Bøger udgivet af University of Iowa Press

Children in Tactical Gear offers a brilliant feed of stark incantations and unsparing satire. Set in distinctly American landscapes, including toy weapon assembly lines and the compounds of the super rich, and voiced by imperiled children, failed adults, and even a smart home speaker, this collection demonstrates the unsettling force of a surreal imagination under duress.

"The Lengest Neoi embraces and complicates what it means to err-to wander or go astray; a deviation from a code of behavior or truth; a mistake, flaw, or defect. Beginning with the collection's title, which combines a colloquial Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi/"Pretty Girl") and the English suffix for the superlative degree (-est), these poems wander, deviate, and flaw across bodies, geographies, and languages. From the Nantucket Whaling Museum to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, from childhood speech and bodily correction to the history of the American Chestnut Tree and anti-Asian sentiment and policies, from voicemails to experimental translations between English and Cantonese-this book asks: to wander or go astray from where? Who and what defines error? What is a right translation? Of language, of body, of self, of history? The speaker's insatiable desire for self-definition-to transform "error" into poetic space and play-leaves her wondering if the process of creating and looking doesn't also embody a kind of projected, and potentially problematic, fantasy of self. Ultimately, the collection grapples with how one might be "still of the histories that define me," and able to locate sites of agency and self-creation. In this debut collection from Stephanie Choi, you'll find the poet's "tongue writing herself, learning to speak.""--

"Imaging Animal Industry: American Meatpacking in Photography and Visual Culture focuses on the visual culture of the American meat industry between 1890 and 1960. It describes how, during that period, photographs and other images helped to shape public perceptions of industrial-scale meat production. Although the meat industry today bans most photography of its facilities, in the past this was not always the case: the meat industry not only tolerated but welcomed cameras. Meatpacking companies and industry organizations regarded photographs as useful tools for creating and managing a vision of their activities, their innovations, and their contributions to the march of American economic and industrial progress. Drawing on archival collections across the American Midwest, this book relates a history of the meatpacking industry's use of images in the early-to-mid twentieth century. In the process it reveals the key role that images, particularly photographs, have played in assisting the rise of industrial meat production"--

The Tigers of Lents the story of the Garrison family, who live in Lents, an outer neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. At the heart of it all, there are the three Garrison sisters: Sara, the eldest, a fiery soccer star on the precipice of pulling herself out of the life of poverty she's always known; Elaine, shy and struggling with the weight she carries both physically and mentally; and Rachel, a reader and poet whose imagination stalls at trying to picture a better life.

"At the age of forty-three, Amy Lee Lillard learned she was autistic. She learned she was part of a community of unseen women who fell through the gaps due to medical bias and social stereotypes. And she learned that her brash and trashy family of women may have broken under the weight of invisible disability. A Grotesque Animal explores the making, unmaking, and making again of a woman with invisible and unknown disability-through a combination of personal storytelling and cultural analysis, through wide-ranging styles and mixed media. A battle cry that dissects anger, sexuality, autistic masking, bodies, punk, and female annihilation to create a new picture of modern women"--

"Immerse yourself in a fascinating culinary journey through American dining from the mid-1970s through today. In a remarkable career that has spanned nearly 50 years, Wini Moranville has witnessed the American restaurant landscape transform from the inside out. At just shy of 14, she began a 10-year stretch working in a kaleidoscope of quintessential Midwestern eateries of the time. From the familiarity and warmth of a family-owned cafeteria, to the groovy vibe of a hippie-run vegetarian restaurant, from the graciousness of a department store tearoom, to the camaraderie of a downtown coffeeshop, and later, the dispiriting milieu of an exclusive private dining club, Moranville's hands-on experiences weave a vivid tapestry of the American restaurant landscape in the 1970s and 80s. In the mid-90s, the tables turned as Moranville became a prolific food and wine writer for national publications, as well as the dining critic for the Des Moines Register and later, dsm Magazine. During the past 25 years, she has written over 750 professional restaurant reviews. Here, she tells of the great evolution of the American dining scene that happened on her watch, as food become more ambitious, energetic, locally sourced, and globally purveyed. She also recounts, with humor and heart, the pleasures and pitfalls of being a well-known and highly trusted food critic, when, for instance, a readers will corner you at the supermarket if they disagree with what you've written. Amidst the vast changes that have occurred over the years, the book underscores the timelessness of what it is we seek when we entrust restaurateurs with our hard-earned money and our hard-won leisure time. Dining out may have changed dramatically since the 70s, but the joys of being in the hands of people who care deeply about our time at their tables have not"--

