The American Urban Reader, Second Edition, brings together the most exciting and cutting-edge work on the history of urban forms and ways of life in the evolution of the United States, from pre-colonial Native American Indian cities, colonial European settlements, and western expansion, to rapidly expanding metropolitan regions, the growth of suburbs, and post-industrial cities. Each chapter is arranged chronologically and thematically around scholarly essays from historians, social scientists, and journalists, and is supplemented by relevant primary documents that offer more nuanced perspectives and convey the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the study of the urban condition. Building upon the success of the First Edition, and responding to increasingly polarized national discourse in the era of Donald Trump's presidency, The American Urban Reader, Second Edition, highlights both the historical urban/rural divide and the complexity and deeply woven salience of race and ethnic relations in American history. Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven H. Corey, who together hold forty-five years of classroom experience in urban studies and history, have selected a range of work that is dynamically written and carefully edited to be accessible to students and appropriate for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how American cities have developed.

A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems. Stephen Corey's work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the depth of thought and emotion, the elegance and resonance and simplicity of language, the affectionate voice and tone-all work to make this a truly important and memorable book. "Here is a life, and a life, and / a life," Stephen Corey writes in the opening poem's instructions to on how find the faded leaf-also a metaphor for the end of life-that one must imagine still colored after he is "gone." The poem is echoed near the end of this stunningly rich and encompassing book in a poem addressed to his four daughters about what he has missed during his life. In between we encounter a world we thought we knew but have not seen in this way before: things as varied as Monarch butterflies, telephones, calligraphy, and bread, as well as other writers and texts that become lenses to show us "How we are growing undoes what we are" and see. Like the glassblower's art in one of these major poems, "Breath makes another world." And like his Michelangelo in a sequence that masterfully covers centuries, we see "the way a life we love can be steered, / beyond our control, beyond us." And so, thanks to this important and needed book we too can live beyond ourselves; that, indeed, is the highest praise for any art." -Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where the Wind Comes From "Stephen Corey's, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them, is sometimes bookish, in the best ways, and in addition to welcoming many of the stars in our pantheon (Shakespeare, O'Keeffe, Keats, Ginsberg, Woolf, and Whitman for example) there's also the dual elegy for the poet's father and Dickinson (the latter also has her own baseball poem), Emerson 'at the moment of his first masturbation," and a sequence in which Li Po and Tu Fu hop on a jet and tour America. What this means is that when Corey forays into "the real world" -keeping a hospital death watch, exploring and exalting carnal love, or delighting in his young daughter "playing Beethoven on my chest" - the poems are informed by both of his masters... by the "shelves of books" that are "the bones of my brain."" -Albert Goldbarth Stephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow's Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.

What Persists contains eighteen of the nearly fifty essays on poetry that Judith Kitchen published in The Georgia Review over a twenty-five-year span. Coming at the genre from every possible angle, this celebrated critic discusses work by older and younger poets, most American but some foreign, and many of whom were not yet part of the contemporary canon. Her essays reveal a cultural history from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, through 9/11 and the Iraq War, and move into today's political climate. They chronicle personal interests while they also make note of what was happening in contemporary poetry by revealing overall changes of taste, both in content and in the use of craft. Over time, they fashion a comprehensive overview of the contemporary literary scene. At its best, What Persists shows what a wide range of poetry is being written-by women, men, poets who celebrate their ethnicity, poets who show a fierce individualism, poets whose careers have soared, promising poets whose work has all but disappeared.

In Conscientious Thinking, David Bosworth cuts through all the noise of today's political dysfunction and cultural wars to sound the deeper causes of our discontent. Americans are living, he argues, in a profoundly transitional era, one in which the commonsense beliefs of the first truly modern society are being undermined by the still crude but irreversible forces set loose by technology's drastic revision of our everyday lives. He shows how this disruptive conflict between modern and post-modern modes of reasoning can be found in all advanced fields, including art, medicine, and science, and then traces its impact on our daily actions through such changes as the ways in which friends relate, money is made, crimes are committed, and mates are chosen. Just as feudal values had to give way to a modern worldview that more effectively contained the new social reality generated by the printed book, so must our democracy reimagine itself in ways that can domesticate - civilize rather than merely ""monetize"" - a post-modern scene radically transformed by our digital machines. To that end, Conscientious Thinking supplies not only the means to make sense of our contentious times but also a provisional sketch of what a desirable post-modern America might look like.