Wesleyan University Press

Since its inception in 1957, Wesleyan University Press has published more than 250 titles within its internationally renowned poetry series, collecting four Pulitzer prizes, a Bollingen, and two National Book Awards in that one series alone. Wesleyan University Press also aspire to maintain and develop their rigorous and multifaceted publishing program that serves the academic and intellectual life of the University; an editorial program that focuses on the publication of poetry, music, dance, science fiction, film-TV, and Connecticut history and culture.

Copyright Consciousness

Musical Creativity and Intellectual Property in Turkey
Copyright Consciousness Cover
Format: 
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819501752
Pub Date: 03 Jun 2025
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 3 figures
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819501769
Pub Date: 03 Jun 2025
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 3 figures
Description:
How copyright shapes the nature, value, and meaning of musical creativityCopyright Consciousness explores the mutual influence of intellectual property law, musical creativity, and state cultural policy in Turkey's vibrant music industry. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data from the past five decades, this book is among the first in-depth ethnographies of music and the law. Adapting theories of legal consciousness and introducing them into ethnomusicology, it documents how a broad range of actors, from courts to composers, negotiate and constitute an emergent legality in music.
Meditations Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 416
ISBN: 9780819501738
Pub Date: 06 May 2025
Illustrations: 7 b&w halftones
Description:
Six decades of writing on literature and art by one of the most significant poets of our timeMeditations gathers together in one volume for the first time an extensive collection of the prose work of Barbara Guest (1920-2006), one of the major voices of twentieth century American literature. Known primarily as a poet, Guest worked in many styles, all represented herein: essays, lectures, art criticism, literary and art reviews, as well as forms of fiction, biography, poetic prose, drama, comics, and other mixed-genre pieces. This collection of the poet's prose illuminates Guest's singular genius, highlighting her structural awareness of language and placing her within the vanguard of American poetry.

Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem

Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780819501851
Pub Date: 25 Mar 2025
Description:
Playful love poems to kids, coral reefs, and crowsWinner of the 2024 Cardinal Poetry PrizeFive-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by renowned poet Robert Pinsky. In free verse and invented poetic forms, Rachel Trousdale explores how the interplay between the mind and body illuminates our most important relationships, whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love; the entropic joys of parenthood; illness and grief; and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us.

The Museum of Unnatural Histories

The Museum of Unnatural Histories Cover
Format: 
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780819501875
Pub Date: 25 Mar 2025
Illustrations: 12 figures
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780819501820
Pub Date: 25 Mar 2025
Illustrations: 12 figures
Description:
Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museumThis extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, Wenstrup's poems weave together the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved colonial violence in "an authorial reckoning//with what remains." Outside the Museum of Unnatural Histories Ggugguyni, the Dena'ina Raven, and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as The Curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm.
Go Figure Cover

Go Figure

Format: 
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780819500793
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2025
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780819500809
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Description:
Keen, pithy meditations on a world that continues to surprise us /> />The poems in Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout's new book are concerned with "this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world" in a time of escalating disasters. From the bird who "check-marks morning/once more//like someone who gets up/to make sure// the door is locked" to bat-faced orchids, raising petals like light sails as if about to take flight, these poems make keen visual and psychological observations. The title Go Figure speaks to the book's focus on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible so that: "We name things/ to know where we are.
RRP: £12.50
Circumpolar Connections Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 128
ISBN: 9780819501882
Pub Date: 23 Jan 2025
Illustrations: 30 b&w photos, 12 color plates
Description:
Creative visions of Arctic geography from Indigenous perspectivesGrounded in the spatiality of Indigenous existence, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic is an innovatively foundational book about experiences and conceptions of geography in the circumpolar world. The book centers Arctic writers and artists as creators of space and disseminators of geographical knowledge emerging from Indigenous epistemologies. It collects newly commissioned poems, short stories, and essays that are accompanied by responses in the form of visual art – including paintings, photographs, and mixed media artworks – as well as brief academic reflections.
RRP: £21.95
Sounds of Other Shores Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780819501066
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 21 b&w photos, 5 tables, 1 map
Description:
A study of transoceanic musical appropriation and Swahili ethnic subjectivity on the Kenyan coastSounds of Other Shores takes an ethnographic ear to the history of transoceanic stylistic appropriation in the Swahili taarab music of the Kenyan coast. Swahili taarab, a form of sung poetry that emerged as East Africa's first mass-mediated popular music in the 1930s, is a famously cosmopolitan form, rich in audible influences from across the Indian Ocean. But the variants of the genre that emerged in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa during the twentieth century feature particularly dramatic, even flamboyant, appropriations of Indian and Arab sonic gestures and styles.
RRP: £18.95

