Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

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Amplifying Voices from Sierra Leone

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

“Sierra Leone, your tragedy was too painful to be a poem.
If you could speak, it would be raw in my bones!”
–Syl Cheney-Coker, “Lake Fire,” in Stone Child and Other Poems (2008)

My work in postwar settings has taught me that our moral indignation and empathic response to others’ pain sometimes recedes, and we grow numb, no longer capable of effective political action to prevent, oppose, or end injustice. Unlike sterile news reports, creative expression such as poetry can help us move past numbness and retain (or regain) a capacity to respond. After spending more than five years working as a psychologist and human rights advocate in international contexts, I was drawn to “found poetry,” a genre in which phrases from existing sources are presented in new ways. Found poetry is a vehicle for transforming seemingly indescribable events into literary expression, and powerfully impresses on the mind of the reader the voices of those affected.

I first encountered public transcripts from the UN-backed international war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone in 2005, when serving as a psychologist for the trials held in Freetown. It became evident to me that eleven years of civil war had resulted in a new reality in which the unthinkable had become a part of daily life:

“…in Kono
when they chop off people’s hands
we use tobacco leaf
to tie it round the wounded place.”

The rebels who had tried to overthrow the Sierra Leonean government were eventually defeated, but the country suffered tremendous losses. The testimonies – comprising hundreds of witness reports – deserved the attention of the international community, but that attention was limited. A number of poets from the West African sub-region have tried to rectify that by creating poems pertaining to the war. Among these, the most notable are Liberian American Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who has published several collections featuring poems about the two civil wars in neighboring Liberia, and Syl Cheney-Coker from Sierra Leone, whose 2008 collection contains compelling poems about the civil war in his homeland. Now, I have rendered the public transcripts into poetry to make a broader global community aware of the war’s impact and to underscore the twin truths of survivor suffering and resilience.

After I compiled this collection, I was faced with the task of identifying a publisher who would consider a book by a first-time author, the subject matter and genre of which were largely unfamiliar. I had a hunch that commercial publishers would not accept this book, but that a university press might. In spring 2019, I was blessed to contact Dr. Carmen R. Gillespie – poet, literary scholar, professor of English, founder and director of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University, and editor of Griot Project Book series. She had a warm, encouraging attitude toward my proposal, and despite her sudden passing in August 2019, the book is now due out from Bucknell University Press in July 2021.

 As I sit here today reflecting on the results of the U.S. presidential election, my mind and heart go back to the many Sierra Leonean women, men, and children whose limbs, lives, and voices were taken from them as a punishment for exercising their right to vote for a civilian government and their refusal to support a rebel force that tried to rob them of that right:

 “Since you say you love a civil government
we are going to chop off your hands,
we will not let you go free.
If we don’t chop off your hands,
we’re going to kill you.”

After the war finally ended, Sierra Leoneans began the long, hard work of attempting to rebuild—and restore faith in—their society and country. That effort is ongoing in Sierra Leone as, indeed, it is in the United States and many other countries across the globe where rights have been violated and power abused. In August 2007, shortly before I left Freetown, millions of Sierra Leoneans all over the country braved long lines to vote in the first presidential election since the end of the long civil war. Those who had had one arm severed by the rebels voted with the other. Those who had been cruelly robbed of both arms voted with their toe-print. There is so much, so very much, that the world can learn from Sierra Leoneans’ determination to survive and to preserve or reclaim their dignity and human rights, including the right to vote and be counted.

University presses help make it possible to know about these stories, and to develop a keener alertness to the ways that language is used in public life: the kind of rhetoric that rationalizes aggression and the kind that serves to reduce it. If we strive to pay attention, we can discern truths that would otherwise slip away. Where do we locate the words to give voice to these truths? The words that we need might be anywhere. The words that we need might be everywhere. Listen. Read.

Shanee Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. Her collection of found poetry, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in June 2021.

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Excerpt: Writing Home

The following excepts are from Donald Ulin’s new book Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier, which offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Quaker immigrant Emma Alderson through her own letters.

