Books published by University of Iowa Press

It is nineteenth-century California, and the missions are still burning after the Americans establish the Bear Flag Republic; it is the twenty-first century, and the miners of '49 are relegated to a mural in an arcade. This title takes us on a journey where Native Americans are 'missing persons' outside a diorama of their ancestors.

Weary from the journalistic treadmill of 'going from one assignment to the next, like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests' and healing from a divorce, Douglas Bauer decided it was time to return to his hometown. This memoir is a picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up.

An anthology of personal essays and short memoirs that span more than 100 years of warfare. It tells the enduring truths of battle, stripping away much of the romance, myth, and fantasy.

Suitable for people with memories of the small-town America that the author describes with such affectionate realism and to those interested in the roots of this renowned man of letters.

Summarizing the geological, archaeological, and ecological features that shaped Iowa's modern landscape, this book recreates the once-wild native communities that existed prior to Euroamerican settlement. It examines the dramatic changes that overtook native plant and animal communities as Iowa's prairies, woodlands, and wetlands were transformed.

A debut collection, set in the light-filled deserts of Nevada and Arizona. These ten stories are full of misfit transients like Julian, a crematorium worker who decorates abandoned urns to create a ""lush underground island,"" and the instant Mormon missionary Eli, a hapless divorce who ""always likes people better when they're a little broken.

Devising a formalism rather than concerning itself with discovering the what, this book is about discovering how to say what needs to be said.

Looks at the question of ownership, of the words with which we define ourselves and each other, and of whose and what claims are legitimate. This work is a lyric which is grounded in the New American tradition of poets such as John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson.

Matthew Mark Trumbull was a Londoner who immigrated at the age of twenty. Within ten years of his arrival in America, he had become a lawyer in Butler County, Iowa; two years later a member of the state legislature; and two years after that a captain in the Union Army. This biography details the amazing life of this remarkable man.

William Henry Harrison Clayton was one of nearly 75,000 soldiers from Iowa to join the Union ranks during the Civil War. Possessing a high school education and superior penmanship, Clayton served as a company clerk in the 19th Infantry, witnessing battles in the Trans-Mississippi theater. His diary and his correspondence with his family in Van Buren County form a unique narrative of the day-to-day soldier life as well as an eyewitness account of critical battles and a prisoner-of-war camp.Clayton participated in the siege of Vicksburg and took part in operations against Mobile, but his writings are unique for the descriptions he gives of lesser-known but pivotal battles of the Civil War in the West. Fighting in the Battle of Prairie Grove, the 19th Infantry sustained the highest casualties of any federal regiment on the field. Clayton survived that battle with only minor injuries, but he was later captured at the Battle of Stirling's Plantation and served a period of ten months in captivity at Camp Ford, Texas.Clayton's writing reveals the complicated sympathies and prejudices prevalent among Union soldiers and civilians of that period in the country's history. He observes with great sadness the brutal effects of war on the South, sympathizing with the plight of refugees and lamenting the destruction of property. He excoriates draft evaders and Copperheads back home, conveying the intra-sectional acrimony wrought by civil war. Finally, his racist views toward blacks demonstrate a common but ironic attitude among Union soldiers whose efforts helped lead to the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Presenting a collection of poems, this work embarks on a journey to the land of America's female children. Demonstrating the seriousness of female childhood - which is as dangerous and profound as war, economics, and history - it reveals the extremes of self-doubt and self-righteousness inherent in being a contemporary American girl.

Acts as a manual for identifying the butterflies of Iowa as well as 90 percent of the butterflies in the Plains. This guide begins by providing information on the natural communities of Iowa, paying special attention to butterfly habitat and distribution. It then covers the history of lepidopteran research in Iowa and creating butterfly gardens.

Embraces the possibility that we can learn as much from objects as we can from other people, from the inanimate as much as the animate. This work reveals what the world is like when your attention is focused elsewhere, when your head is turned the other way.

Settled amid the seasonal amusements and condominium-lined beaches of the Florida coast, the characters who inhabit in these stories reach out of their lives to find that something unexpected has replaced what used to be familiar. Some are stalled in the present and some move towards the future heartened by what they learn from those around them.

Features stories that explore the ambiguities of kept secrets, the tangles of abandoned pasts, and uneasy accommodations. The characters face the desire to reclaim dreams left behind, along with something of the dreamer that was also lost. In each story, they face conflict, sometimes within themselves, sometimes with each other.

Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl, this is a book-length poem written in small fragments. It is formed as much by the poet's travels through Turkey, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe as it is by the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Bill Morrison.

Gives us a poetic inventory in a display of voices and accents. These poems contain the scattered bric-a-brac of the imagination, with goods that range from a dud egg to genetic hybrids, from Marian iconography to pigs at a state fair.

Presenting a collection of letters by women writers, this book explores the act and art of writing from diverse perspectives and experiences. The letters illuminate such issues as authorship, aesthetics, collaboration, inspiration, and authorial intent; and also initiate discussions on race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender.

Part detective novel, part cinematic saga, part street-smart narrative, the poems in The Life of a Hunter form a document of expedition that couples individual discovery with communal transformation.

On the verge of maturity - where parents are distant or absent, friendships are often more accidental than deliberate, and restless angst is common - Anthony Varallo's adolescent protagonists dissect the world, and their place in it. This Day in History collects their moments of discovery.

American poets in On the Wing explore aviation and space flight. Olsen's introduction traces the prehistory of flight literature from the Bible to the 19th century and sketches the evolution of 20th-century response. The book includes a short history of flight in the US and includes 116 poems.

First printed in 1858, this was written to recruit emigrants to Iowa. A Home in the West tells of Walter and Annie Judson who one March night decide to move to the West in search of a better life. It portrays the challenges and transformations of the period and includes the Panic of 1857, the Mormon Handcart Expedition and Native Americans in Iowa.

Wetlands in Your Pocket celebrates the plants and animals that call the wetlands of the Midwest home. This laminated pocket guide illustrates a hundred of the most common plants and animals to be found in wetlands six inches to six feet deep.

The many meanings of ""economy"" are the ground for the mediation and lament of Ledger. It places an individual's crisis of spirituality and personal stewardship, or management of her resources, against a backdrop of a culture that has focused its ""economy"" on financial gain and has misspent its own tangible and intangible resources.

In a startling and original poetic voice, Megan Johnson in The Waiting reveals a vigilant young person who has suffered an unmentionable loss and who dismantles and reconstitutes lyric modes in a relentless search for solace. A lyric adventure of grief and search, The Waiting reinvents language from raw materials, driven by intense emotional need.

The author tells of the excavation of Rivas, a great ceremonial centre at the foot of the Talamanca Mountain range which flourished between AD900 and 1300. He discusses Rivas' builders and users, theories on chiefdom societies and the daily interactions and surprises of modern archeology.

Reading like one long odyssey, the author takes the reader on his many adventures which range from the ludicrous to the life-threatening with Carlyle flying into the light and carrying the reader with him on his perplexing and fanciful journey.

Here, the author confronts the slipperiness of language and perception as she probes natural processes - the lives of insects, the uncertainty of love and the deaths of human beings. The poems negotiate between desire for something irrefutable and an uneasy bedrock of paradox.

In these poems, Lesle Lewis's craft rides the waves of the New England landscape, both internal and external. If her world is a collage, as she says, then her poems provide the glue that anchors everything from shifts in the weather to world events to a cacophony of thoughts.

This collection of short lyric poems evoke certain themes: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God and death; and poetry itself.