Miami University Press – förlag

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated from the Farsi by Geoffrey Squires. Thought by many to be untranslatable, the great 14th century Persian poet Hafez, who has been celebrated by figures as different as Goethe, Emerson, and Bunting, has at last found the voice in English that he deserves. Geoffrey Squires, who lived in Iran for three years, gives powerful insight into that culture with these translations of the work of one of its iconic figures. Based on 248 ghazals (just over half the Divan), this is one of the most comprehensive translations ever to appear and also one of the most varied, revealing aspects of the work—courtly, lyrical, satirical, mystical—that will surprise and delight many. Squires brings a poet's ear to the task, capturing the energy, wit and beauty of the original which after all this time still speaks to us. He also breaks new ground in terms of translation strategy, using short interstitial prose pieces to punctuate and point the text. Detailed background notes are provided, and there is an extensive bibliography in Farsi, English and French. "Geoffrey Squires' translations of Hafez are not only beautiful (and they are) but innovate a new approach to the translation and presentation of poets from the distant and exotic past. In finding fresh means to show Hafez in context, Squires composes a work both faithful to Hafez and with a narrative power that opens a true dialogue between present and past. His Hafez in that sense sets a new standard for our time and for years to come."—Jerome Rothenberg "In their careful, musical, painterly pointing of difference in similarity, stress inside equanimity and singularity breaking the continuum, Geoff Squires' Hafez translations weave a shimmering, moiré fabric from the old and the new, the strange and the deceptively familiar. Squires is the best of hosts, too, offering small, genial and always useful interventions, tiny palate-cleansers of data or abstract form, which arrive before you knew you needed them. If Paul Blackburn had improvised a verbal riff on Astrophil and Stella, and Brian Coffey had written it down, they might have come close to, but would never equal, the marvelous sensual minimalism of Hafez and Squires."—Peter Manson "Geoffrey Squires is a poet of note. What strikes me is his capacity to put into words what is fluid or elusive, writing characterized by the innerness of its language. This explains why he has an affinity with Hafez. His long absorption in the world of Iran has led him to the masterpieces of its literature. Analyzing Hafez in the light of his predecessors such as 'Ayn al Qozat, he explores among other themes the mystic gulf between belief and faith. A richly mature work, this translation brings a new lustre to the jewel that is Hafez."—Charles- Henri de Fouchécour

Poetry. Translation. The Mutability Cantos have long been recognized as Edmund Spenser's crowning achievement, and along with his unfinished Faerie Queene, of which they appear to be an isolated fragment, they constitute a founding text of English poetry, and of the entire Romantic movement. In FASTNESS, Trevor Joyce gives us a poem which his subtitle describes as "A Translation from the English" of the Mutability Cantos. His introduction justifies this provocation on historical and poetic grounds. Spenser migrated to Ireland in 1580 and, as administrator and settler colonist, he served as an intrinsic part of England's colonial enterprise, and a participant in its barbarities. It was in his castle at Kilcolman in north County Cork that he wrote most of the Faerie Queene, including the Mutability Cantos, and it was in that Irish landscape that he situated many of the idylls of his epic poem. It was there too that he composed his "View of the Present State of Ireland," a prose tract which advocated the conquest of Ireland through a savage policy of scorched earth and induced famine, which provided a model for Cromwell's campaign fifty years after Spenser's death. It is the break made by Cromwell's conquest, and the massacres and ethnic cleansing which accompanied it, that radically alters the meaning of Spenser's text viewed in historical retrospect, and justifies calling FASTNESS a translation. Joyce's poem turns allegory inside out, foregrounding the political narrative which underlies the mythological surface of Spenser's text. The Mutability Cantos grafted Elizabethan colonial politics onto a base of classical mythology. In FASTNESS, Joyce strips out Spenser's poetic dialect, and refits the narrative with modern poetic vernacular, viewing this monument of English culture through four centuries of British imperial and colonial history. "Trevor Joyce's superb introduction to his translation of Spenser's English into our English tells us what we need to know about Spenser's time, his method, his politics, Ireland then, and the making of a poetry that is twined around sound, syntax, and sense. This is a bracing book held fast by multitudinous events spinning in unison. We see how the gods behaved towards Earth (a clod of turf in space) savaging her with bad weather. Wild Irish weather from mountains to sea, season to season, day to day: ever mutable. The held-fastness of the words together give indigenous a new poetic meaning."— Fanny Howe "Part of a series of oversettings of Edmund Spenser's work that commenced with Joyce's Rome's Wreck (2014), a monosyllabic 'translation into English' of the sonnet sequence The Ruines of Rome, this new rendering of Spenser's The Mutability Cantos is nothing less than a radical postcolonial Irish poem. In FASTNESS, Joyce gives us back Spenser's language both ruined and revived, as Spenser, the settler colonial official and land- grabber of Kilcolman Castle, Cork, plotted the ruin of Irish culture, language and people. Like Blake's Milton, FASTNESS is Spenser's poetry with sympathy for the devil, a language of Mutability, fast in its vernacular and in its rollicking narrative, and holding fast, as Joyce always does, to the ample resources of the language that its ruination reveals. Read, and enjoy the ride."—David Lloyd

