Poetry & Performance
A Dead Name That Learned How To Live
$20.00
–from SUPER-HUMAN
An honest lyric, a mighty harpoon straight from the heart, Golden’s debut full-length, A Dead Name That Learned How To Live weaves poems, family photographs, and self-portraits to share a journey of survival and living in the American south. Exploring themes of loss and legacy, nation and love language, forgiveness and fortitude, Blackness and being, Golden continually asks–What shifts within and around us when we choose to name ourselves and our kin here–our tragedy and triumphs, our human failures and feelings, our desires to be free? Releasing on their parent’s 30th wedding anniversary (August 29th, 2022) as a dedicated love letter and living archive, this debut is an awe and ode towards southern Virginia & Eastern Shore Maryland, Black family pasts, presents, and futures, to Black queer beginnings and belongings outside and within the family home.
By Golden
Published by Game Over Books, 2022
A Short Biography of Henry David Thoreau
$9.95
This short biography chronicles the life of Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) the 19th Century writer and philosopher from Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was best known as a Naturalist, and his journals are filled with daily observations of the flora and fauna of Concord. He was also an Abolitionist and was involved with the Underground Railroad; his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” would influence Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 20th Century.
The Short Biographies series from Applewood's Benna Books imprint features short, intriguing, and entertaining biographies of world-renowned figures. Each beautiful hardcover book includes an interesting retelling of a single person's life, suitable for young adults and adults alike. These little gems will become beloved souvenirs of a favorite artist.
By Richard Smith
Part of the Short Biographies Series
32 pages
Published by Applewood Books, 2018
Hardcover
4.2 x 0.3 x 5.8 inches
Call Us What We Carry
$24.99
The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman
Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
By Amanda Gorman
240 pages
Published by Viking Books, 2021
Hardcover
5.94 x 0.95 x 8.56 inches
Degas at the Opera
$60.00
A lavish new investigation into the Paris Opera’s influence on Edgar Degas's painting.
From his debut in the 1860s up to his final works after 1900, the Paris Opera formed a focal point of Edgar Degas's paintings. He explored the theater's various spaces―auditorium and stage, private boxes, foyers, and dance studios―and painted those who frequented them: dancers, singers, orchestral musicians, audience members, and subscribers watching from the wings. This theater presented a microcosm of infinite possibilities, allowing him to experiment with multiple points of view, contrasting lighting, motion, and the precision of movement.
This catalog, created in concert with an exhibition at the Muse´e d'Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, considers the Paris Opera’s influence on Degas as a whole, examining not only his passionate relationship with the house and his musical tastes, but also the infinite resources of the opera's marvelous toolbox. Filled with striking reproductions of Degas’s work and including insightful essays by leading curators and scholars, Degas at the Opera offers admission into the world of Degas and the Paris Opera of the nineteenth century.
By Henri Loyrette
320 pages
Published by Thames & Hudson, 2020
Hardcover
10.1 x 1.4 x 12 inches
Don't Call Us Dead: Poems
$16.00
“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood―and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America―“Dear White America”―where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
By Danez Smith
96 pages
Published by Graywolf Press, 2017
Paperback
6.61 x 0.31 x 8.99 inches
Felon
$15.95
One of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2020Winner of the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry
A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).
Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.
The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.
Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."
Written by Reginald Dwayne Betts112 pages
Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2019
Paperback
6.2 x 8.3 inches
Handel and Haydn Society
$40.00
Founded in 1815, the Handel and Haydn Society is the oldest continuously performing arts organization in America. The book brings to life the rich history of this venerable organization. Building on the music of Handel (the classical forefather) and Haydn (the innovator), H&H has grown and changed over the years to become today's foremost exponent of Baroque and Classical music and the leading period instrument orchestra and chorus in America. H&H has been a leader in music education and in its dissemination, publishing historic music collections in the early nineteenth century. The twentieth century brought important H&H recordings and television broadcasts. With the arrival of Thomas Dunn as music director and his commitment to early music practices, a new era focused on historically informed performance began. That practice flourished under Christopher Hogwood and continues today under Harry Christophers.Edited by Teresa M. Neff and Jan Swafford
245 pages
Published by David R. Godine, 2014
Hardcover
8.71 x 0.97 x 12.86 inches
Homie: Poems
$16.00
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Poetry
Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family―blood and chosen―arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.
By Danez Smith
96 pages
Published by Graywolf Press, 2020
Paperback
6.5 x 0.85 x 8.95 inches
Inferno: The Divine Comedy I
$30.00
Describing Dante’s descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.
By Dante Alighieri576 pages
Published by Penguin Random House
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Jabberwalking
$14.99
Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Mexican-American Poet Laureate in the USA, is sharing secrets: how to turn your wonder at the world around you into weird, wild, incandescent poetry.
Can you walk and talk at the same time? How about Jabber Walk? Can you write and draw and walk and journal all at the same time? If not, you’re in luck: exuberant, blue-cheesy cilantro man Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, is here to teach you everything he knows about being a real-life, bonified, jabberwalking poet! Jabberwalkers write and speak for themselves and others no matter where their feet may take them — to jabberwalk is to be a poet on the move. And there’s no stopping once you’re a Jabberwalker, writing fast, fast, fast, scribble-poem-burbles-on-the-run. Scribble what you see! Scribble what you hear! It’s all out there — vámonos!
