Although Neil Shepard has long been associated with the stony foundations of Vermont, both by his luminous invocations of the natural world and his Frost-worthy, densely woven lyricism, he has emerged over the course of his writing life as an intrepid, wise and wry observer of the larger world. His poems are expansive, meticulous in their emotional cartography, and always historically resonant while still discovering those troubled reckonings of the self in motion, in travel. What emerges is nothing less than an ethical aesthetic, a narrative architecture that constellates around a strong moral center even as, at times, the poet's confidence in that center quietly dissolves in the deep bath of experience. Yet this impeccably crafted collection remains the voice of a mature, hard-won, and individual poetic resolve.-David St. John.
Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos—our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today’s sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what’s won, what’s lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries.
Hominid Up, Neil Shepard's sixth book of poetry, turns a nightmared, insomniac eye on both urban and rural landscapes: from the brassy multitudes of Manhattan, to the cruise-ship crowds along the East Coast, to the lone man standing in a northern stream amidst its shush and thrum. At the heart of this book is a darkly political vision of post-millennial America, exploring the tensions and flashpoints of class and race that lead us toward our days of reckoning. Neil Shepard directed the BFA Writing Program at Johnson State College. He currently teaches in the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Wilkes University (PA), and he is the founder and long-time editor of Green Mountains Review.
Neil Shepard's fourth collection of poetry gathers together many of his foreign poems in a book about travel and stasis. As the parentheses in the title suggest, it is also about the unraveling of identity as the traveler loses his cultural bearings and then the reintegration (raveling) of identity as the strange grows gradually familiar. Since this is a book of journeying, the architectural device is to group the poems by the metaphoric conceit of a life-journey: poems whose preoccupations seem mainly youthful (with youth's attendant desires and sensuality); poems specific to adult concerns (with a focus on politics, war, arts, or philosophy); poems of old age and death, and poems of the after-world.
Neil Waldman reveals how his passion for art emerged in the kitchen of his family's apartment, where he discovered the work of Vincent Van Gogh and the ability to use illustration as a means to escape the sadness that plagued his home.
This collection of thirty-eight terrifying tales of serial killers at large, written by the great masters of the genre, plumbs the horrifying depths of a deranged mind and the forces of evil that compel a human being to murder, gruesomely and methodically, over and over again. From Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs) to Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), stories of serial killers and psychos loom large and menacing in our collective psyche. Tales of their grisly conquests have kept us cowering under the covers, but still turning the pages. Psychos is the first book to collect in a single volume the scariest and most well-crafted fictional works about these deranged killers. Some of the stories are classics, the best that the genre has to offer, by renowned writers such as Neil Gaiman, Amelia Beamer, Robert Bloch, and Thomas Harris. Other selections are from the latest and most promising crop of new authors. John Skipp, who is also the editor of Zombies, Demons and Werewolves and Shapeshifters, provides fascinating insight, through two nonfiction essays, into our insatiable obsession with serial killers and how these madmen are portrayed in popular culture. Resources at the end of the book includes lists of the genre's best long-form fiction, movies, websites, and writers.
Usable Social Science represents a remarkable collaboration between Neil J. Smelser, one of America’s most distinguished sociologists, and John Reed, a highly successful member of corporate America. Together, they accomplish an even more remarkable feat of making accumulated social science knowledge accessible to non-academics while, at the same time, making an academic contribution to the social sciences by reviewing the history, accumulated findings, and conceptual approaches in key areas of specialization in sociology and elsewhere in the social sciences."—Jonathan H. Turner, University Professor & Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside. “This book is an ambitious project to provide the public with a review of the available and practicable knowledge for decision-making people (and who is not that today?) that the social sciences have produced over the last 250 years or so. Typically, such efforts are bound to fail. But this project is a full success, keeping its promise to present knowledge in an understandable and exciting way. The language is charming and the elegant prose is the product of a fluent, transparent style. In short: a must read!”—Hans-Peter Mueller, Professor of sociology, Humboldt-University of Berlin.
Traces the history of the United States during the 1970s as well as presenting primary source material such as memoirs, letters, news articles, and speeches.
Shortlisted for the Saltire Society History Book of the Year The legendary Scottish king Máel Coluim III, also known as 'Malcolm Canmore', is often held to epitomise Scotland's 'ancient Gaelic kings'. But Máel Coluim and his dynasty were in fact newcomers, and their legitimacy and status were far from secure at the beginning of his rule. Máel Coluim's long reign from 1058 until 1093 coincided with the Norman Conquest of England, a revolutionary event that presented great opportunities and terrible dangers. Although his interventions in post-Conquest England eventually cost him his life, the book argues that they were crucial to his success as both king and dynasty-builder, creating internal stability and facilitating the takeover of Strathclyde and Lothian. As a result, Máel Coluim left to his successors a territory that stretched far to the south of the kingship's heartland north of the Forth, similar to the Scotland we know today. The book explores the wider political and cultural world in which Máel Coluim lived, guiding the reader through the pitfalls and possibilities offered by the sources that mediate access to that world. Our reliance on so few texts means that the eleventh century poses problems that historians of later eras can avoid. Nevertheless Scotland in Máel Coluim's time generated unprecedented levels of attention abroad and more vernacular literary output than at any time prior to the Stewart era.
This stimulating resource presents the Looming Vulnerability Model, a nuanced take on the cognitive-behavioral conceptualization of anxiety, worry, and other responses to real or imagined threat. The core feature of the model—the perception of growing, rapidly approaching threat—is traced to humans’ evolutionary past, and this dysfunctional perception is described as it affects cognitive processing, executive functioning, emotions, physiology, and behavior. The LVM framework allows for more subtle understanding of mechanisms of and risk factors for the range of anxiety disorders as well as for more elusive subclinical forms of anxiety, worry, and fear. In addition, the authors ably demonstrate how the LVM can inform and refine cognitive-behavioral and other approaches to conceptualization, assessment, and treatment of these often disabling conditions. This important volume: · Introduces the Looming Vulnerability Model in its evolutionary, developmental, cognitive, and ecological contexts. · Unites diverse theoretical strands regarding anxiety, fear, and worry including work on wildlife behavior, experimental cognition and perception, neuroimaging, and emotion. · Defines the looming cognitive style as a core aspect of vulnerability. · Describes the measurement of the looming cognitive style, Looming Maladaptive Style Questionnaire, and measures of looming vulnerability for specific disorders. · Details diverse clinical applications of the LVM across the anxiety disorders. Spotlighting phenomena particularly relevant to current times, Looming Vulnerability, brings a wealth of important new ideas to researchers studying anxiety disorders and practitioners seeking more avenues for treating anxiety in their patients.
The lively story of how private citizens, architects, and public officials formed an unlikely coalition to build Minnesota's statehouse at the turn of the twentieth century.
Evolutionary approaches to the study of human beings have been able to explain the origin and maintenance of many of the features of our bodies. Many thinkers believe that an evolutionary approach will be equally fruitful when it comes to explaining the features of our minds. Since our behaviour is driven by our minds, our cognitive dispositions and processes are likely to have been a target of selection and adaptation. This volume collects recent prominent explorations of this theme, as well as the voices of dissenters who argue that our minds are far more significantly the product of culture than of evolution.
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