From the introduction…

“On September 17, 1842, a Quaker family of seven stepped off the Shenandoah at Philadelphia, having left Liverpool six weeks earlier. Emma Botham Alderson, age thirty-six, had grown up in the village of Uttoxeter, in the Midlands county of Staffordshire, the daughter of a land surveyor and the youngest of three sisters. Having lived under the shadow of her sister Mary Howitt, one of the day’s most popular writers, Alderson was finally setting off to make a new life of her own. Her husband, Harrison Alderson, age forty-two, had been born to a farming family in Yorkshire but, like so many other farmers’ sons, had left the countryside to find work in the city. After an apprenticeship to a grocer and a few years in the tea trade, he had met Emma. Together they had returned briefly to farming before making the momentous decision to seek a new life in North America… ”

A letter to Ann Botham on stationery, with engraving of Cincinnati, presumably from the Kentucky side of the river.
From Alderson’s letters…

“The woods both in Ohio & Kentucky are, however, very beautiful; the remaining greens were intermingled with every variety of yellow, orange, red, brown and occasionally a purple oak with here and there the trunk & arms, \wreathed with the Virginia creeper/, of some dead tree starting up like great scarlet sticks in the very thickest of the forest. The hills, where divested of wood, are of the brightest emerald green, & the river, with its now full and rapid stream, forms a scene of such varied & glorious beauty that I often long you, our beloved friends, could witness it. The houses & villas that are built near the river both in Kentucky & Ohio are all white and enliven and increase the natural beauty of the scenery…”

“I hope, dearest mother, there is no need for alarm on the ground of war between England & America. It is now confidently reported that the Oregon question is settled by partition of the territory. I hope it is, but I do believe there is great disinclination to war in the body of the people here. All know & acknowledge the impolicy of it, & as far as we can judge, it is little worth contending for, with immense tracts of excellent land still uncultivated. What have the Americans to do in seeking to add to their already over large country by the seizing of such distant & unremarkable lands, & England, I am sure, has more dominions than have done her good long ago, but war with this country & Mexico is said to be inevitable. The annexation of Texas was an evil thing because it was intended thereby to strengthen & perpetuate slavery & these are its early bad fruits: war & bloodshed…”

 A letter to Ann Botham on stationery, with engraving of a street plan of Cincinnati.

“A few weeks ago I was invited to join a party at the house of a lady in the country. It was the meeting of an anti slavery sewing society & to me a very interesting occasion. Their object is to provide clothing for poor runaway slaves, who often lurk about in the woods & through the country & are frequently discovered by their abject & miserable appearance. Of course this is composed of the red hot stigmatized abolitionists & a thing little known amongst Friends [Quakers] but and a very questionable affair altogether, but I am perverse enough to have rather a peculiar pleasure in their society & to give a decided preference in my own mind to their proceedings. They told me with a kind of triumph of the arrival of two bands of runaways from Kentucky within the last few weeks, \each/ consisting of upwards of 20 persons. One gentleman lost 11 slaves & these were aided in their effort for liberty, clothed & helped forward on their northward route by the good abolitionists of Cincinnati…”

Along with transcriptions and images of Emma Alderson’s letters, Writing Home includes introductions and notes that situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson’s letters and her sister Mary Howitt’s Our Cousins in Ohio (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.

To learn more about Emma Alderson and how Donald Ulin accomplished this incredible project, check out our recent author interview or a copy of Writing Home.

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Quakerism, Archives, and Cross-writing: An Interview with Donald Ulin

Donald Ulin, editor of Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier, talks with our graduate assistant Madison Weaver about the challenges of archival work, Quaker views on social justice issues, and how the life of an ordinary nineteenth-century woman resonates with the contemporary immigrant experience.

Weaver: How did you find your way into the project of Writing Home? 

Ulin: I grew up Quaker, attending a very liberal, unprogrammed Friends meeting, vaguely aware that there were other Quaker traditions, but not really thinking of them as real Quakers. In graduate school, my work on representations of the English countryside led me to William Howitt’s Rural Life of England (1837). From there I began learning about the Quaker couple William and Mary Howitt. As an American scholar of British literature, I became interested in Mary’s Our Cousins in Ohio, and was trying to put together an edition of that, since it’s been out of print since 1866. Then one day a Google search for “howitt” (just for the hell of it!) turned up a new page on the University of Nottingham’s website saying they had recently purchased a huge collection of Howitt correspondence—including letters from Mary’s sister Emma, the inspiration for Our Cousins in Ohio. I planned to include a few letters as an appendix to the book, but when I visited the Nottingham archive, decided that the letters deserved a publication of their own.

