June 12, 2019
Farid Matuk’s poem “A Daughter the Real Horse (Excerpt)” is today’s Poetry Daily feature on poems.com as part of the site’s Editor’s Choice. The poem was selected by J. Michael Martinez. Thank you so much for sharing this lovely poem!
The poem is part of Matuk’s collection The Real Horse, which we published in 2018.
November 30, 2018
Today we were thrilled to see Stephen Strom’s Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land featured in the New York Times. The article, authored by the one and only Rick Bass, highlights three volumes of nature photography that “take us back to Earth’s innocent roots.”
Stephen E. Strom’s eloquent “Bears Ears: Views From a Sacred Land” is perhaps a more palatable picture book — if not also in its own way a perverse bummer, another chronicling of territory taken by force. In 2016, President Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906 (signed by Theodore Roosevelt) to set aside 1.35 million acres of public land in southeastern Utah, intending to protect for all time more than 100,000 sacred Native American sites, not to mention a contained landscape upon which the narrative of time has been written more eloquently and indelibly than anywhere else on earth. What Yellowstone is to wildlife, Bears Ears is to geology. However, just half a year later President Trump, in one of his first acts in office (and with characteristic racism), reduced the scope of the protected monument by 85 percent — one of the many illegal executive orders that will remain caught up in courts for years.
Read the full feature by Rick Bass in print or online.
March 16, 2018
One of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, UA Press author Mark Nelson had an active visit to Tucson this past weekend. He participated in two panels at the Tucson Festival of Books as well as multiple signings across the University of Arizona campus, and was a crowd favorite following his appearance on the cover of last week’s Tucson Weekly.
One of the many highlights of his trip was presenting his new book Pushing Our Limits as part of the University of Arizona Libraries’ annual luncheon at the Arizona Inn the Monday following the festival. Nelson offered luncheon attendees a rare and compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world and cleared up a few common misconceptions about the 1991–1993 closure experiment. Today we look back at some of the highlights of that talk:
Photos courtesy Aengus Anderson
January 17, 2018
Discrimination is rampant, and working conditions are poor. Safety, pay, and class-war all threaten the future of one of the highest producing copper mines in the United States. Workers are pitted against owners, as the rich receive their keep and leave the bees to fend for the mighty Copper Queen Mine. This may sound like a recurrent story, and it is! For the town of Bisbee, Arizona, it’s actually a centennial of truths reenacted every July.
Such is the basis of Robert Greene’s new documentary film, Bisbee ’17, premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah:
It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die.
Townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary.
Filmmaker Robert Greene confronts the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage, and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle. With consummate skill and his signature penchant for bending the boundaries of documentary, Greene artfully stirs up the ghosts of our past as a cautionary tale that speaks to our present.
But this isn’t the first time Bisbee’s secret has been told. In 1999, the Press re-released Robert Houston’s Bisbee ’17, for which the new film takes its name. Houston, a novelist and professor emeritus in creative writing at the University of Arizona, vividly re-creates a West of miners and copper magnates, bindlestiffs and scissorbills, army officers, private detectives, and determined revolutionaries in his historical fiction novel.
The protagonists in a bitter strike: the Wobblies (the IWW), the toughest union in the history of the West; and Harry Wheeler, the last of the two-gun sheriffs. In this class-war western, they face each other down in the streets of Bisbee, pitting a general strike against the largest posse ever assembled.
Against this backdrop runs the story of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, strike organizer from the East, caught between the worlds of her ex-husband—the Bisbee strike leader—and her new lover, an Italian anarchist from New York. As the tumultuous weeks of the strike unfold, she struggles to sort out what she really feels about both of them, and about the West itself.
December 8, 2017
This month, Poetry Magazine featured a touching guest post from Roy G. Guzmán, who took the opportunity to celebrate the immense literary contributions and impact of Camino del Sol poet Ray Gonzalez:
Through Gonzalez’s poetry I’ve discovered the various syntaxes that run through my own linguistic DNA. Through him I’ve discovered how to deploy my metaphors and when to reveal my silences (“Beware the silence stronger than the voice,” he writes in “Beware the Silence,” included in Human Crying Daisies (2003)). Like his personality—measured, as if ticking like a clock, and with an appetite for tactful wit—Gonzalez’s poem-tellers can be shy but, when allowed to speak, can verbalize truths with the swiftness of a lizard. In “What Lesson?” for instance, the speaker asks, “What were the questions our mothers asked? Who did they make love to before our fathers arrived with newspapers and torn wills and deeds?” Gonzalez has the associative skill and patience of James Wright, and that gift of surprise you find in Russell Edson’s best work. He knows when to walk into a poem and when to walk away, leaving everything around haunted.
Read the full feature on Poetry Magazine.
December 4, 2017
In case you missed it, an excerpt from Tom Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold donned the cover of the Tucson Weekly this past week. The feature story was accompanied by a Q&A between Tucson Weekly Managing Editor Jim Nintzel and Tom Miller, in which nothing was off the table. The two discussed how the CIA recruited Miller for a spy, his work in the underground press, and being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury for some of his work:
Cuba, Hot and Coldis an intimate look at Cuba and the people who live there. What do you hope people take away from this book?
When the U.S. and Cuba finally came to their senses and established this sort of detante, everybody said: “I gotta get there. I gotta get there before it changes. What I want them to take from the book is: You don’t have to get there before it changes. It’s gonna keep changing for the next five, 10, 20, 30 years. When people say they want to get there before it changes, they’re really saying they want to get there before McDonald’s gets there. But the changes have already taken place, and they’re going to continue to take place. I think that people who are so eager to get there are making a mistake. They can take their time and read up on it and enjoy it when they go.
