James Sherry

Comin' ' Round is a tour of James Sherry's career as a poet, thinker, and influential member of the indie poetry world. Each of the included works is virtuosic in its own way, but what to say about them all together? At last, I realized that for all these years Sherry has been performing a startlingly clear-eyed investigation of the long fraught relationship between our interdependence (as humans and as earthly creatures) and our will for power. In its concern with how we live together in our various linguistic and literal ecosystems, this is a very timely book indeed.

Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection presents the first general theory that links poetry in environmental thought to poetry as an environment. James Sherry accomplishes this task with a network model of connectivity that scales from the individual to social to environmental practices. Selfie demonstrates how parts of speech, metaphor, and syntax extend bidirectionally from the writer to the world and from the writer inward to identities that promote sustainable practices. Selfie shows how connections in the biosphere scale up from operating within the body, to social structures, to the networks that science has identified for all life. The book urges readers to construct plural identifications rather than essential claims of identity in support of environmental diversity.

Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection presents the first general theory that links poetry in environmental thought to poetry as an environment. James Sherry accomplishes this task with a network model of connectivity that scales from the individual to social to environmental practices. Selfie demonstrates how parts of speech, metaphor, and syntax extend bidirectionally from the writer to the world and from the writer inward to identities that promote sustainable practices. Selfie shows how connections in the biosphere scale up from operating within the body, to social structures, to the networks that science has identified for all life. The book urges readers to construct plural identifications rather than essential claims of identity in support of environmental diversity.

The Reciprocal Translation Project showcases the work of twelve leading innovators in poetry, six writing in English and six in Chinese. These poets combine many methods of translation to open up new possibilities for trans-cultural literature. Each poem is first literally translated by a bilingual translator and then poetically translated by three poets of the other language. Instead of a single translation, The Reciprocal Translation Project gives readers one literal translation and three poetic translations for each piece, acting in concert and conversation. In this collection, one reads these twelve writers as both poets and translators, as they blur the boundaries between conventional categories.

This book uses the structure of Machiavelli’s The Prince to show how governance has changed over the last 500 years. If Machiavelli focuses on power concentrated in the hands of the republic or principalities, The Oligarch looks at how states and companies today function as oligarchies. Rather than dealing with the form of government, it addresses the operations and networks of governance for both states and corporations as a single set of common processes. The author links politics, ecology and literature, by using the literary device of appropriation to raise awareness of ecology and the overreach of powerful people, offering both wielders and critics of power a common ground based on how people in power actually conduct themselves.

CO is a series of five collaborations between Bruce Andrews and five different women: Barbara Cole, Jesse Freeman, Kim Rosenfield, Jessica Grim, Yedda Morrison. Andrews and his collaborators have advanced the notion of collaboration by showing how, with Andrews' sytle as an anchor, each of the other writers approach to writing is revealed. The hierarchy established addresses gender, social, political and language considerations at once and pulls the reader through the text as a narrative would without a single nod to the narrative forms.