Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry... After years of travelling and losing almost everything - his country, his children, his wife, his farm - an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger's home... A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the second volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and listening becomes an act of welcome.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Alisoun Sings finds its starting-point with Chaucer's iconic, proto-feminist Wife of Bath. Her forceful voice leads the way across narratives of genders, and addresses the brutality of social conventions with caustic humor. This labyrinthine text navigates love and protest in landscapes impacted by global warming, systemic violence and solar eclipses. Bergvall continues her previous work creating texts that rest on transhistoric forms of English, beyond its dominance as a global lingua franca, and places her quest in the intersections and migrations of stories and languages.

Caroline Bergvall's Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today's sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, "Drift," which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall's explorations of historical English language.

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing-prose, poetry, and hybrid-from its most significant practitioners and innovators A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature's future. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live. The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can't be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein presents scholarship on one of the U.S.'s best living innovative poets. Scholars explore major themes in his work, and poets present pieces inspired by his poetry. The book is intended for both scholars looking for informed critical insight into Bernstein's work as well as for students to examine his work. The scholarship covers many of his major pieces and genres, like sound, stage, and poetry. The authors write about his main themes and influences and give insight into some of the major poetry ideas currently being debated in the U.S., such as the nature and future of experimental poetry, the influences on contemporary poetry, the politics of poetry, and wide variety of techniques currently being used. This book is valuable to individuals interested in poetry and libraries trying to stay abreast of the most important recent literary criticism/currents.

This major international anthology provides students and the general reader with an invaluable introduction to contemporary modernist poetry. Containing over thirty poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, this selection offers a powerful vision of late-Twentieth-century poetic achievement: international, politically- and socially-engaged, and radical in imaginative vision and practice. It celebrates risk, resistance, protest and diversity within poetry, reaching across national and cultural boundaries. Vanishing Points provides students of Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, English and American Studies, as well as the general reader, with an important survey of modernist poetry at the start of the new millennium. * A unique introduction to the wide range of modernist experiment in contemporary poetry * Ideal study aid for students of poetry and poetics * Broad, international selection of acclaimed modernist poets * Substantial contributions offer important insights into the range of each poet's work From the Introduction: The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding. Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik. All anthologies enter the world fully aware of their genealogy, of where they fit in, of how they relate to certain traditions of writing by affiliation or rejection. This combination of dependent and independent gestures is inevitable, particularly in the case of selections of work aligned with national or regional versions of literary history. The present anthology does not fall into that category; its international reach does not, however, bring exemption from the dilemma of wanting to stand apart from conditions of rivalry while also needing to claim a special value in comparison with publications already available.