We are honored to present this timeless collection, African Proverbs by Charlotte Leslau-an extraordinary work that preserves and uplifts the enduring brilliance of African oral tradition. These proverbs are more than words; they are echoes of Ancestors, distilled wisdom, and cultural affirmations carried through generations. In a world often quick to overlook or erase African contributions, this book stands as a powerful reminder of the intellect, wit, and deep philosophy embedded in everyday African speech. These proverbs offer guidance, laughter, clarity, and community-if only we stop and listen. STILL. WE. RISE. Through rhythm, metaphor, and truth-telling, the voices of the past reach out to shape the present. Let this work remind us that our stories, our languages, and our lessons are sacred. We are committed to sharing with all who are ready to receive them.

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil's party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C. S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him. The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying. Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

No one before or after Kurt Tucholsky has captured the horrors of the "Great War," as World War I was known, quite like he did. The famed Weimar writer, who would become one of Germany's best-known satirist and journalists, describes surviving in the trenches and fighting a losing battle, the arrogance of the officers and the desperation of the loved ones back home. His writing is similar to that of Heinrich Heine, his role model, in that it appears superficially simple but is replete with hidden meanings. His works are touching, stirring, and precisely to the point. He brings alive the war that still looms even into our own 21st century. This is the first bilingual anthology in German and in English of his works on World War I. The First World War was the "Great War". Everything that happened after this war, even into our own 21st century, is contingent on the years between 1914 and 1918. The Great War also shaped Kurt Tucholsky who emerged from the war.. His style is biting, satirical, and penetrating, full of Berlin gallows humor. This bilingual anthology contains English translation of his short stories as well as a rendition of his poetry about World War I, all representative of his style.

This book "" The Janitor's Boy, and Other Poems "", has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies and hence the text is clear and readable.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Poetry. CAMERA is both paean and lament for a world in flux. To render such a world with its unresolvable tensions between time's embodiment and erasure is the focus of the collection. What does it mean to hold many irreconcilable presences? The task is to measure small changes, arrivals and departures. The work is a border between existence and disappearance. Moments named and described are "framed." Though the created world with its emotional truths will not last, it is a topography of words and a realm of heightened scrutiny. To hold and revere its presence is the poem's agency. A world is predicated by representation of nature, seasons, ritual, location, and the arts. Loss looming, love is attention given and the human bond holding writer and reader. "'I lifted to mind a piece of bright blue air, ' wrote Robert Creeley, in a line Maxine Chernoff quotes in CAMERA. It's apt: this is a book full of air and breezes, populated with doves and thrushes, swallows and crows. It's an earthy book, too, where tender roots push through an eroticized earth ('thigh of hill/breast of leaves/belly of witness'). It's never just a book of the body, though, or of the material world: each sharply sensed moment spirals out into history, geography, biology, or grief. It is a book where the world aspires to be voiced, and where words 'send their tendrils toward the next refrain.' CAMERA lifts a world to mind, and holds it there." --Robert Archambeau

Poetry. "Maxine Chernoff's THE TURNING turns at the moment 'when we survive our disappearances,' 'when murder chastises history,' in other words, right now - when all that's left is the leveled playing field of the page, where graffiti scrawled on a wall is just as likely to carry import as Kristeva or Emerson or 'memory or Memorex.' In stanzas taut as guitar strings - or purse strings pulled tight against the chest - these poems recall a kind of classic Ahkmatovan cry (though they never plangent) combined with a Tsvetaeva-like pluckiness, all of which gets overridden by Chernoff's supreme humanity, ferocity, intelligence, wit, honesty: 'I had thought I knew how the world would end, but all I really know is how to stare and point.' Then the book takes yet another turn, beyond the staring and pointing" - Gillian Conoley.

In the years between 1929 and 1939, when Itzik Manger wrote most of the poetry and fiction that made him famous, his name among Yiddish readers was a household word. Called the Shelley of Yiddish, he was characterized as being "drunk with talent." This book -- the first full-length anthology of Manger's work -- displays the full range of his genius in poetry, fiction, and criticism. The book begins with an extensive historical, biographical, and literary-critical introduction to Manger's work. There are then excerpts from a novel, The Book of Paradise, three short stories, autobiographical essays, critical essays, and finally, Manger's magnificent poetry -- ballads, bible poems, personal lyrics, and the Megilla Songs. These works, which have the patina of myths acquired ages ago, also offer modern psychological insight and irrepressible humor. With Manger we make the leap into the Jewish twentieth century, as he recreates the past in all its layered expressiveness and interprets it with modernist sensibilities.

Allen Grossman's revered position as both poet and professor of poetry gives him unusual importance in the landscape of contemporary American poetry. In this new collection, Grossman revisits the "Long Schoolroom" of poetic principle - where he eventually learned to reconsider the notion that poetry was cultural work of the kind that contributed unambiguously to the peace of the world. According to Grossman, violence arises not merely from the "barbarian" outside of the culture the poet serves, but from the inner logic of that culture; not, as he would say now, from the defeat of cultural membership but from the terms of cultural membership itself.

The U.S. occupation of Japan transformed a brutal war charged with overt racism into an amicable peace in which the issue of race seemed to have disappeared. During the Occupation, the problem of racial relations between Americans and Japanese was suppressed and the mutual racism transformed into something of a taboo so that the two former enemies could collaborate in creating democracy in postwar Japan. In the 1980s, however, when Japan increased its investment in the American market, the world witnessed a revival of the rhetoric of U.S.-Japanese racial confrontation. Koshiro argues that this perceived economic aggression awoke the dormant racism that lay beneath the deceptively smooth cooperation between the two cultures. This pathbreaking study is the first to explore the issue of racism in U.S.-Japanese relations. With access to unexplored sources in both Japanese and English, Koshiro is able to create a truly international and cross-cultural study of history and international relations.

"A satiric and searing collection of poetry obsessed with television, oceans, Jewish history, and time. In Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Aaron Kreuter asks the hard questions: will the Anthropocene have a laugh track? Is it okay to marry your eighteenth cousin? How different would the world look from outside the life-frame of the human? What is it like to have an acid trip in a porta potty? Is it the end . . . of Earth? Of capitalism? Of television? Throughout Kreuter’s sophomore collection, the TV remote is never far. Shifting Baseline Syndrome is both searching and searing, veering between satire and sincerity, history and prophecy, and human and non-human worlds. As the end looms, Kreuter demonstrates why we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done: hoping, for once, that the series finale will be good."--

"One might think of Alan Sondheim as the Joyce of our time. Too big while he?s here among us, or while we?re here among him, to get our heads around what he?s done and is doingEOn the other hand, it?s clear he doesn?t want to be our Joyce at all, in deliberate, un-scrolling process as he is of immolating himself, incinerating any last trace of canonical identity in a stupendous bonfire of poetry, code, and secret philosophy. What OJoyceO shall be left? What OSondheimO? A monk burns in full view and the blaze refuses to go out. We?re here watching, startled and baffled, contemptuous and titillated. That we don?t quite know what fuels the seemingly mystical act renders the transfiguration all the more unsettling and marvelous. -- Kent JohnsonSondheim's writing refreshes. Narrative or persistent personality the reader constructs will resist. It's funny output, coded, destabilizing. It projects, expands and redirects personal need, hunger amidst insubstantial plenty, where the real material is imaginary.Writing without purpose; purposeful writing; not delivery of contentment or white space infill. Writing as individuation of multipliers where what is familiar is parodic as it is manifested, cyborgian tenacity creating its selves in process awareness, sans merci.I is mindful of being confederated awareness. Peripheral desiring bodies remain animal, alone and palely loitering during downtime, mammals with machines, sensuous making intellects. -- Lawrence UptonAlan Sondheim is a force of nature: a Category 5 mindstorm blowing in from all points of the compass at once. Coded and plain-speaking, philosophical and emotional, artistic and banal: to read Sondheim is to fall through a wormhole into a full world. And why shouldn't a work of art be a world? His art is writing as a performance act even more direct than Allen Ginsberg speaking into his tape recorder. A storming virtuosity of ideas. Be shelled. (ksh to be specific.) Complex and simple, digital and just plain talking, Jeremiah and the static. At this time of continuing doom, the storm we need to blow us clean. -- Jim Rosenberg"