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated by Geoffrey Squires. HAFEZ: TRANSLATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GHAZALS (Miami University Press, 2014), also translated by Geoffrey Squires, won the 2014 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize awarded by the American Institute of Iranian Studies. In this volume of translations of another of the major figures of Persian poetry, Squires brings the same combination of poetic skill and scholarly precision to the task. The book traces the changing and sometimes challenging relationship between the scholarly Rumi and the unpredictable dervish Shams, who suddenly appeared in his life, and through it the deepening of Rumi's experience of love and his insight into mysticism. We also get occasional glimpses of Rumi the man and a sense of the times in which he lived. There are detailed notes on the poems and a groundbreaking discussion of Text and Context."The massive volume of Rumi's DIVAN-E SHAMS resembles a vast field of wild flora in which the person in search of flowers to make a bouquet can easily become confused and lost. Geoffrey Squires has not only accomplished the daunting task of picking those flowers, but also domesticating them for the garden of English poetry, and has miraculously managed to retain their original scent and hue. With his free verse renditions, in these translations, he beautifully captures the whirling dance of Rumi's poetic language and music."--M. R. Ghanoonparvar"This book should consolidate Squires' international reputation as one of the most accomplished and sensitive translators of ancient poetry--both Persian and Irish--for the modern reader."--Augustus Young

Fiction. On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American newly arrived in a foreign city pays a young man for sex. Over the next months, as what at first seems an uncomplicated transaction deepens into something more intricate and unnerving, his discovery of the geography and griefs of an unfamiliar country is accompanied by the unfolding of Mitko's own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want. The story of a desire that grows increasingly ambivalent, poised between submission, need, and resentment, MITKO is a powerful meditation on the chances of history and privilege, on mutual predation, and on our inability to know with any certainty the natures of others or our own fugitive selves.

Finding Freedom: Memorializing the Voices of Freedom Summer provides detailed information about the Freedom Summer Monument on the campus of Western College at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The monument, dedicated in 2000, commemorates Western s role in Freedom Summer and memorializes James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the Freedom Summer trainees subsequently murdered in Mississippi, whose deaths focused national and world attention on the continuing existence of segregation and violent racism in the U.S. The book contains essays from participants in the 1964 training sessions at Western College, including essays by Oxford residents who supported the Friends of the Mississippi Project; monument architect Robert Keller; a poem by Miami University alumna Rita Dove; and period photographs by photographer George Hoxie. Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp contributes a preface.

Poetry. GALACTIC MILK: THE FIVE QUESTIONS OF MORTALITY is the second collection of poems by American poet and former hardcore vocalist Frederick Farryl Goodwin, "whose debut begins with Ophelia, ends with Horace, and is populated in between with a cast ranging from Merlin to Robert Mitchum to the Buddha" (Boston Review). Here, characters are re-cast in a "strange mix of Grand Guignol and lyricism, a potent brew of fractured pastoral and seedy cityscapes, fragile confessionalism and Shakespearean film noir ... The workings of some Spicerian angel ... teetering on the brink of some ghastly void" (Signal to Noise Magazine). Once again, tradition fuses with machines of recombinatory energy to present a linguistically hybridized world of possibility for a high lyric of compression and genre-bending extension. Says John Latta, in his review of VIRGIL'S COW: "Some astoundingly different register to the way of seeing."

When Pinson Charfo wakes one morning to find a strange note at his bedside from a Mr. Ralfo to a Mr. Cormill, neither of whom he knows, it proves to be the first in a series of odd clues designed specifically for him to follow, embroiling him in a complex mystery featuring plagiarized manifestos, narcotized cultists, the search for pornographic prints, and a busted fountain whose runoff forms an underground lake beneath the never-named city's unsuspecting feet. Tote Hughes's Fountain is a metaphysical detective story unlike any other, a comic tour de force set in a labyrinthine world of shifting signs and dreamlike insolubility.

