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.

Provides a seamless mix of critical analysis with lively description, theoretical considerations with reflexive remarks by the theatremakers, and matters of current French and American cultural politics.

Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell's award-winning stories transport you to Haiti - to a lush, lyrical, flamboyant, and spirit-filled Haiti where palm trees shine wet with moonlight and the sky paints a yellow screen over your head and the ocean sparkles with thousands of golden eyes - and keep you there forever.

""Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the lanai behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids."" Thus begins Barbara Hamby's magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu.

An examination of contemporary novelists' relationship to copyright, arguing that for feminist writers in particular copyright often conjures up the persistent exclusion of women from ownership. This exhaustive history of how women have fared under intellectual property regimes speaks to broader political, social, and economic implications and engages digital-era excitement about the commons with the most utopian and materialist strains in feminist criticism.

Challenges literary scholars and teachers to look beyond mere criticism toward the concrete issue of social change. Calling for a profound realignment of thought and spirit in the service of positive social change, Ammons argues for the continued importan

Introduces woodland wildflowers to a new generation of outdoor enthusiasts in the Upper Midwest. This book offers information on the many ways in which Native Americans and early pioneers used these plants for everything from pain relief to insecticides to tonics. It is suitable for professionals interested to learn about the wonders of woodlands.

Brings a humanist's keen eye and ear to one of the great questions of the ages: 'What am I?' Lavishly illustrated with beautiful woodcuts by Paul Landacre, an all-but-lost yet important Los Angeles artist, The Great Chain of Life will be cherished by new generations of readers.

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.

Tells the story of the first structure built on the Iowa State University campus. This book provides a comprehensive history of the Farm House from its founding days in 1860 to its role as the center of activity for the new college to its second life as a National Historic Landmark and welcoming museum visited by thousands each year.

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.

In the hot summer of 2004, the author floated away from the routine of daily life just as Henry David Thoreau and his brother had done in their own small boat in 1839. This first-person narrative uses his ecological way of looking, of going deep rather than far, to show that our outward journeys are inseparable from our inward ones.

The river, like a keen memory, carries a record of the past. The author has spent forty years in the basin of the Upper Iowa River. In this book, he tells the story of the Upper Iowa as it flows through land and people, holding true to Aldo Leopold's conception of land as a community in which water, people, and soil play interactive parts.

Reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.

A collection of ten stories that features conflicts with neighbors, troubling memories, and suspicions and fears that lead people into isolated corners as distances open up inside them and around them.

A collection of stories in which the adults can seem as hapless and helpless as the younger characters. It features two neglected daughters who use the language of clothes to cope with their parents' divorce and their father's mail-order bride.