prose writings in his signature "vertical philosophy" with essays in poetics touching on the work of admired artists and poets (Byron Baker, Wanda Coleman, Pablo Jofré, Bob Kaufman, and Ghérasim Luca to name a few), in addition to several key interviews with the author, The Coming Mental Range serves as a critical introduction to Alexander's work and thought, and as a companion to volumes in poet...
Poetry. "THERE is a poem of hidden seams, fissures that we cross unsuspecting. A smooth surface conceals a universe of sudden shifts and transitions from one level to another a philosophical level which pursues the mysteries of consciousness and place, a second level which asks the same questions ('do I have to have a nationality in order to be human?') in a committed social and political vision, a passionate and engaged post-modernism." Michael Beard, Univ. of North Dakota"