As I began to realize that Alderson and her family represented the more theologically conservative tradition that I had only ever heard of growing up, I had a kind of falling out with her and the project. As I persisted, however, I came to see the history of Quakerism, and perhaps religion and politics more broadly, in more inclusive and less binary terms.

Weaver: This sort of archival work seems a difficult and time-consuming undertaking. Could you tell us a bit about the processes of doing archival work in preparation for this book? Was there anything that surprised you in your research over the course of the project?

Ulin: There’s a tough balance to strike between thoroughness and efficiency. You want to collect every detail: paper size and type, watermarks, odd orthographic features, formatting, and so on. But there’s only so much time, so you have to define the parameters of the project and collect just what you’re going to need. Just reading the handwriting was challenging, but over time it became easier. Another challenge was the cross-writing—where the letter-writer finishes a page, rotates it 90 degrees, and then writes on top of what she has already written. I have included several images of these cross-written letters in the book. When I reached the letter in which Emma apologizes to her mother for the cross-writing and promises not to do it anymore, I breathed my own sigh of relief.

An example of Alderson’s cross-writing in her letters.

Weaver: Writing Home centers on the life of a Quaker immigrant on the American frontier. What can Emma Alderson’s writings illuminate about the immigrant experience in the nineteenth century, or perhaps even today?

Ulin: What’s particularly important about this work is that it brings to light the life of one particular immigrant, independent of any generalizations that we might make about “the immigrant experience.” That experience is different for every individual immigrant, which might be one of the most important truths to keep in mind in talking about immigrants from any period. Quaker immigrants in the nineteenth century had the benefit of an extensive support network of Quakers who had gone before. Through these networks, an immigrant was able to sustain some of her old national identity while finding her way into her new life as a productive member of this ever-changing country. In general, if not in specifics, this experience is no doubt shared by communities of immigrants in the United States today, be they Hispanic, Somalian, Rohingyan, or anything else.  

Weaver: Part of what makes Emma Alderson’s story so engaging is how her letters are steeped in her Quaker views and experiences. Could you speak to how her Quaker beliefs might offer a unique perspective on the events of the time period? 

Ulin: Quakers, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren are recognized as the three “peace churches” for their absolute rejection of war. I don’t know so much about the other two, but the Quakers have also been well-represented in the ranks of those fighting for various social justice causes, including prison reform, abolition, and women’s rights. We can see these attitudes quite clearly when she writes about soldiers on their way to Mexico, freed slaves seeking to live their lives amidst terrible racism, and (to a lesser extent) the influential women in her own life. But Quakers were far from united in either their politics or their theology. The movements and controversies in American society around the war with Mexico, slavery and abolition, and the rise of evangelicalism are reflected in conflicts within the Society of Friends. Historians are familiar with the names of leading, public Friends who occupied one side or another of these conflicts—Joseph John Gurney, his sister Elizabeth Fry, John Wilbur, Levi Coffin of the underground railroad. What I think is unique about Alderson’s correspondence is what I can only call a more “ordinary” and personal perspective on this political and theological landscape.

Weaver: Emma Alderson’s writings seem to invoke fascinating intersectionality between her gender, class, religion, and nationality. How does this intersectionality speak to the uniqueness of her story? Is there a special moment in her letters or journals that has stuck with you? 

Ulin: Very interesting question. It’s easy to generalize about women in nineteenth century America or Quaker women. They are either oppressed drudges or committed and articulate activists. Many (not all, of course) of the more activist women came from relatively privileged backgrounds, which gave them the education and liberty to pursue their work. As a middle-class, English-speaking white woman, Alderson occupied a privileged position on most counts. I’m not sure how clearly she recognized that fact, but the twenty-first century reader of her letters is always aware of the Black, or poor, or German-speaking others passing through the narrative, individuals both with whom and against whom she is constructing her own identity.