Soon and Wholly

Format: Hardback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780819501288
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Illustrations: 12 b&w halftones, 4 color halftones
Description:
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.
RRP: £19.50
Room Swept Home Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 140
ISBN: 9780819500984
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Illustrations: 14 b&w photos, 4 b&w line drawings
Description:
Intimate and sweeping poetry that examines race and lineage.Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child.
RRP: £19.50
Living Space Cover Living Space Cover
Format: 
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780819569196
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 42 b&w photos
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780819569202
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 42 b&w photos
Description:
Examines John Coltrane's "late period" and Miles Davis's "Lost Quintet" through the prisms of digital architecture and experimental photographyLiving Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital fuses biography and style history in order to illuminate the music of two jazz icons, while drawing on the discourses of photography and digital architecture to fashion musical insights that may not be available through the traditional language of jazz analysis. The book follows the controversial trajectories of two jazz legends, emerging from the 1959 album Kind of Blue. Coltrane's odyssey through what became known as "free jazz" brought stylistic (r)evolution and chaos in equal measure.

Dybbuk Americana

Dybbuk Americana

Format: 
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780819501158
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780819501165
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Description:
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.
RRP: £12.50

Dance History(s)

Imagination as a Form of Study
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780819500908
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Description:
A multivoiced dance history book, authored by twelve diverse choreographersIn an effort to deepen our understanding of what dance is and how it has functioned throughout human history, this prismatic book project is dedicated to an artist-centric perception of dance history. Diverse dance artists from the American dance field contribute personal views of how dance has unfolded over time, answering the question: "Who is in your imaginary dance family tree, FROM the beginning of time to YOU/now?"Twelve illustrated booklets, each written by a working choreographer, address the subject of dance history from nonacademic, subjective, poetic perspectives.

Between the Night and Its Music

New and Selected Poems
Format: Hardback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780819501196
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Description:
Classic and new work by poet and jazz writer A. B. Spellman /> />A.
RRP: £21.95

Dear Yusef

Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa

Dear Yusef

Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa
Format: 
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819501332
Pub Date: 05 Nov 2024
Illustrations: 3 b&w halftones
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819501349
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Illustrations: 3 b&w halftones
Description:
Anthology of new work honoring the legacy of a celebrated African American poet/>/>This carefully and generously curated mosaic of essays, letters, and poems reveals the profound impact that poet Yusef Komunyakaa has had on poets, educators, and readers worldwide. The anthology brings together creative and critical offerings from fellow poets, former students, literary entities, and other admirers. There are emerging and established voices—from previously unpublished writers to Pulitzer Prize winning poets.
RRP: £18.50
Stepping in the Madang Cover Stepping in the Madang Cover
Format: 
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819501400
Pub Date: 05 Nov 2024
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 11 tables, 21 figures
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819501417
Pub Date: 16 Jan 2025
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 11 tables, 21 figures
Description:
Site-specific expressive ecologies sustain Korean folk culture in a globalizing world/>/>The madang is a key space and concept for Korean drummers and dancers. Literally a village circle, the madang is also a metaphor for an expressive occasion or cultural space of embodied participation. Korean performers step in the madang as a means of bringing their bodies into purposeful contact with the particular time and place of performance.
Brassroots Democracy Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 424
ISBN: 9780819501127
Pub Date: 17 Oct 2024
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 25 b&w photos
Description:
**A new understanding of the birth of jazz through a fine-grained social history of early African American musicians **Brassroots Democracy recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana.