Kirjahaku

Despite having composed 140 major works of music, all while pursuing an active and productive career in teaching, Vivian Fine (1913-2000) has not, until now, been the subject of a significant biography or bibliography. Regarded by many as the finest American female composer of the 20th century, Fine enjoyed many accomplishments, which ranged from seeing her works first performed when she was only 18 years old, and witnessing one of her ballets choreographed by Martha Graham, to the achievement of international renown. Author Judith Cody, who knew Fine personally, provides here a complete bibliography of her compositions, guides to locating published and recorded editions, and analyses of various aspects of the work of this most important figure in American music. Interviews with Fine, combined with extensive research into secondary sources, allow Cody to give shape to a remarkable life, tracing the composer as she moved from child prodigy of Chicago to the center of the modern music and dance movements in New York City in the thirties, forties, and fifties. The result is both an exhaustive reference work and a vibrant portrait of an artist whose talents spanned decades, continents, and nearly every major creative development of the 20th century.

A gimlet-eyed catalogue of the natural world, and, contained within it, the world within ourselves. Irresistible language makes it a classic. Andrew Sean Greer, author of the novel LESS, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winnerThe prose poem, "Hose. Ants. Plants. Expressway." alone makes this delightful chapbook worthy of our close consideration-and is emblematic, too, of this glorious, serious, humorous, loving paean to the natural world and us in it, in this, to quote another poem, "personal myth of the garden. Claire Ortalda, Georgia State University Fiction Prize WinnerIn Judith Cody's gorgeous collection of poems, Garden on an Alien Star, a fistful of soil is a place of endless wonder, where the poet sings praises to decay, and a window box is a magical crossroads where the human and natural worlds interact. The gardener's many relationships with her flowers and weeds are full of metaphors for personal and spiritual relationships. Everyday experiences take on mythical stature, in one poem it's a line of ants along a garden hose, in another poem it's "a descending cascade of petals" distracting a brown towhee from an earwig. The poems in this collection offer the poet's vision of a backyard Eden where today's creation legends continue to be forever born and reborn. John Curl, author of novels, The Outlaws of Maroon, The Co-op Conspiracy and the history, Indigenous Peoples Day