""In a Time of Witness" is a publication highlighting the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art's celebrated collection. Beyond a traditional exhibition catalog, this groundbreaking book pairs stunning imagery from the Stanley collection with original literary response to showcase an innovative vision for art interpretation. The literary responses are written by an impressive array of award-winning poets, translators and bestselling authors, including multiple Pulitzer Prize winners, U.S. Poets Laureate and national medal recipients, all of whom are alumni of the University of Iowa's prestigious literary programs"--

Set mostly in rural Maine, Bjarki, Not Bjarki is an expansive book. It is a standard work of journalism, describing with nuance and humanity the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor. It is also a meditation on what it means to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America. And it is a ghost story about marriage. It is an inquiry into the limits of language and certainty, a rumination on North American colonization, masculinity, gift cards, crab rangoon, bald eagles, and wood, all of it told in an exciting, energized, and original prose.

"Food banks-warehouses that collect and systematize surplus food-have expanded into one of the largest mechanisms to redistribute food waste. From their origins in North America in the 1960s, food banks provide food to communities in approximately one hundred countries on six continents. This book analyzes the development of food banks across the world and the limits of food charity as a means to reduce food insecurity and food waste. Based on fifteen years of in-depth fieldwork on four continents across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, this volume illustrates how and why food banks proliferate across the globe even though their impacts may be limited. Rather than addressing the root causes of food insecurity and food waste, governments and corporations promote food banks because it allows them to deflect attention away from their own institutional shortcomings. The coronavirus crisis has only further underscored the fact that food bank systems are a patchwork of charities rather than a systematic network to reduce food insecurity and food waste. Given the limited impacts and potential pitfalls of food banks in different contexts, the author of this book suggests that we need to reformulate the role of food banks. To start, the mission of food banks needs to be clearer and more realistic, as food surpluses cannot reduce food insecurity on a significant scale. In addition, food banks need to regain their institutional independence from the state and corporations and incorporate the knowledge and experiences of the food insecure in the daily operations of the food system. Also, given that food systems are designed differently across the Global South, food banks may not be a good fit for development in some contexts. If implemented, these collective changes can contribute to a future where food banks play a smaller but more targeted role in food systems"--

Much has changed with Iowa's wildlife in the years 1990 to 2020. Iowa's Changing Wildlife provides an up-to-date, scientifically based summary of changes in the distribution, status, conservation needs, and future prospects of about sixty species of Iowa's birds and mammals whose populations have increased or decreased in the past three decades. Readers will learn more about familiar species, become acquainted with the status of less familiar species, and find out how many of the species around them have fared during this era of transformation.

"Beyond Ridiculous tells the story of Theatre-in-Limbo, a downtown band of actors formed in 1984 by playwright and soon-to-be drag legend Charles Busch, and director Kenneth Elliott. They performed Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the Limbo Lounge, a raffish club in the East Village, then considered a dangerous corner of the New York City. But the next year, the show moved to the historic Provincetown Playhouse, a commercial Off-Broadway venue, and famously became the longest-running nonmusical in Off-Broadway history. From 1984 to 1991, Busch starred in eight Limbo productions, always in proud, outrageously fabulous drag. Yet ironically, Busch would eventually become a beloved grand dame of the New York theatre establishment, even including forays onto Broadway. In Beyond Ridiculous, Elliott, Limbo's director, producer, and co-founder, narrates in first-person the company's Cinderella tale of fun, heartbreak, and dishy drama. Scenes include the ecstatic opening night of Vampire Lesbians, complete with a production assistant rushing backstage with a hot-off-the-presses rave from The New York Times; encounters with Todd Rundgren, Joe Papp, and Milton Berle; but also, a thorough analysis of Busch's plays and a vivid account of the now-vanished gay New York theatrical scene of the 1980s. At the center of the book is the young Charles Busch, an unforgettable personality fighting to be seen, be heard, and express his unique style as a writer-performer in plays such as Psycho Beach Party and The Lady in Question. The tragedy of AIDS among treasured friends in the company, the struggle for mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ theatre during the reign of Reagan, and the exploration of new ways of being a gay theatre artist make the book a heartwarming, bittersweet, but ultimately joyous, ride. With queer rights under fire, remembering this inspiring moment in LGBTQ theatre history isn't just important, it's essential"--

