Bücher veröffentlicht von The Ohio State University Press

In Chi Boy, Keenan Norris melds memoir, cultural criticism, and literary biography to indelibly depict Chicago-from the Great Migration to the present day-as both a cradle of black intellect, art, and politics and a distillation of America's deepest tragedies. With the life and work of Richard Wright as his throughline, Norris braids the story of his family and particularly of his father, Butch Norris, with those of other black men-Wright, Barack Obama, Ralph Ellison, Frank Marshall Davis-who have called Chicago home. Along the way he examines the rise of black street organizations and the murders of Yummy Sandifer and Hadiya Pendleton to examine the city's status in the cultural imaginary as "Chi-Raq," a war zone within the nation itself. In Norris's telling, the specter of violence over black life is inescapable: in the South that Wright and Butch Norris escaped, in the North where it finds new forms, and worldwide where American militarism abroad echoes brutalities at home. Yet, in the family story at the center of this unforgettable book, Norris also presents an enduring vision of hope and love.

Runner Up, 2021 Gournay PrizeEngine Running explores debut author Cade Mason's gradual distancing from home and old selves alongside an increasingly fractured family doing the same. Starting at the beginning of his parents' love and working past its end, he combs through memory to piece together a portrait of a family then and now: of a father, reeling after a blindsiding divorce; of a mother, anxious to move on; of a sister, caught in the crossfire; and of a son, learning to embrace his sexuality even as he fears that his own loves may have deepened the rift between his parents. Lush and innovative, these essays contemplate childhood memories and family secrets, religion and queerness in the rural South, and the ways rituals and contours of manhood are passed through generations. Most of all, we feel with Mason what it is to grapple with and love a place even as you yearn to leave.

Draws on current theories of trauma to examine the prehistory of those psychic and somatic responses to trauma now known as PTSD and their influence on Victorian fiction.

In Narrative in the Anthropocene, Erin James poses two complementary questions: What can narrative teach us about our current geological epoch, defined and marked by the irrevocable activity of humans on the Earth's geology and ecosystems? and What can our current geological epoch teach us about narrative? Drawing from a wide range of sources-including Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Maria Popova's collective biography Figuring, Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here, Indigenous and Afrofuturist speculative fiction, and more-James argues that a richer understanding of the forms and functions of narrative in the Anthropocene provides us with invaluable insight into how stories shape our world. At the same time, she contends that the Anthropocene alters the very nature of narrative. Throughout her exploration of these themes, James lays the groundwork for an "Anthropocene narrative theory," introducing new modes of reading narrative in the Anthropocene; new categories of narrative time, space, narration, and narrativity; and a new definition of narrative itself as a cognitive and rhetorical tool for purposeful worldbuilding.

Experiencing Visual Storyworlds illuminates how comics express what characters and narrators see, think, and feel. Drawing on the narratological concept of focalization, which describes the filtering of a story through the minds of characters and narrators, Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri analyze comics from a range of genres, including graphic memoir, graphic historiography, silent comics, and metafictional comics. Through a series of close readings-including Jason Lutes's Berlin, Charles Burns's Black Hole, Ellen Forney's Marbles, Eric Drooker's Flood!, and Craig Thompson's Habibi-Horstkotte and Pedri argue that the visual form of comics storytelling is uniquely suited to invite readers into storyworld experiences. The authors break down the ways focalization in comics is cued by features such as color, style, panel size and positioning, and genre-showing how these features regulate how readers access the experiences of characters and narrators.

Albert Goldbarth "just may be the American poet of his generation for the ages," says Judith Kitchen in a recent feature on him in the Georgia Review. "Often humorous but always serious, Goldbarth combines erudite research, pop-culture fanaticism, and personal anecdote in ways that make his writings among the most stylisti­cally recognizable in the literary world." This new volume, Saving Lives, both consolidates and extends his passions and their presentations.The poems range from a few tight, resonant lines to works of long story­telling drive, from sequences that encompass the most flexible of free verse to an homage to the sestina. Some center on familiar cultural icons (Rembrandt, Houdini, Barnum, the Hardy Boys), others on little-known fringe players in subculture's oddest unlit corners, and yet others on family histories. But always they examine an essential subject: the ways we try to"save lives"-whether through a trans­planted lung, the archeological rem­nant, the conserved book.As ever, Goldbarth dazzles, displaying an energetic mind eager to share his arcane learning, oddball musings, and observations of intimate moments, joys, and despairs. A zany wit and a generous sense of humanity reign equally. Saving Lives only enhances this writer's grand signature tradition.

In this, David Citino's eighth full-length collection, a poet approaching the end of the twentieth century takes stock of a single life: of its family and culture, history, and beliefs; of the contemporary forces of nature, science politics, gender, and myth that shape and misshape it; of the land--and even the body--it calls home.These are poems that take a hard look at the experience of one individual, but always in terms of place and context, and other lives. Employing "broken symmetry"--a term from high energy physics for a state in which traces of an earlier symmetry can be found--as a description of the contemporary fractured world and his own fitfully declining health, Citino seeks to know whether an unbroken symmetry ever existed, or whether it is human nature to believe fervently in some lost golden age.Readers familiar with the work of David Citino will recognize the territories and obsessions this fine poet has explored over the past twenty years. Here are poems that investigate the credentials of saints, secular and religious; poems that seek to know how the ghosts of history come to haunt the future through the present; poems spoken by the redoubtable Sister Mary Appassionata, a character driven to believe ardently everything she is told, everything she imagines; poems that evoke the urban and rural and even moral landscapes of Ohio. And there are poems that take up new concerns and cover new territory--dire, contemporary warnings, public and personal news that disturbs, myths just now coming into being.These are passionate, accessible poems in which, singing of joy and sorrow, certitude and doubt, a poet wonders what a life is worth.David Citino is Poet Laureate and professor of English and creative writing at The Ohio State University

Social worker, psychoanalyst, and child-development expert Selma Fraiberg's iconic book, The Magic Years, has influenced generations of caregivers, therapists, and clinicians since its publication in 1959. No less rich are the essays that make up this new, accessibly priced reissue of her Selected Writings. Like The Magic Years, these essays (including her hugely influential "Ghosts in the Nursery") glean their insights from years of clinical study and contain Fraiberg's synthesis of and groundbreaking contributions to attachment theory, child psychology, social work, and, through her work with blind children, the experience of disability in infancy and childhood. Clinical rigor paired with attunement to the emotional lives of her subjects was Fraiberg's hallmark: as her husband Louis writes in his preface to this volume, "Once, when asked how she knew what babies were thinking, she replied, 'They tell me.'" Lucid and elegantly written, her Selected Writings will remain a valuable resource for new generations of social workers, mental-health professionals, educators, and others who work with young children.