Written by Juan Felipe Herrerea
144 Pages
Published by Candlewick, 2018
Paperback
9 x 10 inches
Leopold Mozart
$21.95
Leopold Mozart (1719-1787) was undoubtedly one of the most interesting and versatile personalities of his time. He was the author of a "violin tutor," renowned and used throughout Europe, and also a productive composer, long-serving court musician and violist, deputy kapellmeister, and a skilled engraver and copyist of music notation. Moreover, he was a successful teacher, wise educator and promoter of his gifted children, a highly regarded scholar, an attentive observer, and an excellent letter writer. He was a loving husband and a caring, occasionally authoritarian father, a convivial host, an educated reader, an art collector, and an enthusiastic theater- and opera-goer. He created a wide circle of contacts and was an ambitious and prudent organizer of journeys and concerts. He was a devout Catholic, Freemason, provocative citizen, free thinker, and a man of the Enlightenment, who supported colleagues as well as widows and orphans of musicians. This book makes the first comprehensive study of all these aspects, in part little known, of the eventful life of Leopold Mozart.
Written by Anja Morgenstern208 pages
Published by Independent Publishers Group
Paperback
6.75 x 8.25 inches
Music, Sound, and Technology in America
$29.95
A documentary history of early photograph, cinema, and radio
This unique anthology assembles primary documents chronicling the development of the photograph, film sound, and the radio. These three sound technologies shaped Americans' relation to music from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, by which time the technologies were thoroughly integrated into everyday life. There are more that 120 selections between the collection's first piece, an article on the phonograph written by Thomas Edison in 1878, and its last, a column advising listeners "desirous of gaining more from music a presented by the radio." Taken together, the selections capture how the new sound technologies were shaped by developments such as urbanization, the increasing value placed on leisure time, and the rise of the advertising industry. ore importantly, they depict the ways that the new sound technologies were received by real people in particular places and moments in time.
Editors: Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, Tony Grajeda432 pages
Published by Duke University Press, 2012
Paperback
6.1 x 9.2 inches
Opera: The Definitive Illustrative Story
$50.00
Immerse yourself in more than 400 years of the world’s most celebrated operas and discover the fascinating stories behind them. Explore the lives of singers such as Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, and Jonas Kaufmann. Meet composers like Mozart, Wagner, and Britten, and the librettists with whom they collaborated to create the magical blend of words and music that make up opera.
From its origins in the 17th-century courts of Italy to live screenings in public spaces today, Opera: The Definitive Illustrated Story follows the history of opera from Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo in 1607, to Cosi fan Tutte, La Bohème, and modern operas such as Brokeback Mountain. It explains musical terminology, traces historical developments, and sets everything in a cultural context.
By Alan Riding and Leslie Dunton-Downer
360 pages
Published by DK, 2022
Hardcover
9.5 x 1.12 x 11.37 inches
Painting The Stage: Artists as Stage Designers
$70.00
From the 19th century to the present day, the meeting of music and the avant-garde visual arts has produced groundbreaking innovations in both fields. Nowhere is this meeting of the arts as intense as it is on the operatic stage.Painting the Stage charts the close and catalytic relationship between opera and the visual arts from Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 19th-century stage designs for Mozart’s Magic Flute to William Kentridge’s 21st-century operas (with artists such as André Derain, Balthus, Salvador Dalí, André Masson, Oskar Kokoschka, Robert Indiana, David Hockney and Robert Wilson appearing in between). At the end of the book, a series of interviews with contemporary artists such as William Kentridge, Daniel Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Bill Viola and Robert Longo show that opera today, more than ever, is a form of Gesamtkunswerk or “total art,” beyond what Wagner could ever have imagined.
By Denise Wendel-Poray
280 pages
Published by Skira, 2019
Hardcover
7.5 x 1.4 x 10.1 inches
Paradise Lost
$25.00
In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties—blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, and briefly in danger of execution—Paradise Lost’s apparent ambivalence toward authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to “justify the ways of God to men,” or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.
Written by John Milton512 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2016
Cloth Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Porsha Olayiwola: i shimmer sometimes, too
$16.00
Porsha Olayiwola’s debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands deep into the fabric of black womanhood, pulling out all of its threads. This book establishes Porsha Olayiwola firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, pulling equally from Audre Lorde and Danez Smith.
This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self-care, and community-care―the pursuit of building a world that will keep you alive.
Porsha Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston.
Written by Porsha Olayiwola96 pages
Published by Button Poetry, 2019
Paperback
8.5 x 5.5 inches
Rabindranath Tagore
$19.00
Polymath Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. But Tagore was much more than a writer. Through his poems, novels, short stories, poetic songs, dance-dramas, and paintings, he transformed Bengali literature and Indian art. He was instrumental in bringing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he strove to create a less divided society through mutual respect and understanding, following the example of his great contemporary and close friend, Mahatma Gandhi.
