Bøker utgitt av University of North Texas Press,U.S.

"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart's insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."--Eleanor WilnerBetween us, how we wrestle over words Strain to wring some blessing from the silence, Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure, The tyranny of names: night day, Sable and alabaster, flint shale, Steel and lace. Who among us can afford To speak the language--any language--rightly? As if it weren't enough to bear one heart Eternally divided in its chambers? We stand close enough to touch. We do Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire, A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.

Focusing on a much-neglected area of film experience in America, Black Cinema Treasures furthers the preservation of America's cultural and historic heritage, especially its African-American heritage as seen through the eyes of the African-American independent filmmakers of the 1920s through the 1950s. Ossie Davis says that the collection is one of the best sources of black "self-consciousness" in America during those decades.

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 1994. Barbara Hamby makes her poems out of jokes, Italian phrases, quotes from saints and philosophers, references to meals eaten and wines drunk. In a fluid, compelling voice, she sets a stage, peoples it with real and imagined characters, spins them into dizzying motion, and then makes everything disappear as with a wave of a conjurer's wand, leaving the reader to wonder, "Did that happen, or did I dream it?" One leaves her poetry the way one leaves a dark theater on a July afternoon, convinced that the ordinary passions really won't do--they need to be larger, as large as they are in these poems.

Chet Atkins called Lenny Breau (1941-1984) ""the greatest guitarist who ever walked the face of the earth."" Breau's virtuosity influenced countless performers, but unfortunately it came at the expense of his personal relationships. This book analyzes Breau and his recordings to reveal an enormously gifted man and the inner workings of his music.

A black sharecropper's recollections of the Depression. An opportunity to view rural life in Texas during the Depression and its aftermath.