The Poetics Of Fire

In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize–winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism as well as European and Mesoamerican perspectives on food and place. Assembling a rich collection of source material, Valle highlights the fiery fruit’s overarching importance as evidenced by the ubiquity of references to the plant over several centuries in literature, art, official documents, and more to offer a new eco-aesthetic reading—a reframing of culinary history from a pluralistic, non-Western perspective.

"[Bachelard] is neither a self-confessed and tortured atheist like Satre, nor, like Chardin, a heretic combining a belief in God with a proficiency in modern science. But, within the French context, he is almost as important as they are because he has a pseudo-religious force, without taking a stand on religion. To define him as briefly as possible – he is a philosopher, with a professional training in the sciences, who devoted most of the second phase of his career to promoting that aspect of human nature which often seems most inimical to science: the poetic imagination ..." – J.G. Weightman, The New York Times Review of Books

The publication of FRAGMENTS OF A POETICS OF FIRE is a milestone in Bachelard studies that will influence the way we think about his themes & method for a long time to come. Dissatisfied with his earlier attempt to come to terms with the element of fire in "The Psychoanalysis of Fire" (1937), Bachelard returned to this theme in the book he was working on at the time of his death in 1962. Because of delays in &, eventually, the abandonment of a projected edition of his complete works, these FRAGMENTS OF A POETICS OF FIRE remained unpublished & their very existence unknown to all but a handful of Bachelard's readers. The author's daughter, Suzanne Bachelard, edited them for separate publication over a quarter-century later in 1988. For the first time we have an insight into the way Bachelard constructed his remarkable books. Miss Bachelard's introduction & extensive notes are an indispensable guide to the workings of his mind as "he shapes a meandering series of observations on the phoenix, Prometheus, & Empedocles into a coherent & engaging structure that respects the fluidity & openness of a living image - the powerful image of fire."

Winner of the Griffin Poetry Trust’s International Poetry Prize (2014) Runner-up for the Northern California Book Reviewers Northern California Book Award (2014) Fire— its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms—is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman’s masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes—Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water—have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader’s companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.

This collection of papers responds to the question of whether a ritual at the end of a text can offer resolution and order or rather a complicated kind of closure. It reveals that ritual can bring but also can thwart closure by alluding to new beginnings. A ritual could be a perfect kind of ending but it hardly ever seems to be. In Flavian literature this is even more apparent because of the complicated political background under which these texts were produced. Ancient religious practices in the closing sections of Flavian texts help us create connections between endings and (new) beginnings, order and disorder, binding and loosening, structure and dissolution which reflects the structure of the Empire in Flavian Rome. Overall, this volume offers a new tool for studying literary endings through ritual, which promotes our understanding of Flavian culture and politics as well as creating a new perception of the use of religion and ritual in Flavian literature: instead of giving a sense of closure, this volume argues that ritual is a medium to increase complexity, to expose ritual actors and to project a generic riskiness of ritual actors also onto the epic actors who are acting before and mostly after a ritual scene.

The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces. "A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe 6473-4 / $15.00tx / paperback