Weaver: Aside from Emma Alderson’s letters themselves, what other kinds of material are available in Writing Home? Why is the commentary and context so important in this sort of project?

Ulin: The book contains quite a few images of the actual letters, and I have also reproduced many non-textual elements, particularly the drawings and little sketches by Alderson or her son, William Charles. I have also included illustrations by Anna Mary Howitt for her mother’s Our Cousins in Ohio. These are interesting, not as illustrations of Alderson’s actual children, for indeed, two of the four illustrations depict incidents that did not actually occur, but for the ways in which Howitt’s book refigures those children for her own literary and ideological purposes.

The general introduction puts Alderson’s life and correspondence in historical context, with information about postal history, Quakerism, immigration, and more. In that introduction, I also situate this correspondence more theoretically in relation to recent scholarship on epistolarity, women’s writing, trans-Atlantic studies. The introductions to the three sections of the book provide historical and biographical background to the letters in those sections. The introduction to the third section provides the first detailed analysis of how these letters were transformed collectively by the two sisters into Our Cousins in Ohio.

A Directory of Names gives some information about most of the people named, including the pseudonyms assigned by Mary Howitt in Our Cousins in Ohio. So, a reader of Howitt’s book can quickly learn more about the real life of any of those characters. 

Readers may also be interested in the epilogue, which follows the remarkable lives of the main characters and their descendants.  One went on to found Bryn Mawr College, another set international legal precedents at the Nuremburg trials, another helped pave the way for the establishment of the Adirondack State Park.

A short appendix gives all of the physical attributes of the letters, including paper size, postmarks, and addressing.

Weaver: We live in a time when letter writing has fallen mostly out of practice, and the United States Postal Service faces serious risks of losing funding. How can Writing Home help us think differently about how we communicate, then and now? 

Ulin: The materiality of the letter makes it an embodiment of, or a surrogate for, the distant sender. Time and again in these letters, Alderson reminds us of the power of a physical letter. In one letter she describes the pleasure of corresponding with her mother as a “pleasure of holding converse with thee.” Another time, thanking her mother for a parcel, she writes “it seems as if every thing was sanctified by thy touch; the very stiches on the wrappers are endeared to us.” Since working on this project, I’ve been trying to write more physical letters. It’s hard when you know that whatever news you are sharing will probably be broken in an e-mail or a phone call long before the other person gets the letter, but I know they still appreciate it when it arrives.


Donald Ingram Ulin is an associate professor and director of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. His new book Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson (1806-1847), an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight.

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ALTA43 Virtual Exhibit

In celebration of ALTA43, Bucknell University Press has assembled a list of books that may be of interest to attendees. Bucknell is a leading publisher in the humanities with a focus on literary studies, and maintains a broad interest in translation and translated works—particularly in Spanish and francophone studies. Over the years, we have published new translations of canonical texts, first translations of groundbreaking works, and important books about the practice of translation itself. During this time of physical separation and virtual togetherness, publishing work that transcends the boundaries of language and nation is more important than ever: we’re therefore excited to share the following books with you.

If you would like to discuss whether your work-in-progress might be right for Bucknell University Press, contact seg016@bucknell.edu or see our submission guidelines for more information.

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

by Frieda Ekotto
Introduction by Lindsey Green-Simms
Translated by Corine Tachtiris

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. 

Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing

Edited by Regina Galasso and Evelyn Scaramella

Winner of the 2020 SAMLA Studies Book Award — Edited Collection

Cities both near and far communicate in a variety of ways. Travel between, through, and among urban centers initiates contact, and cities themselves are sites of ever-changing cultural and historical encounters. Predictable and surprising challenges and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet, and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural context, and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city’s past and present literary and cultural practices. Thinking about translation and the city is a way to tell the backstories of the cities, texts, and authors that are united by acts of translation.

Faust: A Tragedy, Part I

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Edited and Translated by Eugene Stelzig

Goethe is the most famous German author, and the poetic drama Faust, Part I (1808) is his best-known work, one that stands in the company of other leading canonical works of European literature such as Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is the first new translation into English since David Constantine’s 2005 version. Why another translation when there are several currently in print? Eugene Stelzig’s new translation renders the text of the play in clear and crisp English for a contemporary undergraduate audience while at the same time maintaining its leading poetic features, including the use of rhyme.

