Books published by UNIV OF IOWA PR

2023 Midwest Book Awards in Nonfiction - Nature, winner In a straightforward, friendly style, Iowa's premier scientists and experts consider what has happened to our land and outline viable solutions that benefit agriculture as well as the state's human and wild residents.

Hajar Hussaini's poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one's language. The traces she finds--the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world's nations convening to reject the full stop--retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.

"In his debut collection, Nashville native and Iowa MFA Drew Bratcher writes musically about memory and memorably about music in uncommonly beautiful essays that announce the arrival of a major new voice. The title essay, a requiem in fragments, tells the story of a grandfather through his ear, comb, hands, El Camino, and clothes. With a descriptive precision redolent of John Berger and the literary portraiture of Annie Ernaux, Bratcher delivers a tough and moving tribute to a man who 'went on ahead, on up the road, and then the road turned.' Elsewhere, Bratcher directs his attention to Johnny Cash's looming presence over his childhood ('a landmark, fixed and orienting'), the relative pain of red paper wasp stings, Dolly Parton's generative homesickness, the humiliations and consolations of becoming a new father, the experience of hearing his name in a Taylor Swift song, and the mystifying hymns treasured by both his great grandmother and D.H. Lawrence. Seamlessly blending memoir and arts criticism and aiming at both the heart and the head, this is a book about listening closely to stories and songs, about leaving home in order to find home, and about how the melodies and memories absorbed along the way become 'a living music that advances and prevails upon us at formative moments, corralling chaos into the simple, liberating stockade of verse, chorus, verse'"--