Focusing on the overlapping nature of culture and politics, historian Mark A. Lause delves into the world of antebellum bohemians and the newspapermen who surrounded them, including Ada Clare, Henry Clapp, and Charles Pfaff, and explores the origins and influence of bohemianism in 1850s New York. Against the backdrop of the looming Civil War, The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians combines solid research with engaging storytelling to offer readers new insights into the forces that shaped events in the prewar years.

“Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that ‘glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.’” —Alicia Ostriker

“The movement at the center of so many of these poems is that of air, fire, water, nigh—of what cannot be seen, even as the speaker moves ever inward to face her own dreams, her demons and her desires. The strong central poem, ‘After the Rape,’ defines the moment from which the poet must measure the world. That she finds in the memory of a dolphin rising into air is the magic of Nancy Kuhl’s collection.” –Judith Kitchen

In Repairing Texts, Hans P. Krings challenges the idea that, given the effectiveness of machine translation, major costs could be reduced by using monolingual staff to post-edit translations. With the goal of discovering underlying trends and discovering potential hypotheses for further research, he sets different groups of translators to work post-editing texts both with and without the benefit of the source text. He offers ups studies of machine translation systems and their uses, the current state of translation process research, and methodology, data collection, and data analysis.

“Imagine a postmodern Pindar with a liberal arts education and good command of Polish; think of an Orpheus who starts out as a horny kid from the American suburbs, hits the road like Kerouac, learns a few things along the way, but still looks back—wacked! Kress has come up with some playful and surprisingly haunting sonnets that glance at the old stories but sing their own new, not too sweet songs.” –Julia Kasdorf

In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz’s dictum that “the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.” Peopled with such diverse characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafka’s father, Dorothea Lange, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement-park ride through world history and art. Kovacik’s poetry places us in the strange drama of cataclysmic events and ordinary life.

“Karen Kovacik’s poems are strong, distinctive and thoroughly wonderful works. Her personal poems such as ‘Watching My Father Pray’ make use of autobiographical detail in a way that is never insular or hermetic. And her Richard Nixon persona poems are stunning, brave, and original. American poetry, and American writing in general, tends to be sadly ahistorical, and the way these poems take on one of history’s most loved and hated figures, giving him voice and making him human, is truly impressive. Nixon and I is an amazing debut.”—Jesse Lee Kercheval

Samuel Shem’s The House of God is widely regarded as one of the most influential novels about medical education in the twentieth century. Decades after being published, this satire still raises issues of how interns and residents are trained and how patients experience their treatment. Return to The House of God is a scholarly and creative response to the best-selling novel, exploring its impact on medical education, residency training, and the field of literature and medicine.

Some of the world’s greatest literature is devoted to expressing the joys and sorrows humans experience as they grow old. New opportunities and challenges appear: retirement, a special closeness with the family, failing health, the recognition of personal mortality, prejudice against the elderly, and grief over the losses of loved ones and places. This collection of more than 60 short stories, poems, and plays addresses these issues primarily through the works of modern American writers, including Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Edward Albee, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. The selections represent the experience of aging from the perspective of persons of diverse color, ethnicity, and background, and are complemented by illustrator Elizabeth Layton’s wry and perceptive prints.

“Mindi Kirchner possesses an unblinking honesty and wit that is at once enchanting and heartbreaking. Her agile, beautifully crafted poems address the disappointments and sorrows of our uncrafted, ordinary lives and the painful distance between reality and imagination. She celebrates the joy in spite of, not because of, what is. Like a Buddhist she wishes for no other life, no reincarnation. And yet, as her reader, I can’t wait to see more, more lives, or at least many more books, from this talented new voice.”—Nin Andrews