Mormons in Paris: Polygamy on the French Stage, 1874-1892

Edited and Translated by Corry Cropper and Christopher M. Flood

This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). Each is accompanied by a short contextualizing introduction with details about the music, playwrights, and staging. Humorous and largely unknown, these plays use Mormonism to explore and mock changing French mentalities during the Third Republic, lampooning shifting attitudes and evolving laws about marriage, divorce, and gender roles.

Transpoetic Exchange: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

Edited by Marília Librandi, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Tom Winterbottom

Transpoetic Exchange  illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives–comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.

Venus of Khala-Kanti

by Angèle Kingué, translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley

Venus of Khala-Kanti is a tale of life-altering loss and mystical recovery. Set in an imaginary West African village that becomes a charming cul-de-sac, the unintended consequence of a national roadwork project gone awry, the story follows characters drawn with humor, irony, and empathy. The heart of the story beats with the laughter and tears of three women. Having faced incredible hardship, they come together to build their lives anew, armed with the age-old spirit of human resilience, understanding, and tenderness. Tapping into the very soil of Khala-Kanti, Bella, Assumta, and Clarisse construct spaces, both internal and external, where they and others can rejuvenate their bodies, minds, and spirits. They build the Good Hope Center, which embraces both the physical and the mystical landscape of the story. The Center fuels the restoration and growth of the village’s inhabitants, and offers sanctuary for those who visit and those who stay. 

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse

by Antjie Krog

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog is the first English translation of an award winning book published in Afrikaans in 1989. It engages critically and creatively with a key moment of colonial history—the time Lady Anne Barnard spent at the Cape of Good Hope, from 1797 to 1802. Usually mentioned merely as a witty hostess of fabulous parties, Anne Lindsay Barnard, the daughter of a Scottish Earl and the wife of a colonial administrator, was an independent thinker and a painter and writer of genius. She left diaries, correspondence and watercolors documenting her experiences in this exotic land, the contact zone of colonizers and indigenous peoples. Antjie Krog acts as bard and chronicles an epic about this remarkable heroine’s life in South Africa, and intertwines it with life two hundred years later in the same country but now in the throes of anti-apartheid anger and vicious states of emergency.

Beginning and End of Snow

By Yves Bonnefoy, translated by Emily Grosholz

Yves Bonnefoy’s book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in which the poet’s thoughts and a landscape reflect each other. In the first, the wintry New England landscape he encountered while teaching at Williams College evokes the dance of atoms in the philosophical poem of Lucretius as well as the Christian doctrine of death and resurrection. In the second, Bonnefoy uses the luminous woods of Haute Provence as the setting for a parable of losing one’s way.

Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1975-1995)

By Cintia Santana

Forth and Back broadens the scope of Hispanic trans-Atlantic studies by shifting its focus to Spain’s trans-literary exchange with the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Santana analyzes the translation “boom” of U.S. literature that marked literary production in Spain after Franco’s death, and the central position that U.S. writing came to occupy within the Spanish literary system. Santana examines the economic and literary motives that underlay the phenomenon, as well as the particular socio-cultural appeal that U.S. “dirty realist” writers—which in Spain included authors as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, and Bret Easton Ellis—held for Spaniards in the 1980s. Santana also studies the subsequent appropriation of this writing by a polemic group of young Spanish writers in the 1990s whoself-consciously and insistently associated themselves with the U.S..

Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia

Translation, Interpretation, Performance: Essays in Honor of Susan L. Fischer

Edited by Bárbara Mujica

Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia is a nearly unique transnational study of the theater / performance traditions of early modern Spain and England. Divided into three parts, the book focuses first on translating for the stage, examining diverse approaches to the topic. It asks, for example, whether plays should be translated to sound as if they were originally written in the target language or if their “foreignness” should be maintained and even highlighted. Written by a highly respected group of British and American scholars and theater practitioners, this book challenges the traditional divide between the academy and stage practitioners and between one theatrical culture and another.

