Moss's fifth book of poetry is full of poems that are angry, defiant, yet informed with a sense of the sacred in their images, in their language, in their mimesis of transcendent ritual in everyday life. Here is a writer who speaks bitterness and makes her own music of it.
Cities in Motion was selected by Derek Walcott in 1986 as one of five volumes in the National Poetry Series.
Winner of the National Book Award.
"Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work—which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves—Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time." —John W. Aldridge
"It is a curse in this family that the women bear only daughters, if anything at all."
So begins this hypnotic elegy of the women of the Nebraska plains, winner of the National Book Award. This is the story of the Atkins family, who settle, farm, and raise three generations from the early years of this century. In particular, it portrays the Atkins women and the world they create among themselves. At the heart of the novel is Cora, the resourceful and resolute matriarch whose nobility is a profoundly sustaining life-force. Her intractable submission to the rhythms of the natural order reveeals a tragic and intensely moral innocence. Her sister-in-law, Belle, is a spirited woman who dies in childbirth. The mercurial Sharon Rose, the niece whom Cora raises, carries the story forward far in time and distance from the narrow life of the farm. Refusing to follow Cora's example, she flees to the sophistication of the East with a fury and rebelliousness that darken her spirit. Years later she will return to the plains to confront her flight and to realize fully the dignity of Cora's life.
Aloma is an orphan, raised by her aunt and uncle, educated at a mission school in the Kentucky mountains. At the start of the novel, she moves to an isolated tobacco farm to be with her lover, a young man named Orren, whose family has died in a car accident, leaving him in charge. The place is rough and quiet; Orren is overworked and withdrawn. Left mostly to her own, Aloma struggles to settle herself in this lonely setting and to find beauty and stimulation where she can. As she decides whether to stay with Orren, she will choose either to fight her way to independence or accept the rigors of commitment. Both a drama of age-old conflicts and a portrait of modern life, C. E. Morgan's debut novel is "simply astonishing . . . a book about life force, the precious will to live, and all the things that can suck it right out of a person" (Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times).
"This impressive first book manages the double ground of a nightmarish surrealism and a dryly perceptive wit. It's as if Humphrey Bogart were taking a good, if final, look at what's called the world. These are poems of a survivor, urbane, intelligent, fact of hope and despair equally. The Geographics is an ultimate detox center for 'reality' addicts as thinking becomes the only way out." —Robert Creeley
“Mobilio’s poetry is the ultimate detox center for reality addicts,” wrote Robert Creeley. Infused with pop culture references spanning Tom and Jerry cartoons, Spinoza, and the confessions of a stag film actress, these poems revel in roughhouse lyricism. Mobilio is the winner of a Whiting Writers Award and the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for excellence in reviewing.
A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the city, and China, relentlessly modernizes. Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn’t eradicate, the market economy has. Weaving historical vignettes of Beijing and China over a thousand years, Michael Meyer captures the city’s deep past as he illuminates its present, and especially the destruction of its ancient neighborhoods and the eradication of a way of life that has epitomized China’s capital. With an insider’s insight, The Last Days of Old Beijing is an invaluable witness to history, bringing into shining focus the ebb and flow of life in old Beijing at this pivotal moment.
In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise seas, and even motel swimming pools. She introduces us to Navajo “velvet grandmothers” whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland, as well as to Persians who consider turquoise the life-saving equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the endless surprises in all of life and celebrates the seduction to be found in our visual surroundings.
Long believed to be disappearing and possibly even extinct, the Southwestern bighorn sheep of Utah’s canyonlands have made a surprising comeback. Naturalist Ellen Meloy tracks a band of these majestic creatures through backcountry hikes, downriver floats, and travels across the Southwest. Alone in the wilderness, Meloy chronicles her communion with the bighorns and laments the growing severance of man from nature, a severance that she feels has left us spiritually hungry. Wry, quirky and perceptive, Eating Stone is a brillant and wholly original tribute to the natural world.
