Is there anything cozier than a chilly day, a cup of hot cider and a really good book?
As the Colorado State University community settles into fall break, consider completing your autumn reading list with a book (or six!) by our accomplished English faculty and alumni.
Whether you’re in the mood to be mesmerized by the poetic, drawn into short stories that center complicated and fascinating characters or explore the rhetoric of advocacy and activism—there’s a lot of great writing to be thankful for this season. Happy reading!
New books from CSU English faculty & alumni
Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho
Translated by Professor and University Distinguished Teaching Scholar Dan Beachy-Quick
Published by Tupelo Press, June 2023
From the publisher: Dan Beachy-Quick writes, “There are depths within the denotative life of Greek words that English seldom allows readers in translation to access. At some basic level, I wanted to offer a translation that traced out some of those complexities into an apprehendable substance in the poems themselves—sometimes by allowing an image to unfold more fully than is the norm, at other times by giving some sense of a word’s complicated life, the compound nature of the Greek language, or by translating the same line in multiple ways. The hope, far-fetched as it might be, is to give a reader in English some semblance of how an ancient Greek listener might hear these songs. I’ve also veered away from the various traditions of ordering the poems. I’ve clustered them into groups that seem to loosely trace the entirety of life, from childhood to older age, from the birth of desire to the fear of no longer being desirable. In a quiet way, I mean the book to read as a kind novel, a bildungsroman, so that a larger sense of the life—the poem of the life—becomes palpable.”
Buy the book here!
Wonder About The
By Professor Matthew Cooperman
Published by Middle Creek Publishing, June 2023
From the publisher: Wonder About The is firmly planted in both the prehistoric and contemporary body of the American west. This collection represents Colorado stitched by threads of the water cycle, explored with an intimacy and depth that penetrates both substrata and cell walls and which pushes the interdisciplinary boundaries of poetry to shine light on interconnectedness.
Wonder About The presses light against contention — undermines, cleanses. Lament speaks as we awaken to the knowledge that “what surrounds us surrounds / us becomes us larger.” We see the precipice our children inhabit and inherit “our children— / our desperate thirsts / our raveling threads / our children.” In brilliant defiance, Cooperman refines the dialectic: “inform the shareholders/ what we share we hold.”
Buy the book here!
This Is Salvaged: Stories
By Visiting Assistant Professor Vauhini Vara
Published by W.W. Norton, September 2023
From the publisher: Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.
Buy the book here!
Arguing Identity and Human Rights: Among Rival Options
By Associate Professor Doug Cloud
Published by Routledge, September 2023
From the publisher: Arguing Identity and Human Rights poses open questions about how to best argue for human rights, to help us think through the advantages and trade-offs of different rhetorical strategies, identify rival options, and, ultimately, choose our own paths.
Modeling a humane approach to human rights argument, this book offers four deep rhetorical analyses of some of the most vexing and fascinating challenges facing human rights arguers in the United States: How do we want to frame difference in human rights advocacy―are we trying to downplay difference or something else? How can we best answer dismissive responses to human rights arguments? Should we portray people in marginalized categories as having “no choice” about their identity, and what would alternatives look like? What are the possibilities and perils of trying to “afflict” audiences with hegemonic identities to persuade them on human rights issues? Offering clear practical and theoretical implications while resisting easy answers, the book provides a concise introduction to the relationship between identity, discourse, and social change.
Buy the book here!
Systems Shift: Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration
Edited by Associate Director of Composition and Associate Professor Genesea M. Carter and Aurora Matzke
Published by WAC Clearinghouse, September 2023
From the publisher: This collection extends the discourse on systems within the field of rhetoric and composition by drawing connections among the administrative work we do, the values we hold, and the systems that shape our work and ourselves. The contributors to this collection consider how rhetoric and composition administrators’ change-making efforts address, among other activities, equitable labor and working conditions, student and/or faculty retention, curriculum development and redesign, program assessment, professional development support, and mental and/or physical well-being. They explore how these efforts are embodied acts that interact with and participate in systems and networks that often remain unacknowledged even as those within these systems and networks actively work against that oppression. Recognizing that systems and networks can at times supersede administrator, faculty, and student consensus for change, each chapter includes recommendations for addressing the complexities involved in working toward a more just workplace and profession.
Read online here!
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis
By Kelly Weber (M.F.A., ’19)
Forthcoming by Omnidawn Publishing, December 2023
From the publisher: Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones littering the highways, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queer platonic intimacy and chronic illness. Looking at art and friendship, Kelly Weber’s poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. Considering the meeting place of radiological light and sunlit meadows, the asexual speaker’s body, and fox skeletons, these poems imagine possible forms of love. With the body caught in medical crisis and ecological catastrophe, Weber questions how to create a poetry fashioned both despite and out of endings.
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Mary Jo Bang.
Preorder the book here!
Study English at CSU
The CSU Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts is a vibrant community of critical thinkers pursuing works of creative artistry and interdisciplinary scholarship within and beyond CSU. Learn more about the department’s undergraduate and graduate programs—and our distinguished faculty.