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A Good Surprise in a Terrible Year

The Nobel Prize in Literature for Louise Glück

A Guest Post by Lee Upton

At last, a good surprise in a terrible year.

My mother-in-law brought me the news first: Louise Glück had won the Nobel Prize.

Glück has often been the recipient of awards (the Pulitzer in 1993 and the National Book Award in 2014) and served as the U. S. Poet Laureate in 2003-2004, but the Nobel Award for Literature is an honor like no other.  It’s a wonderful irony that a remarkably private poet who writes of rejection, of emotions that arise from the trauma of abandonment, a poet who has illuminated themes of abjection and oblivion, should find herself receiving the most distinguished of all literary honors.

Her voice that draws us in is one of rigorous self-examination, a voice that doesn’t ask for acceptance and certainly not popularity. In her lapidary prose she has praised the artist who “cultivates a disciplined refusal of self-deception.” She might be speaking of her own efforts in poems that refuse relief or gratification or even a shred of complacency. Behind her poems is the velvety backdrop of mythology, and the cruelties that occupy those myths. The Greek and Roman myths, familiar to her since early childhood, remain current in her poetry, illuminating recurrent traumas and revealing common human patterns of behavior.

She dismisses cultural pieties, including pieties about how women and girls are expected to behave in kindly, affirmative, and harmonious ways. She dismisses the pieties that often attach to poetry as well. Gleefully, she bursts the idea of “bravery” among poets, declaring in an essay, “the poet engaged in the act of writing feels giddy exhilaration; no occasion in the life calls less for courage than does this.”

I’ve heard from friends that Glück’s poems have been comforting to read in times of crisis, and I don’t doubt that. But I think it is an uncanny form of comfort—it is the comfort of exposure, of encountering poems that acknowledge ranges of emotion that are often bewildering to experience, to express, and to witness: anger, shame, grief, resentment, revulsion, vulnerability. She writes of what is unresolved and disturbing, such as the fear of aging and death, the sensation of emotional deprivation, the repetitive trauma of abandonment. 

Emily Dickinson’s declaration that “No is the wildest word” echoes through the refusals in Glück’s work, the charged unwillingness to accept unearned consolation. When the Swedish Academy referred to Glück’s wit they were right to apply the adjective “biting,” for Glück’s poetry has the power to unsettle.  Consider the unforgettable opening of “Mock Orange” in which dissatisfaction and the unrelenting pressure of desire give voice to the following:

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union

In “Mock Orange” and in many of her poems, Glück works toward a new understanding of the dramas that entangle us. She offers a bracing reminder of the value of our emotions and of an internal life that cannot be possessed, that in a time when our public lives may be subject to surveillance, when sensitivity may be ridiculed, when privacy may be intruded upon and our every impulse catalogued, surveilled by marketers and powerful agencies, her poetry puts down its marker—for the right to believe an individual self has value, to question the meaning of a life and find, by questioning again and again, a way to resist compromising the dignity of privacy and an inner life we call our own.  

Her poetry, passionate and disciplined, defends an interiority that is not legible to those who would seek to define us—a poetry that doesn’t easily accept the conditions we’re born into. 

In American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Glück writes about artists: “What is constant, what seems to me the source of resilience (or fortitude), is a capacity for intense, driven absorption.” That intensity, that absorption, is the gift her poetry not only gives to the poet but to us as readers: a willingness to be engaged deeply with those mysteries that can’t ultimately be solved. 

I’ve had the challenge and pleasure of writing about Louise Gluck often—at most length in chapters devoted to her work in The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets (1998); and in Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson (2005), both published by Bucknell University Press. Each time I’ve written about her poems I’ve found myself magnetized by her questing intelligence, her finely crafted sensibility, her distinctiveness as a writer who returns to the ancient theme of loss and reanimates that theme for contemporary readers. 

In each new book she attempts to alter her style, but her voiceprint is immediately recognizable. In recent years, she has relaxed the lines of her poems and experimented further with a range of formal devices, yet the stinging sense of self-examination is still present. 

