The short poems in Bosk grow out of close encounters with trees, shrubs, and understory plants observed throughout a sprawling Boston arboretum built on glacial drumlins, with valleys and meadows threading between them. These poems emerged from slow, aimless wandering—moments when a shape, texture, or pattern tugged at the senses and asked to be noticed. From those encounters came a series of questions: How does careful attention to nonhum...

The overlapping crises of COVID-19, climate change, and rising levels of conflict are exacerbating global inequalities. This report offers a definition and framework for social sustainability as well as examples and guidance on how development can foster progress toward it.

Secret Lakeshia Bell is a young, beautiful, outspoken registered nurse. She knows exactly what she wants out of her life, her career, and her marriage. When her husband, of ten years, is violently murdered, Secret locates the red toolbox filled with his last wishes. Although she doesn’t know where his wishes will take her, she is determined to fulfill them at all costs. Armed with the toolbox and five different colored instructional envelopes, the young widow is suddenly set on a journey o...

Secret Lakeshia Bell. She introduces her handsome new fiancée, Royce Storm, to the most important person in her life, her sassy and outspoken grandmother, Hattie Bell Ruffins. Hattie shares her heart-breaking news with her granddaughter then asks her to help carry out her impossible bucket list. With not much time to spare and a magnificent wedding to plan, an entire new and tumultuous journey begins for the couple. In all the chaos, Secret’s old enemy returns to demand what she feels is r...

Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. The book seeks to document the “new Italian landscape” where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude.” Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at...

As planners and designers have turned their attentions to the blighted, vacant areas of the city, the concept of "terrain vague," has become increasingly important. Terrain Vague seeks to explore the ambiguous spaces of the city -- the places that exist outside the cultural, social, and economic circuits of urban life. From vacant lots and railroad tracks, to more diverse interstitial spaces, this collection of original essays and cases presents innovative ways of looking at margi...

Why are some places successful in moving from war to consolidated peace while others continue to be troubled by violence? And why does postconflict violence take different forms and have different intensities? By developing a new theory of postconflict violence Patrick Barron's When Violence Works makes a significant contribution to our understanding.Barron picks out three postconflict regions in Indonesia in which to analyze what happens once the "officia...

Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent pla...

Andrea Zanzotto is one of the most important and acclaimed poets of postwar Italy. This collection of ninety-one pseudo-haiku in English and Italian—written over several months during 1984 and then revised slowly over the years—confirms his commitment to experimentation throughout his life. Haiku for a Season represents a multilevel experiment for Zanzotto: first, to compose poetry bilingually; and second, to write in a form foreign to Western poetry. The volume traces the life of...

Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the...

Remember trying to learn a language at school? Remember trying to get your head around conjugating verbs? Past tense, present tense, present participle, imperfect subjunctive? Yes, that's right, it was all mind numbing. Language is not about perfect grammar. Language is about communication. Why not try our system.Learn to communicate quickly and easily in another language.

What is contemporary curatorial thought? Current discourse on the topic is heating up with a new cocktail of bold ideas and ethical imperatives. these include: cooperative curating, especially with artists; the reimagination of museums; curating as knowledge production; the historicization of exhibitionmaking; and commitment to extra-artworld participatory activism. Less obvious, but increasingly of concern, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators and t...