Oceanic New York

This volume comprises a three-fold object, Book and Ocean and New York City.If this Book were Ocean, how would it feel between your fingers? Wet and slippery, just a bit warmer or colder than the air around it, since the Ocean is our planet's greatest reservoir of heat, a sloshing insulator and incubator girdling our globe. If its pages were New York City, how would they abrade your imagination? Human and teeming, endlessly humming along with that same old tune. Imagine that these three things were one thing. All together: Book and Ocean and New York City. During the long historical pause between the day the last sailing ship docked at South Street and that day in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy brought the waves back in fury, New York turned its back on the sea. This Book remembers that the City was founded on Ocean, peopled by its currents, grew rich on its traffic. The storm taught what we should never have forgotten: under New York's asphalt lies not beach but Ocean.Oceanic New York salvages the City's salt-water past and present. It takes inspiration from Elizabeth Albert's gorgeous exhibition of historical artifacts and contemporary art, "Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City's Forgotten Waterfront," which was on display at St. John's University in Queens in Autumn 2013. Buoyed up by art, the Book plunges into the urban and oceanic. "Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon," entices our friend Ishmael. "Nothing will content [us] but the extremest limit of the land."CONTRIBUTORS include: Elizabeth Albert, Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Vanessa Daws, Lowell Duckert, Granville Ganter, Anne Harris, Jonathan Hsy, Alison Kinney, Dean Kritikos, J. Allan Mitchell, Steve Mentz, Nancy Nowacek, Julie Orlemanski, Bailey Robertson, Karl Steel, Matt Zazzarino, and Marina Zurkow.

This volume comprises a three-fold object, Book and Ocean and New York City. If this Book were Ocean, how would it feel between your fingers? Wet and slippery, just a bit warmer or colder than the air around it, since the Ocean is our planet's greatest reservoir of heat, a sloshing insulator and incubator girdling our globe. If its pages were New York City, how would they abrade your imagination? Human and teeming, endlessly humming along with that same old tune. Imagine that these three things were one thing. All together: Book and Ocean and New York City. During the long historical pause between the day the last sailing ship docked at South Street and that day in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy brought the waves back in fury, New York turned its back on the sea. This Book remembers that the City was founded on Ocean, peopled by its currents, grew rich on its traffic. The storm taught what we should never have forgotten: under New York's asphalt lies not beach but Ocean.Oceanic New York salvages the City's salt-water past and present. It takes inspiration from Elizabeth Albert's gorgeous exhibition of historical artifacts and contemporary art, "Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City's Forgotten Waterfront," which was on display at St. John's University in Queens in Autumn 2013. Buoyed up by art, the Book plunges into the urban and oceanic. "Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon," entices our friend Ishmael. "Nothing will content [us] but the extremest limit of the land."

"Nezhukumatathil’s poems contain elegant twists of a very sharp knife. She writes about the natural world and how we live in it, filling each poem, each page with a true sense of wonder." —Roxane Gay “Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush... poems. Aphorisms...from another dimension.” —The New York Times “With unparalleled ease, she’s able to weave each intriguing detail into a nuanced, thought-provoking poem that also reads like a startling modern-day fable.” —The Poetry Foundation “How wonderful to watch a writer who was already among the best young poets get even better!” —Terrance Hayes With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and the Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. From “Starfish and Coffee”: And that’s how you feel after tumbling like sea stars on the ocean floor over each other. A night where it doesn’t matter which are arms or which are legs or what radiates and how— only your centers stuck together. Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four collections of poetry. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the prestigious Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, Nezhukumatathil teaches creative writing and environmental literature in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.

The ocean has always been the harbinger of strangers to new shores. Migrations by sea have transformed modern conceptions of mobility and belonging, disrupting notions of how to write about movement, memory and displaced histories. Sea Log is a memory theater of repressive hauntings based on urban artifacts across a maritime archive of Dutch and Portuguese colonial pillage. Colonial incursions from the sea, and the postcolonial aftershocks of these violent sea histories, lie largely forgotten for most formerly colonized coastal communities around the world. Offering a feminist log of sea journeys from the Malabar Coast of South India, through the Atlantic to the North Sea, May Joseph writes a navigational history of postcolonial coastal displacements. Excavating Dutch, Portuguese, Arab, Asian and African influences along the Malabar Coast, Joseph unearths the undertow of colonialism’s ruins. In Sea Log, the Bosphorus, the Tagus and the Amstel find coherence alongside the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to historians of transnational communities, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies, anthropology of space, area studies, maritime history and postcolonial studies.