"This anthology of articles selected from JAB: The Journal of Artists' Books (1994-2020) contains some of the best critical writing on artists' books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists' books from multiple perspectives. With its range of participants and approaches, JAB provided a unique venue for sustained critical writing in the field and developed a broad subscriber base among institutional and private collectors and readers. It featured artists' profiles, book reviews, reports from book fairs and conferences, interviews with major figures, and much lively debate about how to engage critically with artists' books. More than two hundred writers and artists from nearly two dozen countries around the globe were published in its pages. Contributions came from authors in Australia, North America, Europe, the UK, and South America and from literary studies, visual arts, photography, media theory, and book history as well as other backgrounds. The original issues each had covers designed-and often printed-by individual book artists. Later issues contained artists' books produced exclusively for its subscribers. No other journal dedicated exclusively to artists' books had so long a run or such broad representation. As JAB's visibility increased, more artists and writers contributed to its ongoing exchanges. The essays in this collection are all exemplary works of critical writing that illuminate individual books, artists, or presses but also offer a diverse range of methodological approaches to interpreting these vibrant and compelling works of art. Providing new access to these essays will hopefully inspire new work in creative and intellectual areas of the field and offer a resource to those responsible for teaching and collecting artists' books"--

"This book offers a fresh analytical approach to the plays of Eugene O'Neill with its attention to the engagements, weddings, and marriages so crucial to the tragic action in O'Neill's works. Specifically, the book examines the culturally-sanctioned traditions and gender roles that underscored marital life in the early 20th century and that still haunt and define love and partnership in the modern age. Analyzing and weaving in artifacts like advice columns, advertisements, theatrical reviews, and even the lived experiences of the actors who brought O'Neill's wife characters to life, Wynstra points to new ways of seeing and empathizing with those who are betrothed and new possibilities for reading marriage in literary and dramatic works. She suggests that the various ways women especially were, and still are, expected to divert from their true ambitions, desires, and selves in the service of appropriate wifely behavior is a detrimental performance and one at the crux of O'Neill's marital tragedies. Wynstra's study invites more inclusive and nuanced ways of thinking about the choices married characters must make and the roles they play both on and off the stage"--

"Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks, how do experimental poems "think," and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of (often paralyzing) emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss. The cognitive research she draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can, in fact, re-shape the activity of the reader's mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. The book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century"--

"The Global Frontier argues that midcentury American writers were not straitjacketed by the anticommunist Red Scare, but rather pioneered a transnational sensibility. Enabled by air travel and the expansion of the tourist industry, they departed from the West/East binaries criticized by postcolonial writers and academics. American novelists and poets imagined themselves as egalitarian and culturally borderless, an ideology that Strand associates with the frontier. Although we associate the heterosexual white male with the "Ugly American" stereotype, a wide variety of literary travelers sought personal freedom and cultural enrichment outside their nation's borders, including Black, female, and queer writers. However, while minorities as well as straight white males went abroad to achieve autonomy and creativity, they were complicit in imperialism and the formation of global inequality. This book thus takes a critical view of the postwar frontier, a paradigm that displaced the collectivist ethos of the New Deal era. For American writers, the price of incorporation into a transnational professional class was not only forswearing communism, but also rejecting 1930s social commitments and the concept of an interventionist state. Even Richard Wright, who questions the privilege of white flight, himself enjoyed the privilege of the American traveler, leading to a blurring of racial identities. In our day, the explosion of mass air travel, communications, and various subcultures has threatened to discredit the nation-state form altogether. The Global Frontier concludes that a progressive orientation toward state-based reform has never been more important, especially in a new era of ethnocentric nationalisms"--

"Algorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot-points in tales of the political-economy. Plotting Profiles engages this energetic reformation of postmodern literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Indeed, contemporary literature is capable of addressing precisely that which algorithms cannot or do not account for: the affects of profile culture, the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data, the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched, and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Each chapter analyzes preeminent and prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable. This book contributes to literary studies, new media studies, affect studies, surveillance studies, critical race studies, and gender studies because, ultimately, these discourses are inextricably knotted together around the problems of profiling"--

"Poetry FM listens back to the experimental period of FM radio's development from the late 1940s to the 1980s to show how American poetry was shaped by, and shaped in turn, the emergence of a radio counterculture. Like FM radio history, the literary history of American poetry during this period is defined by waves of opposition to the literary and critical establishment by poets and movements who likewise stressed experimentalism, alternative networks of distribution, regionalism, and community. In this study, Lisa Hollenbach focuses on two major radio stations-Pacifica's KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New York-to develop an institutionally grounded analysis of how poets' involvement with FM radio contributed to postwar aural imaginaries. While poetry programming on Pacifica Radio has always been capacious, including poetry from the past as well as contemporary poetry, poetry in translation, and poetry by unpublished writers, Hollenbach focuses on writers who played important roles at these stations and whose work embraces oral poetics and/or radio and sonic tropes. These especially include poets associated with the New American Poetry-William Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, and Amiri Baraka, among others-who brought the oral poetics of the "new" poetry to Pacifica Radio's experiment in FM radio. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the racial, gender, and sexual politics of both the New American Poetry and the FM revolution came under increasing scrutiny and contestation. During these years, poets as different as Spicer, Ginsberg, Baraka, and Audre Lorde responded to this terrain of struggle by creating-in their poetry, performances, and radio work-alternative aural imaginaries, or figurative channels for the transmission of fugitive signals across time and place. This is a book about how radio-the once-dominant mass media form-became an underground medium for and key figure in American poetry in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s"--

"Offering readers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from the 1950s to the present, this book highlights how the artist's book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to providing a broad overview of the artist's book form since 1945 and the many ongoing debates surrounding it, this book thinks through the challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose. It then turns to look at five case studies, detailing not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Making several of these books, typically consigned to special collections libraries and museum archives, more available to a broad readership, the book aims to brings to light a whole genre of works that has been largely forgotten or neglected in critical scholarship and institutional exhibitions. As this study illustrates, the artist's book has been an especially rich site for both poets and painters to engage with the world around them and with each other since the mid-twentieth century and consequently deserves more scholarly and institutional attention than it has been previously granted"--

"It is 1883 and America is at a crossroads. The Civil War is nearly twenty years in the past, Reconstruction has been crushed in the South, and the Gilded Age is bringing unprecedented prosperity to some, along with radical social and class conflicts. At a tiny college in upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers' Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. Over the course of a weekend this already combustible mix is heated up by a group of Suffragists advocating for women's rights, a contingent of die-hard Confederate sympathizers, an apocalyptic street-corner preacher, and a muckraking journalist who stirs the pot in hopes of bringing things to a boil. In this wildly audacious fictional tour de force, author Tom Piazza brings these figures to life as they encounter one another onstage and off - arguing, telling stories, reading aloud, and finally engaging in a debate that leads the gathering to the edge of chaos. By turns brilliantly comic and eerily prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883 - the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal"--

Feminist Rehearsals documents the early stages of feminist theatre in Argentina and Mexico, revealing how various aspects of performance culture--spectator formation, playwriting, professional acting and directing, and dramatic techniques--paralleled political activism and championed the goals of the women's rights movement.

Like the pilgrims in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales who pass the time telling stories while stranded in the Tabard Inn, Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society tells the tale of a traveling salesman and what really happened over the course of his forty- six years.

The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas--a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems--worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions--they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.