Poetry. Alissa Quart's first book of poetry sifts brilliantly through our landscape of damaged Americana. From spam ads to tech speak, from self-help to real estate to the lingo of gossip or "mom" sites, these poems insistently limn a country where nearly everything has taken on the character of money. Quart, the acclaimed author of Branded and two other books of reported cultural criticism, cuts into our clamorous culture, summoning its strangeness and humor. MONETIZED also reflects upon a shared longing for the analogue era,as well as our longing for a less commercialized past. This book is a remarkable account of a state of yearning for the passing moment in a period of rapid acceleration, a feeling Quart calls "right-now-nostalgia." "Ninety- nine cent stores, Slimfast, Amtrak, 'Twitter Dead Souls,' James Caan films and Matt Dillon posters: Alissa Quart's poems form a brilliant "check list of American self- destruction," exploring the absence and dreams of escape that mark the modern landscape."—Barbara Ehrenreich "Alissa Quart's smart and sexy poems perform invasion and insurgency with utmost aplomb and analytical edge. I love her intensity, her compact lines, her clever harvesting of commerce's schizoid hysteria, as if media-speak's carnival (Times Square, the Internet) were reorchestrated, with tidy wit and formalist ingenuity, by a Bauhaus purist."—Wayne Koestenbaum "The poems in Alissa Quart's MONETIZED are not only smart but ambitious as hell. Sharp, biting, and aphoristic, Quart's exact and exacting lines are extraordinary shots in and at our commodified American landscape. ('Let's hope we're perennial.') With their constant awareness of the dissonance found in this post-millennial tweet-filled, Facebook-ed, facsimile age of late capitalism, these poems convey a powerful sense of lost and found awareness: 'We could forgive ourselves / if only we knew our own story.'"—Susan Howe "It's pretty unusual, it's almost unheard of, for poems to feature both the subtlest and most intricate word play and a pure, fierce, tell-it-like-it-is voice, as these poems do. They are stealthily virtuosic."—Louis Menand

Fiction. California Interest. In the California heartland in 1932, at a migrant labor camp whose very name means forgotten, a child's sudden illness leads to tensions between workers wishing to break camp and the land barons enforcing their contracts. Into this dispute Esteban Alas—contrabandista and self- styled businessman—is reluctantly drawn as a mediator, until an act of violence forces him into a more tragic role. "CAMP OLVIDO is everything a novella should be—intense as it is resonant, propulsive as it is deep—but, even more than a shining example of the form, it is simply a great story. I haven't read anything as powerful about pickers and California since I read John Steinbeck. Lawrence Coates writes with every bit as much tenderness and compassion, but this moving novella—full of characters I won't forget and images I can't—is cut with a clear-eyed, brutal honesty that gives it a hard-won wisdom and beauty all its own."—Josh Weil "[A] stunning exploration of one man's bold actions and their consequences. Gorgeously written, the novella shows the dark side of California's prosperity, with violence and, unexpectedly, elements of the divine. A superb addition to a distinguished series."—Cary Holladay "I have rarely read a novella so rich, with the moral complexities of Melville's Billy Budd and the social and visual acuity of a film like Buñuel's Los olvidados... Read CAMP OLVIDO, a masterful work of fiction, as provocative as it is jaw-dropping in its beauty."—Wendell Mayo "In CAMP OLVIDO, Lawrence Coates paints a sensual and humane picture of life and death in a depression-era work camp peopled by Latino fieldworkers... showing not only the sorrow of endemic poverty and powerlessness but the love and good humor of a community that can endure."—Bonnie Jo Campbell

The poems in Liz Waldner’s Her Faithfulness surprise and sustain. The world they know is "daily harmed and harming," and they summon resources against its meanness: the natural world where sight of an indigo bunting or blue lizard presents "the kingdom of heaven," a fragment of song or local speech carrying memory and feeling. All of the themes and inventiveness of Waldner’s eight earlier books are part of Her Faithfulness, here condensed to their essence in poems wild and smart and joyful and wise near the end of their journey: "After a long time, I came to love’s house / where I was invited to stay."

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. LEAVING CLE is made from the detritus of reverse migration. Its poems move from Cleveland to New York City to Tuscaloosa's "schoolhouse door" and back again. They travel and party with a musical Cleveland from Art Tatum's 1920's to Albert Ayler and from Ohio Funk to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. They collage a shifting sense of home and negotiate the gift horse of flashbulb memory. Remembering is a character. Houses speak.

Fiction. For years, the executioner has faithfully performed his duties in a provincial corner of the Republic, enduring the disdain of his fellow citizens. After an uproar over a botched execution in the distant capital, his work is suspended, and he begins disrupting the routines that have defined his life. When rebels attack the town, he must decide whether to resume his old ways."HISTORY OF AN EXECUTIONER is a triumph of empathy, imagination, and lucidity. A haunting examination of a humble, civil-servant killer whose lonely existence has arrived at a crossroads. Is he the last of his kind? Would he even know how to be his own man? Could there be any escape from this life of blood and gloom? This first book by Clancy McGilligan truly swept me away--a stunning debut from a spectacularly talented writer."--Skip Horack"In powerful prose, McGilligan tells a fully inventive and engaging story. You'll want to linger with the sentences and turn the pages. This is a haunting and hauntingly atmospheric novella."--Olivia Clare"With his first novella, HISTORY OF AN EXECUTIONER, Clancy McGilligan has written a dystopian tale with flawless control, compression, and, in the end, compassion. The story is, by turns, hopeless and hopeful, passionless and passionate, and always, always, interesting. I could not put it down."--Richard Wiley"HISTORY OF AN EXECUTIONER takes a thoughtful look at the moments that disrupt normalcy. The familiar rhythms of the protagonist's life are replaced with questions about nation, love, and purpose. Clancy McGilligan creates an executioner who grapples with layers of aftermath and the ways these confine and liberate. This imaginative debut examines the meaning of consequence, showing how both subtle and dramatic changes create new challenges and pathways."--Ravi Howard