In this timely reappraisal of Tagore’s life and work, Bashabi Fraser assesses Tagore’s many activities and shows how he embodies the modern consciousness of India. She examines his upbringing in Bengal, his role in Indian politics, and his interests in international relationships. Taking a holistic perspective, she also addresses some of the misreadings of his extraordinary life and work.
256 pages
Published by Chicago University Press
Paperback
5 x 7.75 inches
Tennyson and His Circle
$19.95
Tennyson's ascendancy as England's foremost poet coincided with one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century: photography. As Poet Laureate, Tennyson and those who moved in his circle became targets for the photographers lens. The resulting portraits by such pioneering spirits as Julia Margaret Cameron, offer a fascinating insight into an age when England felt itself to be the envy of the world. Lynne Truss's insightful and often amusing text captures the spirit of the age through images of the famous, and provides a glimpse into the lives of a group of people crossing the threshold into the modern world.
Written by Lynne Truss120 pages
Published by National Portrait Gallery Companions, 2014
Paperback
5 x 7 inches
The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses
$32.00
T.S. Eliot wrote "Perhaps confessions by poets of what Dante has meant to them may even contribute something to the appreciation of Dante himself." The great fourteenth century poet has been an unequaled influence on many writers in the twentieth century, whose "confessions" may well foster a deeper appreciation of Dante.Previously published essays by some of this century's most renowned poets—Pound, Eliot, Mandelstam, Robert Fitzgerald, Borges, Merrill, Montale, Lowell, Duncan, Auden, Yeats, Charles Williams, Nemerov, Heaney—join new essays commissioned by the editors. Contemporary poets Mary Campbell, W. S. Di Piero, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, Alan Williamson, and Charles Wright reflect on Dante as well as on their own complex (and often contentious) relationship to his legacy. Their engagement with his work offers a fresh perspective on the Commedia and its author that more academic writing does not provide.
As the editors write, a new consideration of Dante "should generate insights not only about his work but also about poetry written in our own language and time."
Edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff
432 pages
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
Paperback
5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
The Rodent Not Taken & Other Poems by Cats
$12.95
A treasure trove of cat poetry, hidden from human eyes until now, reveals the humor and pathos of feline life.
Curated by New York Times best-selling author Jennifer McCartney, this collection of poems―discovered at a cat cafe´ in Milan, Italy―showcases the breathtaking skill, witty intelligence, and breadth of knowledge possessed by the cat mind. McCartney knew she’d found something special as she translated the feline riffs on famous poems, beat poetry, rhyming verse, haikus, and limericks. From musings on a tardy dinner (“Feed Me”) to a trip to the vet (“A Cat’s Revenge”), the “clueless yammering” of sparrows in a birdbath to the pleasures of an empty box, these are special additions to the genre. Soon, in fact, the scribe was inspired to add some work of her own, as well as charming line drawings and photographs. This slim volume will entice anyone enamored of poesy and the fine arts―particularly cats, or people who like cats.By Jennifer McCartney
96 pages
Published Countryman Press, 2021
Hardcover
5.3 x 0.5 x 7.4 inches
The Sonnets & A Lover's Complaints
$23.00
When this volume of Shakespeare’s poems first appeared in 1609, he had already written most of the great plays that made him famous. The 154 sonnets – all but two of which are addressed to a beautiful young man or a treacherous ‘dark lady’ – contain some of the most exquisite and haunting poetry ever written, and deal with eternal subjects such as love and infidelity, memory and mortality, and the destruction wreaked by Time. Also included is A Lover’s Complaint, originally published with the sonnets, in which a young woman is overheard lamenting her betrayal by a heartless seducer.
Written by William Shakespeare
272 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Titian Metamorphosis: Art, Music, Dance
$40.00
This beautiful publication celebrates a unique collaboration between two of London’s greatest cultural institutions. Together The Royal Ballet and the National Gallery commissioned three acclaimed contemporary artists – Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger – to work with international choreographers and composers to create three new ballets inspired by the Titian paintings Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon and The Death of Actaeon. As well as designing all the sets and costumes, the artists also produced new works in response to Titian’s masterpieces for a show at the National Gallery.
The book tells the story of this extraordinary, complex project from conception to stage and gallery. The artists’ notebooks, sketches and other material from the studio are reproduced to show how they evolved their initial ideas into working designs. Numerous views of the dancers’ rehearsals, the creation of the sets and the gallery installations, as well as dozens of unseen photographs of the performances themselves, take the reader behind the scenes to see the many processes and people involved in transforming the artists’ vision into a finished production.
All three creative teams offer their own reflections on the project and on working with very different art forms. An introduction by National Gallery curator and originator of the project, Dr. Minna Moore Ede, explains how the collaboration came to fruition and unfolded. A foreword by Dame Monica Mason, outgoing director of The Royal Ballet, completes this stunning volume.
Edited and with introduction by Minna Moore Ede. Foreword by Monica Mason.182 pages
Published by Art/Books, 2013
Hardcover
8.75 x 11 inches
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