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These poems are the work of thirty years. When I was raising children, poetry was my furtive "sometimes" habit. It seems a miracle to me that I wrote anything at all during that time, but something kept drawing me back to words. It was a way of stopping to take notice of the beauty around me. It was a way to process what was happening: the surprise of loss, and grief. It was a way to keep things, to make them mine. It was a way to share things, to give them to others. Poetry is a kind of work, but it is also a kind of play: a playful work, a working play. I have learned to "let myself" play (as Julia Cameron puts it). Part of the play is dress-ups, trying on different poetic forms: here's the hair-lacquered-into-place-immaculately-ball-gowned villanelle, here's the smart-casual-dressed-for-inner-city-café free verse, here's the so-laid-back-I'm-practically-horizontal prose poem. I am inspired in my play by watching other poets do it. To playfully quote Alvin Pang from "What Happened": "It was vehement. It was egregious. It was somehow / necessary. Accessory."

Against Certain Capture fuses biography and poetry. It is an exploration of poet Miriam Wei Wei Lo's grandmothers' lives. It comprises two series of poems: the first focuses on the poet's Malaysian-Chinese grandmother, Liang Yue Xian; the second on the poet's Anglo-Australian grandmother, Eva Sounness.This book is as much an exploration of form as it is an exploration of lives: The poet plays with various free verse forms (including short and long line variants); experiments with the concrete possibilities of words on the page; and tests out the terza rima sonnet, the pantoum, and the headline forms. This is in contrast to Bernadine Evaristo's fusion of biography and poetry in the verse-novel Lara, which is much more uniform: being largely blank verse (mostly pentameter). At the time Lo wrote Against Certain Capture, Evaristo's Lara was the only book-length predecessor she could find that investigated ethnic hybridity in poetry.In spite of its formal diversity, Against Certain Capture is written uniformly in close third person. This means it occasionally blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction by depicting the thoughts and feelings of its biographical subjects. While these projections are based on extensive research (including interviews with the one grandmother who was still living; as well as a trip to China to interview the sisters of the deceased grandmother), they are still (largely) projections - imagined rainbows of personality that emerge from the granite of the biographical facts (to use Virginia Woolf's metaphors).The title of this book may lead some to think that this poet subscribes to the somewhat fashionable view that language lacks the capacity to sufficiently communicate meaning. While this poet does not claim the ability to communicate meaning in any absolute sense, she does believe in the possibility of communicating enough meaning for connection to be viable.

Hello Keanu! brings together a diverse group of Australian poets on the theme of Keanu Reeves. From Neo's iconic cool in The Matrix to Scott Favor's cruel indifference in My Own Private Idaho and more, contributors to the book offer multigenerational perspectives and a range of poetic styles as they explore and reflect upon their personal connection with the multifaceted actor and his cinematic roles . The result is an eclectic anthology that pays tribute to Keanu's profound influence on pop culture, and celebrates the actor's well-known acts of kindness, tolerance, generosity, and inclusivity.

This trailblazing study examines the history of narcotics in Japan to explain the development of global criteria for political legitimacy in nations and empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japan underwent three distinct crises of sovereignty in its modern history: in the 1890s, during the interwar period, and in the 1950s. Each crisis provoked successively escalating crusades against opium and other drugs, in which moral entrepreneurs--bureaucrats, cultural producers, merchants, law enforcement, scientists, and doctors, among others--focused on drug use as a means of distinguishing between populations fit and unfit for self-rule. Moral Nation traces the instrumental role of ideologies about narcotics in the country's efforts to reestablish its legitimacy as a nation and empire. As Kingsberg demonstrates, Japan's growing status as an Asian power and a "moral nation" expanded the notion of "civilization" from an exclusively Western value to a universal one. Scholars and students of Japanese history, Asian studies, world history, and global studies will gain an in-depth understanding of how Japan's experience with narcotics influenced global standards for sovereignty and shifted the aim of nation building, making it no longer a strictly political activity but also a moral obligation to society.

Contemporary artists from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia map the show into five areas of multimedia installations that examine cultural differences in the construction of time: Time Collapsed, Transgressive Bodies, Liquid Time, Trans-Histories, Mobility/Immobility.