From Twenty Books of Verse published between 1940 and 1993, John Ciardi gives us poems of love written with care and honest discernment; poems of the natural world that reveal humanity's kinship to spiders and nebulae, oceans and thickets; and poems that tellingly render the ritual dance of human life and mortality.

In this study of Ciardi's life, Edward Cifelli has captured all the deep concern, passion, and thoughtfulness that marked Ciardi's long career in American letters. With care and penetrating detail, Cifelli evokes Ciardi's early childhood in Boston, his Italian heritage, his service as a gunner on a B-29 during World War II, and his years teaching at Harvard and Rutgers. Illuminated here are Ciardi's widely read contributions as an editor of Saturday Review and World magazines, as well as his tireless effort to bring an awareness and love of language and poetry to America through radio, television, the lecture circuit, and his twenty-six years on the staff of the famous Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a gathering he directed for seventeen years.

Viscusi also situates Italian American writing within the "eccentric design" of American literature, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to read not only novels and poems, but also houses, maps, processions, videos, and other artifacts as texts."--BOOK JACKET.

This CG animated action adventure offers a prequel to Mass Effect 3, telling the story of James Vega, Alliance Marine and leader of an elite military unit sent deep into distant space to combat a strange and largely unknown race of aggressive aliens known as The Collectors. ~ Cammila Collar, Rovi

War and violence have arguably been some of the strongest influences on literature, but the relation is complex: more than just a subject for story-telling, war tends to reshape literature and culture. Modern war literature necessarily engages with national ideologies, and this volume looks at the specificity of how American literature deals with the emotional, intellectual, social, political, and economic contradictions that evolve into and out of war. Raising questions about how American ideals of independence and gender affect representations of war while also considering how specifically American experiences of race and class interweave with representations of combat, this book is a rich and coherent introduction to these texts and critical debates.

Drawing on his experience as a student of ecology, his career in natural resource management, and his lifelong love of nature, Robert B. Weeden shows how living beings and their environments—foxes, bears, trees, ponds—have shaped the course of his life. An avid journal-keeper with a poetic sensibility, here Weeden has collected his thoughts and musings of the past thirteen years into an epistolary memoir that teaches us how everything is connected: pick up a feather and you will find the universe. By turns smart, funny, and touching, Small Forays into Big Spaces converses with other writers and scientists about topics ranging including natural history and human prehistory, creative imagination, humans’ evolving ideas of home, and the way we think of ourselves as both biological and cultural creatures. Above all, this book is an invitation to join the author in his small forays, and be inspired to create your own beginnings, full of childlike wonder at the miracle of life on Earth. Intended for lovers of nature, observers of the world, poets or poets-at-heart, and scientists reconnecting to the foundational aspects of our universe, Small Forays into Big Spaces is a book to take with you on life’s journeys, and to come back to time and time again.

While emphasizing aesthetic continuity between the wars, Stout stresses that the poetry that emerged from each displays a greater variety than is usually recognized."--Jacket.

Our Emily Dickinsons situates Dickinson's life and work within larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America. Examining Dickinson's influence on Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and others, Vivian R. Pollak complicates the connection between authorial biography and poetry that endures.