Books published by Parlor Press

Augmented Reality: Innovative Perspectives across Art, Industry, and Academia offers a wide-ranging exploration of the implications, challenges, and promises of augmented reality. Traditionally only covered from a technical perspective, augmented reality has become an increasingly important area of cultural inquiry in humanities scholarship and popular media outlets. This collection attempts to cross-pollinate the discourse, creating a multidisciplinary exchange among leading researchers and professionals who each advance different ways of understanding current (and future) forms of augmented reality. Another underlying mission is to bring critical reflection and artistic ingenuity into conversation with design thinking and software development. To that end, the collection features a mix of essays from humanities scholars, artworks by pathbreaking artists, as well as interviews with software developers and industry consultants. Among the first of its kind, the book also incorporates augmented reality into its own design by placing relevant digital content within the printed page using Aurasma."The interviews and the presentation of artworks provide a nice counterpoint to the scholarly articles. The interviews include important figures from the commercial world of AR (e.g. , Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald and Jay Wright) and the academic community (Blair MacIntyre): the heterogeneity of perspectives from business, computer science and the humanities is valuable. The art selected includes some of the best known of the admittedly nascent field of AR art, including the work of Tamiko Thiel and B.C. Biermann. . . . In sum, this volume does an excellent job of enlarging the space of discourse for Augmented Reality, illustrating the contribution that humanistic and artistic approaches can make to assessing the significance of a new media technology. I would definitely consider using this collection in various graduate or upper-level undergraduate classes that we teach here at Georgia Tech." -Jay David Bolter, Wesley Chair of New Media and Co-Director of the Augmented Environments Lab (AEL), Georgia Institute of TechnologyContributorsScot Barnett, BC Biermann, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jason Farman, John Craig Freeman, Jordan Frith, Jason Helms, Steve Holmes, Jason Kalin, Bryan Leister, Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, Conor McGarrigle, Sean Morey, Blair MacIntyre, Brett Oppegaard, Isabel Pedersen, Christine Perey, Mark Skwarek, Tamiko Thiel, John Tinnell, Douglas Trueman, Joseph P. Weakland, and Jay Wright

FREE VERSE EDITIONS, edited by JON THOMPSON | JENNIFER ATKINSON''S THE THINKING EYE, her fifth collection, looks at the syntax of our living, evolving world, paying close attention to the actual quartz and gnats, the goats and iced-over, onrushing rivers. The poems also look at the looking itself-how places and lives become "landscapes" and the ways the lenses of language, art, ecology, myth, and memory-enlarge and focus our seeing. If it''s true, as Gaston Bachelard says, that whether a poet looks through a telescope or a microscope, [she] sees the same thing, then what Atkinson sees is an earth filled with violence and beauty, human malice and ten thousand separate moments of joy. Clearly in love with the earth and the (English) language-all those inter-dependent lives and forms-Atkinson pays attention to both with a Bishoppy eye, a Hopkinsy ear, and an ecopoet''s conscience. Behind the book''s sharp images and lush music creaks Chernobyl''s rusty Ferris wheel. | Praise for Canticle of the Night Path: "With Canticle of the Night Path Jennifer Atkinson sets in motion a deeply compelling sequence of praise songs. Whether their origins are remote in time or close to hand, the objects of her praise become intricately connected as each is illuminated in turn--by electric light, by candle-light, by lightning. She models a patient attention that gives way to sudden insights and the reader is transported by the clarity and music of her forms."-SUSAN STEWART | Praise for Drift Ice: "I don''t know of another poet who can, in Thoreau''s words, so beautifully ''impress the winds and streams into [her] service."-ALLISON FUNK | "As ice drifts in ocean currents, so these poems, keen and visionary, move on inner currents and reveal astonishing worlds within our world."-ARTHUR SZE | Praise for The Drowned City: "With each rereading, The Drowned City becomes even more exciting, engaging, astonishing-for its richness of music, its agility of mind, its exactingness of vision, its unswerving ability to locate ''the silence between/ illumination and when its echo catches up'' ("What Happened Next")."-CARL PHILLIPS | JENNIFER ATKINSON is the author of five collections of poetry-The Dogwood Tree, The Drowned City, Drift Ice, Canticle of the Night Path (New Measure Poetry Prize), and The Thinking Eye. Individual poems have appeared in various journals including Field, Image, Witness, New American Writing, and The Missouri Review. She teaches in the English Department and the MFA and BFA programs at George Mason University in Virginia.