And what also remains: throughout this poetry—a body of work that is now awarded with the highest honor for literature that our world offers—pain releases meaning as experience is attended to with intense awareness and a refusal of easy acceptance. Consider the beautiful ending of Glück’s “First Memory” from Ararat—a poem that extends toward a great clarity and puts into relief the poems of grief and loss that preceded it:

…from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

Although I’ve written about Louise Glück’s poetry often, I’ve never met her.  It’s her words that have drawn my attention repeatedly.  I’m greatly pleased that she has achieved this highest award—and pleased for all of us as recipients of what Glück’s poetry offers and what the prize recognizes: the individual inner life and the dignity of that life that poetry defends.

Lee Upton is the author of fourteen books, including three published by Bucknell University Press: Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan (1996); The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets (1998); and Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson (2005). She is a poet and a fiction writer as well as a literary scholar. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and in many journals as well as three editions of Best American Poetry. Her most recent books are Visitations: Stories and Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems.

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Celebrating Marsha P. Johnson

On what would have been her 75th birthday, LGBTQ+ activist and icon Marsha P. Johnson made history yet again, almost thirty years after her passing. New York governor Chris Cuomo announced on August 24, 2020 that what was previously known as the East River State Park will now be Marsha P. Johnson State Park, the first state park in the country to be dedicated to an LGBTQ+ person.


The park will be renovated to improve its facilities as well as feature art that celebrates Johnson’s life. There will be detailed signage outlining the activism Johnson did in leading the Gay Liberation movement, including her participation in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising and her work establishing a shelter to house LGBTQ+ youth rejected by their families.

In his announcement, Governor Cuomo said, “Too often, the marginalized voices that have pushed progress forward in New York and across the country go unrecognized, making up just a fraction of our public memorials and monuments.” He added, “Marsha P. Johnson was one of the early leaders of the LGBTQ+ movement, and is only now getting the acknowledgement she deserves. Dedicating this state park for her, and installing public art telling her story, will ensure her memory and her work fighting for equality lives on.”

Just across state lines in New Jersey, in Johnson’s home town of Elizabeth, officials similarly announced plans to dedicate a monument to Johnson. It will be located near Elizabeth’s City Hall, in an area used to “recognize trailblazers, pioneers, and international patriots.”

Johnson’s nephew, Al Michaels, is quoted as saying, “Marsha is needed now. Here we have the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trans Lives Matter movement. We have the same thing happening to people today, as far as police brutality.” He continued, “And as far as equality and justice, and Marsha was at the forefront of all that in 1969. And here it is 2020, and we’re in exactly the same place. And Marsha’s spirit has come to guide us through this fight, [like] she did back at Stonewall.”

In celebration of Marsha P. Johnson’s life’s work but also in somber acknowledgement of how far we still have yet to go, the Press wants to celebrate her by highlighting some of our recent books with themes that share her enthusiasm for LGBTQ+ history and rights.

Click on a book’s title to be brought to its landing page on our publishing partners’ websites, either Rutgers University Press or Rowman & Littlefield.

1.) Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema
Andrés Lima-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Pedro Almódovar may have helped put queer Iberian cinema on the map, but there are also multitudes of other LGBTQ filmmakers from Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country who have made the Peninsula one of the world’s most vital sources for queer film. Together, they have produced a cinema whose expressions of queer desire have challenged the region’s conservative religious and family values, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation.

Iberian Queer Cinema is a unique collection that offers in-depth analyses of fifteen different films, each by a different director, produced in the region over the past fifty years, from Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia (The House That Screamed, 1970) to João Pedro Rodrigues’ O ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016). Together, they show how queer Iberian cinema has responded to historical traumas ranging from the AIDS crisis to the repressive and homophobic Franco regime. Yet they also explore how these films gesture towards a more fluid understanding of sexuality, gender, and national identity. This book will thus give readers a new appreciation for both the cultural diversity of Iberia and the richness of its moving and thought-provoking queer cinema.

2.) Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Jason S. Farr

Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

3.) Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella
Frieda Ekotto

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.

