Winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from the 2023 AWP Award Series.

Classic and new work by poet and jazz writer A. B. Spellman/>/>A.

This volume is part of a series of English translations of the Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text carried out by an international team of scholars. Healey has translated the text, while Kiraz has prepared the Syriac text in the west Syriac script, fully vocalized and pointed. The translation and the Syriac text are presented on facing pages so that both can be studied together.

The series Perspectives on the Linguistics of Ancient Languages publishes research papers presented at the annual meetings of the International Syriac Language Project. The papers in this volume are specialised lexicographical studies in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek. Several of them concern the lexicography of the ancient Bible translations. There is also a chapter on Hebrew lexicography by the late David Clines, to whom the volume is dedicated.

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis. Unravelling its origins, James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study. Through a history of Victorian interdisciplinarity, this volume offers a more complicated and innovative analysis of discipline formation. Harnessing the techniques of cultural and intellectual history, studies of visual culture, Victorian studies, and literary studies, contributors break out of subject-based silos, exposing the tension between the rhetorical push for specialization and the actual practice of knowledge sharing across disciplines during the nineteenth century.

Inventive poetry explores Jewish identity in America/>/>"How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?" "America, whose death / didn't you come from?" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor. A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another's body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. Enacting the idea of competing selves in one body, Dybbuk Americana plays with form via a series of text boxes that create a multi-channel effect on the page. The body of the poem can be read with surrounding and intercutting text boxes to generate multiple interpretations. This innovative poetic technique maintains a dialogue with Jewish literary lineages: Talmudic commentary and interpretation of the oral law, as well as the fragmented nature of geniza, a place where Jews store sacred documents when they fall out of use. Dybbuk Americana weaves together the father-son arc within a larger socio-political commentary and historical narrative. Poems move deftly between the ironic and the mystic, from aphoristic questioning and inventive narratives, to interview, oral history, and archival materials. In these lines, "the angels./ They get as close as they can." Witty, curious, warm, and searching, Dybbuk Americana signals a fresh voice in Jewish-American poetry./>/>[sample text]/>/>CHAIN MIGRATION/>/>It took ten men/>to make a minyan,/>/>but only one name/>of G-d for us to share,/>/>so we settled on/>America, one by one,/>/>we settled on America,/>man and woman./>/>My grandfather/>earned his way over/>/>shoveling coal/>in the hold of a boat./>/>Grandmother sewed/>gold into her coat. In secret/>/>they sewed, they sold,/>they glowed. I dream of/>/>gold. G-d's name in gold/>milked and honeyed/>/>in the dust/>beneath our boots—/>/>our dust. And when they made/>a minyan and didn't/>/>realize it? And when/>they married in/>/>and didn't realize it?/>No matter: they sewed,/>/>they sold, they glowed./>Yes, they sold/>/>their solid gold, sold gold/>into gold, sewed gold/>/>together into dust./>When I was born/>/>they gave me/>a dead man's name./>/>But that's true/>for everyone.

Winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2023 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

A new collection of poetry from Jan Beatty, author of Body Wars.

A chapbook of love poems from Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa/>/>I Said That Love Heals From Inside: Love Poems is a small treasure featuring five decades of love poems by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Komunyakaa is a poet whose work aches with a longing that is rarely easily resolved but rather burns fiercely in each line. Every poem in this collection longs for life, for passion, for a different history, a past long lost, and ultimately to love and to be loved. This selection of poems captures a broad understanding of the love poetry category–there is love and the lack of it everywhere: in the bedroom and on the basketball court in the Jazz club and on the battlefield. As Komunyakaa writes, "Hard love, it's hard love."

New poetry by the author of acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need faces the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth./>/>Idra Novey's first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days with children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey's spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda./>/>Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: "Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we'd go under" Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our "bit part in the history of the future."/>/>[sample text]/>/>The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek/>/>We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it./>/>We tattooed with it./>/>We said Hallelujah, the poor man's tanning lotion./>/>Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die./>/>We got funny at Clarion, flung each other's underwear into the trees./>/>Why was it we got naked there like nowhere else?/>/>Maybe we knew we were getting rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water./>/>Maybe we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we'd go under, get sucked to the bottom./>/>We'd sink and become creek bed; its deep mud would claim us, hold us hard and close.

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles. ” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.

This volume is part of a series of English translations of the Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text carried out by an international team of scholars. Skelton, Lollar, and Jurgens have translated the text, while Kiraz has prepared the Syriac text in the west Syriac script, fully vocalized and pointed. The translation and the Syriac text are presented on facing pages so that both can be studied together. All readers are catered for: those wanting to read the text in English, those wanting to improve their grasp of Syriac by reading the original language along with a translation, and those wanting to focus on a fully vocalized Syriac text.

Ayn Rand controversially defended rational egoism, the idea that people should regard their own happiness as their highest goal. Given that numerous scholars in philosophy and psychology alike are examining the nature of human flourishing and an ethics of well-being, the time is ripe for a close examination of Rand’s theory. Egoism Without Permission illuminates Rand’s thinking about how to practice egoism by exploring some of its crucial psychological dimensions. Tara Smith examines the dynamics among four partially subconscious factors in an individual’s well-being: a person’s foundational motivation for being concerned with morality; their attitude toward their desires; their independence; and their self-esteem. A clearer grasp of each, Smith argues, sheds light on the others, and a better understanding of the set, in turn, enriches our understanding of self-interest and its sensible pursuit. Smith then traces the implications for a broader understanding of what a person’s self-interest genuinely is, and, correspondingly, of what its pursuit through rational egoism involves. By highlighting these previously underexplored features of Rand’s conceptions of self-interest and egoism, Smith betters our understanding of how vital these psychological levers are to a person’s genuine flourishing.