You’ve been traveling to Cuba for 30 years now—what first drew you there?
It was partly political and partly journalistic. The journalistic part was that Cuba was and still is the best story in the Americas. And also political: I was part of the anti-war movement, and we would read underground newspapers not just from around the United States, but we would read Gramma, which was the communist party newspaper in Cuba. It was a terrible newspaper. It still is; it is an awful newspaper. But it tells you what is going on there. It tells you who is in charge and what their politics are. And in the anti-war movement, there was always a spot for Cuba at the table. It was at the far end of the table, but there was a spot for Cuba at the table. And because of the taboo, because of the embargo, it became more and more tempting to go.
Read the full feature Q&A and an excerpt of the book on the Tucson Weekly.
November 19, 2017
Terrance Hayes, current poetry editor for New York Times Magazine, selected Vickie Vértiz’s poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous” from her debut poetry collection Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut for the featured poem in this Sunday’s issue.
“I do not know the language of that place” underscores this poem’s striking balance of ambiguity and mystery. Much is said in the white spaces, caesuras, breaks. The unpunctuated five lines of the first stanza unspool suggestively creepily. The hands in car guts have a visceral intensity. The halting final couplet prompts a pause, a silence, a reread.
Read the full feature on the New York Times.
November 13, 2017
High Country News caught up with Esther Belin just outside of her office at the Peaceful Spirit Treatment Center on the Southern Ute Reservation to discuss her latest book Of Cartography:
Her new book, Of Cartography, is framed by the four cardinal directions and their symbolism in Navajo history. It digs into the cultural and physical representation of Navajo language, how landscape shapes identity and what it means to be Indian.
Her poems try to capture the rhythm and storytelling intrinsic to the Diné language. “I wanted to investigate whether there was a Navajo meter or diction, and how that voice could come out,” she says. “It’s not just a collection of poems squeezed together. This was about pairing identity politics with Navajo philosophy, which is all very orderly, and then telling my story through the structure.”
Read the full feature interview on High Country News.
November 12, 2017
Following the release event for Tom Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold, the Arizona Daily Star honored the Tucson travel writer by running an excerpt of his piece “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop:”
Tucsonan Tom Miller first visited Cuba 30 years ago. He has returned often, writing about a Cuba most don’t get to see. His books include “Trading with the Enemy” and “Revenge of the Saguaro.” This is an excerpt from his latest, “Cuba, Hot and Cold:”
José Martí, leader of Cuba’s nineteenth-century independence movement, is said to have had a voice that sounded like an oboe. Perhaps that’s why the country has so many oboe players. I took oboe lessons in Havana when I lived there in the early 1990s and wrote about them at the time. I was hoping to improve my mediocre oboe skills acquired during junior high school, and frankly, I wanted to show readers that contemporary music in Cuba was more than just salsa and reggaeton. I succeeded with the latter, but far less with improving my ability. I even had trouble with the ducks in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. And so I put my oboe on the top shelf in my Arizona office where it gathered desert dust. I’d glance up at it now and then with a sense of forlorn pride, reassuring myself that I owned a quality instrument that I once played with some gusto.
Read the full excerpt on the Arizona Daily Star.
October 21, 2017
This week, Frederick Luis Aldama and Daniel Olivas, two of our very own Camino del Sol authors, came together to discuss matters of content and form in writing fictional borderlands. The conversation between the two prolific writers was the cover feature on Latin@ Literatures.
Established in the summer of 2016, Latin@ Literatures is an online source for contemporary discussion on Latina/o literature and culture seeking to provide a space for philosophical engagement in topics dealing with Latina/o culture.
An expert on Latinx popular culture, Frederick Luis Aldama is the author, co-author, and editor of twenty-nine books, including Long Stories Cut Short and, most recently, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Aldama interviewed Olivas about the power of the written word in Latinx communities and his new collection of short stories The King of Lighting Fixtures:
FLA: Daniel, you are author and editor of numerous books and now you have a near simultaneous publication of your book of poetry, Crossing the Border (Pact Press) and a book of short fiction, The King of Lighting Fixtures (Camino del Sol). You are also a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and work as a lawyer for the California Department of Justice in the Public Rights Division. What’s your secret?
DO: I don’t golf. And I’m a compulsive writer and editor. Perhaps it’s a disease.
FLA: You also edit La Bloga.
DO: Ah, but I share blogging duties with about a dozen wonderful writers.
FLA: While you studied literature at Stanford, you are largely self-taught as a creative writer.
DO: I refused to take creative writing classes while in college because I thought it’d be a frivolous thing to do. Little did I know that I’d embark on a writing career in middle age. But I’m happy I took the route I did. I enjoy being a lawyer, especially in serving the people of California.
Read the full Q&A feature on Latin@ Literatures.
The University of Arizona Press publishes the work of leading scholars from around the globe. Learn more about submitting a proposal, preparing your final manuscript, and publication.
InquireThe University of Arizona Press is proud to share our books with readers, booksellers, media, librarians, scholars, and instructors. Join our email Newsletter. Request reprint licenses, information on subsidiary rights and translations, accessibility files, review copies, and desk and exam copies.
RequestSupport a premier publisher of academic, regional, and literary works. We are committed to sharing past, present, and future works that reflect the special strengths of the University of Arizona and support its land-grant mission.
Give
The University of Arizona Press
