Books published by University of Iowa Press

An anthology of 100 poems, written by physicians, exploring the connections between medicine and poetry.

Real musicians don't sign autographs, date models, or fly in private jets. They spend their lives in practice rooms and basement clubs or toiling in the obscurity of coffee-shop gigs, casino jobs, and the European festival circuit. The ten linked stories in Power Ballads are devoted to the working musician. By turns melancholy and hilarious, it is not only a deeply felt look at the lives of musicians but also an exploration of the secret music that plays inside us all.

In these intertwined essays on art, music, and identity, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, the daughter of African American and Italian American parents, examines the experience of her mixed-race identity. Embracing the far-ranging stimuli of her media-obsessed upbringing, she grasps at news clippings, visual fragments, and lyrics from past and present in order to weave together a world of sense.

The stories of Safe as Houses are magical and original and help answer such universal and existential questions as: How far will we go to stay loyal to our friends? Can we love a man even though he is inches shorter than our ideal? Why doesn't Bob Dylan ever have his own smokes? And are there patron saints for everything, even lost socks and bad movies?

In this whip-smart study, Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell.

This is a powerful debut collection of eight stories, which utilizes a richly focused narrative style accenting the unavoidable tragedies of life while revealing the grace and dignity with which people learn to deal with them. They captures lightning in a bottle, excavating the smallest steps people take to move beyond grief, heartbreak, and failure—conjuring the subtle, fragile moments when people are not yet whole, but no longer quite as broken.

United in their fierce sense of place and infused with the fading echoes of a lost homeland, the stories in Jennine Capo Crucet's striking debut collection do for Miami what Edward P. Jones does for Washington, D.C., and what James Joyce did for Dublin: they expand our ideas and our expectations of the city by exposing its tough but vulnerable underbelly.

Drawing on personal, literary, and historical sources - from Jewish liturgy to the first crude mastectomies, from Anne Frank to Emma Goldman, this title creates an image of a politically engaged, self-aware (sometimes neurotic) woman facing a daunting disease with humor, well-founded fear, and keen intelligence.