"Poets of astonishing vision are rare. Mary Ruefle is of their number. Her poems discover the full beauty and anguish of life that most of us dare not see, much less depict in luminous detail for the ages." —Lawrence Sutin

"Mary Ruefle's poems love our humanness, and they want it back. Not-always-gentle-reader, I don't know if poetry makes anything happen—to quote Ruefle, 'your guess is as good as mine'—but poetry that goes this far past denial does everything and all that poetry can: it makes our moment in time worth living." —William Olsen

"[Selected Poems] offers readers a chance to catch on to one of the most distinctive talents of our time, one of the few who can genuinely startle . . . Ruefle is clearly one of the best American poets writing, and her body of work is remarkable for its spiritual force, intelligence, stylistic virtuosity, and adventurousness." —Tony Hoagland

Trances of the Blast is a major new collection from beloved and award-winning poet Mary Ruefle. Full of the peculiarity and wit characteristic of Ruefle's work, the poems deliver her imaginative take on the world's rifts—its paradoxes, failures, and loss—and help us to better appreciate its redeeming strangeness.

"The fast-moving, jittery poems in this fifth volume from the well-respected Ruefle (The Adamant) try hard to portray the world as her speaker really feels it: 'I want,' she exclaims, 'to have an ecstatic relationship with life.' In fluently unpredictable free verse (mostly) and discursive poetic prose (on occasion), Ruefle's work can take in almost anything, the more unexpected the better: 'a line of laundry strung out over the Acropolis,' 'wigs and temperatures and horoscopes,' 'the moon in utero,' drum majorettes, breast milk, the Book of Job and more." —Publishers Weekly

In Nobody Ever Gets Lost, Jess Row takes on nothing less than the most important questions of our time, through the eyes of individuals wrestling with identity, religion, co-existence and pain in a world forever changed by terror. In these seven profound and emotionally devastating stories, each touched by the aftermath of September 11, Row moves deftly from the streets of Southeast Asia to the leafy boulevards of suburban American and the halls of Washington, D.C., chronicling the small moments, the confusions and betrayals, which push everyday people toward violence and extremism.

Returning to his native Chicago after World War II, Nelson Algren found a city transformed. The flourishing industry, culture, and literature that had placed prewar Chicago at center stage in American life were entering a time of crisis. The middle class and economic opportunity were leaving the inner city, and Black Southerners arriving in Chicago found themselves increasingly estranged from the nation's economic and cultural resources. For Algren, Chicago was becoming "an October sort of city even in the spring," and as Carlo Rotella demonstrates, this metaphorical landscape of fall led Algren and others to forge a literary form that traced the American city's transformation. Narratives of decline, like the complementary narratives of black migration and inner-city life written by Claude Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks, became building blocks of the postindustrial urban literature. October Cities examines these narratives as they played out in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Manhattan. Through the work of Algren, Brown, Brooks, and other urban writers, Rotella explores the relationship of this new literature to the cities it draws upon for inspiration. The stories told are of neighborhoods and families molded by dramatic urban transformation on a grand scale with vast movements of capital and people, racial succession, and an intensely changing urban landscape.

Carlo Rotella, an award-winning writer and ringside veteran, unearths the hard wisdom in any kind of fight, from barroom dustup to HBO extravaganza. He vividly describes the tough choices and subtle pleasures that come the way of every fighter, from perennial underdogs on the tank-town circuit to the one-time heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, who still spars to retching exhaustion daily. Rotella uncovers the often startling light that boxing sheds on the world beyond the ring. A college student's brief fistic career pinpoints the moment when adulthood arrives. The serenity of a fellow fan shows Rotella how to process the trauma of a car crash. The persistence of a wizened ex-champion reminds him of his grandmother and helps him accept her death. Throughout, Rotella achieves moving resonances between the worlds inside and outside the ropes. He also tackles fascinating questions that have gone largely unexplored until now: How do boxers endure the brutal punishment that is the sport's essence? And why do they come back for more, again and again? As Rotella traces his immersion in the fight world, he achieves what few other writers in that world have: he makes it relevant to us, whether we're fans or not.

Located in the heart of England’s Lake District, the placid waters of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty. But under their calm surface lurks the legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation—and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it. Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped one hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering—and of natural resource diversion—inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times.

The Dawn of Green re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, noted historian Harriet Ritvo revisits notions of the natural promulgated by romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent—and continuing—environmental struggles.

Over the past two decades, Harriet Ritvo has established herself as a leading scholar in animal studies and one of those most responsible for establishing this field of study as a crucial part of environmental and social history. Her two well-known books, The Platypus and the Mermaid and The Animal Estate, did much to introduce and illuminate the importance of nonhuman animals to the study of human culture. Hunting and husbandry, as well as petkeeping and zoo-going, forge powerful connections between animal lives and those of humans: in fact, animals have helped define what a human is. They have also been one of the most reliable measures of humans’ disproportionate influence on the environment. From domestication to extinction, the human impact on animal populations has been profound.

In the essays collected in Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras, Ritvo explores our attitudes toward animals, from cruelty to sentimentality to the indifference of pure practicality, and touches on many social and scientific issues, including genetic engineering and an animal protection movement much older than most readers would think (animal advocacy was a cause embraced by many Victorians). While Ritvo’s writing represents the cutting edge in animal history, it has always been characterized by its accessibility, and these essays originally appeared not only in scholarly journals but also in Grand Street, Daedalus, and American Scholar. Collected for the first time in a single volume, they reveal an important dimension of human history by looking to those other creatures that have surrounded us all along.