"Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays."--From jacket flap.

A major new collection of poems about women's lives and the closing circle of nature, from a bestselling poet. These poems celebrate the beauties of nature and the eternal cycle of love, death and birth that is being interrupted by the assault on the environment.

William Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey. As well as being a poet he painted and maintained a lifelong interest in it. Williams was also a physician in both paediatrics and general medicine. He served at the Passaic General Hospital in Passaic, New Jersey as chief of paediatrics from 1924 until his death. Williams is most well-known for his poems that are closely associated with the Modernism and Imagism movements. In addition to poetry he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and worked on translations. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the Imagist movement via friendships with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Soon his opinions moved away from theirs and his style began to confirm his alignment to a modernist expression of his surrounding environment. From the late 40's health became a major issue in his life but with himself as the patient. He suffered a heart attack in 1948 and, after 1949, a series of strokes. One such stoke in 1953 left him in hospital for four months and brought about severe depression. In these later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets especially the American literary movements of the 1950s; the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. One of Williams's most productive relationships was with fellow New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth volume of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956. William Carlos Williams died on March 4th, 1963, at the age of 79 at his home in Rutherford. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

Broken Theory is a jettisoned collection of fragmentary writing, collected and collaged by new media artist, writer, musician, and theorist Alan Sondheim. Folding theoretical musings, text experiments, and personal confessions into a single textual flow, it examines the somatic foundations of philosophical theory and theorizing, discussing their relationships to the writer and body, and to the phenomenology of failure and fragility of philosophy's production. Writing remains writing, undercuts and corrects itself, is always superseded, always produced within an untoward and bespoke silo - not as an inconceivable last word, but instead a broken contribution to philosophical thinking. The book is based on fragmentation and collapse, displacing annihilation and wandering towards a form of "roiling" within which the text teeters on the verge of disintegration. In other words, the writing develops momentary scaffoldings - writing shored up by the very mechanisms that threaten its disappearance. Broken Theory is prefaced by a text from Maria Damon and followed by an extensive interview with art historian Ryan Whyte. Alan Sondheim is a new media artist, theorist, and writer concerned with the phenomenology of the virtual. He has collaborated with motion capture and virtual environment labs. His work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual; with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed reality and codework. His writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that partially appear within and determine the surface. This style embeds interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal systems. The textual body, body of text and writer, are deeply entangled. His current work is based on the psychogeography of real and virtual worlds and their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting" - the body behind the virtual/symbolic body - and modes of viral dispersion in a series of videos and texts. Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, attended Brown University, and has exhibited, taught, and lectured at a number of venues in the United States and abroad.