The Unstill Ones

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English, The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet Miller Oberman’s startlingly fresh translations of well-known and less familiar Old English poems often move between archaic and contemporary diction, while his original poems frequently draw on a compressed, tactile Old English lexicon and the powerful formal qualities of medieval verse. Shaped by Oberman’s scholarly training in poetry, medieval language, translation, and queer theory, these remarkable poems explore sites of damage and transformation, both new and ancient. “Wulf and Eadwacer,” a radical new translation of a thousand-year-old lyric, merges scholarly practice with a queer- and feminist-inspired rendering, while original poems such as “On Trans” draw lyrical connections between multiple processes of change and boundary crossing, from translation to transgender identity. Richly combining scholarly rigor, a finely tuned contemporary aesthetic, and an inventiveness that springs from a deep knowledge of the earliest forms of English, The Unstill Ones marks the emergence of a major new voice in poetry.

The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new.

"Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints [a] ... portrait of her charismatic father--the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and director of his own art museum in California]-- ... the generation of modern artists he championed, and the daughter whose life he shaped"--Dust jacket flap.

A new addition to the Made Easy series, this book will teach readers about the ancient power of Northern traditions, the runes and their magic. This is your key to unlocking the ancient power and wisdom of the runes and their magic. Learn how to use them for divination, guidance and more. The runes are some of the most powerful tools available to you. They are more than just a method of words and writing: each rune has a phonetic sound, similar to the sounds heard in Norwegian or Icelandic. They were used to communicate, for divination, to provide guidance and were also bound together to make magic spells. In this insightful, practical book, Rich Lister will provide you with a resource that you can use to build your knowledge and develop your own relationship with the runes. In Runes Made Easy, you will discover: an introduction to Norse mythology and the role of the runes within it how to use and work with each rune how to make your own set of runes, which materials to use and how the material you choose impacts the energy and resonance of the runes the characteristics and meaning of each of the 24 Elder Furtharc runes how to set an intention for your rune use The runes, if used and treated with respect and honour, provide a support system and life-navigation tool. When you learn how to use them, you'll receive the guidance and answers you've been looking for. 'Rich is the real deal. He's a Viking warrior with a healing heart and soul.' - Kyle Gray, bestselling author of Raise Your Vibration

Humour in Old English Literature deploys modern theories of humour to explore the style and content of surviving writing from early medieval England. The book analyses Old English riddles, wisdom literature, runic writing, the deployment of rhymes, and humour in heroic poetry, hagiography, and romance. Drawing on a fine-tuned understanding of literary technique, the book presents a revisionist view of Old English literature, partly by reclaiming often-neglected texts and partly by uncovering ironies and embarrassments within well-established works, including Beowulf. Most surprisingly, Jonathan Wilcox engages the large body of didactic literature, pinpointing humour in two anonymous homilies along with extensive use in saints’ lives. Each chapter ends by revealing a different audience that would have shared in the laughter. Wilcox suggests that the humour of Old English literature has been scantily covered in past scholarship because modern readers expect a dour and serious corpus. Humour in Old English Literature aims to break that cycle by highlighting works and moments that are as entertaining now as they were then.

In this small but perfectly formed collection of supernatural short stories, Sophie Hannah takes the comforting scenes of everyday life and imbues them with a frisson of fear, then a gust of terror. Why is a young woman so unnerved by the presence of a visitors book in her boyfriend's inner-city home? And whose spidery handwriting is it that fills the pages? Who is the strangely courteous boy still lingering at a child's tenth birthday party when all the parents have gathered their children and left? And why does the presence of a perfectly ordinary woman in a post office queue leave another customer pallid and sweating with fear? Beware what you open this Christmas!

The Winter 2016 issue of Tin House features new fiction, essays, and poetry from longtime favorites and new voices. The Winter 2016 issue of Tin House features new fiction, essays, and poetry from longtime favorites and new voices. Thaw your icy heart with Tin House this Winter. Pour a mug of hot cocoa and cozy up with new fiction, essays, and poetry from fireside favorites and discover New Voices for the new year.

What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.