"Even in death, who has ownership over Black women's bodies? Questions like this lurk between the lines of these stunning stories engaging with the nuance of African women’s histories."Questions like this sit between the lines of this stunning collection of stories that engage the nuance of African women's histories. Their history is not just one thing, there is heartbreak and pain, and joy, and flying and magic, so much magic. An avenging spirit takes on the patriarchy from beyond the grave.An immigrant woman undergoes a naturalization ceremony in an imagined American state that demands that immigrants pay a toll of the thing they love the most to be allowed to stay. A first-generation Zimbabwean-American woman haunted by generational trauma is willing to pay the ultimate price to take her pain away - giving up her memories. A neighborhood gossip wakes up to find that houses are mysteriously vanishing in the night. A shapeshifting freedom fighter leaves a legacy of resistance to her granddaughter.In Drinking from Graveyard Wells, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu assembles a collection of poignantly reflective stories that ventilate the voices of African women charting a Black history across oceans between southern Africa and America. Ndlovu's stories play with genres ranging from softly surreal to deeply fantastical. Each narrative is wrapped in the literary eloquence and tradition of southern African mythology, in a way that transports readers into the lives of African women who have fought across time and space to be seen.Drawing on her own experiences as a Zimbabwean whose early life was spent under the Mugabe dictatorship, Ndlovu's stories are grounded in truth and empathy. Ndlovu boldly offers up alternative interpretations of a past and a present that speculates into the everyday lives of a people disregarded. Her words explore the erasure of African women - while highlighting their beauty potential and limitless possibility. Immersed in worlds both fantastical and familiar, readers find themselves walking alongside these women, grieving their pain, and celebrating their joy, all against the textured backdrop of African histories, languages, and cultures.

Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. The experience introduces him to the beautiful and enigmatic Essie Stamper—a young Cherokee woman who is also working at the inn and dreaming of a better life. With World War II raging in Europe, the resort is the temporary home of Axis diplomats and their families, who are being held as prisoners of war. A secret room becomes a place where Cowney and Essie can escape the white world of the inn and imagine their futures free of the shadows of their families' pasts. Outside of this refuge, however, racism and prejudice are never far behind, and when the daughter of one of the residents goes missing, Cowney finds himself accused of abduction and murder. Even As We Breathe invokes the elements of bone, blood, and flesh as Cowney navigates difficult social, cultural, and ethnic divides. Betrayed by the friends he trusted, he begins to unearth deeper mysteries as he works to prove his innocence and clear his name. This richly written debut novel explores the immutable nature of the human spirit and the idea that physical existence, with all its strife and injustice, will not be humanity's lasting legacy.

Lost in the woods with a horse, a mouse, and the ghost of a dead bird, you will discover if you're meant to live.In Sarah Blake's epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they're not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all—just the strangeness of the woods.7.If only the night held one dream instead of many.In the next dream you dig up the bird.In the next dream you dig in the same place and find a gun. You've shot someone. You weren't supposed to return to this place where you hid the gun.You're an idiot in your dream.In the next dream the horse returns. The horse startles you awake. But you are still asleep. Dreams are some wicked things.In the next dream you are in a desert. That's different.You forget what grass is. What it smells like. What the shadows of trees look like across your legs.You laugh your head off at the sight of a cactus.In the next dream you can see the spirit of the bird that will haunt you for weeks. Her tongue makes you think all of her words will come out garbled.Then you remember all she does is sing.

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream - and work - toward a more capacious "we" In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. perched i am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world. under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen. if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside me, a love of beauty riseslike sap, sprouts from my scalpand stretches forth. i send out my song, an ariablue and feathered, and grow toward it,choirs bare, but soon to bud. i amblack and becoming. - after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

Shakespeare's 154 sonnets anagrammed into wildly new poems about queer desire and kink. The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire is a stunning second collection from National Poetry Series winner, Trevor Ketner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare's sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism. The sonnets come together to form a grimoire that casts a trancelike and intense spell on the reader. Centered on love and desire in the English canon, this collection speaks to the ever-emerging and beautiful manifestations of queer love and desire. Relentless, excessive, wild, and tender, The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire sets itself to chanting from beginning to end. When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,gowns web (herb hysteria)—let's thin flowerythen—gaudy bicep—insistent herd—leaf dyedto holy doorway—hunt syrups—doze—giventhat i swallow debt, let me whorl—feed lard/ ale / ill breath—they get eye winks—husband,of thudhurt, eyeray, saltwar—sheets yell,tan—nude hyphen—i knot woe; sinewy, it seesfingernails (limp waters, a hand sea), leather sets,meshes—hewed out virus—debauchery: try a mopor a match—i hot—i lucid—i wonderflush—stiffens:exoskeleton / cum—cuddly human mass—la,sings a boyish brute in his coven—cut—yep,hood him—we want a wren duet / to be shelter,a trans thud, sob, melt—oh, welt / honeyed wife.

Native puppeteers from the White Earth Reservation travel to the 1962 World's Fair. In the summer of 1962, a group of young Native American puppeteers travel in a converted school bus from the White Earth Reservation to the Century 21 Exposition, World's Fair in Seattle, Washington. The five Natives, three young men and two young women, have endured abandonment, abuse, poverty, and find solace, humor, and courage with a mute puppeteer—a Native woman in her seventies who writes original dream songs, and creates hand puppets and ironic parleys that mock the ghosts of authority. Dummy Trout, the mute puppeteer, also figured in Native Tributes and Satie on the Seine. The troupe attends a performance of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and they create a puppet parley for Wovoka, the inspiration of the Native American Ghost Dance Religion.

