Bøger udgivet af UNIV OF IOWA PR

The Atlas of Iowa examines the state's geography, demographics, agriculture, and political/cultural patterns. Drawing upon archival materials and synthesizing little-known secondary sources, the authors of this thematic atlas have pulled together a comprehensive map series that depicts Iowa's complex, unique story of challenging human-environmental interaction.

"Anthem Speed, Christopher Bolin's third collection with Kuhl House Poets, affirms Bolin's emergence as a singular stylist in 21st century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic and visionary, Bolin's poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: "among/ the disinformation of the distress feeds," Bolin writes, "a pilot hears his coordinates/ being called by other planes." Hypnotically lyrical, unfolding as a series of languorous, cascading fragments of song, Anthem Speed evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations, though, are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Anthem Speed tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms and mountainsides, and envisions-with animal acuity-a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths. Surveying a field in which the sacred has been commodified, Bolin's work moves towards re-enchantment, a poetry that preserves and aims to renew possibilities for humane action, and for humility. Anthem Speed scaffolds new ways of thinking, acting, and hungering, and invites us to imagine that "the mind was the seventh summer of an unfound planet; until the mind was the fruit dusted by antlered collisions, below.""--

"Shane Book's All Black Everything lyrics shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with his blade of caustic irony against the world-wide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet. The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. An original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands, too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is redemption song"--

The characters in No Use Pretending have been forced into conditions of life that they find unbearable, and the stories chart their often tragically misguided attempts to relieve their suffering. This collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist "weird fiction" to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals, inviting readers to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare.

"Neil Gaiman is one of the most widely-known writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, having produced fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and horror, television, comics and prose. He often attributes this eclecticism to his "compost heap" approach to writing, gathering influences from life, religion, literature, and mythology. The worlds of Neil Gaiman have their roots in thousands of years of human storytelling. The Middle Ages in particular have been enormously influential in content, form, and aesthetics for many of Gaiman's works. This book offers an introduction to the idea of medievalism, how the literature and culture of the Middle Ages have been reinterpreted and repurposed over the centuries, and how the layers of interpretation have influenced Gaiman's own use of medieval material. The book examines direct and indirect influences, from Norse mythology and Beowulf to medieval romances and fairy tales, in order to provide context and background to expand and enrich one's understanding and appreciation of Gaiman's work"--

Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney's In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclam

Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman--tender, hungry, hopeful--who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack--poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book's early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

"An Influencer's World pulls back the curtain and reveals what's behind social media influencing - an exploding and often misunderstood industry. It's an unconventional look at both the business side of influencing and the personal lives of influencers and creators. What's the influencer lifestyle and how do they win their fight for relevance? How do influencers create an authentic brand that catches fire, while still leading an authentic, healthy life? Influencing is a business built around likes and hate creating a big psychological toll for those who choose to play in the game. The purpose of An Influencers World is to get an insider's look at influencing and how the game is played by showcasing a diverse set of voices from within the industry, including interviews with dozens of trending influencers, CEOs and other leading industry insiders, brands, mental health professionals and celebrities. It's a complete picture that explores the business, history, culture, and psychology of influencing like no other book before it"--

"The Wapsipinicon Almanac was published by Route 3 Press in Anamosa, Iowa for more than 25 years. It was handmade on antique letterpress equipment by Timothy Fay and featured stories, reviews, essays, and poems. The first issue, published in 1988, sold out, and the publication subsequently became a staple of the Iowa literary scene. Each subsequent issue was a carefully curated collection of critical essays, short stories, book reviews, Iowa history, news blurbs, poetry, beautiful artwork, and charming black and white advertisements of the mom-and-pop businesses who supported the Almanac and serve their communities in every aspect from the arts to agriculture. Fay crafted each issue with a sharp but also lighthearted focus on Midwestern concerns-culled from a variety of perspectives. Now, Midwesterners will be able to peruse the best of the Wapsi in one volume-both text and images-along with an introduction from Tim Fay that will acquaint them with his rare, artisanal process and this valuable repository of Iowa voices and history"--

"The Principles of Comedy Improv is an authoritative handbook for comedy improv, an art that, more than any other, isolates the conscious act of creation. Comedy improv plays with the very mechanisms we use to form our lives. More than just entertainment, its principles enable you to change every moment of your life. Your guide is Tom Blank, a senior instructor at the Groundlings School and Theater, who crystallizes two decades of experience to convey improv in unparalleled scope, depth, and fun. This book's insights go deep, far beyond common lists, rules, and platitudes. It pulls back the curtain on the details of what is really going on when we create a staged reality, what improvisors do, how they do it, and the perfectly human behaviors that get in the way. Our subject is broken down into clear, consumable topics written with precision, each can stand alone but together form a progression. Topics are designed to fit modern life, with a length suited for a wait at the bus stop or a luxurious visit to the bathroom. This is a non-fiction work that contains a lot of fiction, it is a sprawling adventure that careens through tall tales, anecdotes, theory, and example - all meticulously crafted to inform and inspire. It drives principles deep into you, giving you the power to take creative action, to rise to any challenge with whatever you have available, to improvise. Whether you're a hard-core improvisor or a cautiously curious outsider, this is an accessible tour de force that beckons you to take a ride"--

2023 Midwest Book Awards in Nonfiction - Nature, winner In a straightforward, friendly style, Iowa's premier scientists and experts consider what has happened to our land and outline viable solutions that benefit agriculture as well as the state's human and wild residents.

Hajar Hussaini's poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one's language. The traces she finds--the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world's nations convening to reject the full stop--retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.

At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are about Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Big things happen in this collection. But it's also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar.

"In his debut collection, Nashville native and Iowa MFA Drew Bratcher writes musically about memory and memorably about music in uncommonly beautiful essays that announce the arrival of a major new voice. The title essay, a requiem in fragments, tells the story of a grandfather through his ear, comb, hands, El Camino, and clothes. With a descriptive precision redolent of John Berger and the literary portraiture of Annie Ernaux, Bratcher delivers a tough and moving tribute to a man who 'went on ahead, on up the road, and then the road turned.' Elsewhere, Bratcher directs his attention to Johnny Cash's looming presence over his childhood ('a landmark, fixed and orienting'), the relative pain of red paper wasp stings, Dolly Parton's generative homesickness, the humiliations and consolations of becoming a new father, the experience of hearing his name in a Taylor Swift song, and the mystifying hymns treasured by both his great grandmother and D.H. Lawrence. Seamlessly blending memoir and arts criticism and aiming at both the heart and the head, this is a book about listening closely to stories and songs, about leaving home in order to find home, and about how the melodies and memories absorbed along the way become 'a living music that advances and prevails upon us at formative moments, corralling chaos into the simple, liberating stockade of verse, chorus, verse'"--

The Beckoning World is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham. His weeks are comprised of six days mining coal, followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then one day a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream. But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl's case her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications. The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom; and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are "in this business of their hearts."