Nude Descending an Empire

Nude Descending an Empire
Author: Sam Taylor
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2014-09-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0822980290

As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation—in one word, empire—and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.

Nude Descending an Empire

Nude Descending an Empire
Author: Sam Taylor
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-08-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780822963042

As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation—in one word, empire—and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.

The Book of Fools

The Book of Fools
Author: Sam Taylor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9781737835998

At once poem, essay, memoir fragment, and art object, The Book of Fools is a sweeping elegy for our earth-and our plastic-choked ocean. Faced with the question of how to express the enormous ecological loss of our time, poet Sam Taylor marries this collective loss to a personal story of loss involving childhood, memory, and a mother's early death to cancer, a story which culminates in a scene the speaker is compelled to revisit, relive, and revise. Along the way, the poet's experiments in a poetics of "self-erasure" create a polyphonic reading experience, enrich the book's journey into the underworld, and deepen its investigation into nonfiction, myth, and aesthetics. Weaving together a diversity of themes, styles and lyric innovation, The Book of Fools challenges and refreshes our notions of what a poem can look like and what it can accomplish.

Body of the World

Body of the World
Author: Sam Taylor
Publisher: Ausable Press
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2005
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781931337267

Body of the World, Sam Taylor's first book, is the work of a poet whose sense of what it means to be human is inseparable from the physical world, about which he writes with unnerving intimacy. The voice, while grounded in the familiar landscape of twenty-first-century America, is also transparent. It regards itself as integral to that place in time, so that to speak of the human mind and body is to speak of the world, just as perception of the world becomes perception of the physical and mental self: not himself, but the human self. Thus, his subject is the enduring mystery of consciousness in all its embodiments: memory, the rain, a credit card, death, an air conditioner, the scent of eucalyptus. His language is like granite, a substance unto itself yet at home in the flux. As we enter what the poet has called elsewhere "a global age of distance-less information and virtual experience," Body of the World is a necessary book. Oh the body in its bedouin sleep. Always awake, always walking blocks of city scaffolding, always wrapped in rain, hot cocoa, cinnamon. Always a curled embryo, always a curved umbrella, always the handle of an unknown suitcase, always the echo that will not fit inside a cathedral. Always a brief April. A graduate of Swarthmore College and a former Michener Fellow in the MFA program at The University of Texas at Austin, Sam Taylor is a poet, nonfiction writer, and yoga teacher. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and received The Florida Review Editor's Award in Poetry in 2002. He splits his time between teaching English at The University of New Mexico-Taos and as a caretaker for a wilderness refuge in the San Juan Mountains during its snowed-in winter months.

Gardens of the Roman Empire

Gardens of the Roman Empire
Author: Wilhelmina F. Jashemski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2017-12-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108327036

In Gardens of the Roman Empire, the pioneering archaeologist Wilhelmina F. Jashemski sets out to examine the role of ancient Roman gardens in daily life throughout the empire. This study, therefore, includes for the first time, archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence about ancient Roman gardens across the entire Roman Empire from Britain to Arabia. Through well-illustrated essays by leading scholars in the field, various types of gardens are examined, from how Romans actually created their gardens to the experience of gardens as revealed in literature and art. Demonstrating the central role and value of gardens in Roman civilization, Jashemski and a distinguished, international team of contributors have created a landmark reference work that will serve as the foundation for future scholarship on this topic. An accompanying digital catalogue will be made available at: www.gardensoftheromanempire.org.

Titian

Titian
Author: Sheila Hale
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2012-11-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0062218131

The first definitive biography of the master painter in more than a century, Titian: His Life is being hailed as a "landmark achievement" for critically acclaimed author Sheila Hale (Publishers Weekly). Brilliant in its interpretation of the 16th-century master's paintings, this monumental biography of Titian draws on contemporary accounts and recent art historical research and scholarship, some of it previously unpublished, providing an unparalleled portrait of the artist, as well as a fascinating rendering of Venice as a center of culture, commerce, and power. Sheila Hale's Titian is destined to be this century's authoritative text on the life of greatest painter of the Italian High Renaissance.

The Emperors' Album

The Emperors' Album
Author: Stuart Cary Welch
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1987
Genre: Calligraphy, Islamic
ISBN: 0870994999

Fifty leaves that form the sumptuous Kevorkian Album, one of the world's greatest assemblages of Mughal art. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Forest of Eyes

Forest of Eyes
Author: Chimako Tada
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2010-08-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0520260511

One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.

The Center Cannot Hold (American Empire, Book Two)

The Center Cannot Hold (American Empire, Book Two)
Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Del Rey
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2002-06-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345454804

In this spectacular, thought-provoking epic of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has created an unparalleled vision of social upheaval, war, and cutthroat politics in a world very much like our own—but with dramatic differences. It is 1924—a time of rebuilding, from the slow reconstruction of Washington’s most honored monuments to the reclamation of devastated cities in Europe and Canada. In the United States, the Socialist Party, led by Hosea Blackford, battles Calvin Coolidge to hold on to the Powell House in Philadelphia. And it seems as if the Socialists can do no wrong, for the stock market soars and America enjoys prosperity unknown in a half century. But as old names like Custer and Roosevelt fade into history, a new generation faces new uncertainties. The Confederate States, victorious in the War of Secession and in the Second Mexican War but at last tasting defeat in the Great War, suffer poverty and natural calamity. The Freedom Party promises new strength and pride. But if its chief seizes the reins of power, he may prove a dangerous enemy for the hated U.S.A. Yet the United States take little note. Sharing world domination with Germany, they consider events in the Confederacy of little consequence. As the 1920s end, calamity casts a pall across the continent. With civil war raging in Mexico, terrorist uprisings threatening U.S. control in Canada, and an explosion of violence in Utah, the United States are rocked by uncertainty. In a world of occupiers and the occupied, of simmering hatreds, shattered lives, and pent-up violence, the center can no longer hold. And for a powerful nation, the ultimate shock will come when a fleet of foreign aircraft rain death and destruction upon one of the great cities of the United States. . . .