4.) The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence
A.W. Barnes

The Dark Eclipse is a book of personal essays in which author A.W. Barnes seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Mike. Using source documentation—police report, autopsy, suicide note, and death certificate—the essays explore Barnes’ relationship with Mike and their status as gay brothers raised in a large conservative family in the Midwest. In addition, the narrative traces the brothers’ difficult relationship with their father, a man who once studied to be a Trappist monk before marrying and fathering eight children. Because of their shared sexual orientation, Andrew hoped he and Mike would be close, but their relationship was as fraught as the author’s relationship with his other brothers and father. While the rest of the family seems to have forgotten about Mike, who died in 1993, Barnes has not been able to let him go. This book is his attempt to do so.

5.) Representing Queer and Transgender Identity: Fluid Bodies in the Hispanic Caribbean and Beyond
Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins

Fluid Bodies traces the intersections of global movement with transgender and queer identities from authors and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean. Utilizing the theme of fluidity and travel, Fluid Bodies analyzes novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art. These works demonstrate how transgender and queer bodies redefine belonging, particularly national belonging, through global movement and community making practices. Through these genres, the text follows the movement of transgender and queer identities from textual spaces to spaces of the body. The gradual movement from text to body—as it occurs in these genres—demonstrates the variety of representational strategies that dismantle binary readings of gender, sexuality, and nationality. 

Transgender visibility is a pressing social issue, and today’s transgender moment will be a social and political necessity for years to come. Of particular importance are representations of transgender and/or queer people of color. The field of transgender representation is growing, and Fluid Bodies adds to the visibility of transgender and queer identity from the Hispanic Caribbean. By investigating the relationship between novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art, Fluid Bodies emphasizes how each work plays on and against the separation of language and the body, and how Hispanic Caribbean authors and artists represent transgender and queer identity in order to redefine cultural and national belonging in various geographic spaces.

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Call for Essays and Proposals: Teaching the Eighteenth Century Now

Bucknell University’s series Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 invites expressions of interest for essays or collections of essays that highlight the scholarship of teaching the long eighteenth century including the Romantic era. Proposals for edited volumes need not have firm commitments from authors at this stage, but should detail possible contributors and topics.

The long eighteenth century was a period of complex interest in the processes of learning and education, exploration of the natural and human-made world, and questions about who should be educated, in what manner, and for what purposes. Many of our ideas about pedagogical projects and processes have their roots in the period—for good or ill—and these same pedagogical questions drive our scholarship and vice versa. Ernest Boyer argued in 1990 for the value of the scholarship of teaching and learning: “The work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others. … knowing and learning are communal acts. … great teachers create a common ground of intellectual commitment. They stimulate active, not passive learning and encourage students to be critical, creative thinkers, with the capacity to go on learning … (Scholarship Reconsidered, 23-24).

Thirty years later, in this moment of pandemic pedagogy and cultural reckoning, our methods of delivery, curriculum, and even parameters of expertise are all under pressure. It thus seems both timely and essential to ask how we teach the long eighteenth century now. The Transits series invite expressions of interest that recognize and represent teaching as a serious scholarly activity—one that bridges the sometimes solitary and reflective work of conventional scholarship with the more communal and communicative work of teaching and learning.

Essays might consider the connections rather than the disjunctions between the work of scholarship and the work of teaching; theories of pedagogy from the long eighteenth century and their implications or revisions for our own contexts; how we teach the eighteenth century—as the period in which academic institutions were born, the period of Enlightenment and the developing idea of human rights, but also the period that institutionalized settler colonialism and slavery. Work that engages critical pedagogical practices and pragmatic approaches as a way to think about the significance of the pedagogical act (rather than say how to teach a specific work or figure), are particularly welcomed. Interdisciplinary work or work that could be adapted into multiple fields would be of particular interest. We particularly welcome essays and collection proposals from junior faculty and contingent faculty, who often find themselves on the “frontlines” of teaching. Additionally, Transits and Bucknell University Press are deeply committed to the work of equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in solidarity with the Association of University Presses and instructors and scholars of color. We warmly welcome work that explores or exemplifies inclusive teaching practices.

We welcome expressions of interest or submissions as you are able; by October 30, 2020 for fullest consideration. https://www1.bucknell.edu/script/upress/series.asp?id=33

Kate Parker, University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse (kparker@uwlax.edu) and Miriam L. Wallace, New College of Florida (mwallace@ncf.edu).