When Frank X Walker's compelling collection of personal poems was first released in 2004, it told the story of the infamous Lewis and Clark Expedition from the point of view of Clark's personal slave, York. The fictionalized poems in Buffalo Dance formed a narrative of York's inner and outer journey, before, during, and after the expedition – a journey from slavery to freedom, from the plantation to the great northwest, from servant to soul yearning to be free. In this updated edition, Walker utilizes a blend of extensive historical research, interviews, transcribed oral histories from the Nez Perce reservation, art, and empathy to breathe new life into an important but overlooked historical figure. Featuring a new introduction, preface, and sixteen additional poems, this powerful work speaks to such topics as race, literacy, slavery, and Native Americans, while reawakening and reclaiming the lost "voice" of York.

Thirty short reading selections from the Book of Entertaining Stories of Gregory Bar ʿEbrāyā, with an analysis of the grammar and vocabulary of the texts.

The author reviews the Confucian tradition through the two concepts, religion and humanities. Chinese scholars always adopt Zongjiao and Renwen from the ancient Chinese documents as the Chinese translation of religion and humanities. In respect of their own contexts of culture, the Chinese words and the English words share some similarities in meaning, but also have some vital differences. This book covers the major phases of the development of Confucianism, which have a wide historical span from the Pre-Qin period to the contemporary era with a focus on Confucianism in Song and Ming dynasties. Relevant ideas of modern Western disciplines such as philosophy of religion, religious studies and theology are employed by the author as references, not criteria, to illuminate key ideas in Confucian tradition and highlight the features of Confucianism as a religious or spiritual humanism. In some chapters, the author compares the eastern thinkers and theories with those western ones.

This book contains six works that each reflect the different styles of the author in each period of his work, paying attention to men of low status, memories of childhood, campus life, and the living conditions of Beijing’s drifters. Told in a straightforward manner, all the stories in this book are told in the first person and can be regarded together as a spiritual autobiography. Xu Zechen won the sixth Lu Xun Literature Award for short stories, and short stories have always been the focus and intention of his creation.

In Jesse Lee Kercheval’s sixth collection, I Want to Tell You, her searching, incantatory poems speak directly and forcefully to the reader in a voice that is by turns angry, elegiac, wry, or witty but always sharply alive. Crossing through the bewildering territory of grief, Kercheval argues with god and the universe about the deaths of people she loves. She also writes movingly about the complications of family life and love, the messy puzzle of life itself.

The brutality of war and abuse is juxtaposed with the banal in this story of two women who spend their days transcribing the testimonies of Abu Ghraib prisoners. The prisoners' gruesome accounts of physical and sexual abuse, torture, sodomy, and murder interrupt the ordinary lives and concerns of the typists, and reveal deeper – and more troubling – truths. Sylvia is a single mother, haunted by the words of the prisoners' testimonies. Her job strains her already-fragmented relationship with her capricious teenage son. Marina's submissive ignorance allows her to become involved in a disturbing relationship with a man who engages her in humiliating and abusive sexual acts and indirectly involves her six-year-old daughter, causing the child to suffer troubling effects from bearing witness to the trauma. Interjected within the lyrical prose is commentary about the history, development, and qualities of ink, as well as of other objects and elements (such as urine and water) that are part of the accounts of tortured prisoners as well as the lives of Sylvia and Marina. Taken together, this illuminating and meditative work reveals how correlations between the abuse of women, domestic violence, rape, and the abuse and torture of prisoners of war are not as disparate or detached as they might first appear.

What do we mean by moral freedom? What are the necessary conditions required for it? Do the exponential advances and pervasive applications of artificial intelligence (AI) promote it, or do they undermine it? Are we dealing with a new ethical challenge? If this is the case, how should we respond? These are a few of the compelling questions addressed in the current volume. These concerns are increasingly unavoidable in our contemporary computerized society, in which people increasingly depend on AI-based technology, inevitably exposed to its invisible but powerful algorithmic design. Providing a basis for the field of Ethics of AI, the volume helps us understand the new questions raised by AI systems, with particular attention to the challenge that machine-learning algorithms represents for moral freedom. Tiribelli provides both conceptual and practical tools to address these issues, producing a moral compass for navigating our complex world, increasingly structured and shaped by algorithmic technology.

One of the fundamental aspects of the cultural landscape of the last century has been the revival of philosophical anthropology, in the form of a radical examination of the humanum: an examination that has attempted to meet the primary challenge of an era which, in an increasingly radical way, doubts the very possibility of a semantics of humanism. This book argues that MacIntyrean thought can provide an important contribution towards rethinking a new semantics of humanism, on the basis that MacIntyre's contribution stands up to dialogue with and rational competition from perspectives belonging to rival research traditions. The volume emerged from the 2021 conference at the University of Bergamo, in collaboration with the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry.

The current volume provides an interpretation of American pragmatism according to which pragmatism is not opposed to metaphysics but instead represents a vital, non-dismissive, non-deflationary attempt to respond to classical questions of philosophy concerning the nature of reality, truth, goodness, beauty, ideality, etc. American pragmatism has been often interpreted as a form of crass utilitarianism applied to all areas of philosophy – a precipitation of the “industrialist” spirit of the United States. This book demonstrates how such an interpretation is misguided. The chapters focus on different topics in the philosophies of Peirce and Dewey – what is ‘meaning,’ what is the human self, what is truth, what is consciousness, what ‘semiotics’ can add to realism – that articulate the unitary view that the ‘real’ is always inhabited by and open to the ‘ideal.’

As Is gathers everyday poems written over time and mostly at the poet’s home in the Ridge and Valley province of northern Appalachia. This work pays attention to the world as it is with curiosity, candor, and delight. Seeking connection with others and the earth and savoring the fine details of a messy life, these poems reckon with the demands of family, pandemic, aging, and loss even as they witness injustice, violence, environmental degradation, and climate crisis.